night elf hunter

Hunters are unique in that they are the only ranged damage dealers that rely on the mostly physical damage of their ranged weapon rather than spells. But what also makes them unique is the fact that they have pets and traps at their disposal. Despite being a ranged class, they still have some tools for melee combat. All of this makes the hunter design tricky. Ghostcrawler said that they want to improve on the interface involving pet control and improving what hunters do when they get in melee range of an opponent (more on these below).

Ammunition has always been a pain in the butt since the start for hunters. It’s expensive and when you run out of it, the hunter is pretty much useless. Eventually they want to push through with the mechanic that will allow non-consumable ammo wherein the haste benefit from the quiver/ammo pouch would be made up elsewhere. It seems like they need more time, probably another expansion, to implement this because of the problems it could do to data storage. For now they want to fix this problem by lowering the cost of ammo and also by changing the way ranged weapons scale so that hunter dps will still increase even if you didn’t have the best ammo.

As much as they still don’t want Hunters to be very good in melee combat, they want to give them a mechanic so that Hunters don’t always have to run away when they’re in melee range. They’re thinking of maybe a punishing attack on cooldown that hunters can execute while in melee range to give him something worth doing. Like other classes,they would like hunters to benefit more from haste. The only problem is that hunters are a very cooldown oriented class and haste doesn’t benefit that situation very much. They’ll about this problem more at Blizzcon.

Ghostcrawler mentioned that they would like to make a change that will help pet survivability in PvE. They think that AoE damage avoidance isn’t enough to help pets stay alive especially when dealing with bosses like Mimiron. the answer is to just not let certain things damage pets so they don’t die from something ridiculous because of the pet AI. Hunters already can heal and rez their pets and that’s enough. they also want to give pets more action bars because players currently have to switch certain abilities in and out. they want pet action bars to feel more like character action bars.

Lastly the devs are thinking about doing away with stables the way they are used now, making pet summoning more like warlocks in that they can switch pets anytime they want. If they do this, stables will be used more for storage of pets Hunters don’t really use but can’t part with.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

warlock shadowbolt

In the mage Q&A, the devs mentioned that they’re planning to make mages and warlocks feel less similar and that since they’re happy with where mages stand right now from a design perspective, warlocks will be the class that would be drifting away. Ghostcrawler said that the soul shard system is the area they want to make a few changes to achieve this goal. Right now shards are more for maintenance and thus take a back seat to the actual warlock game play. Shards are used to summon the minions, healthstones, summoning portals and other things that are “cool” but necessarily totally needed. They want to change that. They want to make using shards a core mechanic and that using a shard would provide a combat boost instead of used for just minor things. They want shard usage to be a big deal! [maybe things like a trinket like ability costing a shard to increase spell power or things similar to that? That would be so cool if it were].

The devs also want to make pet usage and abilities more interesting. Some pet abilities just aren’t used that much anymore (imp fire shield) and some pets aren’t very interesting to use like the voidwalker. They want us to make interesting decisions when deciding which pet to use for a certain scenario. They also feel like it’s time to improve pet survivability especially in PvP. They said that they’re going to address this by slowly going to make pets scale with all stats, starting with spell penetration and resilience.

They also recognize that warlocks have a problem with threat management especially since other classes can reduce their threat by just spending a couple of points in one talent while locks have to spend a lot on talents that even belong to different trees. They’ll have to figure out a way to solve this problem without moving around the talents too much. A partial solution is lowering the cooldown of Soulshatter to 3 minutes. Talents that affect the range of certain spells also suffer from the same problem as the threat reducing ones and thus are in the same boat.

Here’s a list of other things that were discussed in the Q&A and are being considered for implementation (meaning they’re still just thinking about it, okay).

1. More burst damage for Affliction warlocks through Haunt and Pandemic

2. Hellfire doesn’t have much of a niche and could get cut in the future.

3. Green fire! Instead of giving it to all fire spells, they might just make a new spell have it.

4. Class specific flying mount

5. Being able to customize or change the appearance of the warlock pets.

Looks like warlocks have quite a bit of interesting and cool things to look forward to going forward and I wish the devs some luck and success in trying to address the issues mentioned in this feature.

Post from: WOW Obsessed