Okay, here is just a slew of our current thoughts on the topic.

PvE

1) Hunter dps was just too high through much of Naxx. Ideally hunters should be competing with locks, rogues and mages and for a lot of the LK content they were just head and shoulders above the rest.

2) Currently, hunter dps might be a little low, but we're not 100% convinced yet. Some of the earlier fights in Ulduar are very melee friendly. XT is a rogue and cat's dream. We were pretty harsh to melee in Naxx with a lot of run-out moments and cleaves. Kologarn and other parts of Ulduar turn that on the ranged a little and require them to focus more on situational awareness. We think the later fights in Ulduar are a little more ranged-friendly, and we're waiting to get more parses from those. Plenty of guilds are on or have beaten Yogg by now, but the current data are pretty noisy since people are still learning the encounters.

3) We understand Vezax is a special case for hunters. By the same token, our goal is not to have every class do the same relative dps on every boss. Some fights are just better for some than others. Our goal isn't even to have "the shadow priest fight" or "the fury warrior fight." We just want diversity. We really wanted the Ulduar encounters to push players more towards "What can I do to improve my dps on this fight?" and less on "What is my dps?"

4) Survival may still be slightly higher than BM or MM. We don't think it's off by 1000 dps in most cases. It's something we want to keep looking at. We understand some Marks hunters say they'd be fine if it weren't for mana.

PvP

1) The TNT stuns and the uber mana drains were just too good last season. Sorry. Those aren't coming back.

2) Last season, burst spell damage was very high. That put a premium on active defenses, which ended up being a good niche for hunters. Last season there was almost no reason to bring a warrior; rogues and hunters brought the MS debuff in a stronger form as well as a host of additional utility. Warriors are back now, which means more competition for that spot.

3) This season has seen different classes rising to the top. Priests are rogues are good. Arms and Ret are good, depending on who you believe. We are nerfing or have nerfed some of those classes, which should open up the top playing-field a little. We are getting rid of Exorcism allowing paladins to two-shot pets. I'd agree that hunter representation is a little low at the moment, but we're not sure the class needs massive buffs so much as others need some nerfs.

4) Hunters are betters in 5s than 2s. It's really challenging to have every class or spec have the same representation in small teams as large, which is one of the reasons we offer multiple sizes. Recently the community seems to be focusing on 2s even more than 3s. We are taking some steps to make sure the larger brackets are as rewarding as the smaller ones. (I'm not saying it's a goal that some classes are only viable for some brackets. But it is nice that if you aren't as good for some brackets, you always have the others to fall back on.)

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
Steady Shot revert would not help all that much IMO, it would just make MM/BM ignore arcane shot in their rotations.

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We'd be unlikely to buff Steady Shot, for the same reasons we nerfed it before. If we need to buff hunters, we'd likely do it in other ways. We'd also be unlikely to buff pet damage.

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Q u o t e:
And Blizzard bows down and caters to forum QQ about 99.9% of the time.

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Unless it's *your* post, and then Blizzard never listens to the community, amirite? :)

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
I think by now there is enough data to show that even on bosses beyond the first couple in Ulduar hunters are lagging substantially behind rogues, locks, mages, and dks. You blame the hunter community from QQ'ing when you post response like this. Do you think hunters would be QQ'ing this much about our PVE dps if it wasn't true?

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By that logic, if we see DKs, mages, druids, shamans QQ'ing about their damage then it must be true?

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Q u o t e:
I think part of this problem goes back to pet scaling and how well they benefit from buffs. That may have accounted somewhat for the initial success of hunter dps.

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Pets scaling from buffs is a problem. If we had the tech, we would let pets benefit from buffs but prevent the pet from getting extra scaling from the same buffs on the hunter. That would solve some of the problem.

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Q u o t e:
Warriors have taken over that spot completely in regards to 2v2. There is no reason to bring a hunter over a warrior in 2v2. You'd end up with a far squishier class with far less mobility, less burst, and less utility (for the 2v2 setting).

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"Far squishier" is probably up for debate. Warriors have plate, shields and Defensive Stance and virtually no active defenses. I think warriors are doing better because DKs are more balanced now and because warriors got Juggernaut. If we nerfed Juggernaut into the ground (which we aren't going to do), then I think you'd see warriors collapse again. Maybe.

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Q u o t e:
Hunter never needed massive buffs. You gave us massive buffs we didn't need in season 5 (we never asked for mace stun, being able to layer 2 frost traps at once, monkey glyph).

Then you nailed the class with the most nerfs ever given to a class in the history of this game, when hunters didn't even have top representation at the time.

You nerfed stuff that absolutely NO ONE was even complaining about, like being able to RoS teammates. Who the hell complained about that? Or was that just PvE tweaking that screws over PvP due to lazy coding?

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This is not an appropriate place to insult our programmers.

Much of your argument is "we didn't ask for" or "nobody was complaining." But we aren't asking the community to design or balance the game. This isn't an open-source project.

"Most nerfs in the history of the game" is hyperbole and I'm sure other classes would disagree. It's also irrelevant. The number of buffs or nerfs doesn't matter. Arms received virtually two buffs (Juggernaut and armor pen) and it made a huge difference.

Hunters were concerned going into LK that they would be too weak in PvP. We iterated on the design a lot and ended up in a position where they were too good. Some nerfs were necessary.

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Q u o t e:
It feels like to us that you don't want to buff SS because that would be admitting that your earlier nerf was a mistake.

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Was I just pwned?

We admit mistakes when we make them. Nerfing SS was for a good reason. Since you seem unwilling to go research it, the reason was that it is a very simple attack that requires almost no finesse, skill or timing to play. You just push the button and get some damage. The larger the portion of your damage from SS becomes, the less the other attacks even matter. As SS damage approaches 100%, you can just take those other buttons off your bar completely. Having "white damage" (which this virtually is) account for a large chunk of melee damage is marginally acceptable where the class has to at least do something to stay on a target. Just plinking away from range and doing massive damage with one button is not.

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
1. You say Hunter DPS was too high in Naxx. That is was head and shoulders above the rest. Isn;t it true that as all classes geared up via Naxx that many classes (mage lock DK) caught up and surpassed Hunters? I know thats what happened in my raids. Kind of leads me to believe that Hunters just didn't scale as well with gear.

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Scaling with gear is a legitimate concern, but it's also something the community has kind of seized upon and tends to over-use. Do you think those mages and locks gained 1000 or more dps as their Naxx gear improved? (DKs were just OP.)

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Q u o t e:
2. Stuns and uber mana drains are not coming back... fair enough. Do you feel that after 4 seasons of Hunters being the lowest represented class at 2k rating levels and being back there again for the start of season 6 that it points to TnT and mana draining as the reasons Hunters were able to achiev viable representation in season 5?

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Mentioning previous seasons implies that we need to make sure hunters can win S6 to make up for past injustice. I can understand how you might feel slighted at being too weak in the past, but really that shouldn't have a ton of bearing on what we do in the future.

I'm sure the TNT and Viper Sting helped, but I don't think those were the only factors. As I say a lot, you have to look at the whole picture in PvP. You have to look at who was weak and who was strong last season. When your counters are weak, you do better.

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Q u o t e:
3. Do you feel that the 5v5 bracket is a bit more watered down than 2v2 or 3v3 in the sense that more teammates allows for less focus to fall on 1 classes weaknesses? Does being 50% of a team draw more attention to a classes weaknesses than being 20% of a team? Do larger team sizes lead to teams being more willing to take known gimped classes?

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I don't necessarily want to turn the thread into a discussion of the merits of 5s vs. 3s or 2s. We understand there are logistical (and currently reward) considerations when developing a 5. Burst damage is always going to be higher because you have more people to gang up on someone. But I do want to caution you all a little bit not to steer your arguments towards "Only 2s matter."

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
3) GC provides us with another non-answer, with information that has been said already and plenty of hand-waving.

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If we had a list of hunter buffs to share, we would make them readily available. When you ask for answers to questions, you should not be disappointed when the answers are not “so here’s a buff.” We’re not going to wait for someone to ask a question in a perfect way before providing buffs. When you think about it that way, these long Q&A threads are almost never going to be the ones with a lot of discussion about the future of your class. Those are going to be given in announcements.

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Q u o t e:
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Q u o t e:


What I don't think you understand is Auto shot does more DMG overall than steady. It needs a boost. Not to the point that it takes overthrow other shots in DPS.
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I know auto does more dmg than steady, trust me.

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We’ve been over this ground before, but it’s actually irrelevant if Steady does more or less damage than Auto since you can use them both together (unless it just offends your sensibilities or something).

We think the Glyph of the Monkey was just too good. It made more sense back when you had to go to Monkey. But we didn’t want to keep that restriction when the whole point of Dragonhawk was to make you not have to shift Aspects all of the time.

We can understand how Roar of Sacrifice was cool because it gave you some utility you could share with the rest of your team. Maybe there is some way to bring back that functionality, possibly in a different ability.

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Q u o t e:

Gc I dunno if you are still reading this thread but winning a 5vs5 should net you more points than it currently does.

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Yes, that was the real point I was getting at. I knew my comment about 2s vs. 5s would be controversial, and it does appear some of you took it the wrong way. What I was trying to say was, A) Don’t say “My class sucks in PvP” when what you mean is “My class sucks in 2s.” You can’t just define away the 5s bracket and we are taking steps to make it more attractive. That doesn’t mean we just consider some classes are for 5s and some are for 2s or 3s.

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Q u o t e:
The issue with the nerfs is that they were all PvP oriented. No class has ever recieved so many PvP nerfs in a single patch before . . . ever.

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I’m not even sure if that’s a true statement, but it’s still irrelevant. You should be arguing about the magnitude of the changes -- their total effect -- not the raw count.

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Q u o t e:
So we know that the mechanics of the fights are not going to change. The only way to balance hunter's back to normal is buff Volley and nerf melee AoE. We can at least then have a niche.

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Eurytos, you seem to have a different perspective from a lot of players here. Are you saying that it’s only the lower AE that makes you feel low, or that AE would be a good niche for hunters? The latter we just disagree with. The former seems to go counter to what a lot of other players are saying. (I agree with your other point, that the basic roles of the shots and rotations in 3.0 works.)

I'll conclude with a sigh. Because you can’t necessarily see the results, we banned several of the more foaming responses above. For the millionth time, if your only contribution to this thread is “Blizzard hates me I’m a gonna reroll” please just spare us. Your comments will be deleted and nobody will see them anyway. This is a long thread. Please reward players who make it this far with something of substance. Otherwise the message your are giving loud and clear is “By the time I get to page 10, there’s just QQ, so I’m not going to read that far anymore.”

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
I wish Blizz did remove the ability to "buff" pets by raid buffs and simply let them scale with all the Hunters stats..

Crit rating
Armor Penetration
Agility
Attack Power
Haste


That way it would open up ALOT more gear possibilities..

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Yes, we agree with all of that (more or less). The barrier in this case is technical -- it's just not set up to work that way, so it's not a quick change. But we would like to eventually get that fixed.

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Q u o t e:
I don't think anyone was after that - just some answers to the actual questions stated. You gave us neither. I don't get what the unwillingness is to answer direct, unobtrusive questions.

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I answered a lot of questions. I didn’t (and can’t) answer them all. If there was one you really wanted to see discussed, then feel free to mention it again. Another way to get the same effect is to ask fewer questions so I can tell which ones are the most important to you.

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Q u o t e:
Which you've already admitted won't be forthcoming...

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I didn’t actually say that. I said you shouldn’t expect to see them [buffs] in threads like this. When you think about it, most of the kinds of answers you’re going to get in threads like this are philosophical ones.

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Q u o t e:
I'm fairly sure the number of posts about our representation on here would have been more than enough posts about the result of the magnitude of the changes. Do we need more?

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Yes. The only reason I read these forums is because I am interested in the discussion. I know what the representation numbers are. Posts that just provide Blizzard with links aren’t really contributing to the discussion. The better posts in this thread are the ones that describe situations where hunters have trouble. To give two examples: warriors are always up in my stuff in PvP, and my pet is dead on Mimiron in PvE.

Now, if you're somehow trying to extrapolate that number of posts should be taken as an indication of the accuracy or severity of a problem, we totally disagree. The thing that will convince us, always, is the strength of your arguments. Period. You can accomplish that with a single post (and players have done so). You can also spend a great deal of forum space on something that goes nowhere.

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Q u o t e:
So what does that mean for the ammo changes? The trap launcher? Pets not breaking freezing trap if it had a set amount of damage? We're getting close to Ulduar being finished by your definition (People are already attempting Algalon), and stuff that you guys talked about from nearly beta to 2 months ago have yet to even make way into it.

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Those are all still in the plan. We are always very reluctant to provide timelines unless we have some confidence that we can deliver. The community tends to be a tad unforgiving unless we offer a lot of caveats on everything we “promise.” I can understand how it can be difficult to be patient, but just realize the alternative is not that they get done faster but that we keep our ideas really close to the chest until they are about to go in the game. Some players would prefer this method of communication, which is understandable.

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Q u o t e:
Well, you have to assume that Blizzard nerfed ferocity pet damage precisely because they thought pets were doing too much damage (presumably across the board)... so asking for pet DPS to be boosted again is probably going to be met with deafening silence :)

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We don’t think it’s a strong design to have too much of your dps tied up in the pet, because then you are really crippled when it dies and we aren’t going to provide you with 100% certainty that that isn’t going to happen.

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
He didn't say "we think BM and MM are a bit lower than Survival, he said he thought Survival was higher. That indicates a mind set to me that he thinks Survival still needs nerfs.

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Just to clarify, we have no plans to nerf Survival. We would like to solve some of Marks' mana problems, though some predictions remain that Marks will overtake Survival with the best possible gear. BM is probably a little behind, which is something we also want to address.

I will add my standard caveat not to try and overinterpret Ulduar data. The bosses were designed to be very different from each other. We didn't go boss by boss and say "Okay, this is the one where warlocks will be highest." Put another way, when we make single boss raids, we don't expect to see a 10-way tie for dps. I'm not saying the PvE damage is perfect (though compared to where it's been historically it's honestly not bad). You just have to examine things on a case by case basis and not just link wowmetersonline as conclusive proof that things are off. Take a fight like XT -- it's an almost perfect situation for rogues, while hunters are often asked to help deal with adds. It shouldn't be too surprising that rogue numbers come out very high for that fight. Kologarn and Mimiron are rough on pets.

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer