The Wrath of the Lich King beta realms were updated tonight with beta build 3.0.2 (8926). The realms are not yet up, but early reports from the normal data-mining sources (like MMO Champion and WotLK Wiki) indicate that a number of pet abilities have changed in terms of damage.
I am hoping this means that pets have been included in the current big class-balancing push. Blizzard let us know before that the previous pet ability numbers were placeholders and that they needed to do a damage and threat pass on pets. And since we won’t actually have a good idea about how the pets play until we get some real numbers for damage and threat … well, I’m hoping that this is kicking off that process.
As soon as I can get in-game I’ll start checking the skills and abilities I have handy to see what’s changed exactly. However, I probably won’t be able to get a complete list myself — since pets and pet skills auto-level, it has become prohibitively difficult to check out lower ranks of pet skills. But I’ll grab what I can and let you know what it looks like.
Also …
Apparently, a lot of hunter abilities have also changed, and apparently in ways that are upsetting for hunters who pay more attention to this than I do. I fully expect you guys to express your opinions of these changes in the comments. I would ask you only to please keep the language within relatively tame bounds and to avoid flaming each other (or me!) in the process. Thanks. :>
[edit #1] Koraa has posted a comment indicating that this build represents the first of two balance sweeps they are doing across all the classes. Their internal build (which we will see next patch, one assumes) already has some changes from today’s build. So keep that in mind when looking at the abilities in this patch.
[edit #2] Here’s an interesting thing hidden in this patch! Acid Spit, the Worm family skill, now stacks up to 5 times on a target. The new description for reads:
Acid Spit (Rank 5): Your worm spits acid at an enemy, causing 29 to 41 Nature damage and reducing its armor by 520 per Acid Spit for 30 sec. Can be applied up to 5 times.
[edit #3] Speaking of spits (!), Poison Spit finally has all 6 ranks available.
So yes, I’m seeing a lot of adjustments in pet ability damage numbers. I’ll get the new numbers up on Petopia as quickly as possible. The changes are not straight nerfs or straight buffs — many skills lost some damage in the middle ranks but gained some on the top and bottom ranks. Others were buffed all the way up, and a few were nerfed all the way up. I look forward to trying out some of the changes in actual play.
[edit #4] Petopia is now updated with the 8926 numbers for pet skills.
Hmm… Aspect of the Viper doesn’t sound real powerful now… All I saw on WotLK Wiki was nerfs for hunter class. I’m not in beta, but were all of those so OP to be nerfed? Looks like someone thought hunters were OP in general 0.o
I was wrong about wing clip, they data mined that from a creature instead of hunters, it is unchanged, and I will update that in a moment.
The dangers of data-mining. :> Unfortunately sometimes we’re stuck with it.
Outside of Wingclip supposedly being unchanged, AotV and everything else got gutted hardcore.
I have a Druid and a Paladin at 70. This is good.
Incidentally, the Paladin, holy/ret specced, will now be able to judge every 8 seconds from 30 yards, restoring 20% total mana.
[edit by Mania: The following is the comment by Koraa that I reference in the edited post above]
The balance team did a sweep of the talents and made modifications they felt necessary to keep the talents and abilities in budget. We’ve since done a second pass of what they came up with (which you see in this build) and made further changes. Our latest changes are not in this build you have now.
Some of the changes will stay, some will be reverted, and some will be re-designed. Lock and Load was just too much burst with 3 charges, and the balance guys changed it to 1. We’re going to up it to 2. Also going to make it have a chance to proc from Sting periodic ticks rather than the initial hit.
If you have feedback on specific changes please provide that
Koraa
So thats something at least. I think this was a tweak downward gone horribly wrong. I am still fairly livid with the change to aspect of the viper and invigoration. My mana goes fast enough as it is, and with longevity I want to always have mana up for beastial wrath and intimidation at the very least, not to mention the myriad of shots I like to fire at people.
You posted and I edited at the same time, Palla. I apologize for editing your comment, but I wanted to get the source link in there also.
Well, AotV was literally nerfed into unusability.
I don’t mean “I don’t like it”, I mean % of mana returned equal to base weapon speed means, roughly 100 seconds of DPS at HALF DAMAGE to fill our mana bar.
That is so broken, and so much of a giant drop in functionality from the already dumb mechanic of the existing AotV that I’m consoling myself with the thought that… they can’t possible keep it like that. It’s more broken in the opposite direction than the “way too good” version they changed it from was.
The thing I just can’t understand is… I needed neither a calculator nor more than about a 5 seconds glance to see this.
How the heck do these things get past the discussion stage and actually get pushed into a test build? “Borked” is way too nice a way to describe this.
No need to apologize, Mania! Thank you for editing it for me, you know how much I like to double post.
Nayana, the now beta version of aspect of the viper is so bad it won’t even cover the cost of a steady shot rotation, AND you’ll be dealing half damage the entire time, its that bad. And I don’t even USE a steady shot rotation, so it’d screw me even harder. I honestly get more milage out of just using Viper on Live and wailing on things then I do switching over at low mana or mana potion chugging.
It needs a balance, a good half way point. 100% damage with 20% returned as mana, or something. But that version is just some one crapping on paper and calling it a good idea, pardon the phrase.
Another update, one I find very intereting.
Certificate of Ownership — Allows you to rename your pet.
I’ll see if I can’t find a link some where.
Interesting* http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?action=search2 Apparently its an inscription item that that particular profession can make. Huh, makes me kind of glad Illidius never took a proffesion.
If these changes stay, I won’t be BM in wrath, that’s for sure. as I posted on the Kitty forums, BM is now the “We give you cool pets so you don’t notice we’re nerfing the crap out of you” spec….
If these stay, and considering the haste problems, BM is dead.
* Master’s Call – Can no longer be cast while stunned.
So… an ability that removes stuns can no longer be cast while stunned…. huh.
and mana regen is gone… AGAIN….
Oh Cool!! They also let us rename our pets to take our minds off the #$#)(%$)%YU the are $U$)(U$)_(U$_)U
at least I have a pally to play…
Jester, my best guess is that it, in some way, endangered their current favorite class, the rogues. Can’t have that, now can we! Down the chute!
Thats the general consenus, Fear, that they said “Oh look! Something shiney!” to help take away the sting of this patch. That being said, there is already another patch in the works that, apparently, undoes a good deal of this one. Which kinda begs the question: Why put these changes into this patch at all?
I’m thinking of being a bit more drastic than Fearstalker; not about respeccing just… Focusing on my Warlock and Paladin. For a while.
A long while.
I didn’t actually think AotV could get >worsehate< now, instead of love.
posting.. ate my post O_o
‘I didn’t actually think AotV could get worse, why is there hunter hate now, instead of love’
@Palla
I hope so. This is a little ridiculous. There have been changes made in the past that I could look at objectively and understand the reasoning behind it or how it could be used in a creative way but some of this… some of this is ridiculous. AotV changes alone are enough to get up in arms about. It’s basically useless now. Seems like that whole “get away from relying on so many pots” philosophy is going right out the window.
And I like how Master’s Call got nerfed before it was ever actually available for Beta testing. gg, Blizz.
But see, Ryai, I have a problem with that. I have a paladin, warlock, and druid at seventy, a warrior at 55, and an up and coming shaman that I could play. But I WANT to play my hunter, and I WANT it to be fun. Right now, on live, I am no longer enjoying myself, to many little things are gumming it up, but Wrath promised to make things better. I feel compelled to point out that they still will be better, with so many buffs to our pets, but now they’ve tossed in another money sink I didn’t really have before, water, by turning viper into trash, and shattered any hopes of invigoration helping my mana situation as well. Masters call, something that promised to decrease the amount of time I spent stun locked by a rogue, is now useless for that aspect, though it does promise to help me, hopefully, get away from warriors faster. The nerfs to aspect mastery made little sense as well.
I think part of the problem we are all feeling is this: These changes seem hefty, and overly unnescary. They speak of ‘talent point budgets’. which I do understand, but then they screw talents massively. And heck, aspect of the viper isn’t even a talent! And neither is deflection anymore, yet it got kicked in the groin! Rogues get cloak of shadows AND evasion, while we were getting a watered down combination….but apparently that was to much…. just… where is the sense in it all?
One thing to remember is that no dev team is a monolithic whole. Reading between the lines in Koraa’s post, I would guess that either less senior designers or merely designers he doesn’t much like were tasked with helping him out with the balancing (or possibly reining him in), and data was pulled for this build while he was negotiating with the producer over which of their changes to revert.
Of course I’m making that up out of whole cloth, but in my experience that’s how dev teams work. It’s all drama-driven. *grin*
“Certificate of Ownership — Allows you to rename your pet”
I wonder where this is from and what it’ll cost? I think it’ll probably either be WotLK’s money sink, or an inscription recipe. Either way, it looks promising.
Actually Jester, from my observation they are heading MORE towards needing more mana potions. The old forms of mana regen introduced in TBC have been nerfed to hell and back, shadow priests just lost their mana battery status. The replenishment buff in survival? Thats what they got. The only variation are retribution paladins, who also get back 20% of their mana when judging as well as giving ten people that buff. ((I am not going to get started on paladins right now. I just watched retribution get buffed out the whazoo, protection get buffed, and holy get….. a twenty yard increase in judgements. Livid does not even come close.))
TBC introduced a method of mana restoration that shifted, heavily, away from both mana regen stats and potions. Wrath is either aiming for shorter, less mana intensive fights, or people finding ways around mana shortages. I can’t really tell for sure at the moment which way its going.
Snow, I posted it a bit ago, but the Arcania ate my post. Something about tasty links. Its an inscription skill, they make the certificate and its BoE, I do believe.
Of course I needed a triple. Spirit is making a huge come back here in Wrath. Which does exactly zero for us, since we have zero spirit on our gear.
Can anyone tell me the base mana for Hunters at 80? I don’t quite know if I need to panic yet, it’s the magic number for my “panic” spreadsheet…
Palladiamors: *Ret* Pallies? You can go almost all the way up the Holy tree and still get JotW. My Pally will be.
I’m a little surprised everyone here thought we were looking at final numbers on those talents. its still the beta, guys ;)
That being said, yes its a little sad that AotV can’t even keep up with a steady shot rotation, obviously they’ll notice that. The point of that change is, I’m sure I read on a blue post, that while damage and mana scales with gear, the mana cost of spells and shots does not, and so at a certain point, apparently easily attainable, hunters would essentially be a mana-less class. It’d be like giving mages an evocate with no cooldown.
We SHOULD be a mana-less class. Us using mana is ridiculous. We only have a handful of actual “spells”, such as aspects and what have you. Our shots are not considered spells for the purposes of game mechanics. But we’re mana users. It’s a silly mechanic, made worse by the fact that we have next to no ways to regenerate it efficiently and spend most boss fight guzzling potions *which we’re not going to be able to do in WotLK at ALL*.
I can’t argue that previous version of AotV was a bit OP, but as it stands currently we can only regen our mana by doing nothing by autoshot for over 100 solid seconds. ANY use of ANY special shot would drop regen to essentially where it is now on Live AND reduce our damage done by 50% to boot.
I know this is just the beta, but this is like… they sat around and thought up the WORST things they could do on purpose. Even a cursory glance at this change tells you it’s stupid. Further investigation reveals it to be weapons grade stupidity.
And like I said before, they even nerfed an ability that’s never even been tested on the beta. Never. Been. Tested.
Been considering it, Ketari, I was going for sheathe of light before, but that got boned this build as well. Or I may just effin’ respec to retri…. Divine plea restores 25% mana over 10 seconds, but HALVES your healing. Because, you know, that makes sense.
Jaed, a numbers pass is one thing, reducing one thing or another if its to high, raising something else if its to low. Aspect of the viper got murdered. Invigoration got turned into a 50/100% chance to restore 1% mana in pet special criticals. It started out four, which was just about right…. then it was two, which was to low… and now its one…. its not even worth two talent points. Masters call was heralded as the stun escape for PvP….. and it hasn’t worked once. Yet and in spite of this, was nerfed anyway. There are others, but I ran out of rant…. *Pants*
Wow….. I got my beta invite tonight… and the client is taking about 8 hours to download…. so kicking around while I wait I see that all the shiny’s they gave hunters are being nerfed? I didn’t even get a chance when they were cool! (( heck it’s telling me it’ll be a 3 day wait to copy my char. lol))
Hopefully this ‘build’ that has already been said to be, being fixed, won’t last long. I know Beta gets a new patch every few days to week. Hopefully the fix will come soon.
I dunno, invigoration seems to be still pretty good. 1% of my mana is 71, so every time my pet crits I’d get 71 mana back, which would be 71 mp5 if my pet got a critical hit every 5 seconds, and I’m sure on average it does better than that. 71 mp5 or more for 2 points doesn’t seem so bad, especially considering there’s so much synergy between hunter crit/pet crit talents.
Only works when your pet crits on a special ability. Not every attack.
@Ketari They buried JotW much deeper in Prot in this patch, holy won’t be getting it.
After looking at it all again, and with the haste issues they didn’t address, I still can’t see being BM except to level, and frankly, there’s a dirty secret here that hasn’t been discussed. For general use, I suspect that MM pets will be almost as usefull as BM pets. 4 less points, fine. We’ll spec for aggro and pet health, (assuming the actually fix aggro, haven’t seen that yet) and just blast the mobs ourselves.
MM might be the only hunter spec..
And yeah, my pally is looking a LOT better….
@ Jaedenkaal
Jester has it right, AND they nerfed Cobra strikes, so what you get from pet specials is getting reduced more, and let’s not forget the KC nerf that is going make it mostly unused.
It seems that they are WAY overcompensating for whatever the exotics give us by nerfing ever other place… either that or they really don’t know what we need, and are just playing with a spreadsheet.
The haste issues you have largely invented. With the changes to steady shot it’s far different from what you think it is.
Also it’s pretty much a given that MM is going to have even worse mana issues than ever before with the current setup.
@Jester
Go over to the big red kitty forums for the discussion on why haste is bad for us, look in the WOTLK section for several threads. I won’t try to discuss it here, but I was sceptical at first, but am now convinced. Also check the beta forums for threads on the topic.
In case you’re not following the updates to the post, Petopia now has the pet skill numbers for this build.
I know why it’s not as good for us now with the way SS works in live. I also know SS won’t work that way anymore. No clipping autoshot. Won’t even need a macro. Having a huge amount of haste probably still won’t be good for us but the changes make it less of a problem than you seem to think it is.
Fear: Yes, I’d forgotten about that. Even so, one bite/claw/smack crit every 10 seconds is not unreasonable to assume, which is still (for me) 35ish mp5, without taking into account Cobra Strikes, which, although nerfed, still guarantees the next two bites my ravager makes will crit, which he can easily do thanks to GftT.
No one thought that the synergy between a 4% invigoration and 3-crit cobra strikes was a little too good to be true? ;)
I’m sure we’ll see a boost here before release. As Koraa says, they’ve already boosted a number of these talents up to a middle ground, we just aren’t seeing it yet.
I’m glad I didn’t get a beta invite. You guys seem really stressed, but all us folks who won’t see it until PTR at the earliest won’t even notice what we’re missing :)
@Fearstalker – I’m not convinced it’s not worth it still. A holy pally can get closer than his more squishy counterparts can afford. Except beacon, you have the important healing talents (including infusion), bring a ton of utility and 13% +crit, 19% for holy light / shock.
But that’s pallies.
For Hunters, haste is a mana regen talent as well as a DPS one so its just become pretty much preeminant. And BM will be the best spec because of serpent’s swiftness. No need to go to the end though, more like…
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunter=052012015052122431005000000000000000000000000000000000005335200205000230000000000
Jaedenkaal – it’s been 2% for a long time. And no, even with 3 strikes / 2%, the best mana return of any Hunter tree, there were worries about being able to sustain rotations involving non-steady shots.
And if there are talent changes, they can post about them or they ain’t happened yet (and no I’m not in beta, or I’d be able to find base mana for a lvl 80 Hunter myself. Anyone, seriously?)
Really? We thought 5 talent points were going to sustain an entire rotation indefinately?
My point is, for 2 talent points, its a pretty good deal.
5 talent points, 2 1H weapons with oils, the wrath mageblood potion, replenishment buff, int buff and everything else which comes with the raid was still *not* matching previous to this nerf the expenditure for Hunters related to using a rotation with steady, arcane and serpent sting (talented for duration).
For 2 talent points, it’s a waste which can be better used elsewhere such as in efficientcy over in the MM tree, and in combat expertise’s 6% for 2 points intelligence post.
I can’t see how 6% mana regen from 5 talents points over 2 talents (Cobra Strikes and Invigoration) was over-budgeted…
Hunters suffer the same as Pallies with very little Spirit on their gear, with the significant nerf to AotV and Divine Plea (for Pallies), both classes are really going to struggle with mana regen. Hopefully the next build will revert them.
I’m sorry Ketari, I think we’ve lost each other somewhere here, I’m not sure I follow the(talented for duration) part…
I am almost positive, however, that Invigoration adds more to mana efficiency than 2 points in the Efficiency talent (4% reduced shot and sting cost, thats 11 mana per Steady Shot, btw, under the assumption that wotlkwiki’s cost of 280 is correct); even spamming steady shot constantly you’d still be getting more mana back with Invigoration than you’d be saving with 2 points in Efficiency.
Also, I don’t think its fair to compare Invigoration with Combat expertise, since you’re rarely if ever going to be choosing between them with an otherwise identical spec (and that would be a strange spec indeed, although no doubt someone will try it)
Actually I retract my statement regarding Divine Plea for the time being, until some testing on the debuff is done… More mobility for Pallies is a good thing.
Chris – As a holy pally, frankly I’m not overly worried about mana. I have plenty of mana tools to considerably slow mana drain and heal for long periods even without holy plea, or I can spec holy/ret and get a very fast mana return. Also, Paladin gear has a considerable amount of mp5 – 35 on the T7 set *and* Paladins have suffered less from the inflation of base mana (from Hunter’s allready high base) and mana inflation due to Blizzard only using whole percentage values for spell costs.
Hunters issues are of an entirely different class.
Jaedenkaal – Check the spec I linked. There’s a pretty clear choice between them. And the mana return from pets is subject to travel time and dependent on pet survival. Potentially in that spec you could argue for invigoration over 2 of the points in ranged weapon spec, but remember that without cobra strikes there is a strictly limited pet critical rate and thus return from invigoration.
Ketari – I agree with your comments regarding Pallies as compared to Hunters. What had worried me in the closing stages of Burning Crusade is that Pallies were supposed to be the most mana efficient of all the healers (we suffered with less group utility healing for this), with the changes to Spirit that did not benefit Pallies as much as Priests and Druids, that became less of the case and buffings aside there wasn’t many advantages to being a Pallie healer.
Anyhow, seems a lot of classes (bar Rogues and Warlocks, now there’s a surpise) got hit pretty hard in this patch, and hopefully Koraa is to be believed when they are saying some of this will be reverted back…
Yay for Poison Spit!!!
My hunter curently uses a Serpent (i had it from lvl 20, got it from WC) becouse i didnt want to run around with a cat or ravager like most of the hunters.( and i dont regret it, its good for pulling)