February News/Discussion

[NiteFox]

...and for 3.1.0 we still intend to remove the need for pouches/quivers by greatly increasing the stack sizes on arrows and bullets, and the haste bonus from the bags will be preserved in another fashion. We’ll be sure to inform our players with further updates once they become available.

...

How?

I'm pretty sure that WoW itself cannot handle item stacks of more than 250. This is, I'm sure, a game code issue. As it stands, there isn't a stackable item in the game that has a size more than 250.

So let's take the comment about removing the need for pouches/quivers at face value and assume that, as soon as 3.1 is live, all such items are removed from the game. You still have to buy a new bag to stash your ammo in, just that the haste bonus is baseline.

The largest bags in the game are 22 slots. If I went out and bought a Gigantique (with cash I don't actually have anymore. Damn Massacre enchant), and then filled it up with ammo at 250 rounds a stack, I'd be able to carry a total of 5500 rounds. Still, I'm not rich, so I'll probably replace my quiver with a 20 slot bag (5000 rounds).

With an ammo pouch of 28 slots, and the current stack size of 200, I can carry 5600 rounds. About the only benefit I can think of with this change is that, once I burn a stack of ammo in my new, expensive bag, I can put another item in it.

But... Well, that's not exactly removing the dependency on storing ammo. If quivers are still in the game, then this is a tremendous boost to hunters until non-consumable ammo comes into the game. If quivers aren't, then... Wow, someone at Blizzard better redo the math, because we'd either be filling up more bag space than we would normally be doing with ammo, or going into situations with drastically less ammo than we had before.

And if they are pushing stack sizes beyond the 250 limit, then that would be requiring a lot of coding effort. Coding effort that could be spent on, oh I don't know, non-consumable ammo relics.