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In addition to confirming the removal of freezing trap, trinkets will now also remove Deathcoil:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...geNo=2&sid=1#27
Quote: The trinkets will be updated an upcomming PTR build to remove Deathcoil, Freezing trap, and several other effects that were missed in the first pass.
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Quote:In addition to confirming the removal of freezing trap, trinkets will now also remove Deathcoil:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...geNo=2&sid=1#27
Yay, nerf those pesky hunters right out of the other two Arena pvp games!
(No, I don't pvp, yes, this is tounge in cheek)
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06-09-2007, 03:08 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-09-2007, 03:10 PM by Mavfin.)
Quote:Yay, nerf those pesky hunters right out of the other two Arena pvp games!
(No, I don't pvp, yes, this is tongue in cheek)
Well, this is less about PvP 'balance' than more about 'fun' for people playing. As Legedi said, CC-->death is no fun at all, and turns many off of PvP completely. And that's exactly what happens to the inexperienced now. You start a match or a fight, and lose complete control of your character till dead. What's the fun in that? Blizzard would like to see more people PvP, so they're going to remove more of the 'unfun' parts so that more use the content.
I'm not saying this change or others are 'right' or 'balanced', but I think the above has more to do with it than other factors. I don't PvP myself, as I've never put in the time to become good at it. The only 'PvP' I was good at pre-BC was tanking the NPCs in AV so the good PvPers could kill those players who got in the way, and I could get some honor. This is just how I see this change from the outside looking in.
<ramble>
WoW is still a core PvE game, and if you start rewriting classes for PvP, then you start to lose the PvE balance, which is, of course, always a work in progress, as we've seen in the last few months. Some classes have been buffed a bunch, and Blizzard said 'whoops', and nerfed them back, then boosted them a little till they had them where they wanted (for now). Other classes have seen smaller nerfs and stayed that way, other classes have gotten small buffs. As I said, it's always a work in progress. Also, different people have different opinions on what 'balance' means. YMMV.
</ramble>
--Mav
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The ironic part is, the reason rogues are "good" within arena is that all our cooldowns come back every fight, and a rogue with cooldowns is nasty, and a rogue without cooldowns is in deeeeep doo doo. So seeing rogues as they stand in probably the best case scenario for them PvP wise (all cooldowns come back every fight), it honestly scares me.
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Quote:Yay, nerf those pesky hunters right out of the other two Arena pvp games!
(No, I don't pvp, yes, this is tounge in cheek)
Yeah arenas are not friendly to hunters. We still do very well in battlegrounds, but we have issues in the arenas and it will either take a redesign of the arenas or the class. The size of the arenas and the ease of causing LoS issues or deadzone issues make it tough on hunters to do any kind of damage. All hunter specs are pretty limited on CC options. Oh and for those that don't get it. If someone jumps out of LoS of a mage, the mage just has to get LoS back and can then use the full arsenal. If someone gets out of LoS of the hunter they not only need to get LoS back but then need to make sure they aren't too close. I end up doing more melee than I would like and I've already switched, in most cases from trying to use the mostly useless freezing trap (since it can be dispelled by priests and paladins already so if there is one around that cooldown buys you all of about 2 seconds of CC on someone) to, believe it or not, the snake trap. Since snakes can now entrap and the snakes like to put up crippling as well they are generally the best way for me to get distance again in an arena. But it often means that even when I do damage I'm not doing nearly close to my effective damage.
I do play arenas, once a week on a 3v3 team that we all know isn't a good composition class wise and we aren't PvP players either and are all PvE specs we don't expect to ever really do anything other than hover around 1500 rating, which is alright with us. But even at those levels vs some pretty poor PvP players frustrating the hunter isn't that hard to do. One of the best things that can happen to us is to get the newest arena layout because it's so much harder for folks to play LoS and deadzone games with me. In situations like that I can really do some damage. But any good team when they see the make up of our team is generally best served by killing me off then getting the other folks.
Battlegrounds though are different critters, it's much easier to get and keep range and do some serious damage or interrupt the other side via various traps and distractions for the pet. Hunters are decent flag carriers in Eye of the Storm as well because of how control of the map tends to end up, aspect of the daze can actually be used, this is much harder to pull of in WSG but hunters still have value for that there.
So I know you were tongue in cheek but I wouldn't be surprised to see the hunter ratios go down even more with this change in arenas. If there was no priest or paladin on the team the freezing trap was good CC and did give the hunter team help. Now it just means that even on those teams you end up using snakes or frost to just try and get the slowing or entrapment triggers but that also means you might lose more to them since you can't take some of that DPS you are facing out of the fight (if the team has a druid healer you generally just killed them first because druid healers are the easiest healers to kill by far in arenas at least at the lower skill levels since they have long heals or purgable heals or can't heal at all if they change forms). It does help hunters a bit since we can get out of sheeps now but I still think it hurts us because the few times when we were better to bring than another class in the first place, times when you need CC and everyone could trinket out of sheep, are now gone and the mage is going to be better than the hunter with the blinks, novas, sheeps same or better DPS from range, better burst DPS via trinkets, counterspell on a caster is as good or better than a pet that is there to just stutter casts, etc. Sure a hunter can get out of more annoying situations now because they can actually break sheep and fear now but it just means the mages repeatable CC and the warlocks repeatable CC got more valuable compared to the now breakable hard to repeat hunter CC and the hunter didn't have much in the way of advantages.
But I was already under the impression that hunters were only on top teams anyway because that is what they played and their friends kept them around on the team because a well played hunter can at least break even and bring a few tricks to a team with good focus fire (well timed stun from a beast master scatter shots and silencing shots from marks, but marks bring better tricks to the table than beast for arenas anyway) so that they aren't a total liability in the arena. So their friends let them still play the hunter. I've never figured a hunter was on an arena team because the team thought a hunter was a better choice than another class, only because there wasn't another choice.
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I mentioned that I don't PvP, and that's one of the big reasons. I make no claim to any PvP skill whatsoever, I'm mainly a PvE player, and I like to think a pretty decent one. But I've done some PvP'ing in my time, and there is little more frusterating than to go from full to dead with almost nothing I can do about it. Now I realize that part of this is my spec, and part of it my lack of skill...but even accounting that, like has been said, PvP is no fun if you can't do something once in a while.
I played through to AV exalted because I wanted a couple things from there, and felt useful. From the few Arena's I've done (all skirmish matches) I always felt useless. So I don't arena anymore.
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Quote:I played through to AV exalted because I wanted a couple things from there, and felt useful. From the few Arena's I've done (all skirmish matches) I always felt useless. So I don't arena anymore.
Yep I don't blame you at all on that either. I only play because I'm in there with people that don't care that much about being ranked high. We want to get better we, want to win more than we lose, but we know that we can't be, and in some matches I can be helpful. But I know that if we were doing a competitive arena team that my hunter, even if I did a more PvP friendly spec, would be mostly dead weight on an arena team.
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Quote:I wouldn't be surprised to see the hunter ratios go down even more with this change in arenas. If there was no priest or paladin on the team the freezing trap was good CC and did give the hunter team help.
I don't think it's as dire as that. The people muddling along for their 400 points/week can pretty much continue to do that. I don't think a slight but noticable change in utility is going to change much for those folks.
Anything higher then that and you can pretty much count on seeing a priest or pally anyhow. I'd imagine that people at that level would rarely trinket out of a trap, prefering to save it for something they can't get dispelled out of - like a warrior fear or a scattershot.
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Quote:I don't think it's as dire as that. The people muddling along for their 400 points/week can pretty much continue to do that. I don't think a slight but noticable change in utility is going to change much for those folks.
Anything higher then that and you can pretty much count on seeing a priest or pally anyhow. I'd imagine that people at that level would rarely trinket out of a trap, prefering to save it for something they can't get dispelled out of - like a warrior fear or a scattershot.
You can trinket out of scatter shot as well now. It's not just the traps that were already mostly useless that it hurts on the hunters and marks specs were generally the better Arena specs because of the silence and scatter utility. And there are less hunters (if you look at all 3 brackets) than any other class at least on the top teams based off the link earlier in this thread. Yes there are more druids across all the brackets than hunters.
Code: Class 5v5 3v3 2v2 Total
Hunter 70 12 8 90
Druid 41 29 23 93
Shaman 143 54 17 214
Rogue 52 76 46 174
And yeah the trinket change might not change much for them. But even on the top teams, as I mentioned earlier, I'm pretty sure most of the hunters are just there because their friends are being nice to them. People do actually want druids and shaman and rogues on the teams even with the weaknesses they have.
The trinket change I think is something that overall hurts hunters, but again it's not a huge deal. Hunters are not a good class in the arenas because of class design and the actual layout design of the arenas themselves. I just took some of the discussion in this thread and ran with it. I still have fun in the arenas because I'm just muddling for my 350-400 points a week (I'm on a 3v3 team) but I'm not one of the stats listed there. I'm not in a top 20 team on my server so I play with my friends, get my points, have fun even with some of the frustrations of the class in PvP. The only class I'll even accept arguments about Arena issues being worse for is the druid and I still think they are better in arenas but at least I think they have a leg to stand on as far as griping goes. I haven't checked but I bet that of the hunters in those numbers that a lot of them are only playing 30-40% of the games, that even on the top teams they are getting drug in the ratings up.
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Quote:Hunters are not a good class in the arenas because of class design and the actual layout design of the arenas themselves. The only class I'll even accept arguments about Arena issues being worse for is the druid and I still think they are better in arenas but at least I think they have a leg to stand on as far as griping goes. I haven't checked but I bet that of the hunters in those numbers that a lot of them are only playing 30-40% of the games, that even on the top teams they are getting drug in the ratings up.
I beg to differ GG. An effective hunter is a nightmare in the arenas (More noteably in the larger brackets) due to their survivability, utility, and damage a hunter brings to the table. I think that hunters are definitely underrepresented at the moment but looking at the ultra high-end pvp more teams played a hunter than a rogue in the various rounds of the arena tournament so far. While they are subject to all sort of kiting and los tactics by individual members they provide a source of dps that is not easily controlled in any way. I can't count the number of 5v5 matches my (admittedly terrible 1800ish rating) team has lost due to trying to focus a monster in 200-300 resilience sporting at least 12k health with a get out of trouble free BW button to totally ruin our efforts and to top it all off snares for our melee to keep them off of him.
MaxPower#1485 60 SC Barb/32 HC Witch Doctor/22 HC Wizard/17 HC Demon Hunter
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Quote:I beg to differ GG. An effective hunter is a nightmare in the arenas (More noteably in the larger brackets) due to their survivability, utility, and damage a hunter brings to the table. I think that hunters are definitely underrepresented at the moment but looking at the ultra high-end pvp more teams played a hunter than a rogue in the various rounds of the arena tournament so far. While they are subject to all sort of kiting and los tactics by individual members they provide a source of dps that is not easily controlled in any way. I can't count the number of 5v5 matches my (admittedly terrible 1800ish rating) team has lost due to trying to focus a monster in 200-300 resilience sporting at least 12k health with a get out of trouble free BW button to totally ruin our efforts and to top it all off snares for our melee to keep them off of him.
I don't play enough 5v5. In 5v5 yeah they would be more valuable than in the lower stuff but I would still think you want a rogue or a mage over them.
Of course there are a ton of really really really bad hunters out there so that could play a part in how few of them make arenas.
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Quote:I don't play enough 5v5. In 5v5 yeah they would be more valuable than in the lower stuff but I would still think you want a rogue or a mage over them.
Of course there are a ton of really really really bad hunters out there so that could play a part in how few of them make arenas.
I don't 5v5 much anymore (my team dropped then fell apart as the summer started), but we had an awesome rogue, and teams with a good hunter were a lot of trouble. A good hunter facing a team with 2 melee players (rogue+warrior) can have near-complete board control using frost trap to slow all opponents at just the right time. Meanwhile, the warrior gets every CC dispelled off him by the Paladin and runs around pwning anything soft caught in the frost trap. Typically, they'll pick a soft target (like a priest) and the hunter can use silencing shot to make sure that the soft target drops.
A counter to this (for teams with a druid) is (was?) to chain-cyclone the warrior and drop one of the other team's players before the warrior becomes cyclone-immune.
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