Before coming to the forums to complain, you should really have a long think about the effect of your complaints. Issues surrounding our class are not in a vacuum, there are much bigger fish to fry than a singular drop from a singular tier of content. Don’t be so short sighted. Let’s be real, Blizzard is a business, they don’t have infinite resources and when you eat up the “hunter budget” for such short-sighted nonsense, you hurt yourselves and us all.
Now don’t get me wrong, I agree that the balance between hunters with and without the bow was too extreme. But the problem here isn’t the short-sighted goal of nerfing the bow, there will always be the next bow or trinket or w/e. The real problem is with ultra rare drops and the rng loot system. That is where you should be directing your complaints. Players who spend so much time in the game dedicated to a specific goal and still do not receive their just rewards, now that is the real problem. Next time something like this comes up, go complain about the loot system, not the loot. This way the “loot system” budget is expended and not the hunter budget.
Hunters have much bigger problems right now than a singular drop. Currently hunters have no real raid utility that is a must bring to end game pve content, whether that be mythic + or raiding. On top of that hunters have the least amount of self-sustain and damage reduction tools amongst all the other classes especially in pve. On top of that, hunters don’t bring an especially stand out damage profile or damage amount. These are the issues that need to be addressed for the long-term viability and playability of our class, not some bow!
bold of you to assume that i can complain about only one thing at a time
Then you just muddle the message and again either essential changes don’t happen or ones that don’t really matter do. We need to stand united and give a clear and consistent message to blizz about the problems and what needs to be addressed.
They’re one and the same in this case. We were put into a balance state where we’d be undertuned until having gotten a rare drop. That means we’d spend the majority of our time underpowered.
In the same sense as having one fight on which we excel wouldn’t prop up doing terribly on all others, eventually getting top ST damage on BM via a programming oversight does not make up for the shortfalls the whole way there.
And the feedback on the bow was far from muddled:
Balancing around rare drops of such immense power is going to feel at least as bad for those without as it feels good for those with, and there will be far, far more people without the rare drop while the content is still fully relevant than there will be with that rare drop. Don’t do it. Sizable but reasonable bonuses only.
None of which was remotely mutually exclusive with such issues as…
- Bloated talent trees
- Insufficient eHP (passively or via DR coverage)
- Dragonflight changes having hurt Survival gameplay and mobility
- Etc.
Having an issue with the bow did not detract attention from those other issues.
If BM buffs hadn’t stopped short to instead be balanced around pet AA speed also being unintentionally affected, there would have been no need for the compensatory buffs; we’d simply have been nerfed back to balance when the bow was nerfed. But instead, we were balanced around the bow. That’s the only reason there’s been any overlap between “fix bow” and “fix Hunter”. It’s because Hunter balance depends on the bow and so a bow-less state partly breaks Hunter.
It doesn’t cripple it, no, but it is the most significant dependence we’ve seen since we lost our Artifact Weapons.
As such, while it required Hunter changes to fix, the whole debacle was an issue in gear/acquisition design.
- And in 10.1, we’re probably going to have another that will require address or the removal of Lone Wolf, seeing as our shiny new Hunter-specific trinket will require pets.
The problem is that we can’t agree on our issues. For BM it really was a rare drop bow, as well as poor AOE. For SV it’s their whole thing. For PvP players it’s something else I assume, idk, I assume a pvp player will turn up and tell me. For some players, it’s that they can’t tame all the pets they want, or that survival can’t dual wield, or that our class sets are ugly.
What YOU think is the most important problem we must rally behind and amplify isn’t a view shared by everyone, and it’s not like the devs listen anyway. We told Blizzard very, very clearly and consistently in the beta thread we needed more utility. We were relatively united. Blizz gave us (lol) Sentinel Owl. So you’ll forgive us if we’re a little jaded.
I am not going to waste my time arguing with someone who doesn’t see the evidence right in front of their face, a vast majority of the feedback on this forum was about the bow specifically, not the overarching problem we both agree is a problem. Not only that but the only major hunter changes announced for 10.07 all revolve around the bow specifically and not the general hunter issues. Read the room!
Dev time and energy that could of went to addressing the core issues with the class instead are wasted on the final patch of the season on an item that frankly doesn’t matter anymore.
Then I do not know how you missed the many, many Hunter Survivability threads that have been around since people started hitting mid-prog in Mythic or M18+ or the “Where’s our raid buff?!” threads that have kept going on since Beta, or the threads complaining about the Hunter talent trees. They’re definitely there, and were there even at the height of the bow threads. The bow threads did not drown them out.
How do you think survival and bm hunters, and pvp hunters would feel if they brought an essential utility of some kind or had more survivability or the talent trees weren’t so bloated?
I think we would all be more happy. I am talking about issues that affect all hunters not just me. Don’t try to make me out to be the small minded one. Use some critical thinking please!
While I agree with you to a point. I believe the biggest complaint wasn’t the bow but that hunters were tuned to having a bow that is very hard to get.
It was up there with our survivability. Also lack of aoe and too many multi point nodes in our trees.
What a clown thread.
You can and should be talking about multiple issues if multiple issues are at hand.
You do not see all the threads complaining about loot already? Not just in hunter forum, but in GD, crying for more deterministic loot?
Aside form that, the bow was a special case since not only was it super rare, it was also spec definingly powerful on a scale that no other current item is. By a long shot. If this was just a 1-2% increase, it would just be an annoyance, like the Sylvanas’ bow was, but this creation deserved all its critizism as well as the amount of it.
Its such a simplistic view that there should only be one issue for people to talk about.
Also, criticising the bow doesnt necessarily mean you disagree with the loot system as a whole. You cant just conflate the two.
Ofcourse its written and signed by guy with the bow.
Hunter survivability isnt promoting degenerate gameplay …skipping mythic prog so i can try to get the bow in vault . It isnt making me sit in LFG for hrs so i can get another chance at the bow. It doesnt get me sat because i dont have the bow. Mythic plus groups in 20s arent asking me about my survivability but instead ask " got bow?".
I simply addressed my biggest source of frustration with the class/spec. Had you done the same they couldve have did this sooner and you couldve focused on your next crusade. But instead you wanted to feel special having the bow knowing its not sustainable or good for the hunter class being balanced around it. Save your lecturing. You only have yourself to blame
Thanks for “clown thread” that’s a lot less bannable than what I wanted to say.
OP, the bow thing was a big issue and one that needed addressing. End of story. Players aren’t responsible for Blizzard’s incompetence. They’re only responsible for pointing it out.
The bow is bad design. And that’s what all the complaints are about.
You should never balance an entire class based on one weapon. Whether the weapon is a .01% drop or a 100% drop. That much power should not come from an item… Because in a game as popular and complex as wow you’re either going to have to nerf the weapon or nerf the class.
It should be pretty telling that while nerfing the weapon, they are also buffing the class…
I think that’s why people are asking Blizzard to simply fix one item rather than go back and reassess their entire loot system, which would presumably consume many more resources.
This.
Plus, the fix to the item already sets a precedent for future loot design.
While, yes, we could somehow force end-of-tier drops to instead be available from the start or go about similar shenanigans, it’s easier to have things meant as a thematic reward for progress that’s desirable to acquire remain so and simply constrain how powerful they can be so that they offer incentive/dopamine-on-acquisition, as intended, without causing undue harm.
While it seems like it won’t necessarily solve every issue with obtaining loot, especially at the top end, or for targeting specific items in that sense, there are changes coming. It’s still early, so we’ll see what happens.
this feels like an entirely good faith post, and definitely a good show of intellectual honesty, let me post a diatribe on the complexities of your point below
what are you even talking about
classes shouldn’t be balanced around items, items should be balanced around classes and if you think otherwise, you really shouldn’t be listened to
in case i’m not making this perfectly clear
this change was good, the bow was bad, and items like the bow prenerf shouldn’t exist in an indeterministic acquisition fashion, ideally, at all
like i can’t believe i find myself agreeing with bepples, but he’s absolutely correct
I highly doubt Blizzard nerfed the bow and buffed BM because of listening to feedback. They new exactly what they were doing when they put the bow in the game, and knew exactly when they would implement changes.
We bring high damage to M+, and to end with our defensives/self healing still sucks =(.
Short term thinking and part of the problem!
Didn’t you acknowledge Blizzard had limited resources? Not “short term thinking”, it’s called fixing the immediate problem as efficiently as possible with the resources at hand.