Trap Launcher should be immediately reverted and the above suggestions implemented to actually address the core complaint people are experiencing.
If you are feeling a little wild, could actually make a wholesale change to Trap Launcher that actually changes Frost Trap and Explosive Trap into ‘grenades’ and leaves Freezing Trap and Immolation Trap as they are now.
Frost Grenade - Throws a grenade that explodes on impact to damage enemies in a 10 yard radius for 80 frost damage and slows them by 60% for (x) sec.
Explosive Grenade - Throws a grenade that explodes on impact to damage enemies in a 10 yard radius for 312 to 397 fire damage.
Note with the grenades above…no more ground effect from the Frost Grenade, so nothing to obstruct view in PvE, and only people hit by the grenade are slowed. It’s not going to sit there and passively harass people for 39 seconds. The same is true with Explosive Grenade not having the ground effect DoT that Explosive Trap has. This allows allows you to differentiate between the two abilities when balancing around T.N.T. bracer rune…can leave Explosive Trap how it is now for melee hunters (since they wouldn’t be taking Trap Launcher) and the grenade version could be better balanced around it’s cooldown and scaling (say 25% of attack power scaling vs 50% that the trap version gets).
I think the most frustrating thing was that this has been said, once trap launcher came out last phase, that this would ruin AV, and the dev team did nothing about it and then they go and push the laziest possible fix. Id prefer them remove the entrapment talent entirely than this.
We saw it coming and we offered solutions to limit the power of the Entrapment talent and to greatly reduce the number of Frost Traps that would get spread across the battlefield (and by reduce…we offered up a single chance to proc Entrapment per trap against the current 13 chances per trap)(by reduce we wanted Frost Trap limited to 1 active ice patch on the ground at a time per hunter…right now it is currently up to 4)
Guess what…removing it from Trap Launcher didnt change any of that…a single trap has 13 chances to root someone and a single hunter can spread 4 different ice patches around…complete misunderstanding of the problem by developers looking for an easy way to say they tried something…
That’s pretty good… but he’s going to have to set them himself…in person.
Which was their point:
If a hunter wants to try to get 4 of them down over 30ish seconds ON what is to be the front line… that’s called planning… and should be rewarded.
He may have some challenge trying to do it as an advance or as a standoff brick wall…which is what they’re currently doing.
Wouldn’t complain if they removed it from the “in combat” too… but that’s admittedly out of spite for all the people defending this stupidity so vehemently
For starts…Trap Launcher did not have the extra range granted to other hunter abilities…so if i can hit you with a trap, you can hit me with a ranged attack.
I’m all for planning where i place traps, but PvP tends to want to move so getting multiple traps out is not going to be difficult in an ebb and flow type of environment. People are going to find they still see ice everywhere, they are constantly rooted in place, and they are going to come back to the forums and rage and demand more nerfs because things are still oppressive.
This is why this change was dumb…inconvenience the hunter, hurt the hunter in PvE and solo content, but ultimately people are still going to be mad about the same problem!
That’s a preposterous argument.
“You can stand in my frost trap/explosive trap combination and hit me with spells [if you’re ranged] so that makes it fine I guess.”
(Imagine someone trying to defend burn rune’s extra damage and 5 player spread by saying "it’s only 20-25 yard range, just shoot me with spells…sounds silly, right? Speaking of Explosive trap…)
(this could already be done to a lesser extent in era if the hunter stayed out of combat)
Oh they will. Enhancement shaman is still catching **** despite being heavily nerfed in PvP…twice.
They could delete your class and people would still whine about you. That’s not an argument for anything.
Eh, I think the change is fine. (I personally think Trap launcher just needs to go…period. ScatterTrap was already pretty silly before SoD…that being why they made them share DR despite being different CCs and now they’ve given it 21 yard range.)
Or 30yd if you just want to hold someone still for 35 seconds in 3 freezing traps…lol
(That’s like 4 viper stings if you wanna torture a mage, priest, or paladin.)
the launcher nerf helps a bit but the traps if they are placed in a row on a chokepoint line will do the same effect as before if people place them just ahead of the trap line and will amount to the same exact problem as before.
what needed to happen was for entrapment to only proc on the inital triggering of the trap and for entrapment and slow to dr each other.
other suggestions hes made make sense and dont excessively nerf hunters over much while keeping the entrapped for 20 mins straight chain.
ya but if the changes to the dr and entrapment proc were in as he suggested it would only be a problem for less than a 4th the time you would be in the traps to begin with.
As someone who has played a Hunter since OG vanilla in every version of wow let me just offer my suggestion…delete the class. because you guys obviously cant balance it …ever since it was a last minute addition to the original world of warcraft you guys have struggled to balance it correctly. just put me out of my misery and delete it already so I don’t continue to play it in the hopes that some day you get it right.
also for people who are saying no one complained in previous phases its because no one played ranged…at least not enough people for anyone to notice entrapment…because once again they made melee way to strong and found themselves constantly nerfing the spec. there is so many other balancing issues its pathetic traps were the main focus…what a joke.
oh last minute edit…now that you gutted our pve utility there is zero reason to bring a hunter over a mage in any situation aside from someone using them as a warm body
to not roll on their caster loot.
Trap Launcher is one of the few things that makes hunter feel a tiny bit different than an ERA hunter, and given all of the new abilities given to other classes Hunter needs something to feel different. If you reduce the ability to trap from range, or reduce the damage of Explosive Trap (which I’m sure is coming…likely a flat nerf instead of the redistribution people have suggested to solve PvP burst without hurting PvE) you absolutely decimate ranged hunter and force them all back to melee weaving if they want to be competitive.
Currently ranged hunter is built around traps and lock and load…
Trap > Shot > Shot > Trap > Shot > Shot
Alternating your Fire and Frost type traps…impact the trap, and you also either cause delay with the next ability being cast or see it replaced with a less ideal shot choice. This playstyle also requires the use of Sniper Training to be effective which is a voluntary root for the Hunter basically (if we move, we lose the ability to instant cast Aimed Shot and 10% crit chance).
In ERA even in ideal situations you aren’t going to have a single hunter laying out 4 different frost trap patches…at most you will get 2 to overlap and only for a couple of seconds before one of them is gone. In SOD a single hunter can maintain 4 with time to spare in ideal conditions.