Patch 3.1 -Preview-

[Fordel]

Which you also used to justify being ahead of everything else BUT rogues (oh and demo locks ). Sorry every other melee spec but rogues, hunters need to be on top, they have a PET to worry about!

[Lantyssa]

You do realize that hunter pets fall under melee mechanics, not dot mechanics, right? That they can be parried, etc as was mentioned?

Both of you do realize that from a design standpoint it doesn't matter if a pet does stabby, bite, fire, or shit damage an is resisted by block, parry, nature, magic, or toilet paper it's still damage done at range and while it can be managed for a more optimal output, can be used without any assistance beyond one keypress?  You're not seeing the forest through the trees.

You do understand the principles of game design, yes?  (Actually that's rhetorical since you obviously don't.)

A Hunter is a melee/ranged hybrid because they have some capability to survive and fight in close range combat, not because of their damage type.  Most of their damage is done at a distance, both by their ranged weapon of choice and their pet.  Blizzard could make a duplicate of the warrior which mostly does elemental damage instead of their weapon type and it would still be a melee class.  (Oh look, I'm talking about you, Death Knights.)  They could make a mage whose spells all do slashing, piercing, and blunt which are blocked and parried like any other attack and it would still be a Ranged DPS.  (Oh look, I'm talking about you, Hunters.)

Please stop pretending you're mentally challenged.

[K9]

This argument is fucking retarded.

[Hindenburg]

Which you also used to justify being ahead of everything else BUT rogues (oh and demo locks ). Sorry every other melee spec but rogues, hunters need to be on top, they have a PET to worry about!

Any other  pure dps class that stays constantly in melee range?
 

This argument is fucking retarded.

And old, too.

[Llyse]

Maybe Blizzard should get the bright idea of creating an aoe for range only.

Like a shadowbolt/frostbolt vollet that only hits targets outside 30 feet... 

Just so you know how much fun it is for Rogues 

[Merusk]

Maybe Blizzard should get the bright idea of creating an aoe for range only.

Like a shadowbolt/frostbolt vollet that only hits targets outside 30 feet... 

Just so you know how much fun it is for Rogues 

I've read this 4 times and I still don't know what the hell you're getting at.

[Ingmar]

Being both melee and ranged still doesn't make hunters a hybrid in any case. When a Blizzard dev says 'hybrid' they are talking about roles like DPS, tank, healer; melee dps and ranged dps aren't separate roles from that standpoint.

[Sjofn]

You do realize that hunter pets fall under melee mechanics, not dot mechanics, right? That they can be parried, etc as was mentioned?

Pets automatically run to the ass of the target these days, by the way, so they generally are only going to get dodged. They also last until either the thing is dead or it is, and they aren't as easily killed in most boss fights these days. That's only in PvE obviously ...

Although pets are usually eating someone's butt in PvP too, as people are usually running to the hunter or away completely.  

But whatever, it wasn't my faulty memory, it was me never hearing anyone EVER refer to the pet as anything but a DoT before, so it truly didn't cross my mind THAT was where you were getting the "melee" part from. I could never forget my gay white tiger.  

[Llyse]

incoherent whine

I've read this 4 times and I still don't know what the hell you're getting at.

I'm just whining about how Rogues offer little to no raid utility yet have to deal with various boss phases which require the tank and melee dps to get out of aoe range. For example Prince's shadowbolt volley. (I don't recall if mages with Arctic reach/Fire equivalent, MM Hunters can continue DPSing out of range of the Shadowbolt volley)

[Sheepherder]

Maybe Blizzard should get the bright idea of creating an aoe for range only.

Like a shadowbolt/frostbolt vollet that only hits targets outside 30 feet... 

Just so you know how much fun it is for Rogues 

[Arinon]

Maybe Blizzard should get the bright idea of creating an aoe for range only.

Like a shadowbolt/frostbolt vollet that only hits targets outside 30 feet... 

Just so you know how much fun it is for Rogues 

Any fight like this is either the whole raid playing frogger or just the melee.  If it's safe in melee range the ranged guys just stand in melee range and it's business as usual.  Fuck ranged attackers!  Pussies.

[Merusk]

Ah, now I get it.  Yeah now that I play a melee that shit bothers the hell out of me. Grobulus is particularly bad since 1) he seems to have problems repositioning himself at times and 2) our fucking tank doesn't understand backing up and then taking your finger off the damn movement key.   2-4 repositions per cloud gets damn old.

Anyway, as Sheepherder points out Lootreaver was one such fight where the ranged had to move while the melee stood still. It's also the one that the Ranged folks were always fucking up by standing too close and nuking the melee DPS. 

[K9]

Loken's aura is an example of something that punishes range but not melee. You are correct that these examples are few and far between though.

I guess the only flipside is that the amount of DPS a melee toon can do while moving compared to a ranged/caster DPS is huge.

[Fordel]

That is the basic limitation in how badly you can punish the ranged with movement. Having to constantly shift position as a caster just tanks DPS into nothing land, where most melee can still go full bore even on the move.


It's also one of the reasons PvP is currently extra retarded.

[Signe]

Speaking of... my character is level 46 (or maybe it's 48, I forget) and I have never ever seen anyone in the arenas.  Does anyone ever use them?

[Oban]

Speaking of... my character is level 46 (or maybe it's 48, I forget) and I have never ever seen anyone in the arenas.  Does anyone ever use them?

At 70 and 80, yes.

[Gobbeldygook]

Speaking of... my character is level 46 (or maybe it's 48, I forget) and I have never ever seen anyone in the arenas.  Does anyone ever use them?

There are two distinct types of arenas: One for awesome griefing and ones for fighting in organized arena fights.  The latter are accessible by people of levels 70+ and are broken down by level range and bracket size (2v2, 3v3, 5v5, etc).  They are what most people refer to when they say 'arena'.  There are also other arenas (Gurubashi Arena and another one) which are true FFA PVP zones.  You can attack anyone of any faction at any time in those.  You can also invite people you don't like to your group, summon them with a warlock, and gank their ass like you always wanted to.  Gurubashi is a bit cut-throat these days since there's an achievement associated with it that requires you get the booty 10 times.  There's only booty every 4 hours.

[Koyasha]

Maybe Blizzard should get the bright idea of creating an aoe for range only.

Like a shadowbolt/frostbolt vollet that only hits targets outside 30 feet... 

Just so you know how much fun it is for Rogues 

Any fight like this is either the whole raid playing frogger or just the melee.  If it's safe in melee range the ranged guys just stand in melee range and it's business as usual.  Fuck ranged attackers!  Pussies.

This could easily be changed by giving the bad guy a debuff that causes anyone who does melee damage to him to gain some kind of protection from his AE in direct proportion to the amount of melee damage they do.  Then only ranged, who cannot do significant melee damage, would have to worry about the AE.

[Zetor]

You can't really "punish ranged" in a fight without punishing healers as well (especially those without many instacast heals). Another ranged-unfriendly boss is the second drakonid in oculus, since melee only need to circle-strafe him, while ranged have to be constantly or the run or they get fried by the purple field of death.. ask your healer how fun that fight is to heal sometime. :p


-- Z.

[kildorn]

One note would be that most melee DPS classes have far more protection from damage than ranged DPS classes.

Either AE avoidance, high HP pools, clickies, or just the nature of tank healing (bounce healing due to proximity)

Try a melee dps punishing fight with casters standing in melee range. It won't be pretty, because a hit that would halve a rogue's HP would flat out kill a mage most of the time. That said, it's harder to do things with a melee heavy raid, but melee doesn't mean "suuuuck", especially not for hunter pets (as this whole thing started with) because, well, AE avoidance. The only pet unfriendly fights are ones where positioning is god, and "be behind him" isn't the right position (heigan, any dragon-type mob, etc)

[Ingmar]

Maybe Blizzard should get the bright idea of creating an aoe for range only.

Like a shadowbolt/frostbolt vollet that only hits targets outside 30 feet... 

Just so you know how much fun it is for Rogues 

Any fight like this is either the whole raid playing frogger or just the melee.  If it's safe in melee range the ranged guys just stand in melee range and it's business as usual.  Fuck ranged attackers!  Pussies.

Shade of Aran. Blizzard didn't hit melee, and ranged who stand in close get hit with a silence. Granted, there aren't very many like this, but Shade greatly favored melee.

[Arinon]

I have a long standing and probably irrational hate on for ranged archetypes.  My main beef was always that ranged DPS classes were very rarely required to have the same level of situational awareness as the melee,  (to say nothing of tanks and healers) yet were looking for the same level of performance.  Encounters pretty much have to be specifically designed to reverse this, so yeah, they are rare.

Forced movement seems to be the best way to swing the balance as it doesn't appear as selectively punitive as the other options.

[Paelos]

Maybe Blizzard should get the bright idea of creating an aoe for range only.

Like a shadowbolt/frostbolt vollet that only hits targets outside 30 feet... 

Just so you know how much fun it is for Rogues 

Any fight like this is either the whole raid playing frogger or just the melee.  If it's safe in melee range the ranged guys just stand in melee range and it's business as usual.  Fuck ranged attackers!  Pussies.

Shade of Aran. Blizzard didn't hit melee, and ranged who stand in close get hit with a silence. Granted, there aren't very many like this, but Shade greatly favored melee.

And Prince, Maiden, and the Demon dude all punished melee. For every example of a melee favored fight, there are at least 3x as many ranged favored fights. What I think you and I both realize is that Blizzard needs to balance things a bit better in that regard.

[Sjofn]

The thing is, I feel like melee punishing fights are still less obnoxious than the ranged punishing ones. I mean no, you didn't want to do Kara with six melee dpsers (I think our highest number of melee dps was like ... five. It was Not Fun.), but as a melee dpser, I can still function even in the fights that beat the shit out of me, I could heal through those fine on my paladin, etc. The ones where ranged has to run around like idiots were way harder to deal with as a healer, as my heals were all "lol stay still," and it was friggin' impossible to do anything like decent DPS on my hunter if I had to keep moving, so I imagine it was even worse for the clothies.

Yes, it was a pain in the ass to do Prince as my feral druid, but I could still, you know, dps. Plus once they fixed the safe spots, ranged had to dodge infernals (unless you were lucky). Maiden I had to just hope the healers could manage, even if we weren't standing totally perfect it was doable. Illhoof just punished everyone, I think. :P

[Azaroth]

Are there ANY fights in Naxx that punish ranged?

I mean, not that I can think of. I suppose Sapphiron punishes ranged equally.

Of course, it's particularly punishing as a Ret Pally. I have to switch my DPS off on Loatheb and, most of the time, Sapphiron.. and a misplaced judgement on Gluth will leave everyone wondering why the stupid paladin is dead.

Plus the whirlwinds on the trash... it's a little unbalanced.

[Paelos]

The only fight in Naxx that punishes melee is Kel'Thuzad, and that's only in 25 man. The rest is pretty well balanced in terms of what we're looking for in raid content b/w the two groups. Honestly, despite WotLK being "easy" to the hardcores, TBC is going to be widely agreed as the fuckup expansion of this game. Very little improved during that time, and most of it was reversed later. The biggest changes that stuck with it were the adding of arenas (debatable), and the move from 40 -> 25 mans.

[Azaroth]

The only fight in Naxx that punishes melee is Kel'Thuzad

wut

[Sheepherder]

Naxx trash can go fuck itself.

[Ingmar]

The only fight in Naxx that punishes melee is Kel'Thuzad, and that's only in 25 man. The rest is pretty well balanced in terms of what we're looking for in raid content b/w the two groups. Honestly, despite WotLK being "easy" to the hardcores, TBC is going to be widely agreed as the fuckup expansion of this game. Very little improved during that time, and most of it was reversed later. The biggest changes that stuck with it were the adding of arenas (debatable), and the move from 40 -> 25 mans.

I would include Karazhan in the positive developments list too. It was the runaway success of Kara that made them say "holy shit, there's a HUGE DEMAND for 10 person raid content."

[Sjofn]

The only fight in Naxx that punishes melee is Kel'Thuzad

wut

I haven't done Kel'Thuzad or a successful Sapphiron, but I've done every other fight as a DK (either tanking or DPSing, depending on who I was raiding with) and I tend to agree that none of the fights really PUNISH melee, not like Prince in Kara did. The whirlwinding trash in particular just isn't really that big a deal. Sure, there are ANNOYING fights if you're melee, like Gluth, but that's not the same.

In my opinion, of course. DKs don't have seals that hurt themselves, so that probably helps. You'd think being the emo class they'd be all over cutting themselves to see if they can still feel. 

[kildorn]

None of the Naxx fights I've done have "punished" melee. Closest is Anub, but the locust swarm ain't that big a deal to dodge (quite frankly, Prince only punished melee who are too fucking stupid to book it after the curse), but the majority of the fights are simply Easier for ranged, not punishing on melee.

The thing is, melee frontloads a lot of it's damage as part of the core design of having to move and being in/out of melee range a lot. I can dump a lot of damage in a few seconds on a DK or Rogue due to energy/rune cooldowns. Ranged DPS usually needs to sit still and cast, which is why ranged punishing fights are hard to design. Having ranged move constantly completely destroys their damage output (and fucks healers), whereas having melee move constantly only slightly impacts their damage output. Melee DPS can usually eat a lot more punishment in the form of damage, too.

I went through my emo rogue "waaah all I do is eat fucking cleaves waaah" phase, but that was back in vanilla WoW, where fucking cleave was 360 degree and every goddamned trash mob had it.

[Khaldun]

yes yes yes yes yes (rogue and priest)

One thing I noticed; mutilate rogues are about 10x more work than combat rogues. I got a new shiny and respecc'd to combat and I am never going back. Playing cooldown games keeping Hunger for Blood, Slice and Dice, Rupture up while moving around and paying attention to your surroundings is practically harder than raid healing. I'm not confident the hunger for blood change is going to make it much easier.

Combat rogues simply mash SS and use one of two alternating finishers.

See, the odd thing is I played combat all through TBC and then switched to mutilate, and I *like* that it's more work. It's more interesting, I have some choices to make in a given fight about what to prioritize and when, and so on. Combat rogueing just seemed so automatic. I suppose I should try a combat spec after this coming patch and just see where my max dps is, but I'm really enjoying mutilate. Changing Hunger for Blood though is a mercy: that is the single most OCD-inducing talent I've ever had in WoW, and it really gets irritating after a while.

[Khaldun]

My hunter's role is ranged dps. It's always BEEN ranged dps. It will always BE ranged dps. It's really rather good ranged dps, too.

It's actually a combination of melee+ranged phys dps, which is why they should be under rogues and above everything else but demo locks.

Yeah, but survival hunters with gear comparable to my rogue? If played by anybody but a gibbering moron? In PvE, their dps output right now is just sick. Way way way above mine in some cases, and I think I'm reasonably good at maximizing my dps output.

[Khaldun]

Maybe Blizzard should get the bright idea of creating an aoe for range only.

Like a shadowbolt/frostbolt vollet that only hits targets outside 30 feet... 

Just so you know how much fun it is for Rogues 

I think this is honestly something that they *should* do. Have a "distant whirlwind" on some bosses that requires ranged classes to break off their attacks and move periodically--something that has to be avoided or watched for that is *distinctive* to ranged combat. Or, I dunno, a boss that mind-controls pets and sends them back at their hunter owners. I don't care what it is, just that ranged should have some *unique* dangers or problems that they have to manage that are comparable to what rogues deal with. The other melee classes generally have the armor and mitigation to survive something like retaliate or whirlwind and so they can just plow through it. Rogues have to back off and wait when they think something like that is coming.

The other advantage that rogues theoretically have, tools for managing their threat (vanish, feint, tricks of the trade) are either shared by some ranged classes (feign death) or in Wrath are irrelevant *because* it's so easy for tanks to hold threat compared to in the past.

On Tricks of the Trade, I'm still waiting for some tanks to notice just how much it buffs their dps output if I use it consistently on every pull...I tested the other night and the tank was in the top three to four of a ten-man raid when I had tricks on him, dropped to seventh when I left it off. Even if it's not necessary for managing threat (it definitely helps a weaker tank grab initial aggro, and in longer fights, if a mob has slipped past the tank, I can go fetch it and bring it back to the tank rather than getting it onto me) it buffs total raid dps pretty significantly by the end of a raid.

[Khaldun]

That is the basic limitation in how badly you can punish the ranged with movement. Having to constantly shift position as a caster just tanks DPS into nothing land, where most melee can still go full bore even on the move.


It's also one of the reasons PvP is currently extra retarded.

But for rogues, on a lot of Wrath fights, even some trash fights, it's not that you have to move or reposition, it's that you've got to run the hell out of the fight and then just sit there with your thumb up your ass for a bit while the mob whirlwinds or retaliates. So that's equivalent to forcing ranged to move.