Today I managed to fix my World of Warcraft UI following my unfortunate bout of restlessness earlier, a fact I quickly took advantage of; running a handful of dungeons on my alts and it really solidified a thought that I have had all throughout cataclysm. I know my blog isn't exactly on the Alexa top 500, but it does give me a limited forum to air my discontents. I'm sorry If you don't play World of Warcraft, because this post probably won't be of interest to you, unless you have an interest in the finer points of game mechanics. (Which I hope you do)
Dear Blizzard, Please fix hunters.
I can already see the response on the comments : "Hunter DPS is fine", Hunters are doing great right now! Look at how great their damage is in Firelands and Dragon Soul!
It's difficult to argue against that, in PvE hunters are often near or at the top of the charts, But I don't characterize a class as broken because it has lousy damage, especially a class that is prized for it's consistently high damage. No I save that damning condemnation for classes that are uninteresting to play.
Sid Meier coined a phrase about game design that should be treated as gospel when it comes to making games.
A [good] game is a series of interesting choices. In an interesting choice, no single option is clearly better than the other options, the options are not equally attractive, and the player must be able to make an informed choice.
When I play my fire mage in a dungeon, I have 3-4 viable options when it comes to what strategy I use in a given situation. Sometimes one doesn't work as well as the others, I note when it doesn't and try to figure out why, when I come across a new situation or enemy; I have several viable rotations I can experiment with. I could talk about the nuts and bolts of a fire mage for a full post, but I want to draw a contrast. My fire mage Adul plays very differently in different situations, Furthermore when it comes to "clicking abilities" no two battles are the same, because of how fire mages are built they have a high number of procs. I frequently have to adjust my abilities during a battle according to those procs. Because of that, the flow of the battle is different every time, and that makes for more interesting game play.
Now why am I upset over how hunters are built? Well to be entirely honest I only need 3 buttons for most of a fight. There aren't any interesting choices when it comes to playing a hunter, and it's entirely the fault of the new hunter resource "focus" and it's signature abilities (Cobra shot and Steady Shot) . For the non-hunters allow me to explain why this mechanic is so goddamn boring; Hunters (With the exception of beast-mastery hunters) have 100 energy, a special shot from my bow requires anywhere from 25 to 50 focus (Without talents) and that energy recovers very very slowly. I can use two, maybe three shots before I am completely out of focus and unable to use abilities, if my energy came back at a reasonable rate that would be OK, but focus regenerates at a glacially slow rate, the only way for a hunter to reliably recover focus is to use Cobra Shot or Steady shot.
Steady Shot (I'll omit mention of Cobra shot for convenience) regenerates 9 focus (before talents) when you use it, if you're a marksman hunter and you fire it twice, you get a temporary damage bonus. Doesn't sound too awful does it? Except if you accidentally take Steady Shot off your bar, you won't be able to do anything else as you wait for your focus to regenerate. Steady Shot is not an "interesting choice", it is something a hunter is required to do if he wants to deal any sort of damage. I'm not saying a class shouldn't have a signature ability or a primary attack, Adul the fire-mage is very fond of the fireball spell and it's clear that it was designed to be his primary single-target damage spell. But if I decide I don't want to use Fireball, I'm still viable, just slightly less efficient. If Dawnstalker the hunter doesn't use Steady Shot, she sits for 7 seconds waiting for enough focus to use another ability.
Because of the damage boost, it's optimal for a hunter to "pair" steady shots together when focus is low. Again this is a perfectly viable mechanic, it rewards a player for planning his shots and focus use ahead of time. However the real situation is that playing a hunter is always hitting the "1" keybinding for steady shot pairs, followed by the ability they actually want to use, followed by two more pairs of steady shot. Sounds exciting doesn't it?
The boredom with Steady Shot is my primary beef, but as a mechanic it's fairly terrible for other reasons; for example if I fight another player and he runs into my melee range, I can't use Steady Shot anymore, I am essentially focus starved until I get away. In the same vein, if my enemy runs behind a pillar (fairly common in player vs player combat) for cover, my steady shot does nothing and I'm focus starved again. To compound that problem Cobra shot has a cast time, which means it cannot be used while moving, this can be remedied by an ability called Aspect of the Fox, the downside however is AotF causes your damage to take a steep hit. Because of how Cobra Shot is designed I have to choose between damage or mobility, Which again isn't a terrible tradeoff. But given the difficulties hunters have with fighting in melee, such a steep penalty in PvP is often fatal.
To put it simply Hunters deliver consistently high damage in Player vs Environment combat because they are railroaded into a simple way to play, but the clunky focus and cobra shot mechanics are annoyingly deadly in Player Vs Player combat, and in battles where mobility is vital. But the most important and perhaps damning thing I can say is to reiterate Sid Meier's point, If I'm not making interesting choices I'm getting bored and I'm not having fun.
