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Today we'll bring the Q&A for the Hunter within the game of World of Warcraft. There's not anything groundbreaking here and nothing really to look forward to in patch 3.2, but there's still some interesting potential Hunter changes here.
Like the other Q&A the position of the class in the larger scope of things is considered. The interview focuses on making utility work for Hunters, what the class does in melee and pet control/UI.
For utility this means a change to ammunition. There was a point when ammunition stacked in 250 stacks and you needed a quiver or an ammo pouch to hold them. Now we don't need a special bag and the stacks are in 1000. The idea of no ammunition at all has been tossed around, but isn't a viable change.
From a technical standpoint, what happened is that the quiver is considered a bag just like other bags on the character but most critically, those in the bank. In order to remove ammo we would have to move the location of all of a character's bank slots on the database that stores all of the World of Warcraft characters, which would be a risky thing to do in the middle of an expansion, and result in missing stuff issues if something went wrong. It was just one of those last-minute show-stoppers.
Making ammunition more of a choice is something we could plan on seeing but sometime in the future. For example, for one fight you use poison arrows for the next fire arrows.
Firing those arrows or bullets is also an issue in the Q&A. The old question of "Can I shoot while moving?" is quickly shot down. "Moving should feel like a penalty. We don't want ranged attackers constantly circle strafing FPS-style because it confers a defensive advantage without giving up an offensive one."
A Hunter's melee abilities are limited at best. The "dead zone" was a place where Hunters couldn't fire ranged attacks but couldn't reach a mob in melee. Now there's a minimum distance to shoot and any past that it's time to go into melee attacks. The question asks if dead zone will ever disappear completely.
Doing so technically is possible but something we aren't likely to do. For our part, calling the current implementation a dead zone is just confusing and trying to sell the problem as worse than it is.
More importantly, there's no plan on going to melee-focused build for Hunters. "We might consider a model where Hunters don't run away most of the time but switch to melee attacks – perhaps even a single punishing attack on a cooldown before the Hunter Disengaged or whatever."
Pet control and survivability are the last big issue. Beast Mastery pets aren't doing the damage of Survival or Marksmanship Hunters but it's not an easy problem to fix. Buffing the pets to do more damage is risky. If you're Beast Mastery and your pet dies that means half of your damage dealing ability is gone.
Lastly the tree is supposed to be about pets, so we would rather make the pet easier to control and give the hunter ways to get the pet out of trouble so that they don't face the profound DPS loss of pet death.
