Hunter Happy Dance

[Kailand]

Good news hunters (from http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...4543&sid=1)

The developers believe hunter dps is too low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve dps across the board.

Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel'Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent.

We don't think this will be quite sufficient in boosting hunter dps to where we think it needs to be and we have another buff that we plan to get in sometime over the next couple of weeks. We'll announce that change when it gets closer.

As hunters may recall, we had an ambitious plan to change the way ammo worked for 3.1 that ended up being overly ambitious, causing us to scale back. However as part of that change, we stopped itemizing bullets and arrows. Since hunters could not upgrade from the ammo available at the launch of Lich King, their damage had started and would continue to fall behind as other classes upgraded their gear. This change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons -- as you get better ranged weapons, it's as if you got better ammo to go along with them. This is likely to be a design we continue for the next few tiers of content until we have the opportunity to overhaul ammo completely.

EDIT: There is an unlocked version of this thread in the damage dealing forums. Consider this one more of an announcement.

[Eigun]

Good news hunters (from http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...4543&sid=1)

The developers believe hunter dps is too low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve dps across the board.

Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel'Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent.

We don't think this will be quite sufficient in boosting hunter dps to where we think it needs to be and we have another buff that we plan to get in sometime over the next couple of weeks. We'll announce that change when it gets closer.

As hunters may recall, we had an ambitious plan to change the way ammo worked for 3.1 that ended up being overly ambitious, causing us to scale back. However as part of that change, we stopped itemizing bullets and arrows. Since hunters could not upgrade from the ammo available at the launch of Lich King, their damage had started and would continue to fall behind as other classes upgraded their gear. This change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons -- as you get better ranged weapons, it's as if you got better ammo to go along with them. This is likely to be a design we continue for the next few tiers of content until we have the opportunity to overhaul ammo completely.

EDIT: There is an unlocked version of this thread in the damage dealing forums. Consider this one more of an announcement.

...says the guy topping the dps charts in the Speckle Dust raid!

[Kailand]

Good news hunters (from http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...4543&sid=1)

The developers believe hunter dps is too low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve dps across the board.

Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel'Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent.

We don't think this will be quite sufficient in boosting hunter dps to where we think it needs to be and we have another buff that we plan to get in sometime over the next couple of weeks. We'll announce that change when it gets closer.

As hunters may recall, we had an ambitious plan to change the way ammo worked for 3.1 that ended up being overly ambitious, causing us to scale back. However as part of that change, we stopped itemizing bullets and arrows. Since hunters could not upgrade from the ammo available at the launch of Lich King, their damage had started and would continue to fall behind as other classes upgraded their gear. This change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons -- as you get better ranged weapons, it's as if you got better ammo to go along with them. This is likely to be a design we continue for the next few tiers of content until we have the opportunity to overhaul ammo completely.

EDIT: There is an unlocked version of this thread in the damage dealing forums. Consider this one more of an announcement.

...says the guy topping the dps charts in the Speckle Dust raid!

Hunters on average are in the middle of the pack behind DK's, rogues, ferals, mages, and warlocks....

[Perthes]

This can be a good thing.. but.. only for the hunters that have these higher level weapons.. Other that dont.. well.. i feel they will be left behind until they get the lucky roll... RNG is just that.. pain in the behind sometimes lol

[Kieranna]

Good news hunters (from http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...4543&sid=1)

The developers believe hunter dps is too low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve dps across the board.

Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel'Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent.

We don't think this will be quite sufficient in boosting hunter dps to where we think it needs to be and we have another buff that we plan to get in sometime over the next couple of weeks. We'll announce that change when it gets closer.

As hunters may recall, we had an ambitious plan to change the way ammo worked for 3.1 that ended up being overly ambitious, causing us to scale back. However as part of that change, we stopped itemizing bullets and arrows. Since hunters could not upgrade from the ammo available at the launch of Lich King, their damage had started and would continue to fall behind as other classes upgraded their gear. This change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons -- as you get better ranged weapons, it's as if you got better ammo to go along with them. This is likely to be a design we continue for the next few tiers of content until we have the opportunity to overhaul ammo completely.

EDIT: There is an unlocked version of this thread in the damage dealing forums. Consider this one more of an announcement.

...says the guy topping the dps charts in the Speckle Dust raid!

Hunters on average are in the middle of the pack behind DK's, rogues, ferals, mages, and warlocks....

Says the guy that is topping the dps charts in our 10 man on a normal basis :cP lol

and *happy dance*

[Perthes]

Says the guy that is topping the dps charts in our 10 man on a normal basis :cP lol

Who huh what?

Me topping? no way.. its Druze and Shelah that tops the charts.. im just slacking behind hitting random buttons

[Kieranna]

Says the guy that is topping the dps charts in our 10 man on a normal basis :cP lol

Who huh what?

Me topping? no way.. its Druze and Shelah that tops the charts.. im just slacking behind hitting random buttons

Druze and Shelah may have tromped you this time, but I do recall you topping a few of the wws that I posted lol!

[Waldonnis]

*shoves the epeen talk aside*

This is a good direction for them to go in, really. Hunters have always suffered from weird scaling issues and ammo has frequently been where they applied the "band aid" instead of working more off of the ranged weapon. This definitely simplifies the future change to ammo as well, so I'm happy to see this alteration as a first-step.

[Kailand]

*shoves the epeen talk aside*

This is a good direction for them to go in, really. Hunters have always suffered from weird scaling issues and ammo has frequently been where they applied the "band aid" instead of working more off of the ranged weapon. This definitely simplifies the future change to ammo as well, so I'm happy to see this alteration as a first-step.

I definately noticed the improved damage last night, but It's really too bad that ammo/weapon damage don't play into a good portion of our abilities (Serpent sting, arcane shot, explosive shot, black arrow, pet damage, fire traps). The abilities that ammo/weapon damage applies to are autoshot, steady shot, multi-shot, aimed shot, chimera shot, and killshot. This works out that roughly 55-60% of hunter damage is not based on weapon/ammo damage, and partially leads to the fact that for a hunter in wrath that upgrading their melee weapon(s) yields a larger DPS boost than upgrading thier ranged weapon.

With this recent boosting damage of ilvl 226 and higher ranged weapons now makes them more desirable to upgrade, and is definately an easier way for blizzard to scale hunters with respect to other physical DPS classes. Unfortunately this could have the side effect depending on how far blizzzard carries this in the future of putting us in the same situation that warriors are in, in that hunters will scale mainly dependant on our weapons damage, although that is probably an improvement of pre 3.0.3 (or whenever they nerfed pets/steadyshot) where our DPS was too pet heavy, and reliant on 1 shot. It'll be interesting to see what blizzard finally decides to do with ammo, and whether they follow through on some of the hunter communities speculation on how blizzard should change pet scaling (i.e. pet gets no buffs directly, but inherits more stats from its master, like ar-pen, haste, crit, etc. which would make ar-pen and haste benefit us more similarily to warriors and rogues).

I wish blizzard would also look at having haste for hunters affect our global cooldowns like it does for casters. That alone would probably boost BM to MM/SV DPS levels, and bring hunters overall closer to where the other pure DPS classes currently are.