Wednesday 20 May 2009

Patch 3.1.2 20th May 2009

I'm going to start doing some "Marksman Hunter News" posts and where better to start than today, patch day!

In Patch 3.1.2

Not too many changes to the mechanics of how MM Hunters play, we get the equipment manager to let us change quickly between PvE/PvP (or whatever set-up you might have) but 1 area where we are getting a nice buff is with our ranged weapons.

Before we have a look at the buffs, this is the reason why the damage on some of our ranged weapons is increasing (From mmo-champion):

"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. (We have some plans for other classes as well, but we ask that you please keep this thread on the topic of hunters and the ranged weapon changes.)

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." (Ghostcrawler, Lead Systems Designer)

So how does this effect us? Well to start with any ranged weapon over iLv226 will have it's DPS improved. Not all our shots will benefit from this but we should see good gains on our auto shot, Steady shots, Aimed Shots and Kills Shots for "free". Not bad at all really.

However, there is a catch. This is only going to benefit 25 man raiders, so for yours truely, I won't be seeing any benefit of these buffs as 10 man raids go up to Ilv 219. There is one exception though and that is to get the Magnetized Projectile Emitter from XT-002 Deconstructor in Ulduar 10 Hard Mode! 

The other option for a 10 man raider to get one of these weapons would be to get in a lucky 25 man Naxx25 PUG and hope you win the Envoy or Mortality from KT or to go the PvP route and pick up a Furious Ranged Weapon! PvP guns aren't ideal for PvE but the massive difference in damage from a Furious Gladiator Ranged Weapon vs. a 10 Man PvE ranged weapon will make it superior even in PvE.

So what does Valilor plan on doing you ask? Well, I'm going to stick with my Final Voyage and hope I can get lucky in a Naxx25 PUG! AMOV are currently working our way through Ulduar so it will probably be a while until we try hard modes but as soon as we can, I'll aim for the Magnetized Projectile Emitter!

Happy Shooting!

4 comments:

  1. Nice read man! You seem like a really nice guy, wish you the best =)

    Could you please tell me the meaning of " Aggro my own veggies? I mean I get that u pronounce it like I grow my own vegetables" but aside from that? ;P

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  2. Thanks! I think I'm going to need some luck with a weapon drop tbh.

    Well there's no real meaning behind Aggro my own vegetables (AMOV) it's just a play on words with "aggro/I grow"... we do seem to have a rather random fruit related theme though as our 5v5 arena team is called "Large Inflatable Banana"!

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  3. its me hardmode lol, im axel. this was before I joined lol:P

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  4. Ah, sorry - was a bit slow responding to the comments! Welcome :p

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