Hunter "Balance"  

28Jan09 08:57 CST

Overnerfed BM? Ya Think?

Don't get me wrong, I understood the Steady Shot nerf. Blizzard wanted more diverse shot rotations, and the Steady Shot change forced that. It didn't nerf damage overall. It just separated the truly skilled hunter from the button masher.

I understood the Scorpid changes. A tenacity pet should not be the top DPS pet in the game. I was glad to see Logu'Nahak's Spirit Strike fixed to work with longevity, and the limit on her spawn time removed.

But to have nerfed Steady Shot, Unleashed Fury, Serpent Swiftness, Kindred Spirits, AND Readiness all in one patch? While this may not have been a knee jerk reaction on the part of the devs, it didn't feel like a skillful rebalancing either. If you didn't have a big enough test sample on the PTR that's on us, as players.

But you can't tell me your internal testers told you this was balance? Any idiot with Recount, a couple hundred gold for respecs, and an hour to hit practice dummies could have told you that BM was broken. The changes essentially forced raiders out of the tree. I don't care how much you love your exotic pet, try to justify doing 500 less DPS than you could be, and you're going to stop getting raid invites.

Stop fiddling.

Even with Survival tuned high, we're currently putting out number that are in line with other DPS classes. You will never be able to achieve a perfect balance between the trees. In any given class, at a given level of itemization, there is always going to be a top DPS spec. In Vanilla WoW in was a Marksmanship and Survival Hybrid, Burning Crusade was the cookie cutter Beastmaster spec, and as things stand now Survival is on top. But MM and BM are still viable.

No bad thing.