Official Feedback Thread: Hunter Ranger changes

romotheone · July 2016

@metalldjt ohh don't get me wrong, I am not a trapper advocate, I barely played HR. This shouldn't discourage anyone from taking my feedback seriously tho, I've spent quite a few years in my free time with actively observing game mechanics, especially combat. I was playing around in a different game on my own server, creating my own skills, setting up complete classes with different, complementary skills, trying my best to create a fluid experience. I am not a developer, as I was simply playing around with already existing effects and conditions in XML, but I pretty much exhausted with what was possible there. I went to bed and woke up, even dreamed about solving problems around class balance. The game had 30+ available classes. I know how time consuming it is, to not only come up with a working concept, but to also make it become reality.
Amenar is doing a wonderful job. He is doing the best he can do in his situation, listening to the slightly undecisive community and trying to make the best out of all the unfiltered sh... If you know what I mean.

Please guys, make an effort to make his job as easy as possible, explain things in high details so he can create a more complete picture about where the issues of the class lie. Find out what is the core mechanic of your feat tree, find the essentials, then look for the weakest links that prove to be the least helpful in fulfilling the purpose of your tree. Those are the things you need to get fixed to support the core mechanic of your class/feat tree. Don't do the same mistake as ralexinor did, reporting a bug should be mandatory to create a solid/bug free class, but if it happens at the cost completely ruining a great and fun experience, then come up with something that replaces it in a legit way.

krondhor · July 2016

This is now the time we have the right to be allowed to ask a real base damage boost, and an overall cooldown reduction of all our skills (approx ~20%), and Hindering Shot plus Cordon of Arrows need have the Charge refill time halved, if @amenar goes trought this, then all three trees will benefit at once like it should been since the start, without have a tree performing miserable better than the other two.

Unknown · July 2016

This content has been removed.

gabrieldourden · July 2016

krondhor said:
This is now the time we have the right to be allowed to ask a real base damage boost, and an overall cooldown reduction of all our skills (approx ~25%), and Hindering Shot plus Cordon of Arrows need have the Charge refill time halved, if @amenar goes trought this, then all three trees will benefit at once like it should been since the start, without have a tree performing miserable better than the other two.

Now we are getting to a tricky point tough. How do you give a differentiate boost damage to trappers and the others (as trapper still deals more damage and many powers will be in common in everybody's rotation, like Cordon)? I guess you could boost at-wills more than encounters but has anyone an idea of the levels? Do you have other suggestions?

krondhor · July 2016

gabrieldourden said:

krondhor said:
This is now the time we have the right to be allowed to ask a real base damage boost, and an overall cooldown reduction of all our skills (approx ~25%), and Hindering Shot plus Cordon of Arrows need have the Charge refill time halved, if @amenar goes trought this, then all three trees will benefit at once like it should been since the start, without have a tree performing miserable better than the other two.
Now we are getting to a tricky point tough. How do you give a differentiate boost damage to trappers and the others (as trapper still deals more damage and many powers will be in common in everybody's rotation, like Cordon)? I guess you could boost at-wills more than encounters but has anyone an idea of the levels? Do you have other suggestions?

Yes of course I have some "raw" idea about how much the boost should be to be in pairs with the other DPS classes, but If I say them (numericaly speaking) I believe we ain't going there, we need devel to figure this out by themself, but as you said correctly, At-Wills and Dailies need a bigger damage boost (percentile wise) than encounters.

ralexinor · July 2016

romotheone said:
@ralexinor

Since you reported it as a bug, could you please also come up with a solution to compensate for the lost mechanic, which was essential for the trapper?

@romotheone

You missed the rest of the post you screenshotted.

ralexinor said:
Alright, let's get back on topic because this is just degenerating into moronic arguments and hysteria.

Firstly, I'm going to put this out there:
BUG: Swiftness of the Fox procs based on targets hit instead of encounter execution.

There's been no indication of whether this is a bug or not, so I may go as far as saying that I don't think the devs are aware of this particular issue. From the tooltip, Swiftness procing off targets hit does seem like a bug as I'm sure the tooltip indicates that it procs when an encounter power is used, not when it hits.

Let's sort out this first, and then see where Trapper stands in terms of balance. While 45% total cooldown reduction is fairly sizeable, I don't think it's completely unreasonable. Ideally 30% would probably be a bit more balanced, but for the purpose of this, 45% is fine. Especially if this is a bug, I'm pretty sure the Trapper playstyle is still going to be there especially if you stack some recovery, which is now a useful stat again.

I'm still going to stand by Thorned Roots needing a nerf. Even at 30-35% of an HR's total damage in an instance, that's still a massive 50% damage increase, and capable of going upwards of 100%. Yes, it's a T5 feat, but there's no other T5 feat that gives that much damage.
FEEDBACK: Thorned Roots' damage values should be halved to bring it more in line with other damage feats.

Finally, with that sorted, HR needs a base damage buff. Archery and Combat need QoL changes as well as some buffs to their feats. Overall, HR cooldowns should be reduced by a further 10%. One thing that I don't think has been made clear at any point: having double the amount of encounters that other classes do is not the same thing as having double the damage. You're limited by animation execution time, and where one class can deal x amount of damage in one skill, at minimum HRs need to use at least 2 skills to match that damage, which means we lose DPS purely because of the time it takes to use multiple encounters. Additionally, as it stands right now, even using 2 HR encounters does not do the same amount of damage as another class's single encounter, regardless of which path you use. And quite frankly, as many people have mentioned, HR has maybe a few good encounters, and the rest are absolute trash and filler skills for Trapper cooldowns.

I'm not even going to bother making a list of the numerous changes that need to be made for each skill in order to make them remotely viable (and no, a 10% damage buff doesn't even do anything for skills that are absolute trash). Will just put this out there, first:
FEEDBACK: increase HR damage by 30-50% for all skills, possibly with the exception of already-strong skills like Cordon of Arrows. This is after fixing/doing the aforementioned bugs/feedback lines in this post.

Tbh even starting as a 30% damage buff (not a base damage buff as they've been doing, but an actual damage increase of that amount), we'll start to see some nice improvements in all the paths' damage.

Also, the nerf/bugfix to Swiftness is needed, and the reasoning for it is in my previous posts, but I'll refresh it here.

- 0 cooldowns on any class is extremely broken, regardless of how weak the base class is.
- Trapper is outperforming the other HR trees not even by a small amount, but by 2-3 times more, virtue of Swiftness of the Fox and Thorned Roots.
- Even if Thorned Roots was nerfed, Trapper would still outperform the other trees by massive amounts because you're able to use your encounters a lot more.
- You could buff the Archery and Combat feat trees, but the values you'd need for those to be on par with Trapper is ridiculous. In one of my earlier posts, I calculated roughly a 150-200% damage boost per tree, if not more.
- The base HR class has extremely weak damage, far less than pretty much every other class in the game. Therefore, logically, it makes sense to buff the base class rather than putting insanely high damage boosts into the feat trees, because that's difficult to maintain and test. And in the words of another poster relating to a different issue - "a lot of changes, pointless busy work for the devs".
- Buffing base damage to the needed amounts for Archery and Combat would result in Trapper being extremely overpowered, while buffing base damage in respect to Trapper would result in Archery and Combat being extremely weak, which is what the case is right now.
- Therefore, with the above points established, the only way to establish a strong foundation for the HR feat trees would be to first fix/nerf Swiftness of the Fox, so that the feat paths don't have massive, borderline gamebreaking differences between them. While Thorned Roots is also an issue, the relative damage boost it gives actually scales based on the damage you do with your actual skills. The HR base class and hence damage dealt with encounters/at-wills/dailies is extremely weak/bad right now, which is why Thorned Roots is so strong, because it's a fixed damage source that isn't directly a result of the base class. As active damage sources (encounters/at-wills) increase in strength, Thorned Roots becomes less relevant. That being said, I still think Thorned Roots is too strong, and could do with a reduction in damage (30% nerf would be a good starting point, I'd say).

To reinstate, now that Swiftness has been fixed:

FEEDBACK: buff HR damage across by the board by 30-50% with the possible exception of Cordon of Arrows. The class' encounters and at-wills don't do enough damage. The reason why Trapper was so strong was Swiftness allowing for the repeated and frequent use of defensive and offensive encounters, and Thorned Roots being a too strong external source of damage. At-wills and encounters don't contribute much to HR damage, even with the recent buffs to them. If you want Archery and Combat to be viable, Trapper even, the base damage of the class needs to be buffed substantially. 10% isn't enough. The class lacks damage.

romotheone said:
Don't do the same mistake as ralexinor did, reporting a bug should be mandatory to create a solid/bug free class, but if it happens at the cost completely ruining a great and fun experience, then come up with something that replaces it in a legit way.

I did not make a mistake. If you bothered to read my previous posts then you would have seen that I made suggestions to compensate for the loss of Swiftness multiprocing, as well as the reasons for why it needed to be fixed. As you put it, I "[came] up with something that replaces it in a legit way".

--

Finally, thank you @amenar for actually listening. I'm actually rather impressed.

gabrieldourden · July 2016

krondhor said:

gabrieldourden said:

krondhor said:
This is now the time we have the right to be allowed to ask a real base damage boost, and an overall cooldown reduction of all our skills (approx ~25%), and Hindering Shot plus Cordon of Arrows need have the Charge refill time halved, if @amenar goes trought this, then all three trees will benefit at once like it should been since the start, without have a tree performing miserable better than the other two.
Now we are getting to a tricky point tough. How do you give a differentiate boost damage to trappers and the others (as trapper still deals more damage and many powers will be in common in everybody's rotation, like Cordon)? I guess you could boost at-wills more than encounters but has anyone an idea of the levels? Do you have other suggestions?
Yes of course I have some "raw" idea about how much the boost should be to be in pairs with the other DPS classes, but If I say them (numericaly speaking) I believe we ain't going there, we need devel to figure this out by themself, but as you said correctly, At-Wills and Dailies need a bigger damage boost (percentile wise) than encounters.

Mmmm. Dunno. Still not much convinced about this way. I don't know the numbers that would work fine but my feeling is that the difference between combat and trapper will become blurred, between an encounter spamming tree and an at-will-turned-encounter-via-flurry spammer one. At that point do we need two trees? We could get rid of the trapper and do something else.
The schtick of the trapper is rapid encounter spamming, but if combat can pretty much do the same with at-wills becoming encounter-level via flurry, then let's keep the combat that can be more varied as it is not tied to rooting powers and do something else with trapper.

Unknown · July 2016

This content has been removed.

krondhor · July 2016

gabrieldourden said:
At that point do we need two trees? We could get rid of the trapper and do something else.

Sorry but do you know the main differences between the three paths?

Archery is meant to be a true DPS stance from the distance.
Combat is a survival/tank three at close range.
Trapper is a three focused on control.

The point rather is that none of the three is performing good enough as intended in their legit role.

Anyway this is basicaly another topic, and is better not put out too much fire on the oil, as there's already enough stuff to fix for now.

romotheone · July 2016

@ralexinor yes, you are right. I apologize.

gabrieldourden · July 2016

krondhor said:

gabrieldourden said:
At that point do we need two trees? We could get rid of the trapper and do something else.
Sorry but do you know the main differences between the three paths?

Archery is meant to be a true DPS stance from the distance.
Combat is a survival/tank three at close range.
Trapper is a three focused on control.

The point rather is that none of the three is performing as intended in their legit role.

Trapper is not a controller. There's nothing in this game that needs to be controlled that is not immune. And trapper is basically melee, meaning that it needs exactly the same tanking capabilities of combat. If the meta will tilt back to control I would agree, but as of today they are exactly the same melee dps type. This is pretty much like saying Oppressor is a controller, but basically there are no oppressors out there... And roots suck at control as ranged enemies can still hit you. Crushing roots is an interrupt available to everybody and the reason why trapper could be a better controller is exactly that it was able to cycle through roots encounters faster... still you're far away from a DPS CW even in terms of control,
Nobody in this discussion, not even amenar mentioned control ever, except for perma-daze.

In real game terms combat and trapper pretty much fill the same niche of the GWF except for two group buffs (Longstrider and Fox).

forums700 · July 2016

macjae said:
Keep in mind that Swiftness will still reduce cooldowns by 15% per power activation, which is still a stupendously powerful feat. You can't really get down to 0 cooldowns with Recovery, but I don't think that's a goal in and of itself either; after all, as you said, just because something was the case at one point in the game's history, doesn't mean it should always be that way.

Now, when you consider the activation time of the powers, 0 cooldowns aren't necessary to maintain a nearly constant flow of power activations, but you'll probably need to use a few dailies and at-wills too.

Fixing Swiftness makes room for improvements in other areas, particularly in adjusting base cooldowns and base damage. I think people need to be more constructive about what changes those should be, than clinging to how it was the case at one point in the game's history and therefore that it should always be that way, that a certain playstyle is best for the class.

Thanks for your input, I think it's been a useful discussion even though we've done little to change each other's opinions. BTW, most of the useful HR dailies cost 75-100% of their AP so they are not particularly inexpensive, and a 15% cooldown reduction pales in comparison to feats available allowing at least one other class to get 30%.

I'll continue reading this thread, as I'd very much like to see some more data confirming how encounter cooldowns are affected by the swiftness change. Perhaps a developer could address this issue if community members in favour of this change do not. I recognise that the swiftness change could possibly be offset by improvements in other areas, but the problem is I'm not seeing any evidence of the will to make those other changes so far, at least not to the extent required.

It also seems very odd to me that the steel breeze charges change was reverted on the grounds that it ruined a canonical trapper rotation, but this far more serious change to swiftness is now being considered. And as a side issue, I'm not really sure charges have a place in HR powers anymore if cooldowns are going to become a limiting factor.

Anyway, the danger in attempting to lay the 'strong foundation' some of you envisage for this class is that we only make it halfway there because of time constraints or not fully committing, leading to the overall situation becoming worse. There is a lot to be said for a short term solution which does not break a path which is working while also improving the two others that need it most. This is just my own opinion, but what started as a light touch-up to the class now seems poised on the brink of a much worse result overall unless a lot more balancing work and testing is done first.

If the developers are considering the changes being proposed by macjae and ralexinor as a basis for class design, please understand that they won't work if they're done piecemeal. I really hope those two don't become the architects of the demise of the HR class, even though their intentions seem to be good.

Developers, the changes to swiftness (and any nerfs to thorned roots) would have to be supported by many changes in other areas. The community won't thank you if the sole currently viable HR build is messed up for a period of many months while we endure the results of a partially completed implementation and wait for you to find the time to come back to them. Making a few changes in areas which particularly need them and then evaluating the results is the safer course of action.

Thanks.

gabrieldourden · July 2016

Great post Forums700

forums700 · July 2016

gabrieldourden said:
Great post Forums700

Thanks. I think your contribution to this thread has been valuable, and I particularly appreciate the preliminary testing results you provided for the recovery stacking argument. Take care.

rayrdan · July 2016

indeed at this point im hoping for a great damage boost across the board and swiftness of the fox moved to rank 3 feat to allow some more flexible builds.
the REAL damage boost is now severely needed

gabrieldourden · July 2016

forums700 said:

gabrieldourden said:
Great post Forums700
Thanks. I think your contribution to this thread has been valuable, and I particularly appreciate the preliminary testing results you provided for the recovery stacking argument. Take care.

Thanks. Unfortunately the three charges for Steel Breeze are still in so you can see only three rotations which is not exactly great.

@macjae : it is not exactly true that the 0 recovery was only a trapper thing that happened in a certain period of time. One of the iconic HR armors in the first 4-5 mods was the Royal Guard one and that revolved around cooldown reduction and the Archer had a feat that reduced your cooldowns on crits. By the end of mod three I was prettty much running a trapper-style Archer/ Combat

so you could do that for pretty much 7 mods. And the only reason you could not do that before was that there was not enough crit available. It was different in PvP where the meta shifted to self-healing and dots but for PVE it's been there for a long time.

lirithiel · July 2016

@amenar: you da man! Nice list of latest updates. Glad you looked into Combat more and finally addressed the Swiftness of the Fox issue. Thanks to @ralexinor for bringing this to their attention and pushing for the change.

alliera7311 · July 2016

@amenar DO NOT TOUCH OUR SWIFTNESS OF THE FOX. It will train wreck the Trapper in PVE. Recovery will not help us one bit because it doesn't even work. We can barely keep up with the other classes as it if you take away our SWIFTNESS the build is over.#riptrappers

jokeey · July 2016

Exactly it's going to Completely destroy the trapper now, and i recon that both the other trees will still be s**t

kangkeok · July 2016

All i know is when u know if something is a bug..u fix it then work things from there...instead of keep using the bug feature and continue stacking things on it..that will make HR even more broken. i have to agree with macjae and ralexinor.

I feel trapper has been handed out a broken feat and had been using it since then..how long is it? a year? addiction to that feature is not surprising at all..especially when there are so many build made from player are based on the broken feat. If only u guys could see this objectively instead of from just a trapper point of view. Do u guys wanna live ur life clinging to drugs or u wanna fix it and start a new healthy life? Do u guys wanna play a trapper playstyle based on broken feat or u guys wanna start stacking recovery to get back ur playstyle? I mean u dont have to stack as much as other tree do u know?

Further more, on contrary, it will be more simpler to adjust swiftness then work on encounter and at-will based damage and boost HR as a whole than to adjust or redesign new feat for the other 2 tree and risk more broken code. Its always much simpler to insert value than to put in new code. Risk of getting bug and stuff.

aasur · July 2016

kangkeok said:

Further more, on contrary, it will be more simpler to adjust swiftness then work on encounter and at-will based damage and boost HR as a whole than to adjust or redesign new feat for the other 2 tree and risk more broken code. Its always much simpler to insert value than to put in new code. Risk of getting bug and stuff.

What if those other adjustments do not make it into this balance patch? Then we're stuck with 3 trees that all perform sub par to other DPS classes.

rayrdan · July 2016

probably one change that could help us as trapper is making the whole thorned root ticks strike just once for full damage..this would be good in both pvp and pve.
Thorned root actually gets bugged versus elven battle for example dealing no damage

jokeey · July 2016

Well what I know is some have been saying that you'll need 5k to 10k recovery and tbh that's going to mess my hunter up I only have 21k power 10k crit so I'll be losing power and crit to get recovery and that means less damage there is no point I'm not well geard soo... That's my point

rayrdan · July 2016

wait some time, screaming will bring us no where

kangkeok · July 2016

aasur said:

kangkeok said:

Further more, on contrary, it will be more simpler to adjust swiftness then work on encounter and at-will based damage and boost HR as a whole than to adjust or redesign new feat for the other 2 tree and risk more broken code. Its always much simpler to insert value than to put in new code. Risk of getting bug and stuff.
What if those other adjustments do not make it into this balance patch? Then we're stuck with 3 trees that all perform sub par to other DPS classes.

All they need to do now is to re-evaluate the performance again and adjust based damage for encounter and at-will up to competitive level again which they already had the record. I m sure its not a complex things to do since they already done it before when they 1st evaluate HR as mention in the developer blog.

jhpnw · July 2016

@amenar and other HRs

@amenar if we don't get the much needed Damage increase we are Dead as a class all 3 paths now suck and new payers will not even play HR long before change over to another class.

I have always been a strong advocate of HR and helped many HRs develop as I was helped. Always positive and hardly ever negative. Now I am so disappointed and depressed and pissed. As it stands we are the only class that has ask to be destroyed. We are laughing stock of PVP and now will add PVE to that list too In mod 10 just try to get invited to a PVP guild or a pug run its already hard now . Other classes are smart they fight for there class. We are just stupid and selfish. Most of them just have 1 path that stands above the rest like trapper. Not one of the other classes called to nerf there best class they fight hard to keep it and then they are still getting nerfed . We on the other hand sold out trapper so that if we could not play Archer or combat then screw trapper too.

The 1st post showed HR underperformed other classes and archer and combat under preformed trapper and needed boost not nerfs So what happened? I will tell you people I respected in this game proposed nerf swiftness and boost damage. well they did as was requested nerfed trapper

Due to the huge loss of stats it would take to get recovery, this is what I tried I gave up 10 % LS and 18%crit and power respected down to 1 in swiftness of fox and guess what I cant stack enough recovery to matter and now dps in the toilet to tune of around 30% and forget solo in Wod vs Cult patrol to many things are attacking from patrol and run out of encounters and at wills are just needle pricks
so I die

HR already has to have more stats stacks than any other player just to do damage and survive to stack recovery you give up stats
stats like life steal and deflect which we are already easy to kill and need
stats like crit and power which all our damage requires to be competitive

and worst of all what we got from betraying HR class damage boost to encounters that will never be used and a less than 10% DAMAGE INCREASE FOR LOWER LEVELS AND A 3 TO 5 % INCREASE FOR HIGHER ILS

where is the 40% to 50% boost at, that was called for if swiftness of the fox was reduced? The Devs will never give us this . If they gave in then the riots from other classes that were smart enough not to betray there class and that have 10 x the players per class than HR will start who do you think they care about 98% of players of other classes or 2% that is HR.
I warned others Devs would gladly nerf but will never give back any thing of equal value in return . We are such a low class now and deserve what we got 3 sucky classes and a bunch of happy pvp competitors from other classes that were worried we might actually become a threat with boost to class so they posted on feed back forum.

Look back at HR forum and see that only 10 or so people were regularly on there for support to Hr now you see a100 different opinions and more on feed back how many do you think that are even HRs

Aravein @ jhpnw so you may see I am a 4300 Il trapper with 2 years in game and only play HR no others

aasur · July 2016

kangkeok said:

All they need to do now is to re-evaluate the performance again and adjust based damage for encounter and at-will up to competitive level again which they already had the record. I m sure its not a complex things to do since they already done it before when they 1st evaluate HR as mention in the developer blog.

With less than a month to go, I'm not optimistic. And if it those adjustments don't happen by Mod10, who knows if and when it will finally happen. But we'll see, won't we.

rayrdan · July 2016

aasur said:

kangkeok said:

All they need to do now is to re-evaluate the performance again and adjust based damage for encounter and at-will up to competitive level again which they already had the record. I m sure its not a complex things to do since they already done it before when they 1st evaluate HR as mention in the developer blog.
With less than a month to go, I'm not optimistic. And if it those adjustments don't happen by Mod10, who knows if and when it will finally happen. But we'll see, won't we.

if they dont happen for mod 10, you can rest sure they wont happen for the following 5 mods.

kangkeok · July 2016

ralexinor said:

romotheone said:
@ralexinor

Since you reported it as a bug, could you please also come up with a solution to compensate for the lost mechanic, which was essential for the trapper?
@romotheone

You missed the rest of the post you screenshotted.
ralexinor said:
Alright, let's get back on topic because this is just degenerating into moronic arguments and hysteria.

Firstly, I'm going to put this out there:
BUG: Swiftness of the Fox procs based on targets hit instead of encounter execution.

There's been no indication of whether this is a bug or not, so I may go as far as saying that I don't think the devs are aware of this particular issue. From the tooltip, Swiftness procing off targets hit does seem like a bug as I'm sure the tooltip indicates that it procs when an encounter power is used, not when it hits.

Let's sort out this first, and then see where Trapper stands in terms of balance. While 45% total cooldown reduction is fairly sizeable, I don't think it's completely unreasonable. Ideally 30% would probably be a bit more balanced, but for the purpose of this, 45% is fine. Especially if this is a bug, I'm pretty sure the Trapper playstyle is still going to be there especially if you stack some recovery, which is now a useful stat again.

I'm still going to stand by Thorned Roots needing a nerf. Even at 30-35% of an HR's total damage in an instance, that's still a massive 50% damage increase, and capable of going upwards of 100%. Yes, it's a T5 feat, but there's no other T5 feat that gives that much damage.
FEEDBACK: Thorned Roots' damage values should be halved to bring it more in line with other damage feats.

Finally, with that sorted, HR needs a base damage buff. Archery and Combat need QoL changes as well as some buffs to their feats. Overall, HR cooldowns should be reduced by a further 10%. One thing that I don't think has been made clear at any point: having double the amount of encounters that other classes do is not the same thing as having double the damage. You're limited by animation execution time, and where one class can deal x amount of damage in one skill, at minimum HRs need to use at least 2 skills to match that damage, which means we lose DPS purely because of the time it takes to use multiple encounters. Additionally, as it stands right now, even using 2 HR encounters does not do the same amount of damage as another class's single encounter, regardless of which path you use. And quite frankly, as many people have mentioned, HR has maybe a few good encounters, and the rest are absolute trash and filler skills for Trapper cooldowns.

I'm not even going to bother making a list of the numerous changes that need to be made for each skill in order to make them remotely viable (and no, a 10% damage buff doesn't even do anything for skills that are absolute trash). Will just put this out there, first:
FEEDBACK: increase HR damage by 30-50% for all skills, possibly with the exception of already-strong skills like Cordon of Arrows. This is after fixing/doing the aforementioned bugs/feedback lines in this post.

Tbh even starting as a 30% damage buff (not a base damage buff as they've been doing, but an actual damage increase of that amount), we'll start to see some nice improvements in all the paths' damage.
Also, the nerf/bugfix to Swiftness is needed, and the reasoning for it is in my previous posts, but I'll refresh it here.

- 0 cooldowns on any class is extremely broken, regardless of how weak the base class is.
- Trapper is outperforming the other HR trees not even by a small amount, but by 2-3 times more, virtue of Swiftness of the Fox and Thorned Roots.
- Even if Thorned Roots was nerfed, Trapper would still outperform the other trees by massive amounts because you're able to use your encounters a lot more.
- You could buff the Archery and Combat feat trees, but the values you'd need for those to be on par with Trapper is ridiculous. In one of my earlier posts, I calculated roughly a 150-200% damage boost per tree, if not more.
- The base HR class has extremely weak damage, far less than pretty much every other class in the game. Therefore, logically, it makes sense to buff the base class rather than putting insanely high damage boosts into the feat trees, because that's difficult to maintain and test. And in the words of another poster relating to a different issue - "a lot of changes, pointless busy work for the devs".
- Buffing base damage to the needed amounts for Archery and Combat would result in Trapper being extremely overpowered, while buffing base damage in respect to Trapper would result in Archery and Combat being extremely weak, which is what the case is right now.
- Therefore, with the above points established, the only way to establish a strong foundation for the HR feat trees would be to first fix/nerf Swiftness of the Fox, so that the feat paths don't have massive, borderline gamebreaking differences between them. While Thorned Roots is also an issue, the relative damage boost it gives actually scales based on the damage you do with your actual skills. The HR base class and hence damage dealt with encounters/at-wills/dailies is extremely weak/bad right now, which is why Thorned Roots is so strong, because it's a fixed damage source that isn't directly a result of the base class. As active damage sources (encounters/at-wills) increase in strength, Thorned Roots becomes less relevant. That being said, I still think Thorned Roots is too strong, and could do with a reduction in damage (30% nerf would be a good starting point, I'd say).

To reinstate, now that Swiftness has been fixed:

FEEDBACK: buff HR damage across by the board by 30-50% with the possible exception of Cordon of Arrows. The class' encounters and at-wills don't do enough damage. The reason why Trapper was so strong was Swiftness allowing for the repeated and frequent use of defensive and offensive encounters, and Thorned Roots being a too strong external source of damage. At-wills and encounters don't contribute much to HR damage, even with the recent buffs to them. If you want Archery and Combat to be viable, Trapper even, the base damage of the class needs to be buffed substantially. 10% isn't enough. The class lacks damage.
romotheone said:
Don't do the same mistake as ralexinor did, reporting a bug should be mandatory to create a solid/bug free class, but if it happens at the cost completely ruining a great and fun experience, then come up with something that replaces it in a legit way.
I did not make a mistake. If you bothered to read my previous posts then you would have seen that I made suggestions to compensate for the loss of Swiftness multiprocing, as well as the reasons for why it needed to be fixed. As you put it, I "[came] up with something that replaces it in a legit way".

--

Finally, thank you @amenar for actually listening. I'm actually rather impressed.

+1. I'll bump this feedback to highlight for developer.

@SaveHunterRanger

alliera7311 · July 2016

You will murder us if you mess with Swiftness of the Fox. Even though we can spam our encounters faster than the other classes doesn't mean we are better. It takes everything we got to take down some of the other classes we work harder and faster to do what we do, and you want make us wait and force us to use recovery that doesnt work!? We will not be able to keep up with the other classes bottom line if you do this.Recovery doesn't work at all. I only see a few fellow ACTUAL HRs who post regularly and a bunch of ppl who I have never seen before meddling in affairs that do not concern you.

Official Feedback Thread: Hunter Ranger changes

Comments