Class Update - Hunters

[Vastin]

Greetings O Hunters!

This is the main thread for Bullroarer feedback on the Hunter class changes (detailed below).

Please keep your feedback concise and respectful (especially towards each other), and as Cordovan requested, please focus mainly on your own experiences and opinions - it makes it much harder for us to digest the feedback if it devolves into arguments about each other's feedback.

These changes are NOT final. We're expecting at least one more round of adjustments and fixes before we go live, based on your feedback and bug reports.

-Vastin

Hunter


Overview:

• Work is being done to solidify the Red Line as the dominant group DPS Trait line, and adjust Blue Line to be more of a solo-friendly survival and flexible Trait line.
• Some induction time bonuses found in the blue line have been moved over to the red line.
• Blue line has received some improved survival tools.

Details:

• Barrage has a three shot limit, enforced by a 20 second cooldown.
• Quick Draw and Press Onward/Perserverence have been swapped between the Red and Blue lines.
• Red line T1 bonus has been replaced with the old Blue line Swift Release bonus.
• Blue line's Swift Release bonus has been replaced with Hunter's Voice, a cooldown and run speed buff to Cry of the Hunter.
• Press Onward has been converted to a percentage heal to both morale and power. Trait and LI bonuses have been adjusted accordingly.
• All hunter skills have been normalized to new general damage progressions.
• The hunter LI bleed damage bonus has been reduced from 150% to 50%. The base bleed damage of all hunter skills has been increased by a similar or greater margin in most cases.
• Both Blue and Red trees have undergone some skill tree adjustments to keep their respective specialties intact.
• Increased the base proc chance of 'Needful Haste' to 15%.
• Initial expectations for these changes is that the blue line will keep its DPS approximately where it currently is on the live worlds, and for the red line to eclipse blue line by about 10-20%.
• Yellow line skills have been normalized, but are otherwise unchanged.

[Cordovan]

We are excited to be able to bring you this class work on Bullroarer, and look forward to reading your feedback. In order to get the most from your feedback, we would very much like you to do the following in this thread:

• Make sure your feedback is focused on the class work seen in the Release Notes and the writing above, or focused on your specific feedback regarding the class in cases when you feel it necessary to discuss things beyond what is in the notes.
• DO NOT REPLY TO OTHER POSTS IN THIS THREAD TO PROVIDE YOUR OPINION ON THEIR POST. We want to be able to use this thread to foster a productive discussion between you and the development team, and that means we are less interested in your opinion about someone else's opinion. If you are responding to another poster in this thread, it should not be to provide your opinion about their post. If you are providing feedback that is not in-line with another person's post, you can simply provide that information independently. Posts about someone else's feedback that are opinion-based in nature WILL be deleted from this targeted feedback thread. If you must have this discussion, please do so in a new thread on the Bullroarer forums, and not in this thread.
• Please be civil. Insulting, harassing, abusive, or profanity/filtered profanity-laden posts will be deleted. We welcome critical feedback as it relates specifically to the work being done, but this thread is not the place to provide your opinion on the development team itself, or your view on the historic work that has been done or not done in regard to class balance. In order to get the most use out of this thread, you can expect me to be a bit more heavy-handed on moderation than I typically am.
• Recognize that this class balance work is not a comprehensive and final adjustment to classes, but is rather the first in a series of changes aimed at improving LOTRO's classes throughout the game. We are happy to read about what further work you would like to see, but want to make sure you understand that this is not the final step in this process.

There is some chance that we will not respond immediately to your comments today, as we would like to gather some feedback initially in a relatively "neutral" way prior to providing responses. Thank you for your help in making sure we get this right, both now and in the future, and thank you for the time you spend on Bullroarer in the coming days to try out these changes in-game.

[sahanto]

Greetings O Hunters!

This is the main thread for Bullroarer feedback on the Hunter class changes (detailed below).

Please keep your feedback concise and respectful (especially towards each other), and as Cordovan requested, please focus mainly on your own experiences and opinions - it makes it much harder for us to digest the feedback if it devolves into arguments about each other's feedback.

These changes are NOT final. We're expecting at least one more round of adjustments and fixes before we go live, based on your feedback and bug reports.

-Vastin

Hunter


Overview:

• Work is being done to solidify the Red Line as the dominant group DPS Trait line, and adjust Blue Line to be more of a solo-friendly survival and flexible Trait line.
• Some induction time bonuses found in the blue line have been moved over to the red line.
• Blue line has received some improved survival tools.

Details:

• Barrage has a three shot limit, enforced by a 20 second cooldown.
• Quick Draw and Press Onward/Perserverence have been swapped between the Red and Blue lines.
• Red line T1 bonus has been replaced with the old Blue line Swift Release bonus.
• Blue line's Swift Release bonus has been replaced with Hunter's Voice, a cooldown and run speed buff to Cry of the Hunter.
• Press Onward has been converted to a percentage heal to both morale and power. Trait and LI bonuses have been adjusted accordingly.
• All hunter skills have been normalized to new general damage progressions.
• The hunter LI bleed damage bonus has been reduced from 150% to 50%. The base bleed damage of all hunter skills has been increased by a similar or greater margin in most cases.
• Both Blue and Red trees have undergone some skill tree adjustments to keep their respective specialties intact.
• Increased the base proc chance of 'Needful Haste' to 15%.
• Initial expectations for these changes is that the blue line will keep its DPS approximately where it currently is on the live worlds, and for the red line to eclipse blue line by about 10-20%.
• Yellow line skills have been normalized, but are otherwise unchanged.

my message got deleted so ima give yall some proper feedback:

im glad ur doing work to make red line the most solid hunter line but frankly this really hurts hunters in the raid and in pvp , you might think that the dps for blue line and red line will be similar but the 20 second barrage cd destroys hunter dps. By doing this hunters will very much struggle in the moors because they cant move around and shoot, same goes for the raid. it is going to be crazy hard doing fingar when u have to stand still the entire time the amount of fails in the last 2-3 min will drive ur raid group to quite since each fingar attempt takes about 20-25 min. (Tho this is all speculation)

Now i know this aint an rk thread but i gotta talk about it somewhere, yall completely destroyed us rks, i'd be surprised if we even get raiding spot. Not only did we lost 1 125 rune...but we lost 30% of another one....bye bye rk wtb new dps main

[Hejazia.Arkenstone]

Initial expectations for these changes is that the blue line will keep its DPS approximately where it currently is on the live worlds, and for the red line to eclipse blue line by about 10-20%.

If you start with this statement as the premise to an argument, I feel that the following statements contradict it.

Work is being done to solidify the Red Line as the dominant group DPS Trait line, and adjust Blue Line to be more of a solo-friendly survival and flexible Trait line.
Blue line has received some improved survival tools.

Barrage has a three shot limit, enforced by a 20 second cooldown.

Mathematically it simply is not possible for the blue line hunter to "keep its DPS approximately where it currently is on the live worlds" if Barrage is on 20s cd, because Barrage is over half of the source damage in current DPS parses.

In reality blue line's DPS has dropped significantly in order to make room for increased survivability.

In addition, the new redline will be nowhere near the current blueline. It will not eclipse blue line at all. Rather, blue line will go down and red line will eclipse the new blue line, but the new red line will not eclipse the current blue line. This effectively leads to a big hunter DPS nerf.

[Taldeen]

Reducing the impact of barrage is a good idea (since it was bugged anyway and boring and way to strong)
However I would not recommend putting barrage on a cd at all.
Rather disallow the stacking of the barragebuffs and consider a 3^rd/4^th tier, with slightly higher bonuses.

Also you will need to buff the red line massively to even get close to the current blue line dps.
Consider giving the red line longer inductions but buff the damage significantly.
Also consider higher power costs in exchange for higher dps in redline.
Also consider giving him crit/damage boost the longer he stands still (rewarding good raid positioning).

[Hejazia.Arkenstone]

This picture accurately illustrates why blue line has more DPS than redline. If you want to make red line eclipse blue, you need to buff redline damage as a whole and/or nerf the damage of Barrage.



The tooltip damage on Barrage 1 is more than Improved Penetrating Shot, and Barrage 2 and Barrage 3 are just even higher than that. I believe that if you nerf Barrage 1,2,3 and keep the cooldown at 1s, you will achieve the result that you want. Barrage is simply put, the only good damaging skill from blue line, and putting it on a 20s cooldown makes blue line as a whole, completely irrelevant in terms of DPS.

[Antophant]

I'll list down the problems I saw with the current hunter changes in hopes they are fixes.

1- The trait trees were shuffled around in a way that hurts both trait trees with redline the worst of the 2.

2- Barbed Arrow and Exanguinate DoTs are nerfed by around 20% each.

3- The changes to damage ranges on all the skills makes crits even more important than before.

4- Blue AND Red line are underDPSing by 30%+ atm. *(Compared to the baseline of Blue line on Live)

5- Blue line can still out DPS Red line, it's very close ofc that it could just be margin of error. *(requires some more testers to parse both lines)

6- Press Onward still can't be used on the move which defeats the purpose of a heal if the mobs can hit you still.

7- Press Onward power heal is worse than on Live unless you fully trait it + legacy + wear hunter power book.

8- Barbed Arrow has 2 trait set bonuses but they were split between Red line and Blue line resulting in stronger DoTs in Blue line and faster Barbed Arrows in Red line. Intended?

9- Split Shot lost its -25% induction trait bonus making it slower than on live while in blue line.

*will edit if I find more*

[Gibraisia]

I'm going to say that as far as Red-line buffs, it's really going in the right direction. However, one problem I see is that Upshot still appears lackluster -- and a big buff to Red should include a buff to our capstone skill.

As for Blue, I don't main a Blue hunter. That said, even I think a CD on barrage (of 20 seconds) is too much. It will drop the DPS of Blue-line significantly, easily down to 60k from the 100k where it often is right now. I recommend a shorter cooldown, something like 5 seconds, to nerf barrage but not nerf it quite so much. Also, as a general suggestion, I think it is wrong to make blue a solo-only line. Some fights like Fingar, as others have said, simply require movement that is impossible for red-line, so blue-line should be left viable.

[Snowlock]

Press onward should be a base skill and not tied to any line. It should also be combined with Cry of the Hunter. The reason redline was giving PO was because they are stationary. It's counter intuitive to give a moving target trait line a stationary heal. It also doesn't make sense to take away from a stationary traitline any healing because by definition they have to stand there and take damage.

I'm glad the attempt is to put redline as dps kings again. However, I'm not sure I see anything here that's actually buffing red line, as the buffs you're giving it from blue, the red line hunter already had access to except of course for swift release which you're nerfing and is absolutely meh without barbed hindrance. Put barbed hindrance on that, and you've got something.

What red line hunters really need for survivability is for low cut to remove slows. That should be there instead of Quick Escape.

If you want to boost red line damage, remove the penalty on the 3rd shot of swift bow. Boost the damage on Heart Seeker and get rid of Upshot, and instead give us a skill that allows us to use Improved Focus and stealth for a time in combat. I realize that's new development instead of just shuffling skills around so it may not be in scope, but that's what it would take.

[Snowlock]

[*]The hunter LI bleed damage bonus has been reduced from 150% to 50%. The base bleed damage of all hunter skills has been increased by a similar or greater margin in most cases.

makes me leery. If you recall, Barbed Arrow works like it works now because it was changed for PVP. It had less of a base damage and a longer duration that would allow it to be applied to a Warg Stalker player and force that player out of stealth after his Disappear expired. The hunter community was told it wasn't a nerf in dps because while the duration was shortened, the damage would be increased. Now the duration has been shortened and the damage decreased as well?

[theultimatekyle]

These changes seem like they'll ruin hunters for dps in the raid. Theres no way this is gonna keep hunter dps anywhere close to where it currently is.

[Madmanthief]

I hardly ever use barrage anymore, PS and IPS is a better skill imo anyway. I would like to know why the changes you suggest, Vastin, do you play the game ? and if you do, is red line hunter your main ?, is this why it's being changed ? or are you getting tired of reading the endless complaints of red line hunters who insist that the "god-mode turret" should be the best ?

Why not make the damage on all 3 specs more equalized so that this endless cycle of one line over the other, constantly flip-flopping, can finally end.

[007Squanto]

I hardly ever use barrage anymore, PS and IPS is a better skill imo anyway. I would like to know why the changes you suggest, Vastin, do you play the game ? and if you do, is red line hunter your main ?, is this why it's being changed ? or are you getting tired of reading the endless complaints of red line hunters who insist that the "god-mode turret" should be the best ?

Why not make the damage on all 3 specs more equalized so that this endless cycle of one line over the other, constantly flip-flopping, can finally end.

Equalize the specs? Well they wouldn't be specs then now would they ?

[007Squanto]

These changes seem like they'll ruin hunters for dps in the raid. Theres no way this is gonna keep hunter dps anywhere close to where it currently is.

Raid season for Abyss is long over with. I really don't think these balances were made with the raid in consideration. Despite that, had people brought 5 red hunters into Abyss in December 2017, they could have beaten every boss.

Theres no way this is gonna keep hunter dps anywhere close to where it currently is.

Most of the people who have begged for class balance over the years want the hps/dps/tps values massively brought down, so you might be right, and its kind of the point.

[Helmsley83]

-Barrage has a three shot limit, enforced by a 20 second cooldown.


You can do this our you can delete every Hunter in the game the result will be the same.
Because of this noboady will play a hunter in the endgame because it useless. Maybe as a cap

A 5 second cooldown should be enough.

- Strength of the Earth an press onward/Perserverence are useless delete them complete i dont need them in the trait tree.

[Wolf2x]

Not sure what kind of build people here are testing on but the DPS seems to be even higher than how it was in previous Beta session months ago. Back then the dps was somewhere between 50k-60k on blue line, now its 60k+ on red line. With slightly decent HS proc luck, even more

[Kasius]

Stop crying.
Red line hunter does way more dps then blue line hunter on live server.
That’s a good thing but it goes to far because of broken armour sets from LV 105.

Suggestion:Remove the Heart Seeker reset Bonus and make it a passive red line trait with 45seconds cooldown.
Or leave it as it is and let Heartseeker bleeds not stack.

[Oelle]

Didnt login and test... but does this 20s CD mean one can use 3 barrages within 20 seconds?
That should be 5, as the barrage-buff lasts 5 seconds. Or even 5.5-6 seconds to really be sure it never hits higher than the targeted barrage3.
But still, thats huge and not really wanted. Just delete the skills barrage2 and barrage3 and let barrage work as it does now. If there can be several versions of barrage3, there can be several versions of barrage and everything would be fine.

As I said, I didnt test it... but even now I dont see how red will surpass blue. I agree that its a good idea to aim for that though.

And even though its completely OT here, tacticals need higher dps rating on their ILI to counter the loss of their runes, or some other change.

[siipperi]

Stop crying.
Red line hunter does way more dps then blue line hunter on live server.
That’s a good thing but it goes to far because of broken armour sets from LV 105.

Suggestion:Remove the Heart Seeker reset Bonus and make it a passive red line trait with 45seconds cooldown.
Or leave it as it is and let Heartseeker bleeds not stack.

This. HS reset set is atm the meta of hunter and effectiveness of it needs to be reduced one way suggested above. Its simply toi strong atm after the changes

[Happychappy]

Raid season for Abyss is long over with. I really don't think these balances were made with the raid in consideration. Despite that, had people brought 5 red hunters into Abyss in December 2017, they could have beaten every boss.



Most of the people who have begged for class balance over the years want the hps/dps/tps values massively brought down, so you might be right, and its kind of the point.

A game wide Dps/mob morale reduction would be better, for pve and pvp. To actually use skills and not rely on one shots would be a vast improvement.

[Hejazia.Arkenstone]

This. HS reset set is atm the meta of hunter and effectiveness of it needs to be reduced one way suggested above. Its simply toi strong atm after the changes

I would just like to point out to everyone that they are going to remove the set bonus from Throne gear (aka HS reset bonus). New hunters will not be able to get that set in the next update while people who already had it, will keep it.

No more barrage spam, no more Heartseeker reset. Improved Penetrating Shot and Improved Swift Bow spam for the win? You pretty much need Heartseeker reset in redline for that line to be decent damage, otherwise what does redline even have to offer in terms of superior DPS?

[DKenny]

As it appears you are now going to require yet ANOTHER total overhaul of ILI for hunters, are you going to supply those with hunters with imbued LI a free stack of imbued legacy replacement scrolls?

p.s. I seriously doubt you're going to be able to successfully pull this off. Things had finally settled down in the balance between RKs and hunters in terms of group participation. But unfortunately it seems once again that the squeaky wheels are getting the "oil". In spite of the fact that it was clearly stated previously that blue hunter and red RK would form a dps baseline, you've apparently now chosen to mutilate blue hunter beyond recognition. Will the red hunter buffs be sufficient? My expectation is that they will either fall far short or overshoot the mark. You've just decided to "save" the Titanic from the iceberg by shooting a torpedo at it. Congrats?

[Oelle]

instant HS reset should never have been a setbonus. That thing should be the capstone of redline. Or HS should always be instant (and redline already reduces its CD, which is fine). With its long induction and cooldown, there is no use for HS besides bursting down enemies from stealth.

[DKenny]

Barrage has a three shot limit, enforced by a 20 second cooldown.

Initial expectations for these changes is that the blue line will keep its DPS approximately where it currently is on the live worlds, and for the red line to eclipse blue line by about 10-20%.

Really? A 20 second CD on barrage and you still expect blue line to keep the same dps?

[WorrBinpike]

Didnt login and test... but does this 20s CD mean one can use 3 barrages within 20 seconds?

It means after you do barrage 3 the cooldown of 20 secs starts.