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An Aimed Shot at Blizzard

June 26, 2010 :: Posted by - Plectical :: Category - Class Discussion, Other

One blue post that caught my eye today announced that Hunters would no longer need ammunition for their weapons. Nethaera posted,

A major change coming for the hunter is the removal of ammunition. Guns, bows, and crossbows will now do damage without consuming ammunition at all. There will be no more ammo slot on the hunter’s character display. Any ammunition that a hunter has at the time of the change will become gray sell-able items. Existing quivers will be converted into large bags — though each hunter can only have one and non-hunters will not benefit from this change — and we will not be making any additional quivers.

While Hunters around the world may be rejoicing at the change, it got me thinking about ways to fix a ammunition without getting rid of it completely. It seems like the most obvious way to fix the “problem” of ammunition (not sure if something that makes a class unique is a problem) is to offer up more types of ammunition that can be used in specific situations. For instance, what if there was ammunition that slowed the attack speed of an enemy mob? The ammunition would trade some dps for the ability but the raid wide-benefit would outpace the loss in personal dps. Further, Blizzard could off a wide variety of special ammunition to the hunter class. Imagine giving hunters ammunition that had a random proc to increase a raid’s critical strike? How about introducing a type of ammunition that was particularly strong against a certain class of mobs?

It seems that Hunters everywhere have 2 major complaints with ammunition, cost and difficulty to acquire. Both issues can be addressed with a simple fix. Instead of giving Hunters access to ammunition with reputation and material costs, why not simply offer them up all types of ammunition at a reagent vendor? This way, you can offer ammunition at an affordable price and get rid of the access issue that comes with reputation gates.

Every time I see Blizzard removing a feature that makes a class unique instead of attempting to find a way to fix the feature, I can’t help but feel that they missed an opportunity to make the game more interesting. Hunters feel free to chime in if I totally missed the mark.

Comments (3) :: Add Comment
  • Dick

    I could of sworn I heard them talk about adding that feature as a Hunter skill where they’ll have some type of passive skill that they can toggle to allow them to have ammo with an elemental damage type added to your shots.

  • HearthCast – Rewt

    Might be a “Forest for the Trees” issue at hand here. I see Blizzard, as a whole, getting rid of consumable “ammunition” in the game. Warlocks are getting their Soul Shard system completely redone, to where it’ll act more like runes than what they have now.

    While I like your ideas of different flavored ammunition, I still feel Blizzard wants groups to be composed of different classes bringing different things. Frost traps, Doomguard’s Cripple Spell, and various other elements in the game already slow down the mobs .

    In the past, Blizzard changed how spellstones worked for Warlocks – giving us charges on them, and what amounts to a temporary “enchant/buff” of sorts to our main weapon. Perhaps the same could be looked at for Hunters. While the weapon could have unlimited Ammo, Hunters could apply a “vial” or something to the weapon, thus buffing the ammo, quite akin to your description. This would accomplish the elimination of the ammo slots as Blizzard wants, and would also require rep grinding, etc, to get said vials from particular quatermasters.

    Just my .02 – I’m not a hunter, never played one, or even rolled one to mess with… so I could be completely wrong with my assumption.

    ~Rewt

  • Daggerd

    As far as your ‘making ammo be just a reagent’ suggestion, last I heard other reagent classes didn’t need to fill 1 out of their 5 bags with reagents for 1 night of raiding. And as an engineer with the iceblade arrow pattern let me assure you that 10g per stack (on my high population server) was not out of the ordinary for quite awhile which is an absurd cost to push on to 1 class.

    Unfortunately everything about ammo that made hunters a unique snowflake was also a hindrance to the class in general.

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