Hunter Q&A....

Wow. I mean really. Nothing in this Q&A was particularly interesting, exciting, or clever. In fact, the first third of the class review dealt with every hunter's favorite long-term undelivered promise: special arrows. But I suppose the overall cluelessness toward the class was best summarized in this quote:

We want to resolve what a hunter is supposed to do in melee (Raptor Strike? Disengage?).

I can resolve that for them right now. The hunter never raptor strikes. Ever. You know when a hunter raptor strikes? When they tank Bloodboil in Black Temple and are forced to melee for 30 seconds with no other option. And even then most hunters just melee and watch their healthstones/healthpots/deterrence in a desperate effort not to die. Even before the launch of Burning Crusade there was only one time to ever bother with Raptor Strike - Thaddius in 40 man Naxx, if your tank failed at positioning him just right and you could not get out of your dead zone to shoot. Even in PvP the only useful melee skill a hunter posesses is counter-attack, which is not nearly worth the point spent, especially since it requires a parry or a dodge to trigger it...I really forget, since I haven't even bothered to train level 1 on my new hunter. Hunters do not melee. EVER.

The hunter is not a ranger, a hybrid, a melee character of any kind. They are a physical dps ranged class with a pet (regardless of the "magical" aspect to some attacks, they are still an archer). I sincerely hope Blizzard does not make the mistake this late in the game of redesigning the class to involve any melee skills whatsoever - if this was inteded to be a ranged/melee hybrid class then it should have been developed in that vein rather than with a pet. Oh wait,

I’ll add that the melee attack issue for hunters themselves is something we keep discussing. While we are unlikely to go back to a melee-focused build for hunters, we might consider a model where hunters don’t run away most of the time but switch to melee attacks – perhaps even a single punishing attack on a cooldown before the hunter Disengaged or whatever. This would be one of those things that helped hunters feel more different than actual magic casters, and might make them care about melee weapons as more than stat sticks.

I was confused about this "melee attack issue" until I read further to see the other community questions addressed. This reads like the laziest list ever - complaint after complaind regarding pet controls, survival, heals and resurection for pets. The heal issue was actually my favorite:

One suggestion made by many hunters was to add a passive ability that healed the hunter's pet when the hunter received a heal from a party or raid member.

I have an alternate suggestion. People who are too slow/bad/lazy to heal their own pet should not play a pet class. Pets already recieve pleanty of accidental healing from AoE heals, PoM and other passive regeneration skills. Proper management of pets, such as pulling them AWAY from whirlwinding mobs goes a long way to keeping a pet alive, as does healing it when you know unavoidable damage is incoming. Often, keeping your pet alive in PvE content is as simple as setting your pet on the melee target and setting yourself on the ranged target. Not hard. But then again these are the same people who complain it's too slow to resurrect your pet as BM spec - even though the cast timer goes down to 5 seconds or so.

Finally, the largest misstatement of the interview:

Now for hunters specifically, we think the class is just too cooldown limited,
which creates problems with haste.

This just made me laugh. Out loud. Hunters have many different shots, all of which share a global cooldown. We also have a large number of INSTANT shots - all stings (viper/serpent/scorpid), black arrow and explosive shot for survival, chimera shot and silencing shot for marksmanship, aimed shot and arcane shot for all specs. The only shots that have a cast time are multi-shot, steady shot, and the channeled volley. So perhaps when thinking about itemizing the hunter set gear Blizzard should take into account that haste is not a desired stat - it is equally useless to all. Haste would have been useful in the days of aimed shot spam, but this is the age of hunter instant shots with steady shot mixed in when nothing else is available. Haste is simply not beneficial to most of our skills. This has nothing at all to do with cooldowns. I prefer to play without cooldowns, and that is how it works for Survival spec - I hang onto my Rapid Fire for Bloodlust or favorable conditions, and then maximize my dps. As Marksmanship it's another story that involves on use trinkets, properly timing Rapid Fire, using Readiness to make Rapid Fire available again, and then reusing it again at the proper moment. So yes, I feel this build is restricted greatly by cooldowns and I don't enjoy playing it. But that has nothing to do with haste whatsoever. To make haste useful would require reworking hunter instant shots to include cast time, and would fundamentally redesign the class.

So to summarize. Nothing interesting in the pipe, nothing necessary being fixed (apart from the oft made "we're going to streamline the pet bar" promise and the teaser of maybe, possibly, perhaps in a few years you can tame more pets). And no real solid understanding of what real hunters want, just responses to the whining masses.

Full Text:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/hunter.html