Tuesday, March 1, 2011

What to do with Counterattack

Conventional wisdom these days says that Counterattack will be going away, at least as a talent.  Fine.  I havn't had a point there since vanilla.  As I've been thinking about this I've been asking, "But then what?"  WIll there just be a blank space there in our SV tree?  That idea doesn't make much sense to me for a few reasons.  For starters, that isn't much of a change.  It's basically an empty space now, with an icon.  It doesn't keep PvE hunters from getting a useful talent, nor is it a prerequisite for one.  Simply taking Counterattack out would essentially be Blizzard spending money and other development resources to not improve WoW in any way.
So that leaves changing it.  I've given this some thought and have come up with two ideas that I like.

The first is to make it a useful counterattack.  Maybe something closer to a spell reflect for physical damage or melee attacks.  Put it on a long cooldown or whatever.  I don't really PvP, but I never feel like I have quite enough tools to deal with other classes that get within the minimum range.  It would be great if other classes had to think about running up to us all the time.  "Hmm..is his Counterattack on cooldown?"  To paraphrase Frostheim, right now there is always a right answer for dealing with hunters (get close to us) in PvP and that is wrong.  If Blizz wants Counterattack to be an SV PvP talent, it should attempt to deal with this situation in some way.  The ultimate way to do this would be to have it temporarily remove our minimum range for a short time, but I imagine that would be borderline impossible from a programming standpoint.
As a PvE player, my preference for Counterattack is a little different.  Make it an interrupt.

How many times have you been in a 5 or 10 man and needed another interrupt?  By all accounts, that is only going to happen more as we progress through Cataclysm.  I mean, it's bad enough that we can hit a boss in the face with an EXPLOSION and she doesn't even blink.  At least give us a non-damaging interrupt!  As it stands, hunters have to spec MM to get one.  To me, that goes against Blizzard's goal of allowing players choice in class and spec.  How much of a shame would it be to have all three specs raid viable from a DPS standpoint, only to then have BM and SV players turned away due to a lack of an interrupt?  Before the flames begin, Pummel doesn't count.  While I'm on a roll asking for stuff, it should also be made a second-tier talent.  Switch it's position with any of them, I don't care which.  That way, our BM bretheren also have access to it if they so choose.  This way, every hunter with two specs can bring an interrupt to the table if they want to.
It would be prett amazing if Blizz did anything close to these ideas for Counterattack.  It would be foolish for them to simply remove it.  What do you think?  I'm adding a poll to see what everyone thinks about Counterattack.

No comments:

Post a Comment