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Scattered Shots: New Year's Resolutions for Hunters and for Blizzard
Welcome to Scattered Shots! This week, your author has managed to take a break from lamenting that the stores about to stop selling eggnog to make a few Hunter-specific resolutions.The New Year is considered by many people to be the time for a fresh start, a time to wipe the slate clean of past missteps, or just to make some changes to your life to make it even better. In that spirit, I'd like to propose some Hunter-related resolutions for both Blizzard and for Hunters in the spirit of promoting peace, harmony, and understanding in the new year for all Survivalists, Marksmen, and Beastmasters.
Scattered Shots: The Future Soon: Hunters in patch 3.1 and beyond
Welcome to Scattered Shots, the weekly Hunter column which is written by a guy who doesn't generally spec for said talent.So. I'm here. I'm not completely wrapped up in Wrath, I promise. In fact, just to show how much I am not wrapped up in the here and now, in the long lines for the queues and prospect of getting a beautiful worm pet and all that good stuff, I'm going to predict the future! Let's look at some of the promises and perils that 3.1 and other future patches will bring for the Hunter.
Scattered Shots: What we didn't get
Welcome to another week of Scattered Shots, WoW Insider's column for Hunter miscellany and mischief. So with Wrath of the Lich King coming closer and closer, classes are probably getting more or less close to what they'll look like when it ships. Maybe. As for Hunters, We have our problems, be they a 41 point talent that won't be done in time for Wrath, an Aspect of the Viper identity crisis, or a new skill suddenly removed. But honestly, with the removal of shot clipping, the new Disengage and the new Pet talent system, I'm actually cautiously optimistic about our place in Wrath. We may need another patch or two before we're really settled, but we're getting some very basic class changes in Wrath that have been long overdue, and I'm hopeful that the class will end up solid by the time people are picking out their Arthas-killing teams and/or Season 6 Arena teams. But that aside, permit me this week to opine upon some of the stuff we really did miss out on. Why did Blizzard take it back? Did we need it? Should we get it back again?
Scattered Shots: Traps
Welcome to Scattered Shots, your weekly source for all things Hunter. This week, Daniel Whitcomb begins his stint as the official main author of the column.One of the coolest Hunter class changes in the expansion is the addition of the Freezing Arrow, which essentially the ability to "throw" a Freezing Trap at a targeted patch of ground. It's the type of ability Hunters have been asking for for a long time. Thinking of this, I noticed we haven't had a good trap discussion and primer for a long time, and now is as good a time as any. Traps are one of those parts of the Hunter class that separate the skilled from the Auto Shot AFKers. If you know how to use traps properly, it is much easier for you, as DPS, to stand out from the pack and prove that you bring enough to a group to merit a place on dungeon runs and friends lists. With that in mind though, the trap system is far from perfect, and some traps are definitely better than others. We'll take a look at each trap after the break.
Scattered Shots: How do you make sense of all the beta hunter changes?
Is the tauren above about to cut off his own head -- or lunge forward to attack? Perhaps he's just feeling confused about upcoming changes to hunters? Would you, too, like to know just what's going to happen to your class? Well, you can rest easy now, because Scattered Shots has all the answers to your most urgent questions.The short answer is: You don't; at the moment there is no making sense of all the Wrath hunter changes. We find ourselves at the mid-point of Blizzard's mysterious scheme for hunters, right in-between significant changes already in-progress and vague changes which they've promised or the future. We remain uncertain about which ones are going to make it live, which will be changed again, and which will be removed or added later on. Any analysis we do right now (and indeed much of the analysis we've already done) may or may not be completely out of date in a matter of days or weeks, and if your head hurts from all the ups and downs of turbulent beta-zone theorycrafting, rest assured that Scattered Shots feels your pain.The long answer is: Even though the jigsaw puzzle isn't complete, it's still a pretty neat picture to look at. Today isn't the day for point-for-point talent analyses plus spreadsheets of sting/shot-damage coefficients -- what a headache that would be. No, today is an opportunity to stand back and look at how all this is beginning to fit together, to see how the path our class is trekking through the wilderness of beta-testing ambiguity solves some of our long-standing problems, gives us more of what makes hunters great, and leaves us with several crucial questions mysteriously unanswered.What follows, ladies and gentauren, are the X-files of hunter beta mysteries, a fuzzy look through the crystal ball into the future of our class, the thrilling buildup to the surprising twist that comes just before the epic climax of the Hunter Saga season finale and leaves you hanging on the edge of your seat, biting on the tip of your fingernails, and gasping for air in the thrall of cliffhanger suspense.
Disengage and trap changes coming to Wrath Beta
With all the Hunter changes we've been promised in relation to PvP, one that has recently been announced may be the biggest yet. Disengage will be getting a new trick.In a future Beta build, Disengage will cause the Hunter to jump back from their target 10-15 yards. As a result of this buff, however, the cooldown will be extended to 30 seconds. This really is the change Hunters need, more that the recent Aspect of the Beast and Mongoose Bite changes by far. What we really needed is a way to get back to range, and between this and Master's Call, we should now have a relatively dependable non-talented way of doing just that. 10-15 yards may seem a bit low, but it should be more than enough to get off a quick concussive shot, set a trap, or use a talented crowd control ability such as Intimidation, which will become instant cast rather than on next attack. Another set of baseline ability changes has to do with traps, and should be very helpful in both PvE and PvP. Freezing Trap will no longer break on any damage, but will instead break on a set amount of damage -- meaning a stray cleave or a miscast DoT won't completely ruin you. With this new functionality, Bear Trap will be removed and replaced at level 80 with Camouflage, which is returning after being discarded. Since setting a trap won't break Camouflage, it will become incredibly useful for setting PvP ambushes as well. There's plenty of other exciting changes on the way for Hunters, including a talent tree revamp that's currently up on Blizzard's official Beta site. Look for analysis of that in the coming days on WoW Insider. It's looking more and more like Wrath's going to be a great time to be a Hunter, and we're looking forward to seeing how the class plays with all their new toys at level 80, in both PvP and PvE.
Scattered Shots: The dev team takes on PvP
Welcome once again to Scattered Shots, WoW Insider's spot for all things Hunter, except for the stuff Big Red Kitty covers. Daniel Whitcomb will be your host today (a day late, for which he apologizes) as David Bowers tries to shake off some extra aggro. The state of Hunters in PvP is perhaps one of the most debated subjects in WoW PvP. Some call Hunters overpowered for their dispelling Arcane Shot (which is going away in Wrath, to be sent to the non-damaging Tranquilizing Shot), while others point to their low Arena representation and the ease of using line of sight to negate most of their DPS and Abolish Poison to get rid of their main PvP utility as proof that they need buffs. Regardless, even the devs acknowledge that Hunters probably need some help in PvP, and class designer Koraa recently spoke on the subject on the Beta forums. In his post, he covered the problems he sees Hunters having, and how Blizzard will be helping with those moving forward into Wrath. Unfortunately, his solutions seem confused in and of themselves. They involve giving Hunters more melee attack power (instead of more way to break from melee so they can use their ranged weapon) and a variety of talents scattered around many trees in such a way that it will be difficult for a solid PvP build to get them all. And, as I mentioned in a post yesterday, they still aren't giving pets resilience. Other Hunters such as Megatf have done an excellent job responding to some of Koraa's points in the thread itself, but I'd like to address and respond to the post myself in this week's column, and see how they stack up to the problems Hunters face in small scale Arena PvP.
Scattered Shots: New and improved abilities
Scattered Shots: noun. 1. (Scatter Shot, singular) An ability used by Marksmanship hunters, especially to annoy other players in PvP. 2. (Scattered Shots, plural) A column at WoW Insider about anything even loosely related to hunters, except for high-level raiding and completely improper, sometimes libelous personal commentary.Hunters are getting quite a few changes in Wrath of the Lich King, but so far haven't covered them all. Today I'd like to go through the newest abilities and discuss them in greater detail.New Baseline Hunter Abilities:Nope, no Camouflage. We talked about this before, but it looks like the devs read our article, "Do hunters need Camouflage?" and decided the answer was no. So, instead we have a couple other new abilities to look forward to:Kill Shot: This is the new level 80 hunter ability, and it provides us with a bit of utility that help us to stand out and perform better in various situations:
Wrath Hunter Talent Analysis, Part I: Marksmanship
Hunter talents are out, and there's definitely a lot to say about them, both good and bad. While we have discussed some of the changes to the lower Survival tree, what we haven't touched on is all the new talents and the talent changes in other trees. If I was to sum it all up in one sentence, I'd say this: The 51 point talents look lackluster, but most of the rest is downright drool inducing. Marksmanship's early tiers are now full of easily obtainable goodies for any Hunter, Survival's gained even more group and raid buff utility, and Beastmastery has even more amazing pet synergy. There's a lot to cover, so we'll tackle it one tree at a time. First, we'll look at Marksmanship, which was once premiere Hunter tree, but has fallen a bit to Beastmastery in Burning Crusade. It's certainly seen some marked improvement for Wrath so far, and even if you don't plan to spec Marksmanship, you'll at least want to know about the first few tier talents, as you'll probably want to grab many of them anyway.
