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Scattered Shots: Blizzard listens to hunters, really
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. Just about everyone who plays WoW spends at least some time complaining about it and explaining their vision of how the game could be made so much better. For some players, this occupies more time than playing the game itself. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, which was made evident when I was glancing back through a bunch of old columns. As much as I try to focus on mechanics and divining developer intent, I can't help but suggest ways that I think abilities could be better or pointing out imbalances. Therefore, I think it's worth taking a moment to really look at what Blizzard is doing for hunters in Mists of Pandaria and realize that the devs are trying to give us just about everything that we as a class have been asking for -- something that can be easily missed in all the hunters complaining about the MoP abilities. And for once, we have a documented way to compare what hunters have asked for against what we were given: the class feedback thread. Join me after the cut for the MoP scoreboard.
Scattered Shots: Dire Beast vs. A Murder of Crows
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. One of the goals in Blizzard's revamp of the talent system was to take away "right" choices -- the kind of decisions in which we could calculate a mathematical correct choice -- and instead let us actually make a decision about what talent to choose for any given tier. For many of our hunter tiers, this more or less worked out, often resulting in one clear PvP talent and a choice between two PvE talents that are both potentially useful in the right circumstances. But then we also have talent tiers like the level 75 choice, where every ability is providing us with some kind of DPS cooldown. No doubt we needed some DPS-boosting talents, but once those are in the mix, we are going to be able to calculate a right choice -- or at least a right choice for any given situation. This bring us to Dire Beast vs. A Murder of Crows. I've done a lot of in-game testing both to measure the benefit of the abilities as well as to determine how they work and scale. And at this point in the beta, it's already looking like we have a winner. Update: Since the time of writing, the beta has updated and the name has been changed from Call Beast to Dire Beast (updated in here) and the appearance of the beast is now based on the zone you're in.
Scattered Shots: Masses of hunter beta changes
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. As the Mists of Pandaria beta progresses we're beginning to learn more about how many of the awesome new hunter abilities will work, and of course we're seeing many of the inevitable changes to abilities, including happy news that the 2-second cast time on Black Arrow and lack of Serpent Spread is likely to be reverted to the current design (which also means the AoE component of the beta Black Arrow is likely going away, too). We got a look at exactly what abilities the different pet specs will have in MoP. The design is very much in keeping with the plan we discussed last week and does a good job of helping make the different pet specs feel distinctly different (since you no longer have DPS talents for tenacity pets and tanking talents for ferocity), though there are a few abilities lost that hurt. In fact, pets are a fantastic place to start. Let's take a look at exactly what abilities Blizzard assigned to each of the pet specs.
Scattered Shots: Hunter pet plan in Mists of Pandaria
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. Thus far in the Mists of Pandaria beta, we've seen and heard tons of sweet news about the hunter class, but we've had very little news about the second most important class in the game: hunter pets. Historically, development around new and awesome hunter pets stuff tends to happen later in the beta process, but Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has made an appearance on the forums to let us know what the plan is with our beloved companions. As he suggested at BlizzCon, we will be able to take any hunter pet we want and choose whether to make it ferocity, cunning, or tenacity. So you can have DPS turtles and tanking kitties. But in addition to confirmation of this awesome news is a plan that many hunters are far less thrilled about: no more pet talents at all. Here's what Ghostcrawler had to say about pet talents going the way of the manhood of the elven races.
Scattered Shots: Hunter AoE in Mists of Pandaria
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. Not to go all Grandpappy Frostheim on you guys, but wow, has hunter AoE evolved a lot since vanilla days! Back then we had in theory a few AoE abilities, but in practice, we had none. Explosive Trap did poor damage, couldn't be launched, and couldn't be dropped while in combat. Multi-Shot hit three targets and was on a cooldown (and was a core part of our single-target rotation). We also had Volley, which did incredibly crummy damage, couldn't crit, and was on a long cooldown. By Wrath, volley was a monster of massive AoE DPS on no cooldown, but all we did in AoE situations was push the one button and sit back and watch the numbers tick. While this was great for DPS, it was also fairly dull and meant that there was no skill component to AoE DPS. The worst players could manage to click Volley and watch as well as the best. So Blizzard decided to make our AoE a bit more engaging in Cataclysm and turned it into what we know now. In Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard is once again turning up the knob on our AoE, giving us more AoE abilities than ever before. In Mists there will be a very real skill component to hunter AoE.
Scattered Shots: MoP hunter changes galore
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. The beta has been out for about a week, and as you might expect, we are absolutely drowning in ridiculously awesome hunter info -- and all this despite the fact that there's still tons of hunter design yet to be done. The developers have wisely decided to scatter a bunch of bones for the support classes in the first beta build to keep them distracted and out of the developers' hair while they get to the real work of polishing the hunter class. Still, there is so much hunter news that there is no way it will all fit in this column. I'm going to hit a bunch of the highlights -- the really awesome stuff, and the stuff we've been waiting for -- but if you're the kind of hunter who wants to know every expansion detail coming out of the beta, here are a few places that hunter Mists info is being collected: WoW Hunters Hall Tabana is keeping the WHH stocked with every tidbit of hunter info from everywhere on the web, including some videos of our new abilities she unearthed. MMO-C Hunter Thread Ren is doing a great job on the MMO-C forums of maintaining an updated list of hunter changes in the beta. Just remember not to obsess about the damage numbers there. Don't worry about DPS balance right now; it's all changing. WHU's Mists of Pandaria Hunter Changes I'm also collecting a much more detailed list of all hunter changes over at the Warcraft Hunters Union that goes in more depth and is being regularly updated. Petopia's MoP Board The fine community at Petopia is cataloging all the tamable pets that have been found in Mists. Now, join me after the cut for the awesome info splat of the sweet, sweet hunter life in Mists of Pandaria.
Scattered Shots: Moar boars -- Stampede Q&Q
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. During the recent Mists of Pandaria press tour event, Lead Systems Deisgner Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street gave an interview in which he revealed that hunters would be getting a stampede ability, letting hunters unleash the fury of a stable full of pets all at once. Now, I don't want to imply anything bad about the interviewer in that segment, but in what world do you let a comment like that pass by? I know that there are some people who enjoy playing support classes, but when he wanders on talking about rogue nonsense, any good interviewer would stop him, pin him down, and start asking more questions about hunters! This is what MoP is all about after all -- hunter glory! Stampede is the best and biggest news to come out of MoP since no minimum range, and we're left more questions than answers. In fact, when I started thinking about what I want to know about stampede, I realized it could fill an entire column. And then I realized that stampede is so awesome that it deserves to fill a whole column. So here is what we know about the ability, how I suspect it will work, and what we want to know about the ability.
Scattered Shots: Mists of Pandaria raid buff changes and hunters
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. In the continuing news lead up to the big Mists of Pandaria press tour, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has recently revealed the current plan for the raid buffs in MoP. The overall design is continuing the trend of consolidating the raid buffs and debuffs that every raid is assumed to have, making it easier to get all of the buffs in 10-man raids. This consolidation of buffs affects hunters along with everyone else, though Ghostcrawler revealed that the plan is still to have hunter pets bring many of the raid buffs so that we can fill in whatever holes may exist, as well as having a handful of buffs available only to exotic pets and therefore BM hunters. Let's take a look at exactly what's changing on the raid buff front -- the buffs that we're gaining and losing, plus what role hunters will fill in the changed raid buff ecosystem.
Scattered Shots: Hunter expertise in Mists of Pandaria
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. In his most recent Developer Watercooler, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street talked about stat changes in Mists of Pandaria. Some of these changes only affect support classes, and there's a very interesting change to PvP stats that affects everyone, but what I want to focus on today is the big change to hunter stats that's coming: expertise. In Mists of Pandaria, hunters' ranged attacks will be able to be dodged, which they currently cannot. This means that we're going to benefit from that expertise gear that is currently a sign of the rare "not-hunter loot." Despite a lot of the initial fear and rage response that, let's be honest, tends to accompany just about any significant hunter change, expertise is not scary. In fact, it's almost exactly like having another hit cap. Join me after the cut as we look at what expertise is, how it will work for hunters, why Blizzard may be making this change, and what implications this has for hunter pets.
Scattered Shots: New hunter MoP talent updates
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. Last week, Blizzard updated the Mists of Pandaria talent page, giving us a new look at what it's working on for class customization in advance of its mid-March press tour. We hunters got a peek at some awesome new stuff going on with the class, with improvements both in PvP and PvE. The hunter news from this preview falls into three general categories: Our three new level 90 talents were revealed. We saw some meaningful changes to existing talents. We saw some changes to other classes that could impact the hunter class. While we're seeing a bunch of new hunter info in this update, Blizzard did go out of the way to point out that it is still working hard on the hunter class and it's not as far along as some other classes. In particular, we don't yet have any new class abilities or new spec abilities for level 90. We also don't know what route Blizzard's going to go with our pet talents. With that in mind, let's take a look at all the new stuff we did learn!
Scattered Shots: What to do in-game when there's nothing left to do
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. We have entered the doldrums of the expansion, that period of time when the challenge of defeating new content is behind us, yet it's too soon to start planning for the next expansion. We don't even have the Mists of Pandaria beta to entertain us. Instead it's just the same bosses, the same loot, and the same miserable excuse for a raider winning the rolls that should go to you. It's time to shake off those doldrums. This period of time is one of the best times of any expansion. Instead of raids that bleed away all of your time and blind you to the possibilities of the game, you are now free to go have fun. WoW is filled with challenges and adventure, but the endgame progression grind can trick you into thinking that it's the only PvE challenge available to you. It is not. Today we're going to run through what you've been missing in WoW and how to tackle new challenges and have fun without picking up a lightsaber or waiting on pandas.
Scattered Shots: 5 things other classes can learn from hunters
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.or ask him on Google+. All classes have their secrets -- their little tricks of the trade that are passed from player to player in the hidden hangouts of the class. I can imagine the warlocks in their lush boudoirs explaining to eager-faced new 'locks about the real benefits to the succubus. Or mages in their mirrored enclaves admiring dresses and explaining to stricken young mages the real benefits to sheep. Hunters are no different. When we gather in the wild, high places of Azeroth, we pass our own tricks around the campfire, the secrets that let us survive to see another boss. Many of these tips are not specific to hunters, and every class could benefit from what we have learned the hard way. These are deeper truths and mechanical tips we've learned through the specific roles hunters often fill or through the hardships of our class design. In the interest of inter-class cooperation, we now share five of these secrets with you.
Scattered Shots: Frostheim's interview with an imaginary Ghostcrawler
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim. This is not actually an interview with Ghostcrawler. I did not ask him any of these questions, and he did not answer with any of these answers. But in a deeper sense, a more spiritual sense, Ghostcrawler and I are two lost souls reaching for each other across the vastness of the information superhighway, each seeking that other half to fill the emptiness within us. We are platonic life partners bound by the love of the hunter experience. Because of this connection we share, this ephemeral bond, I am able to predict how he'd answer if we did in fact conduct an interview. If I happened to sit at a bar next to Ghostcrawler in the not-too-distant future and our eyes met over a glass of stout in a moment of magic, I think we can agree that everything in the following transcript is exactly as he would say it. The only thing that might possibly be different is the words.
Scattered Shots: Everything you need to know to top the charts in Dragon Soul
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim. There are a lot of reasons hunters want to top the DPS charts: because the view is better from up there, because we're a DPS class and it's our job, because it makes killing bosses easier, or just because it makes your man parts appear larger. We talk a lot here on Scattered Shots about optimizing your hunter and keeping track of the little changes that happen with every patch and hotfix, but after a while all those little changes add up into a very different optimization picture. Today, we're going to do a quick review of exactly what is the optimal way spec and play your hunter right now. We're getting a handful of minor buffs and changes in 4.3.2, and this optimization review will take those into account. These 10 tips are the quick and dirty answers to the current state of hunter optimization. Bookmark this page and pass it along to that guy with a hunter alt as a one-stop shop for what he should be doing right now. As always, things change with gear and group composition, and there are often choices that are almost as good, but this rundown will get you where you need to go: the top of the charts.
Scattered Shots: Awesome patch 4.3.2 hunter changes and the bottom line
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim. Patch 4.3.2 is sitting on the PTR, and like fine wine, weapons, and women, it just gets better over time. This patch doesn't have any huge changes going on, instead holding a collection of small changes that are all little gleaming gems of awesomeness. And that's not even counting the fire mage damage nerfs. From the hunter perspective, patch 4.3.2 gives a small survivability boost to all hunters, a small DPS boost to all hunters, a further smaller DPS boost to SV hunters, and a nice quality-of-life (and arguably wee DPS) bonus to SV as well. Today we're going to dig into these changes and what they're going to mean for us. The short version is this: Hunter DPS will improve. SV benefits the most, followed by BM, meaning SV will remain the top DPS spec. Skilled players with legendaries will still be about to out-DPS us, but we'll now be competing far better with people without legendaries. How much better? Well, let's take a look.
Scattered Shots: The top 5 hunter raiding priorities
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim. It's a new year, and 2012 promises to be a year of changes throughout WoW with the new Mists of Pandaria expansion. The new year is also a time of new beginnings and of resolutions, so now seems like a fantastic time to revisit the hunter raiding basics. Over the course of time, our focus and our skills can degrade bit by bit, bringing with it the classic DPS obsession with meters and relative position, until we're looking at those meters with blinders on, ignoring the far, far more important things we should be paying attention to. Today we're going to look at the basic hunter priority list of what's important for you to be doing in a raid and what is the most to least important. I'm sure just about everyone knows someone who could benefit from reassessing raiding priorities. Just send them over to this post for an explanation of what's most important and why.
Scattered Shots: Hunter predictions for a new year
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim. Another year of hunting is almost at an end, and that means it's time to dig into the vast past of December 2010, when Cataclysm was fresh and shiny and new and SV hunters were dominating every DPS chart, a time before aspect dancing and when pets still had a happiness system (kind of). That's right, it's time to dust off my 2011 hunter predictions and see how I did. It's also time to make new predictions for the state of hunters going forward in 2012 and take some guesses at what's going to happen with the class in the tumultuous year ahead. Looking back at some of the changes, it's interesting to see the patterns and similarities in the class over time. SV is again the top DPS spec as it was a year ago -- only now instead of blowing away all comers with pretty demonstrably overpowered DPS, SV is at best middle of the pack. In practice, the hunter class is one of the poorest DPSers this tier. SV got nuked to death in patch 4.0.6, much as an overpowered BM spec got over-nerfed into oblivion in patch 3.0.8 in early Wrath, except that while overnerfed, SV got it much gentler than BM did back in the day. The nerf bat is hitting a bit softer these days. Let's hope that's a trend that continues.
Scattered Shots: Pet talent possibilities in Mists of Pandaria
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim. We all know by now that talents are going to work a lot differently in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, but what we don't know yet is exactly what's going to happen with our pet talent trees. Not only that, but Blizzard itself isn't entirely sure what it's going to do about them, other than not wanting to leave them the way they are now. We do know that we will get to choose what family our pets belong to. If you tame a cat, you can choose to make it a tenacity, cunning, or ferocity pet. But pet talents are a bit up in the air. There are currently two possibilities for pet talents. The first is to remove pet talents entirely, making your pet's special abilities and spec -- tenacity, ferocity, or cunning -- the only unique features of the pet. Thus, every ferocity cat is the same as every other ferocity cat. This option is dull and dreary with nothing interesting or engaging about it. Call it the Shaman Option, in other words, or the Blah Option. The other possibility is to revamp the pet talent system so that it more closely resembles the new character talent system in MoP. In this system, we turn some pet talents into spec abilities, and then give an abbreviated tree of meaningful choices. I call this the Awesome Option -- or in other words, the Hunter Option. You're going to love it. Here's how the Awesome Option could work.
Scattered Shots: Patch 4.3 hunter trinket roundup
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim. It's trinkets day here on Scattered Shots, back by popular demand. The number of emails I've been getting about hunter trinkets lately has made me suddenly realize that I have not posted my usual new tier trinket round-up and reevaluation -- and with the new tier of Raid Finder trinkets out, there the decision of when to upgrade is yet more complex. Trinkets are a lot like the nine support classes in WoW: You know they're useful, but it can be hard to figure out exactly which one is worth using without doing some math. Only unlike the support class players, you always want to have two of them with you. And they don't smell funny, or refuse to heal your pet, or screw up your lovely execution of executions. Maybe trinkets aren't much like the support classes after all. They're better. Join me after the cut as we run down the new 4.3 trinkets, compare them to the best of the previous tier's trinkets, and give some thought to the new Raid Finder versions of the trinkets as well.
Scattered Shots: Hunting Mists of Pandaria talents
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim. Patch 4.3 has been out for over a week now, and that means that it's so old news. It's time for us to finally look forward to patch 5.0 and the Mists of Pandaria hunter talent preview that we first got a look at during BlizzCon. The new talent system strips down the talent selections to a mere six talent choices. Every 15 levels, you are presented with three possible hunter talents, and you can choose only one of them. Then 15 levels later, you choose one of a different three talents, and so on -- only unlike many talents now, these talents aren't meaningless. Now, the last time we talked about this MoP stuff, the comments got a bit heated. To assist you today, I have included the above video. If you're about to say anything stated in that video, you are about to become one of those people and are better off calling your mom instead. She hasn't heard from you in too long anyway. She worries.
