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Scattered Shots: Button bloat and its effect on hunter DPS
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing the strange cost of button bloat. When most hunters think button bloat, they think of abilities like Eagle Eye or Distracting Shot -- completely situational abilities that many won't even bother to key bind. They may be superfluous, but these abilities are not the real bloat problem if you ask me. The true problem is having our damage distributed amongst a dozen or more DPS abilities. Having this many buttons for DPS ends up devaluing each one individually until single abilities cease to matter. Each expansion has added more, and it's beginning to get a little tedious. It may seem counterintuitive to suggest less buttons can result in more compelling gameplay, but I believe it's the truth in the case of hunter DPS. Properly using fewer abilities with perfect focus management is more difficult than executing a long list of abilities in sequence. When you have so many buttons, using each one has less perceived impact -- as in how much the monster's health drops in response -- compared to a handful of strong, satisfying abilities. A large number of DPS buttons is only meaningful if there is a choice in what you're pressing. Currently, I feel there is very little choice here. You either hit all the buttons or you don't.
