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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: 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: 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: 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: 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.
Scattered Shots: 4.3 bonus hunter changes
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. At long last, patch 4.3 is live, bringing with it the great hunter balancing buffs (and the pesky melee buff that we don't benefit from -- but the video above demonstrates pretty clearly that hunters need no melee buff). At the outset, the patch is looking like a good thing for hunter spec balance, boosting BM and SV up to levels that are nearly indistinguishable from MM DPS. We also got a nice little surprise buff to SV that alters the base SV rotation -- and actually has the potential to give SV that last little push into first place, possibly slipping ever so slightly past MM in the DPS charts. Join me after the cut for a quick recap of what we're seeing in patch 4.3 and the T.N.T. cooldown change that looks like it's going to change the SV hunter shot choices.
Scattered Shots: Hunter spec abilities 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. Blizzard posted its Mists of Pandaria talent calculator, giving us a bit more of a peek into how things are going to play out with the new talent system. The talents that we're seeing are the same as what was revealed at BlizzCon (and we will get around to looking at those in depth soon -- just not today). But in addition to the talents, we also got to see the very first look at what our new spec abilities would look like. Some of the support classes actually got to see what some of their new spec abilities would be in MoP, but as the premiere death dealers in WoW, they needed more time to refine the ultimate abilities of the hunter class. If you'll recall, in MoP talents will be class-wide and not specific to each spec (and there will be far fewer of them). Many of what are now spec talents will become default spec abilities that each spec gets when it reaches the appropriate level. Others are going away entirely. Today we're going to take a look at what those must-have abilities are for each spec and which ones appear to be gone completely.
Scattered Shots: Patch 4.3 hunter gear
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. If there's one thing gaming geeks like, it's new toys. Whether it's a replica Frostmourne, a shiny new set of D&D dice or a sweet lightsaber app for our smartphones, there's nothing like new toys to get us excited. And the best toy of all for a WoW gamer? New gear! Patch 4.3 is moving along, and while it's probably still a bit away, the background downloader is doing its thing and the final content patch of Cataclysm is undeniably coming soon. And that means that it's time to take a look at the new hunter gear that will soon be available to us! Join me after the cut for the new Wyrmstalker hunter gear, an endgame gun for real this time, and all the other delightful little toys we'll get to play with until the pandas come.
Scattered Shots: Scatter-trapping with grace and ease
Frostheim appears to be decimated, unable to write this week, over the loss of the most recent raiding gun from the patch 4.3 PTR files. As someone who PVPs to get my first raiding weapon of most patches, I can choose whichever ranged death-dealing machine I want. Of course, as a Worgen (not to mention someone who is generally the butt of many of Frostheim's jokes on our podcast), I usually choose a crossbow after buying, returning and screenshotting the gun. Today, Scattered Shots will be all about a very basic hunter PVP survival skill: scatter-trapping. All hunters of all specs can scatter-trap, and whether you're being ganked doing dailies, trying to win Baradin Hold, or doing competitive Arena, it's one of those skills that can really set you apart. Traps on their own are only useful for people you can force to cross through them. Mostly, this means melee, although you can sometimes force a ranged player to cross a trap if you're humping a pillar properly. What do we do when we want to freeze someone who isn't chasing us, though? Freezing Trap is really our most effective crowd control ability. We'll often want it to be used on someone that matters like a healer. Unfortunately, short of stepping up to a healer and dropping a trap on them, there's no way to force them to cross our path.
Scattered Shots: BlizzCon hunter info 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. BlizzCon this year was a very hunter Blizzcon indeed, filled with big announcements not just about the game in general but about the direction the hunter class is headed. The biggest news shouted around hunter circles was of course the fact that minimum range is finally being removed from the game. This was one of the biggest points in the hunter class design feedback threads, and it's a nice indication that Blizzard is indeed paying attention to what the community has to say. (Either that, or the developers also just thought it needed to go, and it's a crazy, random happenstance that it coincides with community feedback.) Join me after the cut as we round up all of the hunter news that came out of BlizzCon, very possibly including some news that you haven't heard from just following the BlizzCon coverage. We're going to focus just on the hunter-specific news rather than wider game-related news.
Scattered Shots: Improving hunter PVP
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 week, his evil twin, Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, is covering for him while he sleeps off the after-effects of the last Hunting Party Podcast. Hunter PVP is in a bad state right now. This does not mean that you can't get Gladiator with a hunter, but it does mean you have to be way better to do it than if you were to play, say, a warlock. You also have to do it in a very small subset of viable team compositions, where your warlock alt could succeed in a large variety of team compositions. Before you burn a hole through that "add comment" button arguing with me about viability and how Arena representation isn't worth the pixels it's displayed on, remember that I'm arguing that it takes more skill to succeed in PVP as a hunter. I'm not arguing that you can't do it, and I know that Arena class representation isn't a perfect measure of class balance. The same way some specs (like BM) are underrepresented in the top 100 PVE raid parses, the highest-rated PVP players in the game tend to play classes they feel they will do best, which skews the representation farther away from some perfectly viable spec/class combos. Arena representation is, however, one quantifiable number we can look into for insight.
Scattered Shots: State of hunter DPS
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. A couple days ago, I posted some 4.2 DPS analysis by spec, looking at how different specs' DPS deviates from the median of all specs. This research was partially in response to a quote from Ghostcrawler in a Developer Watercooler where he talked about the change to the 10% AP buff: Ghostcrawler - Lead Systems Designer Hunter DPS is fine, or even high in 4.2, so we didn't want this buff to extend to them, which is why the AP benefit is now 20% for melee attacks but still 10% for ranged. source When I was digging into the data, I looked at a lot more than just the eight charts that I posted in the DPS analysis article. The majority of the data sets I looked at supported just about everything Ghostcrawler said in his Watercooler -- including the state of melee DPS and fury warriors. While I truly have a fondness in my heart for many of the hard-working support classes in WoW, I did not really do that research for them. I did it to learn more about where hunter DPS stands. So please join me after the cut today as we take a look at the state of hunter DPS.
Scattered Shots: Hunter tier 13 set bonuses
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. While we hunters wait for the PTR to be updated to include the meaningful hunter changes that are no doubt coming (other than the awesome gun finally showing up), Blizzard has released the tier 13 set bonus mechanics to give us something to speculate about as we gaze upon the datamined tier 13 looks. While there's still information that we don't know about how the set bonuses will work, at first glance, the Wyrmstalker set bonuses look pretty awesome. The hunter tier 13 set bonuses are very appropriate for the final set of the expansion, very likely giving us some nice DPS gains and two bonuses that work very well together. However, like our tier 11 set bonus, these puppies are going to change up our shot rotations, at least partially. Here is what we know: Two-piece Steady Shot and Cobra Shot generate double the amount of focus. Four-piece Your Arcane Shot ability has a chance to grant 30% haste to you and your pet for 10 seconds. For all those hunters who were complaining about hunter focus regen in the hunter design feedback thread, now is your chance to see what your class would feel like with substantially more focus regeneration. Join me after the cut as we dig into these set bonuses, discuss the implications and run some initial numbers.
Scattered Shots: Hunters and Brewfest loot
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 that magical time of year again when the thoughts of young hunters the world over turn to beer. Brewfest is a true Dwarven holiday filled with endless events like drinking beer, delivering beer, advertising beer, and fighting with beer mugs. Brewfest is, in fact, the one holiday that I participate in since I knocked off the painful What a Long Strange Trip It's Been. With a new year of Brewfest comes new loot upgrades from the Brewfest boss, Coren Direbrew. I'm not really sure what Direbrew did to deserve our wrath, other than being Dark Iron. I mean, sure, his peeps started a big fight and tried to steal the beer, but really, who wouldn't if they weren't allowed to attend? It's not like he's the Mad Elf or anything. Brewfest loot has never been the friendliest to hunters, with the totally awesome and upgraded Tremendous Tankard o' Terror being a silly mace that hunters cannot equip, and no two-handed drop (which is what we really want). However Brewfest does bring us a nice trinket option as well as a one-handed weapon that we could use. Today we'll take a look at the Brewfest loot from a hunter perspective and perhaps take a wee peek at some of the nice generic rewards offered from Brewfest tickets.
Scattered Shots: Hunter class feedback
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. Blizzard has recently put out the call for class design feedback on the official WoW forums, with a thread for each class. Hunters have stepped up in a big way, and the hunter class thread already has over 1,500 responses at the time of this writing (Wednesday night), which is more than any other class. Go, hunters! The feedback thread is not just an open forums for people to complain but instead is a very focused set of questions looking at longer-term class design. This is not, of course, a promise to implement the will of the class (after all, game manufacturers have known for decades there's a big difference between what people want and what they will buy), but it is a clear request to at least understand the will of the class. We've talked here on Scattered Shots about many ways to improve the hunter class, from removing minimum range to touching up the talent trees of BM, MM, SV, and pet talents, to pet stances, to the problems with haste design and some just plain awesome things we should get. Regular readers have a pretty good idea what I think should be changed. So today, we're going to take a look at what the rest of the hunter population thinks about the hunter class and how they answered the class design questions. Join me after the cut for a look at the over 1,500 hunter responses to class design that the developers will be reading through.
