The Daily Blues

It will be reevaluated.

Chimera vs. Arcane – Chimera should have a higher DPCT/damage than Arcane as a tradeoff for having a cooldown. You should be casting Chimera before Arcane in any situation where it's not on cooldown. There numbers may not be tuned quite right yet.

Serpent Sting – You'll find it's not efficient to cast your damage-over-time on targets that die before Serpent Sting lasts the full duration. This is similar to other classes. Druids don't use all of their bleeds on targets that die in 8 seconds; it's just not efficient. Chimera refreshing Serpent Sting is a bonus for fights that take longer, like boss fights or "epic" creatures. It isn't factored into the "budget" of the ability, so don't feel like you wasted a Chimera just because you couldn't utilize the "refresh Serpent Sting" mechanic.

Tranq Shot – We want this to have a focus cost. There may be opportunities where you want to use two Tranqs in a row, and it's your decision if you want to do that or not. I think most Hunters dislike it having a focus cost because they feel their raid leaders may mandate them to dispel something on an encounter, and because they have to spend focus it sucks because you lose DPS. That's legitimate, but also the same kind of decision that a lot of other classes have to make.

Venoms – We hear you on some of their issues. We might try things like giving them some damage, reducing the focus cost, and / or have them last 5 minutes on PvE creatures. Again, shooting a Venom isn't really ideal on targets that you kill quickly. You shouldn't cast one on every trash mob, for example. That said, we don't want them to become too "maintenance-y" on boss fights.

Aspects – We would like Aspect of the Fox to be as good as it can be, which we feel is 30%. Any higher than that and we lose the Steady Shot focus-generating gameplay. It seems that some hunters are, not surprisingly, somewhat turned off from doing less damage while moving as they are on live, but this is intended. A ranged class that can do almost as much damage moving as it can standing still is not going to be fair, and often is what restricts us from doing cool things with the class.

Trap Launcher – We'd like to take it off the GCD.

I'm exaggerating slightly here, but our LK model for Holy paladins was that they could only do one thing well so they might as well be overpowered at it. We could essentially just balance incoming tank damage around outgoing paladin healing. The paladin niche was very small, so if they weren't good at single target and mostly tank healing, they'd be replaced. Yet because it was small, there wasn't much risk of overstacking them as healers.

That model worked okay but it ultimately wasn't what we wanted, so we're going to change it in Cataclysm as much as we can without all of the healers playing identically. You should feel more comfortable having a paladin heal the raid and a druid heal the tank than most groups typically do now.

We use each others real names. When we bother to remember them.... ahem, Bashiok.

If there's one lesson I've been struggling with a lot recently, it's that rejecting the nature of change can be damaging. Granted, the trials to which I'm referring aren't related to video games, though they still apply universally. Sure, places will change, new questlines will replace many old ones, and Azeroth will never look quite the same again. There are, however, new places of beauty, new adventures to be had, and new struggles to overcome in the wake of change. A brand new player joining us in Cataclysm won't know quite what it was like to level prior to Deathwing's return, but they'll get to experience all of the new wonders of the world, not to mention a design that's become more definitive and polished over the years.