Scattered Shots: Internal review

Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim.

Here at Frostheim Industries Consolidated, we recently realized that some time ago we whizzed past the 50-article mark for Scattered Shots. Naturally, this revelation prompted a swift internal review by our quality assurance team, who are always eager for an excuse to hold meetings and enjoy a variety of jelly-filled pastries.

As a result, we are going to deviate a bit from our standard fare today as we complete the review process. Rather than telling you the greatest details of the latest beta build -- where base focus regen has been changed to 4.16 focus/second, shots are now costed correctly, Improved Steady Shot now affects cast times correctly and tons of BM stuff still doesn't work, incidentally -- we are instead going to ask for your patience and your help in the form of clicking your mouse several times.

Please join me after the cut -- even if you don't even play a hunter -- and let me know how you think Scattered Shots is doing as a column, and most importantly, what kind of things you prefer to see more or less of in the future.

Demographics

Before we get to reviewing me, we of course need to learn a little something about you. The goal of this column is always to write for the largest group of hunters possible. When analyzing gear or spec choices, what is optimal almost always depends on what kind of content you have access to. This is often the danger of sites offering the absolute best possible hunter DPS specs and gemming -- they are based on having the absolute best gear available in the entire game, something only a very small percentage of hunters have. And if you don't have that gear, following that advice could actually lower your DPS. So it's very important indeed to know who our audience is.

We'll always discuss a variety of hunter activities here -- even if you aren't personally going to go solo all of Molten Core, for example, it can still be an entertaining diversion to read about now and again. But the goal is to target the majority of the content to be of interest to the majority of hunters.

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The review

Now we get down to the review part. Alas, the polls I can make seem to only let you select one answer, so just go for whatever fits best. If it is too much of a burden to select only one option, you can always drop a comment to this article filling in the other stuff you need to say.

Up until now I've based the kinds of articles we focus on here on a number of factors: logical deduction based on statistics representing the various hunter populations, comments, how popular and how often forwarded various Scattered Shots columns are, and of course on the crazy number of emails I receive every day. I've felt that this combination has given me a decent feel for where the interests of the majority of internet-information-seeking hunters are.

I'm excited, however, to have this additional point to add to the data. I must say I'm downright eager to see the feedback here. I don't want to write something you don't find interesting even more than you don't want to read that, I assure you.

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The future

Finally, I'd like to get a feel for what kind of things you'd like to see different than what I've been doing for the last seven months or so. Here in particular I encourage you to leave comments requesting any kind of new articles you'd like to see here on Scattered Shots.

Again, since the goal is to write for the majority of hunters, if you really want to read about optimizing your level 1 hunter to turn off XP and pursue World Explorer ... well, that's probably not going to appeal to very many hunters. But since I can only think of ideas that I can think of, odds are good that you guys have tons of brilliant ideas that I've never considered -- or that I considered and dismissed for what will prove to be very poor reasons indeed.

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Final notes

Finally, our quality assurance division requires the following poll to accompany this review.

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Scattered Shots is the WoW.com column dedicated to helping you learn everything it takes to be a hunter. See the Scattered Shots Resource Guide for a full listing of vital and entertaining hunter guides, including how to

improve your heroic DPS, understand the impact of skill vs. gear, get started with Beast Mastery 101 and Marksman 101 and even solo bosses with some extreme soloing.