HunterScaling

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  • Scattered Shots: Marksmanship hunter scaling

    by 
    Brian Wood
    Brian Wood
    08.11.2011

    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. WoW is a game with a lot of different moving parts that is deliberately designed so that different classes and different specs benefit differently from various stats and spells. One complex side effect of this is that different classes and specs can actually scale differently, growing in power at different rates even with the same gear increases. For example, compare death knights and hunters from tier 11 to tier 12. A death knight going up an entire tier of gear is still ugly as sin and gained only the tiniest amount of good looks from the upgrades; meanwhile, hunters are exponentially more attractive (and hunters were pretty amazingly good-looking to start with). Within the hunter class, scaling is most often cited with respect to the marksmanship hunter spec. MM hunters get far more benefit from their ranged weapon DPS than other hunter specs, and the complaint goes that MM will continue to grow further and further ahead of the other specs' DPS as gear progresses because of this scaling discrepancy. Join me after the cut today as we tackle the issue of MM scaling and examine the theory and then see what's really happening as we improve our gear.