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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.
High-level ranged weapons getting buffed
Well-geared hunters, rejoice: you're getting buffed. According to Ghostcrawler, hunter DPS is too low at the moment, so the damage of all ranged weapons with ilvl 226 or higher is being increased by about 30 DPS. This includes drops from Kel'Thuzad-25 and Ulduar-25, as well as Furious Gladiator gear and Ulduar-10 hard modes. This is estimated to result in an overall DPS increase for the hunter of "a few percent." The reason this change ended up needing to be made has to do with what they wanted to do with ammo in patch 3.1. They had grand plans for an ammo revamp (which I don't think they've ever quite revealed), and as a result they stopped designing new tiers of ammo, so raiding hunters now are stuck with the same bullets they were using at the start of Wrath. This change rolls the DPS from non-existent higher tiers of ammo into the weapons. Ghostcrawler also mentions that they think hunter DPS will need more improvement, and that there is another buff that they're trying to roll out "sometime in the next couple of weeks." We will, as ever, keep you posted if we hear anything.
