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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.
Scattered Shots: Hunter transmogrification station
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the WoW 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. As patch 4.2 is beginning to wind down, many hunters are looking for ways to fill some of the extra in-game time, and the coming of transmogrification in patch 4.3 is the perfect thing. Now is the time to start collecting the looks that you want to transmogrify into when patch 4.3 comes. I have a full look at all the hunter armor sets on each race and where to get them, over at the WHU Transmog page. Today, we're going to take a look at the next most crucial transmogrification decision: our ranged weapon. [Update: you can find a full list of every hunter transmog resource on the web (including this one) at the WHH's hunter transmog guide. So if you're looking for custom transmog looks and databases and transmogrification addons, that's the place to go. If you want to see your awesome ranged weapon transmog options, read on!] We can actually transmogrify one ranged weapon type into another, unlike any other weapon type, so we can make our bows look (and sound) like guns or crossbows. This gives hunters a host of options for what kind of weapon look we want to be sporting. Join me after the cut for a look at some of the most distinctive ranged weapons and where to find them.
Scattered Shots: Hunter mailbag Q&A
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the WoW 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. Patch 4.3 info is starting to trickle out of the Blizzard PR department, and it's looking like there's going to be both a lot more news and a lot of big news. Thus far, we haven't seen any big hunter info coming out, but I'm certain it's on its way. So this calm before the storm sounds like a good time to clean out the ol' mailbag! From transmogrification to trinket math to haste plateaus, I'm going to be answering the questions that I'm getting most often in my email lately. If you've got a pesky hunter question that's been tickling the back of your brain, there are decent odds that it'll get answered here. If your question isn't answered, feel free to email me.
Scattered Shots: Hunter reforging priorities
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the WoW 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. One of the most common questions asked by hunter is, "How should I reforge my gear?" Reforging is an elusive mystery, and if you listen to a lot of forum comments, you could quickly believe that reforging is the secret key to real ultimate DPS -- if you're not topping the charts, just reforge better to get those last few thousand DPS going your way. On top of that, we have tons of reforging tools available online, often offering contradictory reforging advice. Happily, reforging is not nearly as complicated as it seems. Today we're going to go over reforging advice for your BM, MM, and SV hunters. I'm going to be giving you my thoughts and research conclusions but also the point of view of some other top theorycrafters. We recently did a Hunting Party Podcast all about stats and theorycrafting with Zeherah from Female Dwarf and Revulva from Ask Mr. Robot. Sadly, unforeseen technical difficulties prevented us from recording the show (we turned on the recording for the sound check, then hit record when it was time to go live, accidentally turning it off -- oops), but the gist of their advice will be included here. Join me after the cut for everything you really need to know about reforging hunter gear.
Scattered Shots: Marksmanship hunter scaling
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.
Scattered Shots: Yes, beast mastery can raid
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. Beast mastery hunters suffered on the DPS charts for the majority of Wrath of the Lich King. By just about any measure, hunters were giving up a lot of DPS by playing the BM spec -- around 20% behind the leading hunter spec at best, one of the worst three specs in the game in Wrath. That's a heck of a lot of DPS loss for a raid leader to swallow. This is not the case any longer. Take heed, raid leaders: BM is a viable hunter raiding spec! I get a lot of emails from poor BM hunters whose raid leaders tell them that their beloved spec does far too little DPS to raid, without even giving the BM hunter a chance to prove them wrong. A lot of this is leftover knowledge from Wrath, when hunters took a huge DPS hit by speccing BM. I imagine this comes from raid leaders' sporting bell-bottoms and giant, poofy '80s hair, because these people are woefully out of date. Join me after the cut as we take a look at the numbers and see where BM's DPS stands and why we can't trust the top 100 parses in this case. (Hint: It's math that tells us not to trust it.)
Scattered Shots: Hunter pet changes -- QQ or HTFU?
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. Today's header video is a sneak peek at the hunter class in patch 7.3, after the implementation of dual wielding and after minimum range is finally removed from the game. It also looks like we get a melee disarm, which I agree would be nice. Pillar humping is clearly still a vital arena strategy, however. This look at the awesomeness to come should help soften the pain of the unpleasant subject of today's column. The hunter pet stance changes blow. There's just no sugarcoating it; the changes to pet stances simply make our lives worse than they were before. If you want to hand me a petition to repeal the changes, I will happily sign it. However, it seems likely the changes are something that we're just going to have to put up with, like ads to buy gold online, fake sparkle pony phishing emails, and the continued existence of elves. So, too, must we apparently suck it up and deal with increasingly unruly pets that need a stronger guiding hand. Join me after the cut as we discuss the changes in more depth and ask the question of what is to be done about it. Do we hunters try to wail up a paladin-like storm of QQ in hopes of effecting a change, or is it something deliberate and we just have to HTFU?
Scattered Shots: Hunter community resources
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. Hunters are more than an amazing class; hunters are an amazing community. The hunter community is hands down the best class community in WoW. We have more intelligent and generous players willing to dedicate their free time to helping each other out than most classes have intelligent and generous players. One of the great things about the hunter community isn't just the quantity of hunter sites and resources out there, but the phenomenal quality of those resources. Today, I'd like to highlight as many of those phenomenal hunter sites as possible. If you're a regular reader of Scattered Shots but don't get out across the rest of the hunter community much, you seriously have to check some of these sites out. And if you're a die-hard hunter who can't get enough hunter news, I bet I've even got some sites here that you haven't heard of yet. Join me after the cut for the gateway into the best community in the game.
Scattered Shots: The DPS value of skill
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. The problem with skill is that there's no number on our character pane or armory to measure it. Everyone will swiftly agree that skill is the most important thing -- more important than this talent or that reforge -- but without having a number right there to look at, everyone ends up ignoring it and instead focuses in on this talent or that reforge. "Your DPS is low? Well you should really reforge your boots to haste," or "Why aren't you gemming for agility u noob!" Let me assure you something: If you're underperforming by thousands of DPS and can't make it to the top of the meters, 95% of the time it's a skill issue. Even if your talents/gems/glyphs/reforging aren't very optimized, odds are you aren't really seeing that difference. But if you have even a moderate slip on skill issues, it's immediately apparent. So let's today step back a moment and consider hunter skill once again. We're all used to obsessing over every tiny part of character optimization, so we're going to put skill into terms that correlate to that: DPS.
Scattered Shots: Improving the hunter pet trees
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. Several weeks back, WoW Lead Systems Designer Ghostcrawler made a passing comment about the input of the community in continuing to refine the talent trees, and since then, we've run with it. We've talked about improving the BM tree, improving the MM tree, and improving the SV tree. We've been swarmed with fantastic suggestions in the comments, including lots of things I didn't think of but made me say, "Oh, yeah -- that's exactly what the tree needs!" Now if we were rogues, or mages, or some other support class, we'd be sitting on the porch with our lemonade patting ourselves on the back for a job well done. But as hunters, it's not enough to just examine the hunter trees -- we have our pet trees to look at, as well. Join me after the cut as we dig into the three hunter pet talent trees and discuss how they could be refined, added to, and improved to complete the hunter experience.
Scattered Shots: Improving the hunter survival tree
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. In our ongoing series to give our feedback based on a passing comment made by World of Warcraft Lead Systems Designer Ghostcrawler, we've discussed how to improve the BM hunter tree and how to improve the MM tree. The discussion has been very interesting thus far -- particularly that BM had far more comments than MM ... more than twice as many. I'm curious to see what you guys think needs to change in SV. Of course, it's also worth noting that patch 4.2 has launched. Happily, we're all up-to-date on the minor hunter changes in the patch, including new hunter gear. You can see a full roundup of every hunter-related change here. Now, on to SV! Survival has had a heck of a ride throughout WoW. From the default PVP spec in vanilla, then dwarfed by BM throughout BC, to explode onto the raiding scene after the great BM nerf in Wrath, SV is the least recognizable spec from its vanilla roots. Let's take a look at where it is now and what we could change to improve upon it further.
Scattered Shots: Improving the hunter marksmanship tree
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. Last week we seized upon a passing comment made by World of Warcraft Lead Systems Designer Ghostcrawler to examine how to improve the BM hunter tree. There was a great deal of consensus about several elements, including ditching Intimidation as the bonus ability and replacing it with Bestial Wrath or Beast Mastery, stealing some talents from the MM tree and ditching some from the BM tree. There was also a wealth of other suggestions from the hunter community; far too many to list here. Today we move on from BM into what I think will likely be a far more contentious discussion, since MM hunters are just a more contentious lot in general. MM has had a pretty good run recently as the unmatched top DPS spec by far for the latter half of Wrath, then holding onto its position, albeit with a vastly smaller lead, in Cataclysm so far. However, upcoming nerfs in patch 4.2 promise to close the MM gap. Join me after the cut for a discussion of the marksmanship talent tree. If Ghostcrawler was reading this, what would you suggest be changed?
Scattered Shots: Patch 4.2 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. It's on the PTR, patch 4.2, and it's coming soon to a Cataclysm near you! And with a new tier of raid content, we have (of course!) new hunter gear (as well as some other gear so the support classes can continue their role of supporting hunters). The big hunter news in the new gear is that we finally have a raiding PVE gun: the Lava Bore Blunderbuss. This thing is a beauty. No more will we be forced to use PVP weapons simply in order to bring finely engineered instruments of death to raids. No more shall we be tempted by useless contraptions of twig and twine. Now we can all have a weapon worthy of hunters. [Update: The WoW Insider editors, who clearly do not play dwarves, inform me that this observation is insufficient for a whole column, so I'm adding some other gear notes below. Hop past the patch if you have interest in anything other than guns. Yeah, that means you, elves.]
Scattered Shots: 10 things hunters should get in patch 4.2
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. Thus far, the patch 4.2 hunter news has been pretty light. There was the odd little tweak to the BM mastery that was most likely just a tooltip update (giving us a more precise number, rather than the rounded one) and the peek at our T12 set bonus, which we've already discussed in depth. We know that Blizzard's process is to push things out onto the PTR as they are completed, rather than in any kind of priority order, to enable the most testing time possible. It is therefore my theory that Blizzard has some fantastic things planned for the hunter class that we'll be seeing in patch 4.2. Now, before you get your hopes up, this incredibly awesome list of the top 10 4.2 hunter buffs is entirely fabricated and wishful thinking. There's no indication that hunters will actually be getting these things. But we should get them. We absolutely should.
Scattered Shots: Hunter tier 12 armor first look
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. Now that Patch 4.2 is on the PTR, the dataminers are working overtime to learn what goodies lurk within the new tier of raid content. As always, datamined content is not always 100% accurate and not entirely complete -- and this is just the PTR, anyway, and everything is subject to change. As much as I love all the datamined goodness, I have a sneaking suspicion that the dataminers are actually responsible for the whole Deathwing event. Like the dwarves of Moria, they dug too deep and awoke a creature of fire and shadow. But hey, we all make little slips from time to time. What matters now is that they've found our first glimpse of the hunter tier 12 set bonuses, albeit with a lot of unknowns. Unfortunately, a lot of hunters are filling in the information gaps with guesswork and trying to compare the T11 set to the T12 set based on those assumptions. I like to go out on a limb now and again with absolute statements, so here's one now: Anyone who says that the tier 12 set is worse than the tier 11 set is just plain wrong. Why? Find out after the cut.
Scattered Shots: Optimizing your racials as a hunter
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. Not all races are created equal. Dwarves, for example, have rugged good looks, wit, and unparalleled charm, all of which are amplified by drink. Orcs, on the other hand, are green, smelly, and think that bodily functions are the height of sophisticated humor. Alas, these too are amplified by drink. But when we talk about races in WoW, we're usually talking about racials -- the bonuses each race gets and how these work in synergy with the hunter class. Racials tend not to be a big deal to casual players but are so important to progression types that even the support classes care about them. It's important to note that racials are not balanced, and never more so than in Cataclysm. Before we get into the specifics of which racials help the hunter class the most, let me stress that it's not that big of a deal for most players -- at best, something around a 1% gain to your DPS. Play the race you like best (as long as it's a dwarf). Hunters can be any race except gnomes, and as the video above shows, with enough liquor, even they can manage. But if you really want to squeeze the last ounce of raiding prowess out of your hunter, then your racials are one of the variables you'll want to optimize.
