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Scattered Shots: Nerf train rolls in on the beta
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+. The great shadow of the nerf bat has fallen over the Mists beta hunter, and it's hitting hard. Of course, it's not necessarily a bad thing -- sometimes numbers are too big, and they need to be smaller to keep things balanced. For those of you who have not been keeping track of all the constant beta changes, here's what happened: A bit ago, we got a big wave of hunter buffs. Some of these were for the sake of buffing hunters, but others were intended to fix bugs or to adjust the comparative balance of shots or abilities. The end result was huge DPS buffs. Too huge. Hunter DPS was over-the-top high, so much so that many hunters even started pointing it out. And there were other weird things too -- like Arcane Shot doing more damage than Explosive Shot, dogs and cats living together, etc. With the volume of changes coming in this patch, you can be pretty sure that we're not done. If history is any indicator, it's likely that hunters got a bit over-nerfed and we'll see some compensating buffs in the near future. But as you'll see, it wasn't just nerfs; we got some buffs, too.
Scattered Shots: PvP Stampede and more beta hunter changes
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+. Another beta patch has landed, bringing with it a host of hunter changes, including the anticipated changes to Stampede. We are continuing to see the evolution of the Mists hunter experience, including some surprisingly big changes for this late in the beta process. Leading the changes in this beta patch is the predicted change to Stampede, making it less bursty and generally worse for PvE but available in Arenas and generally better suited for PvP. But Stampede is by no means the only change in this beta patch; we got a brand spanking new hunter talent and changes to a bunch of core hunter abilities. Join me after the cut for a full rundown of the latest changes and their ramifications.
Scattered Shots: MoP hunter changes galore
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+. The beta has been out for about a week, and as you might expect, we are absolutely drowning in ridiculously awesome hunter info -- and all this despite the fact that there's still tons of hunter design yet to be done. The developers have wisely decided to scatter a bunch of bones for the support classes in the first beta build to keep them distracted and out of the developers' hair while they get to the real work of polishing the hunter class. Still, there is so much hunter news that there is no way it will all fit in this column. I'm going to hit a bunch of the highlights -- the really awesome stuff, and the stuff we've been waiting for -- but if you're the kind of hunter who wants to know every expansion detail coming out of the beta, here are a few places that hunter Mists info is being collected: WoW Hunters Hall Tabana is keeping the WHH stocked with every tidbit of hunter info from everywhere on the web, including some videos of our new abilities she unearthed. MMO-C Hunter Thread Ren is doing a great job on the MMO-C forums of maintaining an updated list of hunter changes in the beta. Just remember not to obsess about the damage numbers there. Don't worry about DPS balance right now; it's all changing. WHU's Mists of Pandaria Hunter Changes I'm also collecting a much more detailed list of all hunter changes over at the Warcraft Hunters Union that goes in more depth and is being regularly updated. Petopia's MoP Board The fine community at Petopia is cataloging all the tamable pets that have been found in Mists. Now, join me after the cut for the awesome info splat of the sweet, sweet hunter life in Mists of Pandaria.
Hunters to get Stampede in Mists of Pandaria
As part of the Mists of Pandaria press tour, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has revealed that hunters will be getting a new level 87 ability that will let them bring out their stable of five pets all at once as a long-cooldown DPS burst ability. Here is the full quote from the MMO-C interview: I don't think we have talked about what we are doing for the hunter yet. I think a lot of hunter players have guessed it but the hunter level 87 ability is basically you get all your pets at once for a short amount of time. So if you have 5 pets in your stable, they all come out and do damage for a little bit of time, and that's really fun cooldown for them. I think it increases Beast Master's damage by 80% while they're out, or something ridiculous like that. That's a pretty fun one. This "Stampede" ability is one that the hunter community has been requesting for years and should provide a valuable burst DPS cooldown that will serve the class well in both PvE and PvP. We have yet to get confirmation that this ability will be available to all hunter specs, but since Ghostcrawler referred to it as a hunter ability rather than a beast mastery ability, it seems likely to be a class baseline ability that enables every hunter spec to unleash a frenzy of rabid death into their opponents' faces. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
