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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.
Scattered Shots: Hunters and patch 4.1
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. Patch 4.1 was a pleasant one for hunters, a relaxing change of pace from the insanity of nerfs and buffs and more nerfs of 4.0.6. The patch brought us a nice wave of quality of life improvements and a very welcome AoE buff. But in addition to everything listed in the patch notes, there have also been a couple of undocumented hunter changes. Even the undocumented changes are wee hunter improvements. Clearly, Blizzard feels bad about the (admittedly somewhat necessary) trauma we endured in the last patch, and it wants this patch to be a nice, therapeutic massage of tranquil ease for hunters. Join me after the cut as we go through the patch 4.1 hunter changes -- the official notes, as well as the undocumented things that crept in there.
Scattered Shots: Patch 4.1 hunter 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. Over in PTR land, where life is always just a little bit better and a little bit more unpredictable then life over on live, the patch 4.1 testing is starting to wind down. Things are shaping up and looking pretty close to how we think they'll look when the material goes live. As always, we never know exactly when the patch will hit, but all signs point to soon. So this then becomes the perfect time to start taking a look at all the new hunter loot the patch will shower on us. Since this patch is not bringing a new raid tier, the only new loot we're getting comes from the two new 5-man dungeons, the revamped Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman. These dungeons will drop ilvl 353 epic loot. This means that while the loot is better than other heroics, it's still going to be worse than your raid gear. Worse yet, despite dropping a bunch of new loot on us, there still isn't another frickin' hunter bracer [Update: commenters point out that yes there is! Woo!], and there still isn't a frickin' gun. Come on, guys! If you're making new loot, please fill up our gear gaps! Nevertheless, there are plenty of other shiny new toys for us to play with. Join me after the cut for a rundown of the patch 4.1 hunter loot.
Scattered Shots: Hunter addons
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. Playing WoW means dealing with a constant incoming stream of information. Damage and healing numbers, angry floors trying to eat us, buffs and enrages to be dispelled, casts to be interrupted, angry floors trying to burn us, proc notifications and aspect dancing, angry floors trying to suck us into a twilight realm, resource management, and angry floors trying to do every other bad thing imaginable. But no matter how much information the game throws at us, it's never enough. We want more. Enter the addon. While the in-game UI is constantly improving in Blizzard's ongoing efforts to improve the hunter experience, there is some information it still doesn't provide. More often, there is important information that the game doesn't provide in an easy-to-assimilate format. Today we're going to go over some of the basic hunter addons for Cataclysm. As usual, I'm ignoring custom UIs here, since as hunters we don't really need them, and they're very personalized anyway. So join me after the cut for the must-have hunter addons.
Scattered Shots: Musings on hunter haste design
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. One of the many goals with hunters in Cataclysm was to make haste a more attractive stat and a more intuitive stat. Back in Wrath, haste was an almost comically poor stat for hunters. Just about the only thing it did for us was increase the rate of fire of our Auto Shots. While it was still a beneficial stat, it was so much worse than all the rest that hunters would bend over backward and jump through hoops to avoid dirtying themselves with it. Blizzard certainly succeeded in making haste a more attractive stat for us in Cataclysm. It did not, however, score well on making haste more intuitive. In fact, haste is far more complicated and less intuitive than ever before. At certain points, haste is very good for us; then when we get past those haste plateaus, suddenly haste is much, much worse, until we hit another plateau when it's suddenly good again. And of course, these plateaus are radically different for each spec. While I'm glad we no longer have a nearly useless stat, I do hope that Blizzard continues to tinker with haste to make it work a bit more smoothly and remove some of the unnecessary complexities. In fact, I even have an idea of where to start. Join me after the cut for Frostheim's haste design theory.
Scattered Shots: Grandpappy Frostheim on pet happiness
Scattered Shots is brought to you by Grandpappy Frostheim, who spends his evenings in an Ironforge tavern telling young hunters how much harder things were in his day, when they had to kite mobs uphill, both ways ... back when men were men, and women were men too, and pets were next to useless -- but they were also men. You can ask him questions on Google+. All right, all right, settle down. Everyone take a seat, and someone bring me my ale -- then I'll tell you a little something about what being a hunter was like in my day, back when men were men, and women were men too, and pets were next to useless but they were also men. The latest hunter news includes the removal of the pet happiness system, and by Magni's beard, I have to say the negative response I'm hearing surprises me -- and here I thought that nothing you youngsters jabber about could surprise me anymore. But you kids these days have it so good that you're actually complaining about how good you have it! Well, let me tell you a little something about what pets were like back in my day. You think you know what the pet happiness system is, but you kids have no idea.
Scattered Shots: Patch 4.1 hunter AoE changes
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. Coming fast on the heals of the chaotic hunter changes from patch 4.0.6 and the hotfixes that followed, we now have more changes to look forward to in patch 4.1. Happily, we are not seeing another overhaul of the hunter class to disturb the precious state of hunter balance we're enjoying now. Instead, we have some nice quality of life improvements -- no more pet happiness system to juggle, and when we tame a hunter pet, it will now automatically level up to our hunter level, instead of three levels below. I definitely think this last was a needed change; hunters were the only class that actually had to level up one of their key DPS abilities in this way. It's worth noting that for the moment, this only works for newly tamed pets. Your existing pets still have to be leveled the old-fashioned way. But aside from making the collection of our 25 pets easier, the other thing (so far) that we know patch 4.1 is bringing us is some attention to our AoE abilities. Join me after the cut for a look at what we're seeing on the PTR and how that affects the balance of each spec's AoE.
