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Scattered Shots: What's wrong with Marksmanship 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 every expansion there is inevitably one spec that is the red-headed stepchild of DPS and a host of hunters fond of the spec crying into their ale at the unfairness of it all. Right now MM is that spec, and MM-lovers everywhere are sloppy drunk on their own sadness. Actually, if you look back far enough there was often only one raid viable spec, rather than one bad one. In the memory of Grandpappy Frostheim, it goes something like this: Vanilla: MM is the only raid viable spec. BC: BM is the only raid viable spec. Wrath: BM Briefly on top, then nerfed to the stone age. SV briefly on top, then MM for most of the expansion. After the nerf BM never recovered and held DPS 20% behind the leader. Cataclysm: SV briefly awesome and overpowered, then over-nerfed. MM on top with SV just behind and BM in third. BM wasn't so far behind, but was significantly so. The three specs were closer in DPS potential than any time in history. Nowadays we have BM back in the lead with MM in last place. And if you look at the logs, MM DPS looks horrible. However, recent comments from Blizzard confirm what hunter DPS simulations show us: MM's dps is in theory very close to BM's. So what the heck is wrong that we have MM so amazingly low in the logs -- almost always in very last place against every other DPS spec in the game?
Scattered Shots: Hunter raid gear in tier 14
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+. We've already discussed the hunter pre-raid gear, so now it's time to start talking epics! Which hunter drops are the absolute best for your DPS? Which are worth a pass? And which four set pieces should you collect? Here we're going to look at all the loots that drop from raid bosses, including world bosses. I'm also going to include the epics that can be purchased with valor points -- though these are slightly lower ilvl items and never make the top of the lists, sometimes they're only slightly worse than the top tier loot. For the sake of simplicity we'll be looking at the normal difficulty version of gear. As always, it's worth stressing that the actual DPS difference of items of the same ilvl is very small -- though they certainly add up. And, as always, the actual value of stats changes not just with your spec but also with the rest of your gear. I'll be presenting all of the top gear choices, and then making my recommendations of which is the best, taking reforging options into account.
Scattered Shots: Don't anger the tank or she will make you cry
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+. Mists of Pandaria has brought a lot of awesome stuff to hunters: minimum range finally dead and buried, the awesomeness that is Stampede, improved self-heals, better burst for all specs, and very clever new rare pet tracking challenges. It has also brought us so many flipping buttons to press when DPSing that we need a third hand to keep up with it all. While the hunter changes in Mists have been overwhelmingly positive, they've also introduced new ways for hunters to make mistakes. And I'm not just talking about mistakes that affect the hunter -- like the tragedy of rolling an elf back when you didn't know any better -- I'm talking about mistakes that hurt your group. There are also a lot of opportunities for the unwitting hunter to piss off the tank. That may be all good fun and games when you're running in a guild group, but when you're running Dungeon Finder you do not want to piss off the tank: she has all the power. You annoy her enough and she'll initiate a vote kick. No one else wants to be on the tank's bad side so they'll vote to boot your sorry ass. But not until the tank calls you names until you cry like a sissy little elf. Here's what to look out for in Mists.
Scattered Shots: MoP hunter enchants
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+. Greetings fellow hunters! So far in our quest to optimize our Mists of Pandaria DPS we've discussed the best pre-raid hunter gear and the best gems for your gear. Today we're going to go a step further and get into enchanting all that sparkly new gear. The first question you have to ask yourself in the early weeks of an expansion is whether it's even worthwhile enchanting your gear. Certainly by the time you set foot in raids you want the best enchant on all your slots to ensure you're contributing as much as you possibly can to your raid's success, but there if frankly not much point in enchanting those non-heroic blues or gear you picked up while questing. As a general rule of thumb, you only want to enchant gear from heroics (or equivalent gear of ilvl 463 or higher). You just don't need the extra edge of enchants to run 5-mans, especially when that gear is going to get replaced within a few runs. That said, if you've gotten unlucky on a slot or two and are preparing to walk into a raid with some lower level gear, then you should get it enchanted. Okay, let's get into the best option per slot.
Scattered Shots: MoP hunter gems
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+. Now that most of you are at or almost at level 9o and working on putting together your pre-raid hunter gear, it's time to take a moment to discuss gemming for Mists of Pandaria. Like gear and enchants and talents, gemming is one of the areas where you can statically optimize your hunter's DPS. While the benefit of choosing one gem over another might add up to an unnoticeably small DPS difference, once you add up the benefit of all your gems, and your gear, and every other tiny optimization opportunity, you suddenly have the difference between topping the charts or not; or the difference between downing a boss or not. Every little bit of optimization adds up into a big difference in DPS. Mists brought us more than just upgraded versions of our gems: it also changed the itemization of gems to make some of our decisions more interesting.
Scattered Shots: MoP hunter pre-raid gear list
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 third significant step for all hunters in Mists of Pandaria is gearing up to become raid ready. (For those interested, the first step is race (and possibly faction) changing to dwarf, and the second is leveling up to 90). With that in mind here is a list of some of the top hunter gear to go after. We're specifically only looking here at non-raid PvE gear that does not come from a raid or require raid mats. However, in Mists you are able to get valor points outside of raids, including by doing daily quests and some of the reputation gear requires valor points to purchase in addition to faction rep. Thus I am going to include some valor gear in this list. Odds are you won't have enough valor points pre-raiding to get all of these pieces. My recommendation is to run your heroics to get the best non-epic gear possible and then spend valor points to fill in the worst gear slots. I'm also not including any gear that requires you to have a certain profession -- thus no engineering goggles even though they may be superior for engineers.
Scattered Shots: Hunter leveling from 85 to 90
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+. We're less than a week away from the launch of Mists of Pandaria, when overnight we'll have to start the short grind back up to the level cap, after which we'll replace all of our hard-earned purple gear with fresh greens and blues. When it comes to leveling, hunters have it easy. You could go through and choose the worst possible optimization and still have an easy time of it. I should stress this at the outset: you don't need any special tricks to solo quest your way to level 90. That said, by optimizing your hunter for leveling you can certainly make the trip to 90 a bit easier. What follows are my recommendations for preparing your hunter for optimal leveling.
Scattered Shots: Hunter PvP after Patch 5.0.4
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, Euripides is filling in for Frostheim, who has taken a week to debate shaving his arm hair. Hunters are shaping up to be excellent in PvP this patch. We've always been sort of acceptable at very high skill levels, but now we have a bunch of new tricks in our toolbox. It's still too early to give a definitive guide to the best choices you can make, but with everything that's changed, it's worth going over where we are now. Beastmastery is the spec of choice Marksmanship was the most commonly played spec for the last two expansions, mostly because of readiness and silencing shot. These can now be learned by any spec, and since BM has the best damage of the three specs, it's the default PvP spec. In addition to the raw damage, BM also has an additional crowd control breaking effect with The Beast Within, a stun, and the ability to tame exotic pets, including one with a heal. On its own, that heal isn't much to write home about, but with glyphed Stampede, it can heal for a large portion of your health.
Scattered Shots: Bugs, not bugs, and oddities of patch 5.0.4
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+. As much as the beta process eliminates hordes of bugs (but never the horde, sadly) there are always some that follow us to the pre-patch. Patch 5.0.4 has brought a handful of hunter bugs with it, and it appears that Blizzard is making some progress on stamping them out. Here are the top bugs, strange things that might or might not be bugs, and things hunters thought were bugs but turned out not to be so buggy after all. It's worth noting that this is not a comprehensive list, but these are the things that are most likely to affect your game experience in some way.
Scattered Shots: 5 awesome 5.0.4 hunter things
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+. According to WoW Insider's analytics department, 83.7% of you have now downloaded the giant patch 5.0.4, reforged yourself for hit and expertise, been momentarily dismayed at your DPS until you realized the target dummy changed, and then gone out to explore the post-patch world. You may have noticed that there are still some bugs to be worked out -- like how the improved Kill Command is broken on Ultraxion and Madness, or how Snake Trap is a bit fussy about when to attack, or that Spirit Bond isn't working in combat. You may have noticed things you thought were bugs but weren't, like the target dummies or Explosive Shot ticks clipping on Lock and Load. You almost certainly noticed impressively huge DPS in 5-mans. Today we're going to suggest five new awesomely fun things that you can do with your post-5.0.4 hunter. Regardless of what you think about the new mechanics, this list should get you excited about the changes.
Scattered Shots: Hunter prep for 5.0.4
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+. Patch 5.0.4 is landing on Aug. 28, bringing all of the mechanical changes of Mists of Pandaria to hunters, which we'll get to play with at level 85 for a good month before the expansion hits. The patch is bringing hunters a lot of changes -- everything from the removal of minimum range and melee weapons to expertise being a required stat and aspects going on the global cooldown. WoW Insider has a good rundown of what to expect from patch 5.0.4. Here, we're going to focus on the hunter-specific stuff. And there's a lot of hunter ground to cover, so let's get started.
Scattered Shots: Hunter racials in Mists of Pandaria
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+. Of all the different optimization options for the hunter class, racials are the one that is hardest to change. Nevertheless, there are plenty of hunters out there willing to race-change to squeeze out a bit more DPS or to get a little bit closer to the rugged perfection the designers blessed on the dwarves. This means that there are plenty of people asking what the best hunter race is. In Mists, we have the new racial of the pandaren, plus a few of the old racials changing. Add to that new abilities and new formulas for the old ones, and the common question of what the best hunter race is requires a new set of math. Or if you don't have one of those cool glass whiteboards with neon markers like they have in TV to do your math on (I really want one of those), we can shortcut it with Zeherah's hot new beta spreadsheet.
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.
A closer look at the hunter rare tames in Mists of Pandaria
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 Mists of Pandaria beta has been updated with an awesome treat for pet-loving hunters. Blizzard has introduced new rare hunter pet tames with their own unique taming challenge -- only this time, they did it in a way that prevents random ass-hats from wandering around slaughtering lovely, rare beasts that are destined to become your beloved companions. Following a cryptic clue, the dedicated hunters over at Petopia scoured the beta to discover what these new pets are and how they work. These beasts leave unique tracks in the landscape that are visible only to hunters. If you follow the tracks, they will eventually lead you to the rare beast; however, you have to use your Flare to make it visible, and you can use your Hunter's Mark to keep it visible to you. This is awesome -- a solution that provides rare pets to tame while radically reducing the odds of their getting butchered by non-hunters and at the same time giving us a neat challenge to find the pets by actually hunting! So let's take a look at what we have.
Mists of Pandaria Hunter Pet Guide
Anne posted yesterday about the new hunter pet challenges, including exciting information on how hunters can track down their target tames using tracks on the ground that are visible only to hunters. The hunter then casts down a flare at the end of the line of tracks to hopefully reveal the rare pet. This is a really cool-sounding new feature that should hopefully also dramatically reduce the number of hunter tames lost to other marauding players. So why are we telling you about it again? Well, Kalliope over at Petopia has done a truly fantastic forum post that serves as a guide to hunting down these beasts of mystery. Kalliope has done a pet-by-pet guide showing you what tracks you're looking for, where the tames are likely to be roaming in Pandaria, and the family and names for each tame. Not only that, but Kalliope has a host of great tips for would-be owners of these beasts. The full tip list, after the jump.
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.
Grandpappy Frostheim on dumbing the game down
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+. I've said it before and you can bet on the balls of the Titans that you'll hear me say it again, but kids these days don't know how good they got it. In fact, they got it so good that after years and years of complaining about every little thing, these days the kids are actually -- get this -- complaining that they have it too good. I know, right? Kids these days. A complaint that's been getting louder lately is that the game is being dumbed down. That because life is easier for these young'uns somehow the game requires less skill than the miserable pain in the backside the game was for us back in my day. Well, I got some good news for you kids: The only thing that's been dumbed down is the useless, soft mass inside your noggin. In fact, by many measures, substantially more skill is required now than years ago.
Scattered Shots: Stampede me this
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 most awesome hunter news from Mists of Pandaria is without a doubt the removal of minimum range. But next on the list is Stampede, an ability that has been requested by mobs of hunters throughout WoW's history. But then as soon as Stampede was implemented in the beta, hunters started complaining about the ability. In particular, the 10-minute cooldown turned a lot of vocal hunters against the ability. This ensures that Stampede cannot be reset by Readiness and that Stampede cannot be used in Arenas. Lately Stampede has been the subject of much discussion, with Lead Systems Designer Ghostcrawler chiming in on the forums on the topic, and it looks like Blizzard may be reconsidering the design to accommodate hunters who want it to work differently. And I think that's a bad thing. I strongly suspect that the result of changes to Stampede to placate our class is going to give us a worse ability. Here's why.
Scattered Shots: Aspect macros and crows endangered
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+. We've got some more good hunter news coming in from the beta with more buffs to hunter stuff. It's very important that you keep this in mind, that there are some interesting buffs to abilities including more hunter PvP buffs. Because there's bad news as well. We've had both news of another beta patch and a handful of posts from Ghostcrawler on the hunter thread. Though A Murder of Crows was nerfed in the patch just a couple of weeks ago, it's been nerfed again, and fairly hard this time. Furthermore, we also got news that all this crazy combination of hunters summoning extra creatures into combat is potentially too much for lower-end machines, and Blizzard may have to scale back on some of these abilities. A Murder of Crows is a likely suspect for that. But remember, there are buffs too. So let's dig into all the changes and news, starting with A Murder of Crows.
Scattered Shots: Faster, stronger, and with fewer crows
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+. Every new expansion is a game developer's dream. Throughout the course of the expansion, they have to be careful not to make too many changes too fast, something that can quickly become too hard for players to keep up with. As new tiers of content come out, the developers' list of dream changes build up faster than they can be deployed. But when a new expansion is in the works, they're free to unleash the torrent of ideas that built up over the years. They can take the hunter and rebuild it -- faster, stronger, and as it turns out, with fewer crows. The latest Mists of Pandaria beta build brings several buffs for hunters with some raw DPS increases. It also limits the ability of hunters to leverage A Murder of Crows to bring out a bazillion crows at once.
