wow-hunters
Latest
Scattered Shots: Hunter predictions for a new year
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. Another year of hunting is almost at an end, and that means it's time to dig into the vast past of December 2010, when Cataclysm was fresh and shiny and new and SV hunters were dominating every DPS chart, a time before aspect dancing and when pets still had a happiness system (kind of). That's right, it's time to dust off my 2011 hunter predictions and see how I did. It's also time to make new predictions for the state of hunters going forward in 2012 and take some guesses at what's going to happen with the class in the tumultuous year ahead. Looking back at some of the changes, it's interesting to see the patterns and similarities in the class over time. SV is again the top DPS spec as it was a year ago -- only now instead of blowing away all comers with pretty demonstrably overpowered DPS, SV is at best middle of the pack. In practice, the hunter class is one of the poorest DPSers this tier. SV got nuked to death in patch 4.0.6, much as an overpowered BM spec got over-nerfed into oblivion in patch 3.0.8 in early Wrath, except that while overnerfed, SV got it much gentler than BM did back in the day. The nerf bat is hitting a bit softer these days. Let's hope that's a trend that continues.
Scattered Shots: Pet talent possibilities in Mists of Pandaria
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. We all know by now that talents are going to work a lot differently in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, but what we don't know yet is exactly what's going to happen with our pet talent trees. Not only that, but Blizzard itself isn't entirely sure what it's going to do about them, other than not wanting to leave them the way they are now. We do know that we will get to choose what family our pets belong to. If you tame a cat, you can choose to make it a tenacity, cunning, or ferocity pet. But pet talents are a bit up in the air. There are currently two possibilities for pet talents. The first is to remove pet talents entirely, making your pet's special abilities and spec -- tenacity, ferocity, or cunning -- the only unique features of the pet. Thus, every ferocity cat is the same as every other ferocity cat. This option is dull and dreary with nothing interesting or engaging about it. Call it the Shaman Option, in other words, or the Blah Option. The other possibility is to revamp the pet talent system so that it more closely resembles the new character talent system in MoP. In this system, we turn some pet talents into spec abilities, and then give an abbreviated tree of meaningful choices. I call this the Awesome Option -- or in other words, the Hunter Option. You're going to love it. Here's how the Awesome Option could work.
Scattered Shots: Patch 4.3 hunter trinket roundup
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 trinkets day here on Scattered Shots, back by popular demand. The number of emails I've been getting about hunter trinkets lately has made me suddenly realize that I have not posted my usual new tier trinket round-up and reevaluation -- and with the new tier of Raid Finder trinkets out, there the decision of when to upgrade is yet more complex. Trinkets are a lot like the nine support classes in WoW: You know they're useful, but it can be hard to figure out exactly which one is worth using without doing some math. Only unlike the support class players, you always want to have two of them with you. And they don't smell funny, or refuse to heal your pet, or screw up your lovely execution of executions. Maybe trinkets aren't much like the support classes after all. They're better. Join me after the cut as we run down the new 4.3 trinkets, compare them to the best of the previous tier's trinkets, and give some thought to the new Raid Finder versions of the trinkets as well.
Scattered Shots: Hunting Mists of Pandaria talents
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 4.3 has been out for over a week now, and that means that it's so old news. It's time for us to finally look forward to patch 5.0 and the Mists of Pandaria hunter talent preview that we first got a look at during BlizzCon. The new talent system strips down the talent selections to a mere six talent choices. Every 15 levels, you are presented with three possible hunter talents, and you can choose only one of them. Then 15 levels later, you choose one of a different three talents, and so on -- only unlike many talents now, these talents aren't meaningless. Now, the last time we talked about this MoP stuff, the comments got a bit heated. To assist you today, I have included the above video. If you're about to say anything stated in that video, you are about to become one of those people and are better off calling your mom instead. She hasn't heard from you in too long anyway. She worries.
Scattered Shots: 4.3 bonus hunter 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. At long last, patch 4.3 is live, bringing with it the great hunter balancing buffs (and the pesky melee buff that we don't benefit from -- but the video above demonstrates pretty clearly that hunters need no melee buff). At the outset, the patch is looking like a good thing for hunter spec balance, boosting BM and SV up to levels that are nearly indistinguishable from MM DPS. We also got a nice little surprise buff to SV that alters the base SV rotation -- and actually has the potential to give SV that last little push into first place, possibly slipping ever so slightly past MM in the DPS charts. Join me after the cut for a quick recap of what we're seeing in patch 4.3 and the T.N.T. cooldown change that looks like it's going to change the SV hunter shot choices.
Scattered Shots: Hunter spec abilities in Mists of Pandaria
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 posted its Mists of Pandaria talent calculator, giving us a bit more of a peek into how things are going to play out with the new talent system. The talents that we're seeing are the same as what was revealed at BlizzCon (and we will get around to looking at those in depth soon -- just not today). But in addition to the talents, we also got to see the very first look at what our new spec abilities would look like. Some of the support classes actually got to see what some of their new spec abilities would be in MoP, but as the premiere death dealers in WoW, they needed more time to refine the ultimate abilities of the hunter class. If you'll recall, in MoP talents will be class-wide and not specific to each spec (and there will be far fewer of them). Many of what are now spec talents will become default spec abilities that each spec gets when it reaches the appropriate level. Others are going away entirely. Today we're going to take a look at what those must-have abilities are for each spec and which ones appear to be gone completely.
Scattered Shots: Patch 4.3 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. If there's one thing gaming geeks like, it's new toys. Whether it's a replica Frostmourne, a shiny new set of D&D dice or a sweet lightsaber app for our smartphones, there's nothing like new toys to get us excited. And the best toy of all for a WoW gamer? New gear! Patch 4.3 is moving along, and while it's probably still a bit away, the background downloader is doing its thing and the final content patch of Cataclysm is undeniably coming soon. And that means that it's time to take a look at the new hunter gear that will soon be available to us! Join me after the cut for the new Wyrmstalker hunter gear, an endgame gun for real this time, and all the other delightful little toys we'll get to play with until the pandas come.
Scattered Shots: Scatter-trapping with grace and ease
Frostheim appears to be decimated, unable to write this week, over the loss of the most recent raiding gun from the patch 4.3 PTR files. As someone who PVPs to get my first raiding weapon of most patches, I can choose whichever ranged death-dealing machine I want. Of course, as a Worgen (not to mention someone who is generally the butt of many of Frostheim's jokes on our podcast), I usually choose a crossbow after buying, returning and screenshotting the gun. Today, Scattered Shots will be all about a very basic hunter PVP survival skill: scatter-trapping. All hunters of all specs can scatter-trap, and whether you're being ganked doing dailies, trying to win Baradin Hold, or doing competitive Arena, it's one of those skills that can really set you apart. Traps on their own are only useful for people you can force to cross through them. Mostly, this means melee, although you can sometimes force a ranged player to cross a trap if you're humping a pillar properly. What do we do when we want to freeze someone who isn't chasing us, though? Freezing Trap is really our most effective crowd control ability. We'll often want it to be used on someone that matters like a healer. Unfortunately, short of stepping up to a healer and dropping a trap on them, there's no way to force them to cross our path.
Scattered Shots: BlizzCon hunter info roundup
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. BlizzCon this year was a very hunter Blizzcon indeed, filled with big announcements not just about the game in general but about the direction the hunter class is headed. The biggest news shouted around hunter circles was of course the fact that minimum range is finally being removed from the game. This was one of the biggest points in the hunter class design feedback threads, and it's a nice indication that Blizzard is indeed paying attention to what the community has to say. (Either that, or the developers also just thought it needed to go, and it's a crazy, random happenstance that it coincides with community feedback.) Join me after the cut as we round up all of the hunter news that came out of BlizzCon, very possibly including some news that you haven't heard from just following the BlizzCon coverage. We're going to focus just on the hunter-specific news rather than wider game-related news.
Scattered Shots: A very hunter BlizzCon
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. I was going to write something today about the wee, tiny little BM and SV buffs that we saw on the PTR, but frankly I can't focus on that stuff right now. I'm too excited about Blizzcon. As you're reading this, I spent the day getting up early and navigating airport security to spend too many hours on a plane only to navigate my way out of LAX and catch a taxi up to BlizzCon. If all goes well, there'll be just enough time to check into the hotel before running over to what will be the most epic WoW Insider party ever. If you're attending BlizzCon, you also don't want to miss the Great Hunter Meetup at the Hilton lobby bar on Friday night starting at 8 p.m. The greatest part of BlizzCon is meeting and hanging out with all the awesome people, both hunters and support classes. But it's also when we get all sorts of news about the future of the game -- and the hunter class -- and a chance to ask questions to the developers directly. And of course, Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) is there wandering the halls -- and as hunters, if anyone can track him down for a quick extra question or two, it's us. Join me after the cut as we take a look at what we learned about hunters at last year's BlizzCon and what we might learn this year.
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.
Hunter tier 13 armor set and retrospective revealed
Blizzard has just officially revealed the hunter tier 13 armor set, and as expected, it does in fact have a dragon motif. Blizzard's continuing its tradition of making hunter sets based off of monsters the hunter might have reasonably been hunting during the patch or expansion in which the set appears. Dragons, of course, are the big thing that comes to mind when one hunts Deathwing, but in order to differentiate the set from tier 2's Dragonstalker set, Blizzard went with a skeletal look this time around. I have to admit, I'm still thinking I'll transmogrify to some Gronnstalker or Alliance PVP armor for my hunter, but judge for yourself. Check out our gallery below for images from the hunter tier armor retrospective. %Gallery-136011% Brace yourselves for what could be some of most exciting updates to the game recently with patch 4.3. Review the official patch notes, and then dig into what's ahead: new item storage options, cross-realm raiding, cosmetic armor skinning and your chance to battle the mighty Deathwing -- from astride his back!
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.
