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Scattered Shots: Cataclysm beta hunter info
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. Okay, take a deep breath. The NDA has been lifted and we're about to take a look at what's been going on with the hunter class behind closed doors. Those of us who have been desperately keeping our mouths shut until we were vibrating with the secret knowledge we possess can finally climb to the rooftops and start shouting about the awesomeness contained within. Because those hunter class previews we had earlier in the year? That was nothing. Nothing I tell you compared to the sweet, sweet huntery goodness lurking behind the closed beta doors. Join me after the cut as we begin to scrape the surface of some of the awesomesauce hidden in the Cataclysm beta. I think you'll join me in agreeing that it's been worth the wait. Hold tight to your seat, folks; this is a killer ride.
Scattered Shots: Pet tanking
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. As hunters, we spend a lot of our down time engaged in awesomeness. On long weekends, we strip down and roll around in awesomesauce; we drink it and bathe in it it and steep ourselves in the awesome until we reek of it, until we radiate awesome so strongly that it even starts to rub off on those around us. Pet tanking is yet another example of this principle in action. Grandpappy Frostheim always used to say, "If you want a job done right, do it yourself. But if you're getting a good drunk on and good enough is good enough, send your pet to do it." With the right pet, the right talents, a bit of gear and a pinch of forethought, our pets can make surprisingly formidable tanks. Our pets can easily tank, for example, any dungeon and any heroic in the game. We can even tank raid bosses. And I'm not talking about just the easy stuff in Naxx, either. We can tank a goodly number of ICC bosses including, as you can see in the video above, Sindragosa (and we don't even need another tank to help out in Sindragosa phase 3, either). So join me after the cut and learn how!
Scattered Shots: Hunter loot in Ruby Sanctum
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. Patch 3.3.5 is live, and it won't be long now before the Ruby Sanctum opens, giving us yet another dragon to kill and another chest overflowing with nothing but hunter loot. Like a good hunter, I've been poking through the Ruby Sanctum loot lists and doing some paper napkin math to decide exactly what drops I'm going to want to keep safely out of the hands of dirty rogues. Now, the loot lists we have access to may not be complete. I want to stress this. I really, really hope they're not, because, all joking aside, the hunter loot selection is grim as all heck. I'm seeing three hunter drops from 25-man, which is fine. But in 10-man I'm only seeing one hunter drop, and it's probably not going to be used by any hunter -- basically no hunter loot in the 10-man version. On the bright side, awesome new trinket! Join me after the cut as we take a look at what kind of worthwhile loot (i.e. hunter loot) Ruby Sanctum has to offer.
Scattered Shots: Grandpappy Frostheim on traps
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 through the snow, uphill, both ways. Young hunters these days got no appreciation for their traps. One of the signature abilities in the hunter toolbox, thematically appropriate, and stronger and easier to use than any time in WoW history, but they may as well not exist 'cause you kids can't be arsed to use 'em. Mob charging at you? Hunters these days just Feign Death (that is, if they don't try to melee it) then watch the mob make a beeline for the healer. Once it's safely carving pretty patterns into the healer's face, the hunter goes back to volleying the pack. Bah! Kids these days! Let me tell you something, back in my day our traps sucked. They were horribly limited and difficult to use by your pampered standards, but by the Titans we used 'em and used 'em well! So sit down, listen closely, and maybe you'll learn something about your class. You see, back in my day ...
Scattered Shots: Stacking cooldowns and procs
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. As hunters, our main job in a raid or a dungeon run is to do as much eyebrow-searing DPS as we can, and do it without pulling aggro or standing in void zones. This is the primary difference between hunters and healers -- healers don't worry about any of these things. One of the secrets of end-game hunter DPS is to stack our cooldowns together, and to time those cooldowns with trinket procs. Over the course of a boss fight, this stacking can yield very real DPS gains. While every hunter spec benefits from this stacking, marksman benefits the most, being able to use our big cooldown, Rapid Fire, four times in a typical four- to five-minute fight. The key here is to stack abilities that combine multiplicatively, rather than additively. One of the interesting benefits of the DPS gain of stacking cooldowns is that you could actually do more DPS than spreadsheets would indicate. Spreadsheets use averaging of all abilities over the course of a fight, rather than assuming that you're combining them intelligently. Join me after the cut as we take a look at how it works, when you should stack and when you should not.
Scattered Shots: Pistols for hunters?
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. The idea of hunters dual-wielding pistols has been around since the beginning of WoW. The reason it keeps coming up is because it's frickin' awesome. It was even recently addressed by Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) himself in the Developer Twitter Chat back in January. Specifically, he said: Ghostcrawler The pistol idea for hunters gets suggested a lot. It could either be an alternate to the gun / bow / crosssbow or something they use for short-range attacks. source I should stress here that Blizzard has never said that they are going to do this, and they have never even said that they're considering it. However, we certainly know that they are aware of the idea. I started thinking about this again when BRK brought it up as a guest on the Hunting Party Podcast a couple weeks ago, and my half-formed ideas on how pistols could fix some problems with the hunter class grew into fully formed ideas. Join me after the cut as we take a look at why I think this is more than just something cool, but also a much-needed change for the hunter class.
Scattered Shots: Will Cataclysm lower our global cooldown?
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. We recently got an exciting tidbit of hunter news from Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer) about potential chances in Cataclysm. You may have missed it, since it was buried in the warrior forums, of all places: Ghostcrawler - Lead Systems Designer Lowering the GCD is as close to anything on the never list. We will possibly do it for hunters, but that is because their resource system is going to prevent them from ever spamming multiple buttons at once (in the same way rogues have a lower GCD). Even with rage normalization there are going to be times when a warrior is at 100 rage and can unload with multiple attacks at once. The GCD is there for a reason, partially for game balance and partially to keep the server - client communication from getting gummed up. source Why hello there, tasty one-second global cooldown of scrumtiousness! This is of course not definite, not a promise and just something they are considering. But considering it they are, and if you were to put on your Frostheim Goggles and look into the future, you too would predict that a one-second hunter GCD will indeed come to pass. So what exactly might this (possible) change mean? Let's do some speculating after the cut.
Scattered Shots: Transitioning to hunter PvP
Welcome to Scattered Shots! Filling in for Frostheim for this post is Basil Berntsen, also of outdps and the Hunting Party podcast. Hunter PvP is fun. It's a lot of fun. It's also something you can jump into any time, compared to raiding where you have to be in a guild that is managing to continue running content. A lot of people are getting into it for the first time but are having trouble getting started. Start with the gear The average hunter with a bit of PvE experience and gear will queue up for a random battleground and get mulched. Hunters are almost as squishy as mages, and until you get some resilience, you're going to die a lot. The best thing you can do while you're in this state is to use your cooldowns to extend your death, stick with healers and do as much damage as you can before you croak. Hunter damage is insanely high -- the phrase "it goes to 11" doesn't begin to cover it. The problem is that if you can die to a single warlock DoT, you won't be able to apply this pressure for long.
Scattered Shots: Hunting the Lich King
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. Arthas Menethil, the Lich King, the ultimate boss of Wrath, is now within your sights. I don't care that Ruby Sanctum is coming out; the Lich King is it. He's been haunting you ever since you stepped foot in Northrend, popping up here and there to check on your progress, being amused by you, threatening you, chasing you down long hallways. Now after clawing your way up Icecrown Citadel, you finally stand before the Frozen Throne and Arthas himself. It all comes down to this. It's going to be a bad day for one of you. The Lich King is the most complex and demanding fight in ICC. It requires a moderately high DPS throughput, with lots of target switching and burst DPS, situational awareness and unforgiving positioning requirements. With a 15-minute enrage timer, this fight has it all. Join me after the cut as we take a look at the hunter-specific roles within the Lich King encounter. As always, we are assuming you have an understanding of the encounter mechanics, and we are focusing on tricks and tips for hunters. If you are unfamiliar with the encounter, please check out the WoW.com Lich King tutorial video.
Scattered Shots: Damage meters are awesome
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. I love damage meters and raid parses and any other source of data that can help you evaluate and analyze your performance. I strongly believe that any hunter who is interested in doing the best he can should absolutely run a damage meter. Whether you prefer Recount or Skada or something I've never heard of is up to you, but you want to use damage meters just like you want to use any tool that can help you improve your performance. Alas, damage meters have gotten a bad name, and it is now very in vogue to hate the damage meters and the people who run them. For today, we're going to set fashion aside and ignore what's popular to talk a bit about why damage meters are so awesome and why you should absolutely use them. We'll also look into exactly why it's important to do as much DPS as we can.
Scattered Shots: Pure awesome
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science, mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout, to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. Hunters are quite simply the greatest class in WoW. We have pure awesome running through our veins, fueling our every action, our every shot, driving even our smoldering good looks to new levels. For breakfast every morning, we eat a giant stack of awesome cakes topped off with a heaping helping of awesomesauce. It's not just that we're capable of doing so much, such godlike feats, as it is that we are able to do them with such style. Whether it's careening across the field of battle with a perfectly executed jump-disengage, jump-shot kiting mobs and bosses, chain trapping or even the awesome moment of getting dropped off the Lich King's platform by a valkyr but spinning around in midair and disengaging back to safety on the platform, everything we do is done with flair. It's like we were designed to look good doing everything that we do, to incite the abject awe of onlookers. Today we're going to set aside discussion of the minutiae of optimization and the endless slog through progression or the heroic grind. Instead we're going to rekindle that sense of pure joy that the hunter class brings to us. We're going to suggest that you embrace that joy, that spark of pure awesome, that makes the hunter the greatest class in WoW. Join me after the cut for a few suggestions of pure hunter awesome.
Scattered Shots: What spec should I use?
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. I get a lot of emails, and this is awesome. I love to hear from all you guys. While there are disappointingly few offers of sultry Blizzcon trysts or suggestive photos, there are lots and lots of hunter questions. Some of these I answer with lengthy explanations, some with only a few words and some with just a link to a guide that already answers the question. But I have a little tally running in my mind that pings with every type of question. Once enough emails come in on a topic, I figure it's time to write about it. Today's topic is a perennial favorite that I really should have covered long, long ago: What spec should I use? This question is usually accompanied by a description of the hunter's gear, and often an explanation of where the hunter's DPS currently is and where he or she thinks it should be. So join me after the cut as we tackle the question of what spec you should be, and what factors go into the decision. With any luck, putting this one to bed will make room in my inbox for more pressing emails so I can start scheduling my Blizzcon downtime.
Scattered Shots: Five secrets for not being a terrible hunter
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. I've been spending some time leveling an alt lately, and because I despise questing and most of the solo game, I've been leveling entirely through the dungeon finder. One of the truly startling results of this (other than how disturbingly fast leveling is these days) is getting a fresh look at how people behave in these dungeon finder groups. In a word, they behave badly. More disturbing however is that the worst offenders seem to be the hunters. You can imagine my mortification when, after years of defending the hunter name as unfairly sullied by farmers and pre-DKs, I see group after group where the hunter is pulling aggro, setting his pet on aggressive and pulling everything, and then yelling at the tank and healer on those rare occasions when he doesn't just Feign Death and watch us all die to his shenanigans. It got to the point where I dreaded seeing a hunter join the party. I like to think these are growing pains of hunters just learning the ropes -- hunters that are in fact ret pally alts, I secretly hope -- and that by the time they reach 80, they'll have figured out some of the basics of how the game works. But I think we all know that we have our bad eggs at the level cap as well. So today we're going to cover five basic rules of how not to be a terrible hunter in groups. Following these rules won't make you great, but they'll keep you from being called a huntard. I'm going to be a bit more stern than usual here, because this is the hunter good name we're talking about, but be assured that it comes from a place of love. Tough love, to be sure, but love nonetheless.
Scattered Shot: Jump-Disengage
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. We talk a lot about optimizing our hunters here in Scattered Shots, and then spend almost as much time stressing that skill is more important than gear -- and in fact, more important than those last several degrees of optimization. I've found in the hundreds of emails I get every month that the number one cause of low DPS is lost or delayed shots -- people just failing to execute their rotations correctly. But close on its heels in number two is poor movement management. One of the greatest movement tools in the hunter arsenal is Disengage, and it is also one of the least used in raids. Just like jump-shot, you can use jump-Disengage to Disengage in the direction you're running without slowing your forward momentum. It takes some practice, but once it's habit, jump-Disengage becomes a fantastic tool to let you get where you need to go faster. I believe this is a key hunter movement skill. Rather than trying to explain it in writing, I put together this little tutorial video so you can see how it's done. I even dug a couple bits of old raid footage so you can see it in action. Engineers can have even more fun and more distance by macroing in their Flexweave Underlay with Disengage. One final word on jump-Disengage: the game doesn't seem to track you while you're in the air. This means that it thinks you're still in your starting place until you land. In other words: Disengage is not a way to get out of void zones! You want to be a hunter, eh? You start with science, then you add some Dwarven Stout, and round it off some elf-bashing. The end result is massive DPS. Scattered Shots is the WoW.com column dedicated to helping you learn everything it takes to be a hunter. See the Scattered Shots Resource Guide for a full listing of vital and entertaining hunter guides, including how to improve your heroic DPS, understand the impact of skill vs. gear, get started with Beast Mastery 101 and Marksman 101 and even solo bosses with some extreme soloing.
Scattered Shots: Cobra Shot and Camouflage
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. I have no doubt that, such astute and learned people as hunters tend to be, you are all well aware of the Cataclysm alpha leaks that have been piling up. If you were to follow your curiosity in hopes of getting a better mental picture of how we hunters will turn out, you would be sorely disappointed. Well, first you'd be disappointed, and then you'd probably get lost looking at pictures of new zones and old zones made new again for far, far too long ... But then some hours later, you'd remember why you went there in the first place and return to being disappointed. Unlike some classes whose talent trees have been showered with presents in the leaks, our talent trees appear mostly unchanged at the moment -- in fact, they're still filled with our mana regen and mana reduction talents. However, there were a couple of little nibblets of hunter goodness hidden in there -- the actual tooltips for our new spells, Camouflage and Cobra Shot. This is not official. The beta has not even started, and even if it was official it'd be subject to all kinds of change at any moment. This is stuff that, frankly, was never meant for our eyes to see. Also, these are spoilers. If you don't want to know anything about Cataclysm until it's released, don't click to read more. In fact, you really shouldn't go any further, if you're being good. If you do click to read more you will be rewarded with naughty goodies of secret hunter info. So those of you feeling just a bit naughty, join me after the cut.
Scattered Shots: Hunter gems
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. If you take the average hunter and strip him bare of all gear and weapons, he would still be a shining thing of such deadly beauty you would ache to look upon it. And should you dare to attack that hunter in all his natural grace, that ache would turn to sharp, searing pain as a fury of fur and fangs descended upon you. But it is important to note that though we hunters are glorious to behold with all our parts exposed, it does not mean that we shouldn't wear our gear. With approximately 90% of all drops designed specifically for hunters, it would be a shame to let them go to waste. And as long as you're wearing you gear anyway, you should accessorize. Grab some gems to accentuate that sparkle in your eye and the lovely flash of muzzle in the face of overwhelming odds. Join me after the cut as we do some window shopping and suggest what gems go best with eyebrow-searing DPS. Diamonds may be forever, but Relentless Earthsiege Diamonds mark the end of all life within range of your gun.
Scattered Shots: Secrets and myths of the world's best hunters
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. Over at the Hunting Party Podcast, we've had the opportunity to interview some of the best hunters in the world. Hunters in the top guilds, like Ensidia and Paragon, and the hunter with more top DPS benchmarks than any other, Kripparrian. One of the interesting things about talking to them, both on and off air, is all the traits they have in common: they're calm, logical and of course, uncommonly good looking. The way they talk about the game and hunter optimization is very similar, too. When you start asking them about hunter advice or how to get the last ounce of awesomesauce out of your hunter, they all say pretty much the same things. And it's somewhat different advice than you'll get from the forums or Elitist Jerks. Personally, I suspect if anyone knows what really matters when it comes to downing bosses, it's these guys. But in talking with hunters in the community, I notice there's a lot of misunderstanding about what goes on in a top raid guilds -- pervasive myths about top raiding teams that don't seem to go away. Join me after the cut as we reveal the secrets of the world's best PvE hunters and find out what really matters, and at the same time take a look behind some of the myths as well.
Scattered Shots: PvP basic stats and specs
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. After a long and frustrating night of progression raiding, you may find yourself thinking, "You know, screw this dragon. It's my teammates that I wanna kill." There are few sensations in this life quite as satisfying as slaughtering other players, kiting weepy melee and glorifying in the lamentations of their menfolk (because believe me, it's the menfolk who do the lamenting in PvP). We're going to start paving the road to lamentation today with a look at how our stat priorities change for PvP and an overview of how the three hunter trees look in a PvP environment. And yes, we'll have some sample PvP specs, too. Join me after the cut as we learn to exalt in the misery of others.
Scattered Shots: Survival 101, part 1
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. After languishing in obscurity for all of vanilla and all of BC, Survival finally burst onto the scene after the great BM nerf of '08 as a leading hunter DPS spec. While it was overtaken by MM with top gear, SV remains a competitive spec with a more forgiving play style. At long last, after so much waiting, those die-hard SV players who have been dedicated to their spec since launch can finally say, "Screw you, fair-weather speccers, I've always been SV. I'm a real SV hunter!" Today, we're going to go through the basic nuts and bolts of the SV spec. As always, the 101 guides are focused on the new level 80 hunter just picking up the spec for the first time. As such, we'll try to avoid going into too many situational things or strategies focused only at top gear levels.
Scattered Shots: Frostheim faux interviews Ghostcrawler
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. This is not actually an interview with Ghostcrawler. I have never spoken with Ghostcrawler, nor have we exchanged emails. In this, we are two lost souls reaching for each other across the vastness of the information superhighway, each seeking that other half to fill the emptiness within us. He by crafting and endlessly refining the perfect class in WoW, as well as nine other support classes to improve the hunter experience. Me by taking apart that creation to revel in the component pieces, to learn how they work and thus better understand him. We are platonic life partners who have yet to meet. Because of this connection we share, this ephemeral bond, I am able to predict exactly how he'd answer if we did speak. If I happened to sit at a bar next to Ghostcrawler in the not-too-distant future and our eyes met over a glass of stout in a moment of magic, I think we can agree that not only would he consent to an interview, but that everything in the following transcript is exactly as he would say it. Except, possibly, for the words.
