Here’s a brief overview of the latest news on Cataclysm stat changes. For some deeper thoughts and speculation on what it may mean, you can read my WoW.com hunter stat change article.
- Stamina: we get lots more — almost as much as tanks. So does everyone else. This is another BC-style stamina jump.
- Intellect: going away, we don’t have mana, so we don’t need it. It won’t be on our gear. We aren’t sure what the int on our current gear will turn into.
- Attack Power: going away as a stat on gear (will still be in the game). Agility will now give us 2 attack power. AP on existing gear will be converted into agility and stam.
- Agility: giving us 2 attack power per agil, but to compensate it will give us less crit rating.
- Haste: will increase our rate of focus regeneration.
- Armor penetration: going away as a stat on gear (will still be in the game). ArP on existing gear will be converted into crit and haste.
- Armor: we’ll get more armor, and in fact our armor level will be closer to that of plate gear.
- Resilience: pvp only, no longer reducing our chance to be crit.
- Hit: staying around, but hit gems will now be blue.
- Crit: staying around, but our crit percentages won’t be nearly as high as they are now.
- Mastery: the magical new stat that will scale based on our tree. We still don’t know exactly how.
- Reforging: You’ll be able to convert one stat on your gear for 50% that much of another stat. You can’t get rid of your stamina. This is mostly intended for stuff like converting away excess hit rating on gear when you’re already capped.
I can’t wait for Cataclysm! It will be fun to try out all the new changes!
im so going to quit this game
It will take some time to get used to all these changes, but I’m sure they’ll be fun and enjoyable.
Maybe an obvious question but- We should seriously consider being haste capped as Cataclysm approaches?
Feo, probably not. Seeing as these changes *wont* take place until Cataclysm is released, and when it is, we’ll be leveling to get to the new raids and getting entirely new gear anyways.
I am betting that the Int on our gear will become agility since it converts into AP currently, but we will likely see it on a 1:2 ratio since we only get 1 ap for each int now, so 50 int will become 25 agility. Though, if haste affects our focus regen, we might see some of it become haste.
My Dwarven head hurts………… but I’m sure I’ll get used to it all after a while. When I read the “reforging” bit I got all exited for a second because I thought we might be able to pay somebody to turn a bow into a gun with the same stats
No more mana? This boggles my mind what about abilities like aspect of the viper and my arcane torrent for mana regen? What are they going to be changed too? Or viper sting?
Yeah, have to admit, I’m more nervous about the new changes than I am excited. I feel like I’m going to need to relearn my class entirely. I suppose it’ll be nice for the mana to go away though, so it’s worth it in the long term. I just hope they nerf the crit on other classes in the same fashion as they are, ours. Having crit grow with attack power made our gemming decision simple. Now, who knows what’ll be best.
Things will change… Change is usually good, it allows us to grow and expand our horizons.
I suspect it will all balance out in the end and we’ll still be insanely good at what we do once we learn the new rules.
My initial reaction though, is that the future looks particularly rosy for extreme solo and hunter tanking
Perhaps we get a weak selfheal?E.g changing viper sting mana stealing to steal life.It would be awesome for soloing.
Hmm. Lower crit rating sounds not so nice, does this mean in level 80 gear or can we expect our nice 54% crit in level 85 gear?
Great article. As a new player to the game rolling my first level 80, it will be interesting to see how these changes affect this class. One aspect that concerns me is the cost to regem, enchant, and respec in order to maintain good DPS. It’s already hard enough running instances and raids as a ‘new’ 80 without being totally trashed for crappy DPS.
I don’t understand why any other class can put up low DPS and no one says a word but if a hunter puts up low DPS they get lambasted. Very discourging for new players.
Crap. Resilience. I should probably go on a tanking spree soon, in case things go south come Cataclysm. Otherwise, cool beans.
Mastery effects you based on how many talent points you put into any given tree. The deeper you go into a tree, the more mastery is supposed to benefit you for whatever that tree gives you. For DPS classes, I imagine it will mostly be ArP and AP. Although maybe they will pull out some other cool shit too. The mastery portion of the tree is supposed to replace the passive damage bonuses that already exist in the tree, so you can spend points on the cool crap that no one ever takes because it doesn’t boost damage, at least that is the theory. I am interested in how they will actually implement it.
I still don’t like the focus thing. I know, some high end dev guys doesn’t like mana, and was unhappy about it since day one, but since virtually no hunter complained, why change it?
The reason I don’t like it is because it fundamentally changes the way a hunter dps works. Today we have our rotation so that it maximises dps regardless of mana. That is our rotation is not dependend on mana amounts.
Of cousre we can run out, so we have talents, teammates, pots. If that al fails we go into viper. At that moment we lose huge dps for a moment, so our trick is to avoid it and else time it, so it doesn’t occur at moments we need the dps.
So in essence we have unrivaled peak/burst dps, as long as our mana is there. But it sinks when no mana is there.
With focus it becomes just like a roque or deadknight or warrior, etc We must change our rotation so that we have maximum dps per focus/rage/runes/etc generation. We have no burst dps anymore. Of course our dps also doesn’t crash anymore.
I always felt that this huge burst but also huge drop when we have no mana, is something that is an essential part of being a hunter. Changing it to a more steady behaviour changes the whole game. It changes the way we played since 2005.
Too bad, although I’m of course completely open to be surprised
Mastery:
From what i’ve read and heard, you get points based on your talents.
1 – 1% more pet damage
(..)
5 – 2% more pet damage
10 – 3% more pet damage and 1% more crit chance
So basicly, the bonus increases the more you spend into a tree. This will add another dimension as, using the above example, just spending random talents also increases dps. This will help a lot in the goal of ‘pick whichever talent you want’ as the mastery bonus might make ‘weaker’ talents desirable.
This will also help ‘fun’ talents, such as entrapment, as trough the mastery system it will still provide you with some form of damage boost.
DISCLAIMER: do note that above is purely fictional.. the mentioned boost, step size and the like is just for illustrative purposes.
Also, i really love the resilience change. Just plain lowering damage done of both hits and crits so critting (and especially related talents/trinkets, such as proc on crit expose weakness) become desirable again. Removal of mana drain/burn from resilience dont really matter as draining with viper wont be usefull anymore anyway and we wont have mana to drain either.
Oh, almost forgot, there’s also change with mastery on armor bonus.
Using proper armor (in our cause, full mail) will add an additional bonus to the mastery. So if leather is better on dps, the loss on mastery bonus might just let you keep the mail. Same will happen on all classes, probably to ensure you stick to your own gear.
Finally, haste will be useful again. Shoo, Global Cooldown!
What will happen to the armor pen gems? Will they also be replaced with crit or haste gems?
ive wondered what will happen with current gear gems and enchantments myself. if they mechanically switch them out, some folks will be angry.
I think they will switch it all over to the new stats personally however you will be able to proceed to Level 85 by this time I expect you will be getting better gear and have to re gem and enchant everything anyway. I am just praying we can get enough focus regen however my rogue friend says he never runs out of focus and can spam all day if that works for us look out other classes hunters is definitely going to be top dog again
. Dam i was really getting close to a srmour pen build too but after this I think I will leave it on the drawing board and not waste my gems and gold. PS dont forget there will be new enchants and gems probably too which we make people change over even if there original gems do stay or convert over there will be better ones mark my words.
What Im curious about is hunters using leather instead of mail. It has been stated that not using mail will llower our mastery bonus. But the same can be said for right now in Wotlk where you have hunters who are taking leather over mail because of the Armor pen. Whats to stop use from grabbing a piece of well itemized rogue gear over a poorly itemized hunter mail piece? Blizzard has even stated that although the loss to mastery will happen it may still be worth grabbing that leather piece over the mail piece. Im curious to see what incentive blizzard will give us to stay with mail because as you all should know if your getting hit as a hunter your doing something wrong…
I’m really excited to see all these changes, but after more than 2 years on my hunter, mana management has become something instinctive that I can do at the back of my mind. Changing our resource to something like rogue energy or focus is going to take some getting used to.
Chris, i think the point is in bonus vs gear. If you still got your level 80/81 blue/epic then that level 85 10-man leather piece will be a huge upgrade.. probably more then the mastery bonus. However, as you start gathering mail then suddenly that mail drop with slightly lower agi/haste or whatever might just weigh up against the mastery bonus.
Sort of… see it like tier sets. Sometimes getting 4/5 is worth it, sometimes its worth sticking with 2/5 and 2/5… Wether its worth it is up to you.
Oh, most importantly, dont forget blizzard wants you to CHOOSE. They want a spreadsheet to go only so far and then give up.
For example, they want cookie cutter builds that go like “51/0/6, put the rest wherever you want them” and probably the same with titan paths. They tried the same with gems and glyphs, and now they’re adding reforging. So its not that odd if armor itself becomes just another choice of preference.
Does this mean we wont be sharing gear type with anyone else. Right now we have to compete with melee shamans for our gear but if they still need int and we don’t, that would mean drops only for hunters. Related: what will happen to the drop gear that both hunters and shamans use? I hope it will be irrelevant and cat. gear will be like bc gear where the quest rewards of the first zone make our silly epics outdated
Like Armin, I worry about a lack of burst damage with the focus change.
I play arenas with another hunter, which is about the worst combination you can have.
But we do okay, and that is only because our burst damage allowing us to cut through through the heals.
Our fights generally last 20 seconds win or lose.
Without that burst, forget arenas for a hunter, who already have a lot of difficulty to begin with in arenas.
I am pretty sure that this change will result in *more* burst in pvp, not less. If our bar starts full, like a rogue or feral druid, then you can start an arena battle by dumping the whole thing into your most damaging shots immediately. Plus it sounds like we won’t have any combo points to slow us down.
Basically, pve will be balanced around the regen rate, but pvp will be balanced around the size of the pool. This should also make pve more interesting because we an save up energy for burn phases or gimmik power-ups.
Well, i think that for burst you’d better be worried about the massive HP increases then anything else.
Besides, when it comes to burst we’ll probably have the same issue as we do currently and like any other class/spec: GCD’s. If you dont believe me, just look at a rogue in pvp.
Great article Frostheim
I for one can’t wait for Cataclysm. I think hunters should consider themselves lucky we get so much special attention compared to many classes (that is not flame bait!)
I dont know y they feel the need to change it, blizz doesnt know when to leave well enough alone. No one has a problem with mana as a hunter, and if uhave a problem keeping it up u r moron. Real simple, switch to viper for a few seconds after every battle, it will be full the whole time. They make this shit so damn complicated, and then they tell us its to complicated, but do they make it any less, NO, they just change the complications. If it aint broke, don’t fix it.
I really hope they go back to the vanilla itemization where each set was undoubtably better than the set before. Call me crazy but I loved the full 8 peice sets. With the simplifying of stats I think there will be less of a need for off set items because there are only 5 stats we will need, agility, stam, hit, crit and haste. I would like to not have to number crunch and use spread sheets every time a potential upgrade drops. And hopefully there won’t be another t9 t10 set bonus ordeal, I like using my shiney new content gear.