I don’t know for a fact whether or not camo is currently working as intended or not, but I thought I’d interject some thoughts on the issue, and address some of the most common (and often inane) arguments against camo.

Camo breaks on melee and aoe!!! (or it’s supposed to!!!)

A bunch of people have stepped in to talk about how Camouflage does not make you immune to aoe or to melee attacks. This is not true. Many more have said that is how it’s supposed to work. That may be true, and may not, but I do not know, and neither do they.

These comments come from a blue post waaaay back at the beginning of April, in the class preview where camo was described as:

The hunter enters an obscured state that prevents him or her from taking ranged damage. The character would still be subject to melee or area-of-effect attacks, and dealing or taking damage will break the Camouflage effect. The hunter can move and set traps when under Camouflage, and will receive a damage bonus when attacking while under Camouflage (which will then break the effect).

But this was info from April, not any form of camo at all that was ever implemented in the game. Let’s also remember what else was in that same class preview: cobra shot didn’t affect serpent sting, but BM would get talents to make it their signature shot; viper sting restores 9 focus/3; careful aim makes shots do more damage but have a longer cast time; longevity will reduce BM cobra shot to 1.5 sec cast. None of these were ever implemented in the form first described. It’s not surprising that camouflage wasn’t either.

And that’s fine, these things change — they change before the alpha, before the beta, during the beta. My point is that what was said back then is in no way, whatsoever, representative of how Blizzard now intends an ability to work now. All we know is what they actually implement in the game, and from the start camo was implemented nothing like what was described.

We’re stealing stealth, the one unique thing about rogues

I know this is a ridiculous statement, but seriously, it comes up a lot. I mean a lot.

First of all, who cares? Classes have been getting mechanics from other classes for years. Rogues themselves got a superior version of our Misdirection. Secondly stealth is not unique to rogues. Thirdly camouflage is not stealth any more than invisibility is stealth.

Stealth is a state where others cannot see or detect you, though they have a small chance to do so briefly, if you’re close to them. Aoes will break you out of stealth… but of course first you have to know where the stealthed person is, which is the whole point.

In camouflage, any time you move everyone can see you. Sure, you look damned cool, but still, your position is evident. If aoes could break camo, then it would be absurdly easy to break hunters out, since everyone can see where they are.

Camouflage is basically a pally bubble that lasts 1 minute!!!

Another ridiculous and sadly common statement.

No, it’s not anything like that at all. Paladins can attack while bubbled. They can do anything while bubbled. We cannot. Camo is more like a mobile iceblock, if anything.

But of course it is very difficult for a hunter in pvp combat to go into camouflage. If we have any dot or bleed on us, it will bust us out of camo even if we succeed in FD/camo to get back in (not that easy if someone’s actually attacking you). I have never spent more than a handful of seconds in pvp combat without getting a dot on me. And certainly with camo, that will be the first thing everyone does.

Camo will primarily be used before combat, and between combat engagements.

A hunter can stay in camo and be immune to everything forever!!! OP!!!!

Assuming that the camo’d hunter stays far enough out of combat so that he isn’t pinged with any damage in the second where camo wears off — remember you can’t go into camo while in combat — then yes, he can.

But, what’s wrong with that, really?

A rogue or feral druid can do the exact same thing. All they have to do is stealth and stay on the outskirts of the bg. No one will ever see them, and  if anyone gets remotely close to aoe range they can scuttle away, unseen.

You know what else, every class has the ability to stay immune to damage 24/7. Just don’t log in.

Because as long as the camo’d hunter is immune, he cannot effectively participate in combat. He can’t shoot. His pet can’t attack. In essence, his team has one fewer players on their side.

Don’t get me wrong, camo is a strong ability. It allows for tactical positioning before combat — running in to where you want to be without regard to the enemy and entering combat on your terms. It also has fantastic ambush possibilities — laying in wait. And in some situations hunters will even be able to escape foolish opponents by FD/camoing. That’s strong, but not overpowered.

5 camo’d hunter arena teams OMG OP insta kill anyone!!

Much like 5 stealthed rogues or feral druids. Yes, they will probably obliterate their first opponent (if he/she doesn’t have bubble/frost tomb/deterrence/barkskin, etc). Then the hunters’ll get dotted up and slaughtered by the team with healers.

Great weakness, great strength

As most of you know, I’ve never been a fan of our bleeding minimum range. Yes, it certainly makes is unique to have a brutal pvp weakness like this. One of the reasons I object to it is because I honestly believe it’s a mechanic that cannot be properly balanced — the balance will either favor us too much, or the melee too much — too hard to be absolutely perfectly balanced on that fine line.

But another reason is that we didn’t seem to have some great strength to compensate for this great weakness. I mean, we have the same dps potential as other dps classes. Mages can kite/control even better than we can. We have smaller strengths and smaller weaknesses certainly, but no great strength to compensate for our great weakness. Thus for most of the history of arenas hunter have been underrepresented, with short periods of exceptions.

So I have hopes that camo could help to balance us somewhat. Though to be perfectly honest, I’d far rather not have camo and not have a minimum range. That would be a net gain. So in my opinion at least, camo isn’t as good as our weakness is bad. Speaking of which…

What would you give up for camo?

Among the various way to weight abilities and determine if they are too tough is to compare them to other abilities. Stealth is the common one, and I’d argue that camo is actually better than stealth… by itself. However, the classes that have stealth usually also have a host of brutal abilities that combo with stealth. It’s not the stealth alone that’s so tough (though it is tough) but the stunlocks and hard openers that stealth gives them.

So, would a rogue be willing to give up stealth and those stealth-combos in exchange for camouflage? Would a ret pally be willing to give up bubble — immunity while allowing for full combat actions — in exchange for camouflage?

I think the answer is no. But if the answer is no, then how can camouflage be tougher than those abilities?

Saying that a rogue is designed around stealth is, by the way, not an answer. The ability is overpowered, or it is not overpowered, or it is overpowered in combination with other class abilities but not overpowered with weaker class abilities.

What I think

I think camouflage should get a couple of changes, but mostly stay as it is. I’m totally fine with the ability to be immune to damage as long as you can’t attack. As long as you are taking yourself out of the fight, I’m cool that no one can fight you. The fact that dots break it addresses what would otherwise be my main concern (hopping into camo to evade combat whenever you want).

• I do not think aoe should break camo — since the hunter can be seen, that would make the ability crazy weak. It’s different for stealth, because you have no idea where to aoe.
• I do not think melee should be able to attack a camo’d hunter, mostly for mechanical reasons. It’s melee we’re most worried about. If a melee class can attack us, that’s a double whammy ’cause now we’re in melee range and unable to attack until we successfully run away.
• I don’t have a problem with the one-minute cooldown. That feels about right. Everyone seems to have this idea that hunter’s won’t leave camo until their one minute is up — then fire a couple shots and recamo. That would be a bad player, who would contribute only to losing a battle. You will enter combat when the time is right, and then you won’t be able to re-camo, because you’ve still got 20 or 30 or 40 seconds left on the cooldown. That is the more common situation. By the time that cooldown is up, people will have dotted up the hunter just like they dot up rogues… except hunters have no way to remove those dots, have no vanish — which is as it should be. That’s balance.

I do, however, think it should be possible to break a hunter out of camo. I prefer that every ability should have a counter somewhere. Much like heroic throw and mass dispell can take down a pally bubble (or whatever it is that can) I think there should be a couple abilities specific to a couple specs that can counter camo. But not something that just anyone can do.

Furthermore, I think if a hunter trap deals damage, that should break the hunter out of camo as well. That seems well in the spirit of the ability to me — if you do damage, you’re out of camo.

Finally, it may be possible that you’d want to give camo a nice 3 sec cast time. I’m not certain that’s necessary, but if it turns out to be too good at escaping combat mid-fight, that’s the solution I’d use. Something to keep an eye on, in other words, with a fix in your back pocket.

Otherwise I think the ability is nicely strong tactically, but not very strong in actual combat. It doesn’t make you more likely to beat anyone once you are engaged in combat, but lets you enter combat on your terms, which is very helpful. Also, though the “Camo is OP” thread in the beta forums was locked when people started insulting each other, and though it’s been several days, we still have not heard anything from Blizzard on the subject.

This leads me to think that the way camouflage works is not an accident. Whether they’ll decide it’s too strong is another matter, but they haven’t stepped in to say “whoops!”, and they usually do by now when a big error is made.

After playing around with them a bit, I abruptly decided to stop. I’m not yet convinced that these values are set in stone — they could change and we don’t yet have the end of the beta in sight. We aren’t at the tweaking stage of the beta yet, we’re still at the big heapin’ sweeping changes stage of the beta. And calculating this stuff isn’t so much fun that I want to do it twice.

However, here are some of the values I got before stopping. They’re a bit crude and the rating to 1% could be off by as much as one rating point. So not exact, but certainly pretty close.

The Hit Cap

The hit cap still appears to be 8%. There’s even a handy little thingymajobber on the paper doll that lets you know what your miss chance is for various levels.

It looks like we’ll now need about 120.19 hit rating to get 1% hit chance. This means a whopping 962 hit rating to reach the hit cap. Ouch!

Other Stats

Agility is indeed providing us with 2 attack power per point of agility.

We need about 179 mastery rating to get 1 mastery.

We need about 180 crit rating to get 1% crit.

The Gear

I can’t really say how the gear is going to work out or what stats to expect on our gear. When I leveled up to 83 in Hyjal and Vashj’ir and Blackrock Caverns and Throne of Tides I came across several pieces of blue gear that were almost as good what I have not. Almost. Usually with more stamina and the same dps stats, but without a socket. And of course I’d have to re-enchant, so I didn’t replace them (though the new gear had mastery, something that serves some specs very well at the moment).

But when I leveled from 83-85 they had xp turned off in dungeons (so I didn’t do them), and I quested in Uldum and Twilight Highlands. Neither of those zones have gear done yet, so you get no gear for the quest rewards. Blue posts have told us that we’ll be getting upgrades from questing there, but I cannot say what kind of gear we may or may not have.

With any luck I’ll be able to get some instance runs together with the Wyrmfoe beta crew and check out the newer 5-mans, and then we’ll see what the quality of the gear is.

The level cap is 85 in the Cataclysm beta, and we finally have access to Camouflage. I have to say, for what is essentially a pure pvp ability– and I was a bit disappointed to learn our level 85 hunter ability was only for pvp — but despite this, Camouflage is impressive! Both in appearance (badass!) and utility.

Seriously, take a look in the Camouflage video:

How Hunter Camouflage Works

I’ve been doing as much testing as I can on Camouflage. I haven’t tested it against everything, but I’ve covered a whole lot. Here’s the basics:

You can only enter Camouflage while out of combat. If you or your pet attack, Camouflage ends. If you take damage (from a DoT on you, for example) Camouflage ends. Camouflage lasts for 1 minute, and has a 1-minute cooldown.

While in Camouflage, if you’re standing still it acts as stealth (kind of) — you essentially cannot be seen. While moving you have that cool-shimmery predator effect. You can be targeted, however — not by tab-targetting, but by clicking. But though you can be targeted, you cannot be attacked. Also while in Camouflage, you do not display a nameplate to someone who has nameplates turned on — so you remain difficult to see.

In PvE, if you’re Camouflaged, mobs do not aggro on you. Your traps are effectively useless on them however, since they aren’t in combat and they just evade or insta-heal damage. In PvP, you’re immune to virtually everything while Camouflaged. Oh yeah, seriously.

The Camouflage List of Awesome

The List of Awesome includes all of the varied awesome things that you are totally immune to while in Camouflage:

• You are not affected by any ability that must target you
• You cannot be tracked
• Flare does not remove you from camo
• Hunter’s Mark does not remove you from camo
• You do not set off traps
• You are not affected by any aoe that I’ve tested (including locks, priests, and warriors)
• You are not affected by aoe fears
• You are not affected by mass dispell
• You are not affected by demoralizing shout

What you can do while in Camouflage

All of the follow can be used while under the effects of Camouflage without breaking Camouflage:

• Drop traps
• Use the trap launcher
• Change aspects
• Deterrence
• Use the pet “move to” command (which could have some neat tricks)
• Mend pet
• Dismiss pet
• Summon pet
• Use non-damaging engineering stuff, like nitro boosts, parachute cloak, explosive sheet (but not bombs)
• Drink a potion
• Use hearthstone

What you cannot do while in Camouflage

Well, technically not anything other than what you can do — some things you literally cannot do, while most others will simple break you out of Camouflage. Specific things tried and failed include:

• Any kind of attack, by you or your pet, other than traps
• Hunter’s Mark
• Flare
• Misdirection
• Bandaging (you can bandage others, but not yourself)
• Eat
• Disengage — well, since you have to be not in combat to enter camo… and you have to be in combat to disengage, you pretty much can’t by default.

Overall, Camouflage scores an 11 on the Awesomesauce meter. Sure, it’s still a pvp ability and sure, all those immunities are only useful if you aren’t actually fighting (and no one has put a dot on you) but camo is fricking huge. Huge I say!

Even in PvE, camo will give us a nice quality of life boost. The ability to just camo and walk past anything we don’t want to waste the time to slaughter. Or rather than just hitting FD when things get rough, we can hit FD, camo, then saunter off to safety.

So yeah, Camouflage is a winner. Now just wait for the other classes to start wailing about it : )

I’m sure that’s just a bug when they tried to re-implement the minimum range after accidentally removing it. But goddamn. Seriously?

My pets do not seem to have any new abilities. Here are the changes we see…

Beast Mastery

• Viper Venom and Scorpid Venom seems to be gone.
• Focus Fire now has a 15 sec cooldown. Down from 30 sec.
• Improved Kill Command now Increases the critical strike chance of your Kill Command by 5/10% instead of reducing its cooldown.
• Kill Command now triggers the global cooldown.
  

Marksmanship

• Kill Shot now deals 150% weapon damage (down from 200%) and scales with 30% of your Attack Power (down from 40%). Base damage reduced by 50%. Cooldown increased from 6 sec to 10 sec. Focus cost removed.
• Multi-Shot – Fires several missiles, hitting your current target and all enemies within yards of that target for x% of weapon damage. / 40 Focus, 5-35 yd range, Instant
• Aimed Shot no longer deals 300% of weapon damage, now deals [ 40% of RAP + 681 ] damage. Cast time increased from 2.5 sec to 3.5 sec.
• Arcane Shot base damage reduced by 60%, now scales from 19% of Attack Power, up from 17%.
• Chimera Shot no longer deals 190% weapon damage, now deals [ 24% of RAP + 401 ].
• Artisan Quiver (specialization): instead of giving 25% attack power boost as both BM and SV specializations do, this now increases auto-shot damage by 15%.
  

Survival

• Serpent Spread – Targets hit by your Multi-Shot are also afflicted by your Serpent Sting equal to 12/15  sec of its total duration.
• Scatter Shot – now has a minimum range of 5 yards. (Mistake when fixing the minimum range on other stuff?)
  

Base focus regen rates look untouched. Interesting to see a change to Artisan Quiver for MM — I wonder if this means we can expect either the BM or SV “25% AP” one to chance in the near future?

The loss of viper and scorpid venom is odd. I kinda understand viper venom, which has only situational (pvp) uses, but scorpid venom? I guess we shall no longer be one of the classes bringing the armor debuff.

The big news on the BM front is that the Imp Kill Command talent has gone back to boosting the crit chance of Kill Command. This means that the talent no longer removes the cooldown on Kill Command — thus BM now will need to use arcane (more on that in a bit) as a focus dump and kill command on cooldown. Boosting the crit chance on kill command is also great, as it combos with sic ‘em and cobra strikes. This is the start of an actual rotation for BM! Add to that Kill Command now triggers the global cooldown, and at the very least we’ve removed the one-button rotation macro. Whew!

Focus Fire now has a cooldown equal to its duration, of 15 seconds. This is a… odd change. You’ll still want to hit it every time it’s available (except, possibly, during big red pet) and it still doesn’t trigger the global cooldown. This is still looking like an ability that requires no thought and will just be macro’d into all the other shots.

Shot Damage Adjustments

Many shots have had their damage adjusted so that they are less dependent on weapon damage and scale more with attack power. We’ll have to do testing to see how this actually works out, but I figure it’ll be a wash, and I totally agree with this move. We’re still scaling with weapon damage, just not as strongly.

Kill Shot looks like it got weaker overall, with a reduction both in base damage and in attack power coefficient and its cooldown increased. It is also now free, not costing any focus.

Aimed Shot is far weaker. In fact it’s only a bit better than arcane shot seems to be. Gone are the days of the 20k aimed shot crits. Now the average crits for me at level 83 seem to be around 11-12k.

Arcane shot had it’s base damage reduced a touch, but had its attack power coefficient increased. Is this the predicted tweak to make arcane worth using again? Will it go back to being better than steady/cobra and thus go back to being our focus dump? Initial testing suggests that arcane is indeed a *bit* better than cobra shot for BM, and certainly better than steady for MM. The numbers are close enough however that I should really do some good long target dummy tests.

Multi-Shot AoE

So multi-shot has been changed to be pretty much exactly what I thought it’d be — except instead of a conical attack, it’s sort of an exploding attack. You shoot one guy, and everyone within a certain number of yards (we don’t know how far yet) also gets hit. Still costs us 40 focus, meaning at best we can only fire 2 or 3 in a row before going back to steady/cobra. It still has a minimum range.

This does indeed feel like their intent for a more huntery feeling aoe. By which they maintain our minimum range mechanic, and we go back to having a weak aoe (but we still have an aoe). It is true, however, that we have fewer aoe situations than we do in Wrath, and that everyone’s aoe has been weakened.

Ultimately I suspect I’ll be fine with this version of our aoe. The big disappointment is that we can only fire it twice and then work on recharging. Also, MM has a talent that makes it cheaper so can fire more; SV has a talent that makes it land much harder (serpent sting applied on every single target? OMG) and BM… is screwed? Let’s get them something to make our sucky aoe a little less sucky.

We’ve had new builds just about every week for the last month or so, all of them bringing various hunter changes. Despite all this constant change, the details of hunter rotations are holding pretty steady… for the most part.

Arcane shot has been repeatedly tweaked time and again — and every time made weaker. Currently arcane shot actually hits for less damage than either cobra shot or steady shot (a lot less damage – nearly half the damage). So if you’re at full focus, you’re actually better off using another steady rather than an arcane. The result is that currently MM and SV will use Kill Command to dump excess focus.

However, I’m sure their goal isn’t to effectively remove arcane shot from the game, and I’m guessing they’ll tweak that damage back up so that it becomes a valid focus dump — which seems like the correct role for the shot… though I am a little baffled as to what they were thinking when they made it do less damage than our free focus-generating shots. Do they want to remove arcane from rotations?

Multi-shot is now down to only 20 focus, and I think that change came in a wee hot-fix patch that came after the latest beta build. The damage still sucks, and it’s still just 3 targets, but we probably have to wait for another actual build or two to see what their plans for multi-shot are. However, with Serpent Spread SV is probably better off applying Serpent Sting via multi-shot rather than pushing the serpent sting button. The shorter duration doesn’t matter, ’cause cobra shots will take care of that.

The MM rotation now looks more like it did earlier in the beta when arcane shot was expensive — since it’s now using Kill Command instead of arcane shot, but again, I’m assuming this is temporary and arcane shot will go back to being the dump. BM is still a decision-free spec, but it’ll probably take a build or two before that gets fixed (and to those who disagree, I can only assure you that Blizz does not want a spec to be devoid of decision-making or to be playable at near-optimum levels with a one-button macro).

Kill Command has an annoying bug, that I’m assuming will get fixed: when you’re fighting bosses with large hit boxes, your pet is considered too far away to actually use Kill Command. So currently tough to get actual KC data in actual 5-mans, and when I’m MM I end up capping on focus since I’m better off using steady shot rather than dumping focus with arcane shot, which is a sad failure of the focus mechanic.

I am, however, kicking ass on the dps charts in 5-mans. Whether this is because I’m a bit more familiar with the instances, or just the fact that dps balance hasn’t been done yet, it’s still nice to see. I’m doing either about the same or slightly more dps on average than I do now in heroics (usually a chunk over 7k). And that’s without volley.

Admittedly I’m level 83; however, my dps has actually gone down every level from 80 simply because I was super geared for level 80, and as those rating changes hit (losing 40% crit, 16% haste, etc) the dps plummets despite the increase in shot power.

Misdirection

As I’ve mentioned before, our new Misdirection has the added text at the end:

Transferred threat is not permanent, and will fade after 30 seconds.

This left us with the question of what “fade” means. Does it mean the transferred threat just vanishes, disappears into the ether? Or does the threat move back to us after 30 seconds, making the transfer temporary?

Happily, I did some testing and it seems we got the best deal, and the transferred threat just disappears — it does not go back to the hunter. So we can still use MD to get a few threat-free shots off, even if we don’t permanently boost the tank’s threat in the process. I am finding that I’m having far more aggro problems in dungeons now than in Wrath, even with tanks pulling over 4k dps.

Also, when I asked a guild tank who’s in the beta to help me test this to see how it worked, he had some questions:

Og: What exactly do you want me to do?

Frost: I just need you to stand there while a mob beats on you for a while.

Og: And that’s it?

Frost: Yes, you need to generate zero threat. My pet will attack a mob a couple times, generating a few hundred threat. Then I’ll MD to you and shoot the mob a couple times, generating several thousand threat and sending the mob to attack you. Then after 30 seconds when MD fades we’ll see if the mob comes to me, or goes to the pet.

Og: So am I going to end up naked in front of a target dummy? Because that’s what testing always seems to be to you.

Frost: Not this time, no. And that’s not me! That’s just the way science works!

Mastery

Obviously the mastery bonus for each spec are not balanced against each other. Radically not balanced. I mean, you get a few pieces of gear with mastery, and suddenly your SV spec is getting an extra 5% damage to everything except auto-shot and your pet. That’s f’ing awesome! You’re MM and the same gear gets you an extra 4% chance to proc a half auto-shot damage shot. That is much, much less of a boost.

Of course, I figured, MM does more damage naturally, so they need a weaker mastery so that in the end the specs can dps about the same. Only as I’ve been thinking about it more, I’m not sure this is such a good thing. Certainly you can’t expect them to be perfectly balanced — they’ll always be off a bit and will move around and blizz starts to tweak those numbers to balance the spec.

The unfortunate result of the benefit of mastery being so varied is that the specs are going to value the mastery stat wildly differently. So differently, in fact, that you could end up needing a different gear set for SV than you do for MM. This is a bit disappointing to me, because I was looking forward to an era in which the specs were dps balanced and we’d use our dual-speccing to swap from spec to spec mid-raid to use the spec that compliments the fight mechanics of a particular boss the most.

But if we need different gear to play a different spec… yikes!

Population Explosion

Back in the first days of the beta, it was kind of like being in an awesome club of like-minded folk. People were helpful and worked together and chatted together. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were asshats then, but I never really encountered them. When people disagreed, they talked about why they disagreed. If it was a technical disagreement someone would produce data. If it was opinion they’d disagree respectfully and go on their way. It was like a guild.

Now with the population explosion of the beta in the last three weeks or so, it’s a far less nice place to be. The beta forums have gone way, way down hill. When people disagree they start getting into name-calling and personal attacks rather than discussing what they actually disagree on. You also see more and more people posting flat contradictions (rather than making an argument) and then treating people who contradict them as morons.

There’s also a whole lot more wrongness going on in the forum. This was always there, but the percentage seems to be higher now. People who claim patently silly things about rotations — a favorite of mine was that MM doesn’t need to save up focus for Chimera, instead that focus will somehow just always magically be there when you need to fire the shot. And these people, of course, post them just like the contradiction — no reasoning to support their weird thinking.

The larger chunk of the beta invitees — as I understand it — is effectively a random sampling. The people brought in specifically for their expertise or experience are a sufficient minority that they shouldn’t skew the sampling in any statistically significant way.

Whether there are a thousand or fifty thousand people, the percentage of asshats and trolls and scum who exist just to pollute the internet should be the same. So why does it seem like as any given population increases, the percentage of the loud-mouthed worthless increases?

Is it that they are dragging other people down to their level, the gravitational pull of the lowest common denominator? Or is it just that the loud-mouthed ranting of these rage-filled asstrolls has caused the non-rage-filled asstrolls to step out of the conversation. I have to admit to struggling with that impulse myself.

For the time being I’m sticking it out — despite that there are other channels available for sending feedback, including the in-game bug & suggestion reporting — I feel like presenting the feedback within the beta community is more important, and is a responsibility of the beta tester. You never know when someone is going to have a perfect answer to why your thought is wrong, or when your thought sparks an even better thought in someone else. Just submitting suggestions via the reporting tool is working in a vacuum, giving a thought without a bunch of people to chew that thought over and offer insight, support, or disagreement to supplement your voice to the developers.

But I tell ya, if things keep up like this, I’m tempted to subscribe to the work in a vacuum theory, no matter how much nature abhors those people.

I have a suspicion that Wrath will go down in the history books as the golden age of pet tanking and extreme soloing. I think that Wrath hit the precise perfect balance for extreme pet antics, whether by design or by accident. We have solo’d from Molten Core to Violet Hold and everything in between (and more). We have used our pet to tank for our raids, from Naxx to Ulduar to TotC, all the way to ICC. Our pets have tanked Marrowgar, Deathwhisper, Gunship and Blood Princes, and our pets have even solo-tanked Sindragosa. We can pet tank Rotface while we kite the slimes.

…

While it’s too early to say how pet tanking will work out in Cataclysm – the pet design pass has not yet been done — I keep getting emails about it, and we have seen enough to do some speculation. Join me after the cut for a look at what made pet tanking work so well in Wrath and what we know about it so far in Cataclysm… Read More.

Thus I went and put together a simple one-button macro that will take care of everything you need in your BM rotation, including cooldowns. Hopefully this explains the issue better than my words could : )

Now, technically this rotation is all you need to do — moving or standing still — to get within a few percent of your optimal dps as BM. To really max your dps, you’ll manually hit a couple extra cobra shots before hitting big red pet and just use the macro the other 90% of the time.

I should point out that this is in fact even simpler than the BC one-button macro, because back in BC we still had to reapply Serpent Stings outside the macro.

Also, it’s possible that at higher levels than we can now reach it’ll be a good idea for BM to take improved steady shot (whether this will be worth it depends on what the final Cobra vs Steady Shot damage works out to be at level 80). In that case BM will have to hit steady shot twice outside of the macro — thus needing two whole buttons : )

Note that the super special guy at the end has already been fixed in the beta in Friday’s patch (this is the problem with doing articles on the beta — by the time they’re actually published, info may have changed!).

Tom Cruise — use your witchcraft to put out the magical fire of AWESOMESAUCE!!!!

In the current beta build there is… NO MINIMUM RANGE ON SHOTS!!!!

After wrestling with some odd errors I was finally advised to delete some random folders here and there and got into the beta… rushes to Ironforge, leapt over to my favorite target dummy, got in melee range, swung my axe a few times… then started shooting!

It does appear that this only applies to our special shots. In melee range we still use our melee attack instead of auto-shot. But still, whatever, this is brilliant!

Suddenly everything seems so much brighter. Colors are more vivid. Life is wonderful!

/tar Ghostcrawler
/salute