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.

It is now very late at night, and I’m very dirty, stink of bug spray (which hides other stinks) and I’m very tired. I have my beta downloading the patch, and I shall get to it much later in the day today … much later. First I shall sleep in for a long, long time. Then I have to actually unload and unpack everything.

But I’m back and I’ll poke around to see what they changed and have an update for you today.

Roomate: Hey Frost. I need a big strong man…

Frost: (looks up)

Roommate: … but you’ll do.

Frost: (spends the next chunk of his evening moving furniture to obscurely more attractive locations).

I tend to use the horde bank when I’m in Dalaran, because it’s closer to the engineering auction house, and usually when I’m going bank stuff I’m going back and forth between there and the AC. Well one day a few months back I noticed someone waving to me, and I was shocked to see it was a horde character, Quadilious! He had apparently transferred to my server for a new raid team… but foolishly to the horde side, a decision I’ve no doubt he’ll regret before his days are done.

But that’s neither here nor there. I recently got an email from Quadilious showing me some of the videos that he’s got going up, including a video of his gameplay in action. You can see his keyboard and mouse-like-thingy setup as he plays, with the in-game action as picture in picture. It’s kinda fascinating to watch, and as always make me feel inadequate. I only wish we could see this in a more movement-heavy fight, though that would probably just drop my self-esteem further : )

If you’re interested in more, you can go to Quadilious’ site.

You hunters these days and your love affair with mana. All I hear from kids lately is, “Waa! I don’t want focus. I like my mana!”

Well listen up, pups: You may think you have mana right now, but you don’t. I don’t know what that little blue bar you have really is — some kind of frilly decoration that has something to do with “feelings” or “positive reinforcement” or some such nonsense, I imagine. But whatever it is, it ain’t mana…. Read More.

The next two WHU events will likely happen much, much closer together — though as events they may not be quite as epic. Currently the plan is to have an in-game event on Pirate Day, and another one during Brewfest. But that’s a matter for the future, for now:

WHU In-Game Event
Sat, Sept 11th — 6pm Server Time
Levels 1-30
Meet in Kharanos

If you are unfamiliar with the WHU guild, you can read how to join up on the WHU Guild Page. You can also see some of our previous in-game events in the videos below:

Our current version of Multi-Shot has not target cap. It’s a little like Fan of Knives.

It’s looking like the aoe version of multi-shot will look a lot like the normal version of multi-shot, just with unlimited targets. This means that you have to hit it every time you want the effect (it has no cooldown, but limited by your focus) and you’ll have to recharge focus every few shots. This also means that it will not ignore our minimum range as volley did. Nor can you eat food, send IMs, and play solitare as you could during volley channel.

As I’ve explained at ponderous length before, I’m vehemently against the minimum range given the way the game is currently balanced. However, if you’re going to have a minimum range as part of the hunter mechanic, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to give us dps shots that ignore that minimum range, and this was an anticipated effect of the volley replacement.

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.

There has been a bit of frenzy over the Volley loss, both over on the beta foums, and in comments here. Not even so much over the loss of volley, but over what Ghostcrawler had to say about it (and possibly a bit about their wonky implementation of the change, which I agree seems poorly done).

I’m concerned that a lot of the GC Volley rage stems from either misunderstanding something Ghostcrawler said, or from deliberately only reading the negative things and not reading any of the positive things. Let me highlight a couple quotes, that will hopefully make the situation look a bit better:

The Volley and Multi-Shot niches were very similar, which resulted in the latter being dead.

This I think is the statement that caused the most misunderstanding. Some people interpreted this to mean that Ghostcrawler thinks that multi-shot (or volley) is not currently used. This is not what he’s saying. He’s just saying that hunters have multiple tools to deal damage to multiple targets — multi-shot, explosive trap, and volley. The end result was that no one used multi-shot… in the beta. This discussion is all about the beta. (And actually, no one used it because it was worse damage than single-target shotting, and, you know, it’s not an aoe).

Why not kill multi-shot? Ghostcrawler also answered that:

We wanted to pick one and we though Multi-Shot felt more huntery and less “clunky”

Now don’t get me wrong, volley is far superior to multi-shot. Volley is, for example, an aoe. Multi-shot is not. And in the beta multi-shot’s damage blows taurens. However, don’t forget this:

We think Multi-Shot is a more interesting ability and can fill the hunter AE niche (along with Explosive Trap). We’ll have to change Multi-Shot from the current version to get it there.

They know that multi-shot is not a replacement for volley as it is right now. They will be changing it! Finally, some more words of reassurance:

When you do need to AE, hunters will have the tools to do so.

Now, it is entirely possible that their implementation of the multishot solution to aoe will suck. It absolutely could. It’s also possible that their solution will rock ass. Or be just right for the new Cataclysm gameplay.

But the point is, we don’t know.

All we know is they say they are aware that we need an aoe. They don’t want volley to bet that aoe. They know multishot is not currently that aoe. They are changing multishot and assure us that we’ll be able to aoe as needed.

If you assume that any change being made will suck even when you know nothing about it, either you’re just naturally a pessimist (in which case you really shouldn’t be posting your negative opinion everywhere – pessimists are wrong just as often as optimists, and that’s pretty often) or possibly you just have a very low opinion of Blizzard’s game design… in which case maybe you should switch games.

But if you’re one of the vast majority in the middle — you love wow and your hunter, and Blizzard sometimes gets it wrong and sometimes gets it right — but generally gets it right more than wrong and the game steadily improves over time — then just be sure not to skip over all the good things Ghostcrawler said. There’s plenty of it, and it addresses every concern.

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.