Today I thought it’d be fun to pull together a bunch of related posters for Hunter Poster Friday. These ones are all inside jokes or references of some kind, relating to the site or other hunter community stuff (like the podcast) and plenty of WHU guild love. I’m sure there are more that we’ll see in the Friday’s to come (it takes a long time to dig through all of those for common threads) but here’s a collection of inside joke posters to start us off. Euripides will hate this.
Today at WoW Insider I have a quick & dirty guide and optimization review for hunters in Dragon Soul. A quick one-stop shop for the current state of hunter optimization:
There are a lot of reasons hunters want to top the DPS charts: because the view is better from up there, because we’re a DPS class and it’s our job, because it makes killing bosses easier, or just because it makes your man parts appear larger.
We talk a lot here on Scattered Shots about optimizing your hunter and keeping track of the little changes that happen with every patch and hotfix, but after a while all those little changes add up into a very different optimization picture. Today, we’re going to do a quick review of exactly what is the optimal way spec and play your hunter right now. We’re getting a handful of minor buffs and changes in 4.3.2, and this optimization review will take those into account.
These 10 tips are the quick and dirty answers to the current state of hunter optimization. Bookmark this page and pass it along to that guy with a hunter alt as a one-stop shop for what he should be doing right now. As always, things change with gear and group composition, and there are often choices that are almost as good, but this rundown will get you where you need to go: the top of the charts. … Read More.
MMO-Champion has an interesting post on rated battleground balance, in which they look at the average win percentage for each class with different minimum gear levels. Unsurprisingly for anyone familiar with the state of Cataclysm hunter pvp, hunters have the lowest win percentage of any class in every minimum gear level examined.
What I found was interesting about the article is that the difference between classes was relatively low. In the chart above, for example, MMO-C found that hunters with a minimum ilvl of 370 won 53.3% of their games. Meanwhle the leading class, mages, won 57.55% of their games. While it sucks to be on the low end and hunters have demonstrable issues in pvp, we’re forced to admit that according to this data hunters aren’t really all that far behind in rated bgs (note: this is not looking at arena, where class balance is highlighted much more).
Of course there are a lot of factors that we can’t take into account with statistics like this, including selection bias — the idea that because hunters are poor in pvp the only teams that have hunters are ones that have exceptionally skilled hunters. We have no way of knowing if that’s happening or not, statistically.
Either way, I love it when people put together verifiable data about class balance, and this is one of the best examples I’ve seen for the pvp world. Be sure to check out the balance across all the different minimum ilvls over at MMO-C.
So what do you think — are hunters really only lagging behind the best pvp class in the game (which also happens to be the highest pve dps class at the moment) by a mere 4% in rated bgs? Or is there something else this isn’t taking into account? Or does rated bg balance not really matter and arena is still the one true measure of pvp ability?
asd
I’ve been getting enough emails misunderstanding the way the MMO-Champion presents the patch data that I think it’s worth a clarification. The changes to Aspect of the Hawk and Deterrence will affect all hunter specs. These changes not specific to just BM or just SV.
The confusion comes because MMO-Champion attempts to organize the changes by listing each ability under the spec associated with that ability (something the official patch notes do not do), even if it’s a class-wide ability. So their list of changes looks like this:
Beast Mastery
- Aspect of the Hawk now increases ranged Attack Power by 2700, up from 2000.
Survival
- Deterrence now also reduces all damage taken by 30% while active.
- Black Arrow now ticks every 2 secs instead of every 3 secs. Damage is now spread over 20 secs, up from 15 secs.
What’s happening here is that Aspect of the Hawk is considered a Beast Mastery ability — though every single spec gets access to it at the same time. But in your spellbook, Aspect of the Hawk was under the BM tab, thus MMO-C is associated it with BM even though it’s a class-wide ability.
So again, every single hunter spec will benefit from the buff to Aspect of the Hawk. Every single hunter spec will benefit from the buff to Deterrence. MMO-C only lists them that way as a method of organization — and perhaps not a terribly good one in light of the confusion it’s causing (though that’s how they’ve always done it, and this is the first time I’ve gotten a flood of emails misunderstanding it).
