Hunter Q/A, what a let down..

#0 - July 23, 2009, 8 p.m.

At the same time, we don’t necessarily want to give them one because then Arcane Shot risks just vanishing from the hunter rotation. But, we can’t just buff Arcane Shot (unless it is very deep in Beast Mastery) because Survival and Marks use that too. See the problem?

When I saw that quote. My heart sank. I realized GC perhaps infact is massively restricted on his hunter knowledge. Did he just forget that SV hunters don't use arcane shot, and never will because ES is far superior? Also, why not buff Arcane in deep BM? Seems like a simple solution. On top of that, I'd like to know why GC didn't go into Hunter PVE dps. Hundreds of hunters have shown evidence of lacking DPS in ulduar. Rogues dominating. Feral/DK/Shaman and other hybrids outdpsing hunters. Overall, it just felt like GC was dodging a lot of the questions. Also, a first for the Q/A "Wait till blizzcon". Really gc? /cry Oh, and you mentioned if you gave pets an instant revive, you'd need to lower their HP to ghoul level hp, which is 12k without glyph. You even realize pets already have lower then that?

Ghostcrawler

#19 - July 23, 2009, 8:31 p.m.

Q u o t e:
ArP MM doesn't use Arcane Shot, that is not the same as MM doesn't use it.

Also, buffing Arcane Shot baseline, in a matter that brings BM up to par to current MM/Surv, could easily skew MM/Surv to using Arcane Shot more then intended (i.e. at the cost of their signature shots).

That is the key, not that they won't buff Arcane Shot, just that they probably won't buff it baseline

Yeah that was my point. The solutions are:

1) Give BM a signature shot and try to give Arcane a situational use.
2) Buff Arcane so deep in BM that nobody else will get that talent.
3) Accept that BM needs to be buffed in ways other than shots.

There are good points and bad points to each tree having a signature shot. A bad point is that it makes e.g. set bonuses hard because you can't boost things like Explosive Shot easily. A good point is the trees feel a little more different rather than just swapping Explosive Shot for Raccoon Shot if you were BM.

Ghostcrawler

#50 - July 23, 2009, 9:27 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Help! I don't know where to use Arcane shot in my survival rotation, with out replacing Explosive shot. What am I doing wrong?

There is a number at which you would use Arcane over Explosive I can assure you.

Q u o t e:
Hunter - 4 pieces: Your Steady Shot has a chance to grant you 600 attack power for 15 sec. (45 internal cooldown)

Death Knight - 4 pieces: Increases the bonus damage done per disease by 20% on Blood Strike, Heart Strike, Obliterate, and Scourge Strike.

That was the point I was making. The original hunter bonus was "Your Explosive Shot, Chimera Shot and X Shot do more damage." The lack of an X shot (it couldn't be Arcane or Steady) killed the whole feature. We designed the DK expressly to have an X strike for every build. We could do that with hunters too. Some players are saying that just makes the specs more and more like each other though.

At a high level, you can have a trivial choice among your specs, which means it doesn't really matter which you pick so the decision is not terribly interesting. Or you can have significant differences among the specs, but that means one-size-fits-all balance solutions and even set bonuses are much harder.