Aimed shot 3sec cast in cata. deadzone gone?

#0 - July 1, 2010, 12:59 a.m.

With the NDA lifted, all the class changes are public now and looking at the Hunter changes i have a few concerns:

With aimed shot being casted, what are hunters expected to do vs melee or anyone for that matter once they get in their face or a hunter has to move?

As of now, Hunter dmg is very frontload because of mana and our instants, i get it, its a bit much. BUT looking at the cata changes, the only thing say an MM hunter can do is arcane shot, which is horrible dmg, and chimera shot on the go included auto shots with aspect of the fox, BM arcane shot auto shot, and SV explosive shot auto shot.

It just seems our dmg is going to be significantly decreased especially since hunters will be forced to steady shot for meaningful focus back. Our main 2 attacks will be casted and hunters will become super melee trainable. Hunters dont have shields of any kind, or soul links of any kind, so its not like we can sit there and let the melee kick our teeth in while attempt to use our biggest attacks.

I guess what im trying to get at is where is the dev team going with hunters making us rely so heavily on casted abilities while keeping the "Dead zone AKA melee"?

Ghostcrawler

#4 - July 1, 2010, 1:41 a.m.

It's not a "dead zone." It's a minimum range. I say that because many hunters use "dead zone" to refer to an old design quirk where there was a range at which neither range nor melee attacks would work. We haven't had a dead zone for some time.

If a melee is up in your stuff, you have a couple of choices. Choice one is to use your melee abilities. Choice two, which will probably work out better, is to get away from them and resume using ranged attacks. You have several defensive cooldowns you can use to gain distance or survive long enough to gain distance. Your third choice is to keep shooting even with someone attacking you in melee. By design that is supposed to be quite ineffectual.

In Cataclysm, hunters have some capacity to do damage while moving, but again that's not going to be a super effective way of dealing damage. It's a last resort.

Ghostcrawler

#46 - July 1, 2010, 6:31 a.m.

I meant trying to shoot while someone is in melee with you isn't going to work out well. We don't want a model where the hunter goes about his merry way while melee dudes are trying to melee him.