Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

Another year of hunting is almost at an end, and that means it's time to dig into the vast past of December 2010, when Cataclysm was fresh and shiny and new and SV hunters were dominating every DPS chart, a time before aspect dancing and when pets still had a happiness system (kind of). That's right, it's time to dust off my 2011 hunter predictions and see how I did. It's also time to make new predictions for the state of hunters going forward in 2012 and take some guesses at what's going to happen with the class in the tumultuous year ahead.

Looking back at some of the changes, it's interesting to see the patterns and similarities in the class over time. SV is again the top DPS spec as it was a year ago -- only now instead of blowing away all comers with pretty demonstrably overpowered DPS, SV is at best middle of the pack. In practice, the hunter class is one of the poorest DPSers this tier.

SV got nuked to death in patch 4.0.6, much as an overpowered BM spec got over-nerfed into oblivion in patch 3.0.8 in early Wrath, except that while overnerfed, SV got it much gentler than BM did back in the day. The nerf bat is hitting a bit softer these days. Let's hope that's a trend that continues.

Continue reading Scattered Shots: Hunter predictions for a new year

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Hunter predictions for a new year originally appeared on WoW Insider on Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

Another year of hunting is almost at an end, and that means it's time to dig into the vast past of December 2010, when Cataclysm was fresh and shiny and new and SV hunters were dominating every DPS chart, a time before aspect dancing and when pets still had a happiness system (kind of). That's right, it's time to dust off my 2011 hunter predictions and see how I did. It's also time to make new predictions for the state of hunters going forward in 2012 and take some guesses at what's going to happen with the class in the tumultuous year ahead.

Looking back at some of the changes, it's interesting to see the patterns and similarities in the class over time. SV is again the top DPS spec as it was a year ago -- only now instead of blowing away all comers with pretty demonstrably overpowered DPS, SV is at best middle of the pack. In practice, the hunter class is one of the poorest DPSers this tier.

SV got nuked to death in patch 4.0.6, much as an overpowered BM spec got over-nerfed into oblivion in patch 3.0.8 in early Wrath, except that while overnerfed, SV got it much gentler than BM did back in the day. The nerf bat is hitting a bit softer these days. Let's hope that's a trend that continues.

Continue reading Scattered Shots: Hunter predictions for a new year

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Hunter predictions for a new year originally appeared on WoW Insider on Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

We all know by now that talents are going to work a lot differently in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, but what we don't know yet is exactly what's going to happen with our pet talent trees. Not only that, but Blizzard itself isn't entirely sure what it's going to do about them, other than not wanting to leave them the way they are now. We do know that we will get to choose what family our pets belong to. If you tame a cat, you can choose to make it a tenacity, cunning, or ferocity pet. But pet talents are a bit up in the air.

There are currently two possibilities for pet talents. The first is to remove pet talents entirely, making your pet's special abilities and spec -- tenacity, ferocity, or cunning -- the only unique features of the pet. Thus, every ferocity cat is the same as every other ferocity cat. This option is dull and dreary with nothing interesting or engaging about it. Call it the Shaman Option, in other words, or the Blah Option.

The other possibility is to revamp the pet talent system so that it more closely resembles the new character talent system in MoP. In this system, we turn some pet talents into spec abilities, and then give an abbreviated tree of meaningful choices. I call this the Awesome Option -- or in other words, the Hunter Option. You're going to love it. Here's how the Awesome Option could work.

Continue reading Scattered Shots: Pet talent possibilities in Mists of Pandaria

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Pet talent possibilities in Mists of Pandaria originally appeared on WoW Insider on Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

It's trinkets day here on Scattered Shots, back by popular demand. The number of emails I've been getting about hunter trinkets lately has made me suddenly realize that I have not posted my usual new tier trinket round-up and reevaluation -- and with the new tier of Raid Finder trinkets out, there the decision of when to upgrade is yet more complex.

Trinkets are a lot like the nine support classes in WoW: You know they're useful, but it can be hard to figure out exactly which one is worth using without doing some math. Only unlike the support class players, you always want to have two of them with you. And they don't smell funny, or refuse to heal your pet, or screw up your lovely execution of executions.

Maybe trinkets aren't much like the support classes after all. They're better.

Join me after the cut as we run down the new 4.3 trinkets, compare them to the best of the previous tier's trinkets, and give some thought to the new Raid Finder versions of the trinkets as well.

Continue reading Scattered Shots: Patch 4.3 hunter trinket roundup

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Patch 4.3 hunter trinket roundup originally appeared on WoW Insider on Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

Patch 4.3 has been out for over a week now, and that means that it's so old news. It's time for us to finally look forward to patch 5.0 and the Mists of Pandaria hunter talent preview that we first got a look at during BlizzCon.

The new talent system strips down the talent selections to a mere six talent choices. Every 15 levels, you are presented with three possible hunter talents, and you can choose only one of them. Then 15 levels later, you choose one of a different three talents, and so on -- only unlike many talents now, these talents aren't meaningless.

Now, the last time we talked about this MoP stuff, the comments got a bit heated. To assist you today, I have included the above video. If you're about to say anything stated in that video, you are about to become one of those people and are better off calling your mom instead. She hasn't heard from you in too long anyway. She worries.

Continue reading Scattered Shots: Hunting Mists of Pandaria talents

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Hunting Mists of Pandaria talents originally appeared on WoW Insider on Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

Patch 4.3 has been out for over a week now, and that means that it's so old news. It's time for us to finally look forward to patch 5.0 and the Mists of Pandaria hunter talent preview that we first got a look at during BlizzCon.

The new talent system strips down the talent selections to a mere six talent choices. Every 15 levels, you are presented with three possible hunter talents, and you can choose only one of them. Then 15 levels later, you choose one of a different three talents, and so on -- only unlike most talents now, these talents are meaningless.

Now, the last time we talked about this MoP stuff, the comments got a bit heated. To assist you today, I have included the above video. If you're about to say anything stated in that video, you are about to become one of those people and are better off calling your mom instead. She hasn't heard from you in too long anyway. She worries.

Continue reading Scattered Shots: Hunting Mists of Pandaria talents

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Hunting Mists of Pandaria talents originally appeared on WoW Insider on Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

At long last, patch 4.3 is live, bringing with it the great hunter balancing buffs (and the pesky melee buff that we don't benefit from -- but the video above demonstrates pretty clearly that hunters need no melee buff). At the outset, the patch is looking like a good thing for hunter spec balance, boosting BM and SV up to levels that are nearly indistinguishable from MM DPS.

We also got a nice little surprise buff to SV that alters the base SV rotation -- and actually has the potential to give SV that last little push into first place, possibly slipping ever so slightly past MM in the DPS charts.

Join me after the cut for a quick recap of what we're seeing in patch 4.3 and the T.N.T. cooldown change that looks like it's going to change the SV hunter shot choices.

Continue reading Scattered Shots: 4.3 bonus hunter changes

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: 4.3 bonus hunter changes originally appeared on WoW Insider on Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

Blizzard posted its Mists of Pandaria talent calculator, giving us a bit more of a peek into how things are going to play out with the new talent system. The talents that we're seeing are the same as what was revealed at BlizzCon (and we will get around to looking at those in depth soon -- just not today). But in addition to the talents, we also got to see the very first look at what our new spec abilities would look like.

Some of the support classes actually got to see what some of their new spec abilities would be in MoP, but as the premiere death dealers in WoW, they needed more time to refine the ultimate abilities of the hunter class.

If you'll recall, in MoP talents will be class-wide and not specific to each spec (and there will be far fewer of them). Many of what are now spec talents will become default spec abilities that each spec gets when it reaches the appropriate level. Others are going away entirely. Today we're going to take a look at what those must-have abilities are for each spec and which ones appear to be gone completely.

Continue reading Scattered Shots: Hunter spec abilities in Mists of Pandaria

Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Scattered Shots: Hunter spec abilities in Mists of Pandaria originally appeared on WoW Insider on Fri, 25 Nov 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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