Hunters in Cataclysm beta

[Kruf]

I've finally had some time to play the beta and test things out, so I figured I'd start a topic about hunters in the beta.

Feel free to post any questions you have, suggestions on things to test and just speculate in this thread. Also if there's interest I could stream some playing, possibly some 5man instances if I can arrange a group.

[Kruf]

Some notes from my testing last night:

The fact that we already had a truckload of buttons that were "situationally useful" in PvE combat and thus had to be keybound got far worse with the new Venoms and Trap Launcher. Unfortunately you can't just macro Trap Launcher to all your traps - that didn't work. Scatter Shot being baseline does not make things any easier either...

I tested MM with this spec.

The current build seems to have removed Volley completely, which is a rather major blow to our aoe ability.

Focus is quite neat for normal leveling style grinding, since you're practically always at full focus by the time you run to the next mob, and thus can unleash a nice burst of damage right away. Unfortunately I haven't been able to test any instances yet so I don't know how well it works in practice - I did test on a dummy and noticed that without any addons it is somewhat annoying to manage the focus as the default unitframes are rather small and far in the corner of the screen, and unlike rogues/druids with energy you can't just spam your key and wait until you have enough focus, you have to choose between something that uses focus or something that gives focus.

MM damage is quite different from live. White attacks do far less damage while yellows seem to hit quite hard and especially piercing shots seems to tick very high numbers.

[Lailyne]

Yeah Im a bit nervous with the loss of volley at the moment. Not sure what we are supposed to do AOE wise without it. It really makes no sense for them to take that away after all this time with the claim, "it seemed volley was more magic then what a hunter could actually do." What.

Talking with one of the other hunters in my guild, he seemed rather confident in beta with the focus change since there are still some bugs to be worked out. But he did admit its gonna take a little while to completely fix the class and make us as useful as we are now come Cata.

He also informed me that he was able to steady shot and move which is awesome. Hopefully that sticks.

[Kruf]

Yeah Im a bit nervous with the loss of volley at the moment. Not sure what we are supposed to do AOE wise without it.

Explosive Trap and Multi-Shot, according to Ghostcrawler.

It really makes no sense for them to take that away after all this time with the claim, "it seemed volley was more magic then what a hunter could actually do."

I'm tempted to agree that major changes like this for the sake of roleplaying immersion might not be the best idea ever. But that's how it's going to be, and having one button less is in fact something I can appreciate, especially with all the new buttons needed for Venoms and Trap Launcher (why oh why does it have to function in a way that makes it impossible to macro into traps).

[zYN]

Removal of Volley wasn't really justified through roleplay reasons, just thrown in as an additional point. Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with losing some additional AoE damage. DKs, Warriors etc all got a pretty huge nerf in that department, which I think is totally justified. The really huge amounts of cleave damage should also be reduced a ton imo.

I like a lot how hunters are looking at the moment, really.

[natulcien]

So far I really like hunters in cataclysm, so far I've tried MM and BM and they both have some really nice things to it.

When it comes to leveling it seems that the pets threat has been greatly improved. Basically if your pet taunts you won't be able to overaggro (not even with MM burst), together with focus this makes leveling even easier.

Focus by itself seems to be a very good change, feels like it fits hunters better, although I have to agree that the amount of abilities that need to be key-bound are increasing. on the other hand I like not having a completely fixed 'rotation'.

It does look like our rotation is gonna be more like current DK's. I found that its really easy to use :
focusdump >> steady shot x2 >> focusdump
the 2 steady shots get you enough focus for 3 shots and keeps up your haste buff. I called if focusdump as the shots you use in between are different with aimed shot procs etc.
My spec is something like this

Haven't tried aspect of the fox yet but other guild hunter tells me its really nice and balanced. When you stand still aspect of the hawk is best. when you have to move a lot fox is best even though you lose some AP.

on the AOE thing. I think its gonna be fine. focus allows you to use multi shot more often especially with the reduced cost talent. And keep in mind that blizzard is changing trash to be harder so aoe isn't used as much.

Lets hope we get the 85 lvl cap next patch so we can try camouflage!

[Kruf]

It does look like our rotation is gonna be more like current DK's. I found that its really easy to use :
focusdump >> steady shot x2 >> focusdump

It's not quite that simple since you do kind of want to factor in the ability cooldowns, occasionally it'll be better to fire 3 Steady Shots to line up better with the high damage abilities coming off cooldown.

My spec is something like this

Does Improved Serpent Sting actually work with Chimera Shot? Didn't have time to test that yet. Generally all the Serpent Sting related talents are rather worthless for leveling unless you're in very low end gear, at least for me it seemed like everything died faster if I spent that first GCD on something else instead.

Haven't tried aspect of the fox yet but other guild hunter tells me its really nice and balanced. When you stand still aspect of the hawk is best. when you have to move a lot fox is best even though you lose some AP.

You can't really tell anything about the balance yet as no raid instances are available for testing. I think as it is now it would be quite annoying for a fight like LK which requires a lot of movement, having to switch aspect all the time. If they'd only fix it so we could swap aspects while casting, so you could actually swap aspect when you think you'll need to move soon without having to wait for the next instant... (NB: Haven't tested that in the latest build, maybe they already did fix that annoyance.)

The "gain focus whenever you take damage" part is also going to make it rather funny for bosses with aoe damage auras, I somewhat suspect they're going to remove that before it goes live.

on the AOE thing. I think its gonna be fine. focus allows you to use multi shot more often especially with the reduced cost talent. And keep in mind that blizzard is changing trash to be harder so aoe isn't used as much.

Now that they've said there's no target cap on Multi-Shot I think it's probably going to work reasonably well, but before that there was absolutely no way it could be balanced for both low-target and high-target situations. Changing trash has nothing to do with this, since the key is bosses where you need aoe, not trash.

[natulcien]

haven't really had the time to test a lot of specs etc. but I will test it in the near future.
completely true about serpent sting not being useful for leveling, but I didn't spec for leveling.

And the rotation was just a really basic principle not a guide.

[Kruf]

completely true about serpent sting not being useful for leveling, but I didn't spec for leveling.

That's a little funny, considering leveling is all you can do in the beta at the moment pretty much ;)

[Jubeto]

If they'd only fix it so we could swap aspects while casting

I bet Blizzard made it the way it is for good. You'd have to constantly aspect dance in order to do max dps, e.g if you auto shot and start to steady shot, you'd have to swap to focus regen aspect (w/e its called) and switch back to hawk before the shots go off. You gain just a little focus by doing that and lose nothing. If you want to min/max, stuff like that is very hard if not impossible to pull off perfectly and too valuable to just ignore.

I checked wowwiki and it says that aspects have 1 sec global cooldown, so this would be even possible. (edit: incorrectly phrased 1 sec cd between changing aspects.)

note: I have never played a hunter past lvl 30, I have no idea how interesting the class is overall, but I think small stuff like that could be fun.