Scattered Shots is brought to you by Grandpappy Frostheim, who spends his evenings in an Ironforge tavern telling young hunters how much harder things were in his day, when they had to kite mobs through the snow, uphill, both ways.

Young hunters these days got no appreciation for their traps. One of the signature abilities in the hunter toolbox, thematically appropriate, and stronger and easier to use than any time in WoW history, but they may as well not exist 'cause you kids can't be arsed to use 'em. Mob charging at you? Hunters these days just Feign Death (that is, if they don't try to melee it) then watch the mob make a beeline for the healer. Once it's safely carving pretty patterns into the healer's face, the hunter goes back to volleying the pack.

Bah! Kids these days!

Let me tell you something, back in my day our traps sucked. They were horribly limited and difficult to use by your pampered standards, but by the Titans we used 'em and used 'em well! So sit down, listen closely, and maybe you'll learn something about your class. You see, back in my day ...

We could only drop one trap at a time, to start with. All our traps shared a cooldown, so if you put down one trap, every other trap was then on cooldown. None of this having them all out at once nonsense.

Also, our traps couldn't be used in combat. Yup, not at all. You could only place your trap out of combat, before combat started. And we didn't have the ability to fling our Freezing Trap over at the enemies' feet either. We put our trap at our own feet then when the tank charged in, we'd fire off our Distracting Shot to pull the mob over to us. Of course back in my day Distracting Shot wasn't a taunt -- it actually caused threat, 800 threat in fact, which was a heck of a lot back then.

Naturally the side effect of this system is that as soon as our trap broke, the mob would make a beeline for us. But that's okay, it was just another part of our job. Unlike those kid hunters these day -- who I swear are all mentally damaged, brains quietly rotting away like those new fangled death knights -- we didn't run away when a mob came at us, or worse, FD the mob onto the healers. No, we'd slow the mob with a Wing Clip or a Concussive Shot and kite it over to the tank. Once the tank had a chance he'd pick it off of us. If it took him a while, that was okay, tank's perogative, we'd just keep kiting back and forth past him until he was ready.

None of this second guessing the tank back in my day, I'll tell you. We worried about our job and let the tank worry about his. No one accused the tank of being a noob or told him what he should be doing -- tanks back in my day were fearsome things and if you got on the wrong side of one, you can be sure he'd get you killed. In my day tanks had a special button that would instantly make any mob attack you to the exclusion of all else. No, if the tank didn't pick up your mob, you just assumed he was doing other more important things and he trusted you to take care of until he had a moment to spare.

I realize that CC (crowd control) isn't really a factor in the lives of you young hunters today, and while it was important in my day, it's not like every pull had CC involved in it. But even so, we'd use our Freezing Trap before almost every single pull in someplace like UBRS. If you weren't assigned a target to CC, you'd just set your trap right in front of the healers before the pull.

We had a much better relationship with healers in those days. Don't get me wrong, they still couldn't be arsed to heal our pets -- that hasn't changed -- but they did love us hunters and they'd keep us up while letting the rogues die. Good times.

Of course today CC isn't a concern at all, and neither is single targeting mobs. You just gather them all up and AoE them all down. Didn't work that way in my time -- and a good thing it didn't! We didn't have an AoE back then. Sure, sure, technically we had Volley still, but you wouldn't recognize it from your beefy overpowered Volley today. It did ridiculously small amounts of damage, it couldn't crit, it was horribly expensive in a time when mana mattered and we had no way to get mana back other than potions and waiting, and of course our Volley back then also had a long cooldown.

If you were facing, say, a pack of imps in Molten Core, you could Volley once during the fight. The rest of the time you'd multi-shot and then auto shot them. And we were okay with that. After all, mages were the AoE class, let them have the imps and corehounds. We didn't need to be great at everything like every class today does. Anything we weren't great at we found another way to do. Oh, and of course Explosive Trap wasn't an AoE option for us either. After all, we couldn't drop the trap while in combat.

Except, sometimes, we could.

Combat trapping was a real skill back then. Two of the things that set skilled raiding hunters apart from the pack was jump-shot kiting and combat trapping. You see, Feign Death worked a bit better back then than it does now. When you feigned, you'd temporarily drop out of combat. It usually wouldn't work if your pet was attacking -- that would thrust you right back in -- but that was okay 'cause your pet was probably a red smear across the floor anyway.

A typical scenario is we'd be assigned to CC something, set our trap before combat, and then pull the mob into the trap. Then, when the trap was about to break (but before it did), we'd move into position, recall our pet, FD and quickly drop a new trap before we popped back into combat. If our trap wasn't placed exactly at the mob's feet, we'd then have to shoot the mob to pull it back onto our trap.

I have to say, I do miss the good old days of FD. It was much more likely that we'd survive a wipe by feigning in the right place -- well at least until Blackwing's Lair it was. But also, as I mentioned, mana was an issue. We were very mana efficient, but we could still run out. We didn't have Aspect of the Viper to regen our mana, and Viper Sting just drained mana, it didn't give it back to us. We had only two ways to get mana back when we were low: drink a potion, which we could do every two minutes, or sit there and auto shot until we ever so slowly got some mana back.

But that lovely FD gave the careful hunter a third option. If we positioned ourselves well we could recall our pet, FD, then actually sit down and drink right in the middle of combat. We were the envy of every mana user, I can tell you that!

Of course they killed that use of FD off long, long ago, and now it's mostly just used as the greatest aggro dump in the game. Not, of course, that kids these days use it right. Nowadays they wait until they've pulled aggro before they FD, and of course then there's a chance that the mob will head for the healer instead of back to the tank. Because kids these days don't understand how aggro works.

But that's a whole different discussion. I'm talking about traps.

Back when I was a wee hunter, my grandpappy used to always tell me, "Frostheim, if you just let the beer sit there it'll go bad. Drink it or lose it!"

Traps are like that barrel of beer sitting in the back of the room. The traps have gotten better and better. New traps. Use them in combat. Drop multiple different traps at the same time. Fling them from range to the feet of your enemy. Every change was greeted with cheers of joy, but then after every change those traps get used less and less.

Every so often Blizzard looks through our abilities and picks out the ones that are seldom used. Sometimes they try to make them more useful in hopes that we start paying attention to them. Sometimes they just shrug and get rid of them. A whole host of these are going away in Cataclysm.

Be careful about neglecting your traps, or they could be the next to go. Blizzard has already tried buffing them and buffing them, and they're buffing them a bit more in Cataclysm with the trap launcher. But if you keep ignoring them, they might just take them away, or worse, give them to a class that will actually appreciate them.

Halfway through Cataclysm when you're getting trapped by a rogue, you'll have no one to blame but yourself, kiddo.

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You want to be a hunter, eh? You start with science, then you add some Dwarven Stout and round it off some elf-bashing. The end result is massive DPS. Scattered Shots is the WoW.com column dedicated to helping you learn everything it takes to be a hunter. See the Scattered Shots Resource Guide for a full listing of vital and entertaining hunter guides, including how to improve your heroic DPS, understand the impact of skill vs. gear, get started with Beast Mastery 101 and Marksman 101 and even solo bosses with some extreme soloing.

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Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots