Posts with tag hunter-marksmanship-scattered-shots

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing the finer points of pew pewing in The Underhold and Downfall wings of Siege of Orgrimmar.

Some of you have been waiting 6 weeks for the Downfall wing to unlock, but now all hunters will get their opportunity to turn Garrosh Hellscream into their own personal pin cushion. If you missed the column from a few weeks ago, you can go check out part 1 of the Siege tips and tricks, covering Vale of Eternal Sorrows and Gates of Retribution.

The fights in the latter half of the raid range from purely single target, such as Malkorok, to complete AoE binges like Spoils of Pandaria. In this guide we'll be focusing on mechanics in flexible and normal mode, but some of this can apply to raid finder difficulty. Keep in mind that a lot of the forthcoming tips are simply suggestions and that your mileage may vary. What works for me may not work for you, but this will give you an idea of how our abilities can be utilized on the final six bosses. Stock up on some Tomes of the Clear Mind and let's get started.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing how to maximize your performance through theorycrafting.

Whenever someone asks me what my secret is for topping the meters, I always tell them it's because I push my buttons harder than anyone else in the raid. Most of them think I'm joking, but it's the truth. High DPS players are keyboard abusers who don't miss a single global cooldown. This is the biggest factor in your DPS, but optimization through theorycrafting still matters -- it's like icing on the cake.

If you're scared of a little math, then don't be. There are fancy tools that do everything for you now such as Zeherah's Hunter DPS Analyzer, Simulation Craft and Ask Mr. Robot. Aside from squeezing out a little bit of extra DPS, theorycrafting will help you understand your abilities and how they contribute to your DPS which is going to result in better damage in the real world.

Hunter changes are beginning to show up on the patch 5.3 PTR patch notes, and those changes are of the buff variety, assuring that they'll get the seal of approval from the hunter community. Certainly 5.3 is bringing the hunter love, with these buffs coming on the heels of 50 stable slots!

Hunters are getting a flat buff to their DPS, while BM and MM hunters are getting substantial AoE DPS buffs. It's still early in the PTR process, and we can expect to see more changes coming, but for the time being BM is the winner of patch 5.3, getting more benefit from the changes than the other specs.

Let's take a loot at what's changing, and how it will impact the hunter specs.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast 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 or ask him on Google+.

With the awesome buffs to MM in Patch 5.2, MM hunter DPS is better than ever, just a theoretical wee bit behind SV DPS. Despite this, however, MM continues to be vastly under-represented in raid parses, often having so few it's impossible to make a statistical evaluation of their performance (and that's before even considering the selection bias).

Theories abound for the lack of MM representation: MM is harder to play; MM is technically a bit behind the others so everyone leans on the ones ahead; MM has no clear role in which they are superior (unlike BM burst and SV AoE); MM is associated with elves, and no one wants to have anything to do with dirty elven things.

It's been a long time since MM has been a popular spec, and most of the hunter optimization sites focus on maximizing your performance in BM or SV. So now seems like a good time to review how to optimize your MM hunter to take full advantage of all those juicy 5.2 buffs.

With MoP patch 5.2 due to be released in just a couple weeks, Blizzard has released several hunter buffs on the PTR that are designed to bring the hunter specs closer together in DPS output -- and from the looks of it, it may well bring the hunter specs closer than at any point in WoW history.

I'm talking insanity of biblical proportions here, BM and MM living together, mass hysteria!

While it's almost all good news, there were some nerfs to hunter PvP in specific -- though keep in mind that some of these are sometimes tied directly to abilities that are also being buffed. So lets take a look at the entire list of hunter changes for 5.2, both those from this past week and the others still around from earlier in the 5.2 PTR, and see what it means to the hunter class.

Last week we went over the patch 5.2 hunter gear -- everything, that is, except for the most complicated slot. And as always, the roughest gear and most debated gear decisions revolve around trinkets.

The question of which of the hunter trinkets are best is further complicated by the fact that current trinkets can be upgraded (a feature that will not be available to us once patch 5.2 hits). So will the upgraded Relic of Xuen be a contender with the new trinkets? Or should you spend those valor points elsewhere in your remaining weeks?

So let's roll up our sleeves and do some trinket math! We're going to take a look at all the new hunter trinkets datamined in patch 5.2, and compare that against the upgraded forms of some of the top other trinkets.

It looks like we're going to be seeing patch 5.2 land within the next couple of weeks, and now thanks to some datamining we have an idea of all the hawt new gear we're going to be seeing in patch 5.2.

Included in this gear is our new tier 15 set: Saurok Stalker's, which is a spiky looking set with a helm that bears a suspicious resemblence to a lizard is eating our heads. Fun Saurok Stalker's set activity: get to just the right depth in water and can make it look like a crocodile head floating on the surface. Then jump out and kill something.

On to the gear!

There will always be some hunters who disagree with anything (believe it or not I recently read a hunter who thinks removing minimum range made the game no longer playable) but most hunters these days agree that we hunters have too damn many buttons. And it's not just us: in a recent tweet Ghostcrawler said so too:

We don't think hunters need a massive revamp (beyond range and ammo changes they already have). They do have too many buttons.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) November 20, 2012

Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot that can be done in the middle of an expansion -- frankly what needs to happen is a bunch of these abilities just need to go. But remove anything (even minimum range) and you'll hear complaints, not to mention making hunters learn new rotations mid-expansion is bad design move. But I think there are some things that can be done to mitigate the situation.

But first lets get into why too many buttons is a bad thing, because there are actually two important reasons.

Patch 5.1 landed on Tuesday and while there were no ground shaking changes that force every hunter to change everything about their playstyle, we definitely felt some nice quality of life improvements and some important DPS buffs and burst nerfs. It was a quiet kind of awesome, but still pretty awesome.

Blizzard is definitely handling these changes with very delicate taps of the turning fork. Very gentle buffs, very gentle nerfs, moving different areas of hunter play just a little bit in one direction or another. Certainly part of this lines up with Blizzard's assertion that "More players quit because of constant class changes than quit because of balance concerns." But a good chunk of it is probably also that hunters weren't in a very bad place, and small changes might be enough to get us where we want to be (as well as changes to certain other classes whose crazy DPS is fueled by their burning underpants).

So lets take a closer look at the changes we got and what the impact of those change is looking like.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast 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.or ask him on Google+.

We're less than a week away from the launch of Mists of Pandaria, when overnight we'll have to start the short grind back up to the level cap, after which we'll replace all of our hard-earned purple gear with fresh greens and blues.

When it comes to leveling, hunters have it easy. You could go through and choose the worst possible optimization and still have an easy time of it. I should stress this at the outset: you don't need any special tricks to solo quest your way to level 90.

That said, by optimizing your hunter for leveling you can certainly make the trip to 90 a bit easier. What follows are my recommendations for preparing your hunter for optimal leveling.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast 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.or ask him on Google+.

As much as the beta process eliminates hordes of bugs (but never the horde, sadly) there are always some that follow us to the pre-patch. Patch 5.0.4 has brought a handful of hunter bugs with it, and it appears that Blizzard is making some progress on stamping them out.

Here are the top bugs, strange things that might or might not be bugs, and things hunters thought were bugs but turned out not to be so buggy after all. It's worth noting that this is not a comprehensive list, but these are the things that are most likely to affect your game experience in some way.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast 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.or ask him on Google+.

According to WoW Insider's analytics department, 83.7% of you have now downloaded the giant patch 5.0.4, reforged yourself for hit and expertise, been momentarily dismayed at your DPS until you realized the target dummy changed, and then gone out to explore the post-patch world.

You may have noticed that there are still some bugs to be worked out -- like how the improved Kill Command is broken on Ultraxion and Madness, or how Snake Trap is a bit fussy about when to attack, or that Spirit Bond isn't working in combat. You may have noticed things you thought were bugs but weren't, like the target dummies or Explosive Shot ticks clipping on Lock and Load. You almost certainly noticed impressively huge DPS in 5-mans.

Today we're going to suggest five new awesomely fun things that you can do with your post-5.0.4 hunter. Regardless of what you think about the new mechanics, this list should get you excited about the changes.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast 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.or ask him on Google+.

Patch 5.0.4 is landing on Aug. 28, bringing all of the mechanical changes of Mists of Pandaria to hunters, which we'll get to play with at level 85 for a good month before the expansion hits. The patch is bringing hunters a lot of changes -- everything from the removal of minimum range and melee weapons to expertise being a required stat and aspects going on the global cooldown.

WoW Insider has a good rundown of what to expect from patch 5.0.4. Here, we're going to focus on the hunter-specific stuff. And there's a lot of hunter ground to cover, so let's get started.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast 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.or ask him on Google+.

Of all the different optimization options for the hunter class, racials are the one that is hardest to change. Nevertheless, there are plenty of hunters out there willing to race-change to squeeze out a bit more DPS or to get a little bit closer to the rugged perfection the designers blessed on the dwarves. This means that there are plenty of people asking what the best hunter race is.

In Mists, we have the new racial of the pandaren, plus a few of the old racials changing. Add to that new abilities and new formulas for the old ones, and the common question of what the best hunter race is requires a new set of math.

Or if you don't have one of those cool glass whiteboards with neon markers like they have in TV to do your math on (I really want one of those), we can shortcut it with Zeherah's hot new beta spreadsheet.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast 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.or ask him on Google+.

The great shadow of the nerf bat has fallen over the Mists beta hunter, and it's hitting hard. Of course, it's not necessarily a bad thing -- sometimes numbers are too big, and they need to be smaller to keep things balanced.

For those of you who have not been keeping track of all the constant beta changes, here's what happened: A bit ago, we got a big wave of hunter buffs. Some of these were for the sake of buffing hunters, but others were intended to fix bugs or to adjust the comparative balance of shots or abilities. The end result was huge DPS buffs. Too huge.

Hunter DPS was over-the-top high, so much so that many hunters even started pointing it out. And there were other weird things too -- like Arcane Shot doing more damage than Explosive Shot, dogs and cats living together, etc.

With the volume of changes coming in this patch, you can be pretty sure that we're not done. If history is any indicator, it's likely that hunters got a bit over-nerfed and we'll see some compensating buffs in the near future. But as you'll see, it wasn't just nerfs; we got some buffs, too.