Posts with tag hunters-warlords-of-draenor

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 predictions for hunters in 2014.

Happy New Year, Hunters! I hope you're all enjoying our late Christmas present from Blizzard. For the past three years, Frostheim (former Scattered Shots columnist) has been doing annual hunter predictions and looking back at them to see how accurate he was a year later. I'm going to continue the tradition today with 2014 hunter predictions. Trying to guess what's going to happen in an expansion year is pretty tough compared to predicting what will happen during an already-released expansion, but that just lets me get a little more crazy with the predictions. I'll try to have a decent mix of realistic and outrageous predictions, but before that we'll start with doing a quick review of Frostheim's 2013 predictions which he made a year ago. At that point, patch 5.1 was about a month old and the Throne of Thunder was still a couple months away.

2013 predictions review

• Hunters get a DPS buff. This one turned out to be slightly true. We never ended up topping the meters in Mists, but after getting some PvP-driven nerfs early in the expansion, we were finally compensated somewhat in 5.4 with signature shot buffs and having Stampede restored to full damage in PvE. There was also Aspect of the Hawk -- which started out this expansion as a 10% RAP buff -- now a whopping 35% after three mid-tier buffs.
• Sniper Training or something similar returns. This didn't happen in 2013, but one of the level 100 talents (which could and probably will change), is called Snipe and can only be used while standing still.

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 new stats and the potential for hunter spec differentiation.

We're still patiently waiting for the Warlords of Draenor beta to get some more concrete information on hunters, but in the meantime we've had Celestalon to poke and prod on Twitter. Celestalon is a Technical Game Designer on WoW and has been very forthcoming with technical information regarding classes and the new gearing system in Warlords. We've learned a few new bits of information such as how new secondary stats will work and some vague plans for their intentions with the hunter class. If you missed the BlizzCon hunter recap post, be sure to check it out before we dive into the newer stuff.

The replacements for hit and expertise

You may have heard how hit and expertise are being removed from the game in Warlords of Draenor. I was very happy when I heard about this, but at the same time wondered if gear was going to get too simple since they're also removing reforging, and having less gems and enchants on gear. The good news is, those two wholly uninteresting stats are being replaced by 3 new ones, and if you've been raiding Siege of Orgrimmar their functionality may already be familiar to you.