I will be honest: Whenever I read about "class changes" I look first at what's going to happen to hunters, then to prot warriors, then to priests. After that I look at what's going on with other classes that I feel are in need of a nerf/buff.
I can't really speak for anything but the hunter changes mentioned in this and I will speak with happiness about the following:
Ghostcrawler posted:
We’re happy with damage overall... Still, we see Survival hunters and Unholy DKs on top of a lot of single target fights. Arcane, Marksman, and Beastmaster damage is too low... On fights where there is a lot of area damage, Demonology warlocks, Frost DKs and possibly Survival hunters are all too high.
It's good to hear him say that a couple hunter specs are TOO LOW rather than the one spec that is performing well is TOO HIGH. The reverse has been the pattern for hunters for years now and it's good to see him finally acting in a manner that seems palatable. Survival is indeed in a good place for hunters per the discussions I've been having with other trusted hunters in game. Survival AOE is probably too high, but is easily remedied without impacting much. My hope is that they address it in baby steps rather than sweeping changes - perhaps the issue is with Survival's mastery applying to AOE effects (explosive trap and the serpent sting from multi-shot effect) or with the scaling of the mastery effect to those effects. Either way, there are (to me at least) some clear ways to handle Survival hunter AOE in small tuning steps rather than class gutting steps. The fact that Survival is the de facto pve spec right now is more a result of BM and Marks being UNDERpowered than Survival being OVERpowered - apparently the dev whose GF dumped him for the hunter guy that was banging her in closed beta has left the team or finally got over it.
Hunters do still blow chunks in PvP though by all accounts, it is no surprise to see that not mentioned though - the number of times devs have spoken to hunter PvP issues since the 2.0.1 nerfs can be counted on one hand with fingers left over. I don't give a sh*t about PvP anyway so as far as I'm concerned, so what.
Ghostcrawler posted:
• As part of the Marks and Beastmaster buffs, we’re buffing Aimed Shot, Kill Shot, Chimera Shot, and Kill Command.
This is good news though I think that Aimed Shot is just not a good skill right now, it will have to get a hell of a buff to make it useful. The whole skill could use an overhaul imo - having it have a long cast time again is just not going to cut it - it becomes only useful to one spec and then it's on a long proc which makes it useful only on boss fights - lame.
I also like this:
Ghostcrawler posted:
We also want to make sure the epic PvP gear isn’t too easy for just anyone to obtain, given that the PvE endgame content is more challenging than it was in Lich King. We don’t want the player base to just migrate to the most efficient epic delivery mechanism; we want you to participate in what you find most enjoyable.
Though I recognize that for many of the people on this board at least, much of the game isn't enjoyable at all which brings the last clause of this quote into question, but in the end, it's the right approach for the game.
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If ignorance were painful, half the posters here would be on morphine drips.
Everyone playing WoW knows everything about playing two classes: 1) their own and 2) Hunters
