Lo-Quality WoW

The past few weeks have been very WoW-lite for myself.  I managed to catch a serious cold, which took me out for a bit.  Work got a bit hectic, including a rather late night drive in to fix something.  And our raid was missing some key people, meaning that the few times I did log in, there wasn’t any raids going on.  At least I made a major effort to catch up on my sleep!

As I mentioned last time, not much new has been happening within the raids themselves, so let’s talk about 4.0 and some of the changes it hath wroth.  Particularly for Hunters.  While every class got a bit re-arranged, hunters had a core aspect of their class change which is causing Hunters some major growing pains.

So every since I started playing a few years ago, Hunters were a mana based class.  Which didn’t quite make sense for the most part, most of their shots were physical, not magical.  With 4.0, they finally got rid of mana and changed it to something called focus, which is probably most similar to the Rogue’s energy bar.  You start with 100 points of focus, which each special shot costing some focus, and you regenerate focus at a certain rate.  You can generate a bit more focus per second by using Steady Shot, which isn’t that big a deal since most Hunters have it in their rotation ever since it came out.

But it’s a major shift in mechanics to change from a rather large resource that allowed you a couple of minutes of attacking, followed by several seconds in Aspect of the Viper, and then back to shooting again.  Now, it’s a short initial burst of attacks, followed by Auto and Steady Shots, with an interdispersed special shot here and there, Explosive Shot for myself since I’m still Survival spec.  I know for myself, my whole game rhythym is off because whichever attack I use next is heavily dependent on how much focus I have rather than what is the best shot at the time.  Do I fire a Black Arrow now or wait another few seconds for another Explosive Shot?

In some ways, Survival Hunters are sort of used to it, since their dps shot order has pretty much always been a priority based order rather than a rotational based one.  It still takes a lot of getting used to and it’s being reflected in my dps output.  While I’m still doing pretty decent dps on average, my min/max dps range seems to be even greater than before.  For instance, in a typical fight, my dps was around the high 8k, low 9k range.  Not the best, especially compared to MM Hunters, but very respectable numbers.  Now, I’m anywhere between 6k to 10k at any given point. 

Fortunately, the raid leaders understand what’s happening and don’t get on my case about it.  But I think many people who have Hunters are deciding to focus on their other classes for awhile, where the changes aren’t quite as drastic.  Or at least in our 25-man raids, it’s gone from a high of 4 Hunters a night to me being the only Hunter around again.  It’s reflected in other classes as well since suddenly we seem to have 4-5 Mages when we usually only had 1 or 2 per raid. 

So is this a bad change or not?  I’m deferring judgement.  It’s mainly just “different” at the moment.  After all, I spent years doing things one way and suddenly having to do it another way takes some time to adjust to.  Thematically, the change does make sense, but I don’t play on a Role-Playing server, so who cares about themes right?  I’ll see how I feel about it all a few months after Cataclysm is out.

So what else has changed?  Skill trees have all changed.  And while I’m knowledgeable enough about Hunters that I could figure out a decent build there rather easily, all my other alts have an extreme mish-mash of builds.  The tree specialization in itself is a good and bad things.  In the past, lower levels could be hybrids, which I thought gave me some flexibility, but now you’re pretty much locked into a tree until much later and then you can spend points in other trees.  Great if you’re already lvl 80, but takes some of the fun of lower levels, or at least I think so.

Hunters lost Volley but Multi-Shot was altered in it’s place.  It sort of sucks because in a pinch you could case a Volley right on top of yourself if you were surrounded, now more than ever Hunter have very few options when that happens now.  However, there’s nothing like hitting Multi-Shot and seeing a dozen arrows zip out and your screen suddenly fill with numbers. 

While I can no longer do any replenishment, Hunting Party becomes the new SV raid buff.  I don’t seem to get as much grumbling about being an SV with that compared to before when I was the only Hunter and people said I should go MM so they could get the Trueshot Aura buff.  Come to think of it, I’m not sure what’s BM’s equivalent buff.  I should probably look into that…

Pet management has changed somewhat.  You can “store” 3 active pets and have 20 others in storage.  Which is all fine and dandy except for the first day or two when my beloved cat “Mudgie” was in neither my active list nor my storage list.  But the RFID I put in him must have work, he showed up again a few days later but I was a bit put out by it for awhile. 

Glyphs are now a three-tier system, which I do like because I felt that in the two-tier system, there was a huge gap between the usefulness of a major glyph versus a minor glyph.  That and you permanently “learn” glyphs, which means you don’t have to keep buying new glyphs (whose prices have gone rather up) and makes reglyphing easier between instances. 

Reforging allows you to mess around with “secondary” stats on items.  Which was nice when I realized I’d been sitting at something like 12% hit rating because of my gear.  I was able to reforge all that hit rating to mastery, giving me 12% mastery and reducing my hit to just over 9%.  My crit and haste ratings are still pretty decent but whereas crit was generally easily favorable over haste in my SV spec, now I’m not quite sure how the numbers work out.

I think I got gyped a little during the currency conversion, I knew I should have spent stuff before 4.0 went in.  In particular, heirloom items are now really expensive.  Fortunately, I have a couple sets bouncing around my alts already.  Not that I’m playing my alts all that often, so much to get used to with my main after all.

And of course lastly is all the add-ons I use that now don’t work since the latest patch.  I mean, they’re very minor things but it still bugs me.  Oh well, I just hope the latest, newest versions come out soon.

So those are the main points that 4.0 brough to my mind with my Hunter.  There’s probably a lot more but most of them are minor in my head.  I’ll just have to see what happens when Cataclysm comes out and hopefully I’ll be back up to speed before we start doing the raiding content there!