A Hunter's Story

Well, I finally got a chance to get in game and try out the Hunter changes from the patch. My thoughts? 100% fail. I know I should give it some time, but I’m really not looking forward to even trying. In fact, now that my arrows are trash items, I don’t have a reason other than to get the stupid bear that my luck precludes ever achieving it. Been trying every day for something like a year now and still no bear. Ugh. So no auctioning for my cash cow. I am tired of farming the stupid bear. And I can’t stand the changes to the Hunter. This may be the death of my Hunter blog!!!

I s’pose I should try to explain a little why I hate the changes. Focus. I liked that the mechanic was based on mana, that you start with the resource pool, everything you do takes a small chunk, and the goal was just to not run out by the end of the fight. Thus you could put your energy towards using the right abilities at the right time for max DPS. Now, instead, with focus… You have to shift the mechanics so that you use the abilities when focus has regen’d enough, but then plan to reapply stings, so you have to make sure you aren’t running out of focus when you need to hit those because it takes extra focus from your “rotation” (*rotation now defined as “use abilities when you have enough focus” instead of “use abilities in a rough priority order to squeeze out as much deeps as possible”).

Now don’t get me wrong here. It’s a perfectly fine mechanic. It is similar to rogues & warriors. And if that mechanic works for you, then by all means you should look forward to playing a Hunter. In fact, Lady X loves playing her Rogue and has been looking forward to starting a Worgen Hunter in Cataclysm. So for her, I think she’s going to really enjoy the Hunter. Just for me, focus is the main reason why I don’t play my rogue (leveled him only to help w/ the Insane achiev). It’s the same reason I don’t even have a warrior. I just flat out don’t like that mechanic for my own play style.

But this post isn’t meant to be a complete downer. On the “Yay!” side of things, my DK hit 80 last night (got to 5% left on Monday night and our internet took a digger… ugh.)! And the play style, while different, isn’t all that much changed. In fact, I think I’m starting to like it more than before the patch, so that’s a positive. I even tanked 2 dungeons successfully with him, so that’s a good sign.

And I also wanted to include a fun story from last night, lol. Made me feel like a huntard for a sec, but then I remembered that I’m not one because, well I noticed it!. So here goes… I logged on, messed with my UI to get it working again, sold my trash arrows, checked the AH for the price on them, out of curiosity, and laughed that people were still trying to AH them for a couple gold a stack. I collected the gold from my auctions that sold prior to the patch. Jumped over to Ironforge & trained the new abilities. Started playing with the new stables (AWESOME!). Had a momentary “Oh $*#@*!” moment when Macavity literally disappeared. My heart stopped and I panicked! I don’t know how it happened, or how I got him back, but I was very much in shock. But anyway, I got him back. Then I setup a talent tree for myself, and one for Macavity. Headed over to the target dummy (poor thing, had almost every alliance hunter on the realm beating on him!). And then I, too, laid into it. Playing around a little, I was able to get my deeps to about 4.8k as my max I could hold steady. A bit depressing since I was doing over 7k easy prior to the patch, but I also realized that prior to the patch I was doing that in SV. On BM, I had been doing less, so that plus the new tree could account for some of the difference. So then I switched over to my secondary spec, switched pets to Fluffy, and setup my tree for SV. Again laid into the dummy and did a whopping 3.5k deeps.

WTF?

I tried different rotations, tried messing with things, being more conscious about keeping stings & such up and then I realized the problem… I forgot to spec Fluffy. D’oh.

So I gave him a talent tree, tried again, and got myself up to a max of about 5.2k. So yeah, lost 2k dps in the patch. I attribute some to just general patch change dps adjustments, some to lag, and some to the fact that I don’t care for the focus mechanic. So it sucks I don’t do nearly as much dps, but at least it’s understandable why. Besides, at least I got a laugh out of my almost-huntard move. See, I would’ve been a huntard if I went on playing without a spec’d pet. But because I was working on the test dummy, and realized it within a few minutes, I can successfully classify myself as a Hunter, not a Huntard. Yay me!

Oh, and patches suck. Lady X still hasn’t been able to get on. Her comp really doesn’t like the patch. First it took forever to download, now it’s crashing her video driver… ugh.