f13.net

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1778027018&sid=1&pageNo=1


That's a lot of changes.

A ton of changes and yet everyone is insistently screeching about just how quick this one's going to be. This one's the one where they do it in a timely fashion... I just know it... Blizzard won't hit me again.

 :heart:  Arcane Shot's change.

I wonder how much the stings will scale with AP.

Epic Flyer for engineers.  Buahahah.

The notes I saw at curse said something about daily quests for Cooking.  I thought it odd at the time but I see that's not listed on these notes, but it's listed at the link you provided too. Weirdness, no?

Also, Arena changes:  Need 2000 rating for shoulders and 1850 for weapons.  Ratings are based off your PERSONAL rating rather than your team's rating.  Your personal rating is based off of your individual win/ losses in the arena.  Way to fuck hunters in 5v5 again, since my groups always lose when we've got a hunter.  If I'm on the pally, all is golden.. bleh.

Don't think all will be fine with that arena change. Think in the macro: someone has to have the basement rating and right now that's the scrubs. If there's no chance at gear, that means less scrubs. Less scrubs means that the middle tier teams are suddenly ass.

Prediction: that change gets rolled back in a year.

That's too much sunshiny goodness in one patch.  My prediction is over 1/2 of that gets pulled and put on the nexter nextiest patch list.

*Edit: That 20-60 exp change makes the altaholic in me happy in the pants!

"Scrubs" will still have access to Season 2 (Tier 5 equiv.) gear without any rating requirements, and Season 1 (T4 equiv.) without even setting foot outside a BG. Considering current PvE progression, that's still some quite nice gear.

Also on the PvP front, Random Battleground Daily Quest, yay!

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1778036755&pageNo=2&sid=1#22

When's the third anniversary? November 24th? Patch 2.3 there or thereabouts is my guess.

No, I KNOW what they're saying. I remember them saying that they will never, ever, ever hold off on small bug fixes until a patch becomes a massive monstrosity, too. And that they won't hold bug fixes for content patches. They may get it done in a prompt fashion but if you're convinced they WILL? There's a gulf between those two things.

Watch what the scrubs buy first. 9/10 it's shoulders and weapon. Sometimes the ONLY things these guys buy is shoulders and weapon. The guys who play arena for fun at any rating are still going to play, but there are enough people who just play for teh itamz and they will not want to play arena for last season's gear or the non-special pieces of armor and so will have no reason to play. I kinda like those players being in the arena and boosting the number of participants so I hope there's not as many as I think.

While that's true, Blizz's logic is a little skewed here.  The chest piece is always the biggest upgrade, but people don't buy it first because it's one of the most expensive pieces.  Folks get the weapon to increase their DPS, then the shoulders because it's cheap and still an upgrade.

The logic I saw expressed behind making it shoulders was 1) it's the most-purchased piece (see above) and 2) the 'visual reward' factor.  Shoulders are the easiest piece to recognize and the only one that can't be hidden in some fashion (via toggles or tabards).  The chests are still the biggest upgrade, and this just means the scrubs will be nabbing it instead of the shoulders.

I wouldn't worry about the #'s participating falling off.  Those who only play for 'the lootz' still have plenty to buy and can't have a full S2 set (since they usually suck.)   What I'd worry about is their habitual participation.  If you know you can only pick up 2-3 more pieces you're not going to be as obessive about queuing every week.


Also, I've changed my mind on Arcane Shot.  Fuck Blizz and their miniscule nearly-worthless bone tossed at a class they don't understand (because none play other than alts) that has significant PvP-based problems.  (PvE we're golden as far as I'm concerned.)  My inidial euphora was tempered by the cold logic of "wait, one buff at random.. every 6 seconds.. how is that useful other than chance?"  coupled with learning the RAP scaling will be 10%... to abilities rarely used anyway.   :roll: :mob:

I've been thinking about Hunters in Arena PvP, and as best I can tell there's a couple of interlocking problems.

First and foremost: A hunter's "role" in combat is basically to stand motionless at 36+ yards and do steady, moderate, but sustained DPS. Blizzard keeps dicking with Aspect of the Viper to try to get this to work right, but as far as I can tell the idea is that all the other DPS classes do a ton of burst damage, and we catch up over the long haul. Our mana problems in actually DOING that seem to go all the way back to when we got switched to mana from focus 'cause Blizzard couldn't get it to work.

Since, in Arena PvP, there is NEVER a time when a hunter gets to stand still at range and shoot, what our PvP role consists of is "shitty DPS and uselessness". There are no vast vistas to shoot across, no way to keep an enemy at range that doesn't involve US moving (and thus losing Aimed Shot, Steady Shot, and Auto Shot -- not that Aimed is all that snazzy). In short, we can't do even moderate DPS, and "sustained" is a joke.

Add in resiliance and post-TBC stamina, and we're fucked. Prior to TBC, after patch 2.0, we were insane because we critted often against low-hp targets and that got us nerfed to shit on RAP scaling -- as everyone predicted, our crit rates at 60 were screwy because they were balanced around post-TBC gear (Resiliance and high-stam) and no one had it. They never bothered to adjust that one back, so we're still knee-jerk nerfed on account of a situation that doesn't exist anymore.

Secondly, that farkin' dead zone. I don't know why they keep that. Melee = 0 to 5 yards, ranged equals 5-36/41. Why the "Nothing but scatter shot, if you specced for it" from 5-8? There's no damn point to that. It doesn't balance us against squat.

Traps: Our primary form of CC (we also have one 3-second stun (specced), another 3-second low-chance stun (5 point spec for 10% chance), a 50% snare and a 60% snare. The 60% one is usuable only in melee, and not nearly long enough for us to make it to 8 yards.) are useless. For damage, they're really useless. For snares and roots? First off, they can be seen now. They have a 2 second arm time, and they're buggy about triggering. People just avoid them. Go us for useless fucking CC (they can also be intercepted or blinked THROUGH).

I don't see a lot of ways to make Hunters viable in the Arena. We're built for long-distance, motionless, moderate DPS. That's NOT a PvP thing. Our BM pets are okay, but they're weaker then Felguards and we don't have a Warlock's damage output to back it up (TBW is nice, but frankly not nice enough to counter that). Marksman can't get their DPS high enough to be viable even in 5 man, and survival is...pitiful.

Remove the deadzone, increase RAP scaling back to pre-nerf levels, and we're still....screwed. Arenas are too small to kite, our CC is still useless, our DPS is still too low. I don't see any really viable fixes here, unless you want to seriously redo the talent trees or start adding some serious PvP pet tricks, which would be a bitch to keep us from getting overpowered everywhere else.

We do all right in BG's, because we stand way the hell in the back and plink away. Everyone focuses on the screaming warrior in their face.

My thoughts were along the lines of adjusting Survival to be "the" pvp tree once again.  Give it some mana-intensive burst-happy PVP-friendly stuff and leave marks/ BM pretty much alone.

Survival sucks so bad right now because it's nearly 100% chance based for everything.. and those chances are tiny once you figure out all the prereqs.   Since it's so underused, just toss a few of the useful PvE things into the low end, or other trees (and trash CE for god's sake).. It's not like you're going to be rattling the bulk of the playerbase in doing so.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1778517774&postId=19994027780&sid=1#317

Again, I know all that. I know they're rushing it to the ptr. I hope they get ZA out quickly so I can start playing again. I mean that. I'm rooting for them. But we've been down this road before. December release.

It's not like Shamans or Priests get to choose to remove a certain buff over another either. Dispels are so important that I take two separate talents to improve them, having another class be able to get rid of something like BoP or Earth Shield (assuming I've already stripped them clean like I should have) at the same time they're still doing damage is a huge help. If a Hunter is on a non-Priest target, your offensive dispeller doesn't need to be on assist for the most part.

Dispel and purge are spammable, making them infinitely more useful. AS is on a 6s timer, and is easily countered by just walking up to the hunter as well as the los issues that the other two have.  I'm not saying this isn't a buff, it is, but it also does nothing to address the real issues of the class in pvp. 

It's a useless bone tossed to placate the folks who don't think it through.  You have a 1/<number of buffs> of making good use of that ability every 6 seconds.  Plus in the 5v5 teams, having that hunter target something other than your groups current target means less focused damage on that target, and a greater chance one of the two healers will keep it alive.  Better to just bring more burst damage than bing a hunter with the one buff every 6s dispelling wonder shot.

The classes i care about (also lock but they need no help) - PURE SEX.

The much-bemoaned mage damage tax that kalgan swore up and down was soooo necessary to stop mage's "jaw-dropping damage" gone.  Evocation finally scales on relavent mage stat.

The red-headed step child that is enh shaman shown some love.  Threat reduction, substantially improved mana efficiency on shocks, attack power linked to dmg/healing, and some pitiful buff to shamanistic rage even tho enh will always suck in pvp without some method to control distance or otherwise gain the initiative.

And priests... wow.  Meditation buff is crazy, improved scaling of some of the worst-scaling spells in the priest arsenal is much appreciated.  The pain suppression buff is also quite nice, utility and versatily to skill sets are ultimately what makes characters most fun to play (for me) so increasing this is never bad imo.  On top of all this love, some recognition that grinding in this game is basically unavoidable and essential to most every aspect of play, and theirfore the "heres some damage with your healing" itemization buff.  Really fantastic stuff here.

Edit:  Also, not mentioned above is, all priests now have fear ward as a trainable skill.  3 minute duration and 3 minute cooldown.  So they gave it to everyone, but nerfed it abit.  Better then nothing i guess (from the perspective of a NE priest).  To compensate dwarf and draeni priests, chastise has been given.  10 min cd, does holy damage and 2 second incapacitate.  Amusing that dwarf and draeni racials are still by anyones measurement strictly superior to everyone elses.

Was really looking foward to having fearward, this nerfed version is kinda disappointing.  Overall synopsis still very positive however.

Oh good. They give hunters something, they got to make sure to give everyone else a LOT more. It's really not fair to everyone else otherwise.

About all I've got to look forward to is 20 and 24 slot quivers/ammo bags (if they fucking REMEMBER ammo bags). Still not enough -- a big instance needs 28. No word on speed increase, but I bet it stays 15% (same as the best current ones).

Oh, and engineer flying mounts. I'm okay with those, although they'll undoubtably require a huge grind and obscene materials to make.

So they're giving Subtlety rogues their own version of Blink?  :|

AFAIK, you have to have a target, so more like intercept.

Yay, my priest and lock will finally get 100->0'd by fearwarded undead rogues w/ a pvp trinket! kek.


-- Z.

Sure but I'd argue that this is the same with way more classes than hunter. Except for a small handful of spec/classes in the arena everyone's useless at the higher end. It shouldn't be that way but don't feel alone; hell, I wouldn't even get mad about it.

It's very hard not to when your rating puts you up against new-formed teams all the time who are designed around those optimal set-ups.  Because of that you get to be the gimp group and take a nosedive in the ratings.  Whee.

I love wow as a pve game, but the pvp gets shittier over time.  The only reason I even bother with it anymore is it's the only 'sport' pvp out there other than FPS' right now.

The biggest change in the patch is /cancelform being instant like /dismount.


If you thought druids were hard to catch before 2.3...  :-)

I admit that I'm not totally up on these things, but as I understand it that'll allow instant changes between forms without going to squishy caster-form first.

I'm not sure what else.

/cancelform
/travelform


Will be the most common cheese being employed. Basically, it will let a druid use anything that isn't on the GCD while in a form. IE: A Bear drinking a potion without any GCD.


Visually and for all practical terms, yes, a druid never has to be in squishy/slow caster form. It'll just be a puff of smoke as that resto druid cheetah's around the pillar out of your snares.



As to hunters, they got thrown a bone, it won't fix anything magically, but if you get enough bones tossed your way, you start to suck less. It's a start.


As to the Arena Gear, the rating req's will make people cry a lot, but not change anything. The change will be caused by Season1 being sold on honor vendors. The entire reason you have people doing "welfare epics" is because it's the most accessible set of 'good' gear available to the masses. Now that gear will be available via AV farming. Way more people are useful in AV then they are in the Arena's.

Everyone else is getting a bigger bone, and we're still fucked. Frankly, all I've come up with to handle the LOS and pillar issues is making melee 0-5, ranged 6-36/41 and removing the stun from Cheetah (maybe adding in debuff to hit or defense to balance? You lose DPS by not being in Hawk, but I could see losing some chance to hit, or taking a bit more damage as a balance).

You'd be able to sort of keep up with pillar dancers, rather than spending 90% of your time either out of LoS or square in your damn deadzone. Or trying to melee down a caster, which frankly I don't think is actually possible for a Hunter.

Meh, the only big bones this patch Arena/PvP wise are /cancelform and all the rogue shit. I'm not sure what brought on the sudden influx of rogue improvements like that, maybe that's the new 'in' class at Blizz HQ :p. Most everything else is a small nerf, a PvE change, or a little change like hunters got that won't do much to bring them out of inconsequential in terms of Arena. (The druid /cancelform thing is really big though, like... game changing big, expect huge amounts of QQ when that goes live and people start to abuse it)



Basically, hunters are like protection warriors/paladins in the arena, out of their element. The difference is a hunter can't respec holy/arms to not suck. the best you can ever hope for, with Arena design as it is, is to suck less. Not to "not suck", but just suck less. Give hunters enough bones like the new Arcane shot, and the suck might be low enough to work around. Things like the dead zone and steady standoff DPS define the class, Blizz won't ever make those go away. Too many mechanics are working against hunters, things that won't change either.

The only way to 'fix' the LoS/Pillar issues is to have Arena's without LoS and Pillar issues. Design a map that is the inverse of Blades Edge Arena. Where are the ledges, where are the crossing paths to climb? Where is the swamp in the middle of the map that melee is forced to go around or be snared while going across? All of the current designs are thought of through the "How can people use the terrain to avoid LoS?" mindset, there isn't one Arena map where the focus is "How can people use the terrain to KEEP LoS?".

Until you see maps like that, hunters will continue to suck in the Arena, its just a question of how badly.

I dont know why people constantly bitch about hunters in the arena, we are not the best but we dont really need that much help.  Right now my 5v5 of hunter/holy priest/holy pali/warrior/mage is around 2100 after a really horrible week, they've tried replacing me (hunter) with a shaman with disastrous results.  I do about 10% less damage on average than our stormherald arms warrior, sometimes i do more damage than him actually.  LOS is obviously a problem, but so is spending the whole fight sheeped or being kited over frost trap, i have an easier time dpsing than a rogue or a warrior would, sure they can do more when they actually reach the target but its actually easier for me to accomplish that than for them.  The Arcane shot change is huge.  Fucking HUGE.  Dispeling the current target is one of our priests main duties, usually he has to do this while under heavy fire, me being able to help out with this, even if its only every 5 seconds (i already used the talent to lower the cooldown even before this change) means when that BOP goes on our target it will not be a crapshoot on wether it gets removed in time or not, either me or the priest will get it instantly.  The thing to remember is if someone goes out of los they are not doing anything either, healers have to be in los to heal, dpsers have to be in los to dps.  Frost trap + entrapment, silence, mana drain and an offensive dispel and more than seviceable dps make us a very good class to have in any bracket.

Rogues have terrible mobility in arenas and frankly the Subtlety tree is a joke after (and arguably including) Hemorrhage.

The same could be said for half the class/specs in the game really, so I'm not certain why rogues got all the money improvements this time around.

Ummm, because they need them?

Good stuff.

On Mages: Ritual of Refreshment: What does this mean, that we can load Food and Drink into the AH? Or that people in a group will automatically receive it to their inventory? Or that we can go into some EQ1-esque vendor mode to let people just click us and pick it up?

On Engineers: Engineers get their own flying mounts? I assume it's a 375 thing, so maybe I should grind it out after all.

If they stay true to pattern I'd expect you to need 375 to ride them, ya.

It's a Soul Well, for Food and Water, not that complicated.

I've never really gotten that. How is the deadzone "defining the class"? What possible reason is there for a Hunter to have a 3 meter area where he can't do damage, at all? (And, to boot, the ONLY thing that works there being a 31 point talent. WTF?).

I don't see it being a balance issue -- I can't see it being unbalanced at all to switch to 0-5melee,6-36/41 ranged. If you feel some shots might get abused, you can certainly set minimum ranges on things like aimed shot to 8 yards.

Threash: 5v5 is the only place a Hunter doesn't suck so bad it's soul-sucking to have him along. And even then, your team would be better off replacing you with a mage of equal skill. Replacing you with a Shaman should have worked fine, but either he sucked or he wasn't specced for DPS, and so couldn't fill your role.

5v5 is the only place you see Hunters in the top teams, and even then their represntation is tied for dead last as opposed to "very obviously dead last".

Auto Attack and Auto Shot are not linked, so a Hunter could dance around 5-6 meters of someone and be able to use both his melee weapon and ranged attacks.

Then...link them? Problem fixed?

Frankly, our melee auto-attack sucks, and our ranged auto-attack isn't that much to write home about. I'm hard pressed to see much advantage in jumping back and forth rather than getting to range, since our biggest "Melee attack" is pretty freakin' lame AND costs too much mana to boot. I mean, sure, you could sort of add in an extra melee attack by dancing like that (if they cooperated by remaining still, and our only root breaks on ANY damage).

But to do that, you'd be stuck using auto-shot,arcane shot (Every 6 seconds), and auto-attack. That's a pathetic damage total compared to being able to use steady-shot and multi-shot reliably.

I honestly don't see how it's to a hunter's benefit to try that, in terms of actual practical results, but if the price for removing the dead zone is linking auto-attack and auto-shot to the same cooldown, count me in. 100% support. I'll sign a petition, make a billboard, and buy a bullhorn.

Although, now that I think about it -- they might be linked now. Hunters automatically switch from auto-shot to auto-attack once a target enters melee range. It's a bit hard to tell if they're really linked, or if Blizzard is just fudging it because of the 3 yard deadzone between ranged and melee, so....

It "defines the class" the same way 6-Max defines melee classes. It's like asking "why can't a rogue use its specials with throwing daggers 25 yards"? Melee classes get some abilities that work outside of there defined range, Hunters get some as well. The deadzone is the only way to stop autoshoot outside of Lockdown CC, only way to stop most hunter abilities. Hunters don't have to deal with school lock or pushback or interrupts the way the other ranged classes do.

Rooting a rogue/warrior and moving to 30 fucks them over just as much as rooting a hunter and moving to 7, sometimes they have cooldowns to burn that will get them out of that situation, other times, there just done like dinner.

That's just the trade off and niche hunters fill. The same way a rogue gets in the thick of things to be effective, a hunter has to stay out of it to be at it's best.

You're wrong on push back.  It's also arguable that we have no defense from 8 meters to 0 meters, as our melee is so laughable even pallies can outdps us.  Really, are you that concerned about a hunter's "does 120 damage on next swing, 6s cooldown" raptor strike?  You shouldn't be.  Even if that hunter somehow got Cataclysm's Edge off of Archimonde, his top damage is going to be 1400 every 6s IF he crits.   Scary damage.

Hunters also aren't given the tools that most other classes are given in order to GET to their advantage zone.  No intercept/ cloak/ bubble/ blink/ fear. At best we have wingclip, which does nothing that can't be countered by most classes these days, and traps which are so resisted it's laughable.

If AoC had no stun, we could dance out of warrior melee with wingclip. We can't as it is now.  Charge, hamstring, MS, hunter's fucked.  Perhaps a trap, but even with that, as soon as you're at range again it's another intercept.  We can NOT get out of that 25 yard range once incercepted.  On the off chance wedo, the warrior can simply walk towards us as we stand still to attempt to dps them.  Try and kite in a BG and you just wind-up among another group of hostiles who came up behind you.

Crippling poison weakens us to the point that we can't get out of rogues way.  It's only 10% weaker than wing clip but lasts 2s longer. Even if we could, they can COS off the slow, or the trap.  CoS is powerful to the point of stupidity. 

Right now, Shaman are about the only class I can consistently take one on one.  Everyone else knows our weakness, and the Shaman have similar ones.  We have to stand still to do damage, and that's death in PvP.  Just walk towards us and we're just a body on the field taking up space.  We can get off an instant or demi-instant shot every 6 secs (unless you want to count lolserpent sting. However, I fall for more damage off of the ledge in shatt's portal dome)  So if we want to do anything, it's kite kite kite kite, for a DAMN long time.  We're currently meant to do damage with Autoshot and Steady Shot, both of which are near useless in the arena.

If you respec bm you can beat any class 1 on 1 easily, but obviously duels are not what this game is balanced around.  My 2v2 and 3v3 teams are 1880 and 1804, and i play with undergeared friends to help them get arena points. 

I keep hearing that, but I AM bm spec, and wars still pwn me and rogues chew me to death before the pet can. Even the big red pet.   Locks/ Mages if I'm red they can die, unless there's a healer.  Then I'm just fucked.  Pallies are impossible to kill in that 15s window.

Even then, as you said these are not duel situations.

Look, I'm willing to concede you're simply better at pvp than I am.  You apparently aren't, and think everything's dandy because you're better.  Were that the case, well you'd be able to pwn as easily as a warrior or lock of equal skill.

Perhaps I just need to roll another lock. Seems that the days of when there were a billion hunters got us to this point, so it's time to return the flavor and just go with the FOTM.

A war shouldnt even touch you, 18 seconds of kiting him over frost trap should be more than enough to kill any of them.  A rogue shouldnt be touching either while you are red.  You are unsnareable, they arent, 18 seconds is more than enough to kill them.  Most people think hunters suck, thats why theres so few of them in top teams, but we really really dont.  We arent warlocks either though so yes it does take some skill but every single team ive played on now firmly believes hunters need no buffs whatsoever.

Yeah, really at least if you only take your opponent into account you should never lose to a rogue or warrior unless you're really outgeared. Frost trap is absolutely absurd for kiting purposes.

If you know what a Soul Well is, sure. I had to look it up. Thanks for the reference.

You guys sure are getting into a lot of 1v1 situations in your arena.  Wish that were the case for me.   Frost trap kite the war? Sure then the rogue comes up behind and crips you.. or the warlock fears you.. or the mage takes the time to Pyro you to oblivion.

But then, you're still talking 2v2 and I'm still talking 5v5 where I'm getting rocked on a consistent basis.   If I'm not first targeted, then I'm last and still unable to do jack.

Then the question is what is your team doing while you are being targeted? if it takes two people to shut you down then your team has a 4 to 3 advantage.  If you are the first one targeted then your priest should be going nuts with dispels and mana drains, your mage should be alternating sheeps on their dpsers and your warrior should be raping someone.  If they attack me first even if im completely shut down they've already lost, between sheeps, silences, frost trap + entrapment, scatter shot and counterspells i can live more than long enough for the rest of my team to gain the advantage even if i end up dead.  Meanwhile i can still frost trap and mana drain even if im under heavy fire, i might not be able to dps but at least i provide some support for my team.

Maybe they changed something, but last time I tried that the war intercepted (or charged -- fuck if I know the difference) through the fucking trap. He was on my ass in melee before the trap finished animating. Then I got hamstrung, and nothing I could fucking do would get me to range.

Once we're in melee, it generally takes a stroke of luck (some low-change survival skill proccing), or an act of idiocy on the meleer's part to allow you to get back to range.

Fordel:
The deadzone is there to stop autoshot? WTF? I don't think anyone fears our our autoshot.

And yes, we deal with spell pushback (aimed shot, steady shot) and interrupt (volley). It's hardly out fault that volley sucks. Our instances (arcane, multi-shot) are on long cooldowns (6 seconds), so in the BC enviroment our damage is based around a 2second cast time spell with pushback. (Auto-Steady-Auto). Mages do have more pushback problems, but they also have methods of dealing with it (talents and the like), as well as doing a ton more damage.

Our problem in a nutshell is that every melee class has a way to close range on us. We have nothing to GET to range -- nothing that works. Our snares are weaker than melee snares. Our stuns are too short, our traps too worthless, or melee damage easily ignored. Once we're in melee, against an equally skilled opponent we will not regain range, and thus we are dead.

The other ranged classes can lock us down in a variety of ways, and can easily out damage us (our burst DPS is non-existant these days, especially with resiliance-geared opponents) on any reasonable time frame. (If the match is going on longer than 5 minutes, then the numbers might swing our way).

The deadzone is pointless. It's a three yard space that does nothing except allow a handful of classes to nuke us with impunity.

Couple that with arena-design -- pillar huggers seriously fuck us because we're not just having LoS problems, they're generally in our deadzone or into our melee zone if we can see them.

Just for anyone who is not clear on the whole dead zone concept:

0------5m****8m----------------------36/41m

Those "stars" -- the area between 5 meters and 8 meters (or does blizzard do it in yards? Not much of a difference, really) is our deadzone. We have ONE thing that works there, which is "scatter shot" -- a 21 point talent in the MM tree. No damage, 3 second stun that causes you to wander randomly.

A skilled ranged opponent -- like a mage, for instance -- often gets quite good at staying 7 meters away from you, pummeling the shit out of you with instants while you can't respond. (They really love to do it if they've got you locked down with FN).

The only snare that's better than Wing Clip is Crippling Poison, which is a proc and a poison, and thus not an issue with a half-competent dispeller on your side. In saying your stuns are too short I assume you mean Intimidate, which is 3 seconds and really more than enough time to get away. Your pvp trinket should also deal with snares, and if that fails you also have freeze trap and frost trap for unlimited kiting action, not to mention the incredibly annoying concussive shot. I haven't done arenas as a hunter but I recall Counterattack being a win-button back at 60 as well.

Meanwhile I, as a snared rogue, have a few options open to me. 1) Sprint, if I have the talent that makes it break roots/snares, or 2) shadowstep, if I was idiot enough to spec into that shitty tree. Of those options, frost trap makes sprint utterly useless and cloak of shadows does nothing against it. Option 3 will work but only if I'm stealthed (in 2.3 i can use it out of stealth but it gets a 40s cooldown making it useful maybe twice in a match).

Now if I'm a warrior I can intercept every 20 seconds which does make your staying out of melee much harder, but everyone else has the same problems with them. Can we just drop the hunter stuff and agree that warriors ( and frost mages, really) are broken for arenas right now?

How is that any different than the mage standing 7 meters away from a rogue or a warrior? we have a deadzone between 5-8 meters, for them its 5-41 and they are just as easy to kite.  We cant be silenced or counter spelled, every other class has a way for you to stop their dpsing.  Ask rogues and warriors how they feel about their dead zone when my priest is kiting them over my frost trap.

Hamstring lasts longer, 3 seconds isn't enough to get back to range -- it really isn't, especially not with everyone and their dog having speed-enhancing talents these days. (Ours, of course, comes with that lovely stun on damage).

Counterattack is pretty damn useless, as is survival in general these days.

Yes, our PvP trinket deals with snares -- so does theirs.

As for traps -- I think I've mentioned this, but I'll say it again: 30 second cool-down, high resist rate, two second arm time, and HIGHLY VISIBLE. Really, you have to be several kinds of dumb to step on one of our traps, especially if you're already in melee.

As a rogue, you'd never trigger our frost trap, because you're not a moron. In PvP, we'd get crippling poisoned (assuming you can't pull off the great stunlock sequence) and we'd wingclip you, we'd both trinket, and you'd go back to raping my ass with your melee DPS. I might get off a 3-second stun and run for the hills, but you'd sprint in as soon as it clears and I'd maybe get one shot off, and even concussion shot wouldn't stop you from getting back to range.

You'd never hit our trap (unless I got incredibly lucky and scatter-shot you into it), because you'd see me lay it and move around it. (Quite easy -- the trigger zone is small and you can see it). I can't just "lay it at your feet" because it doesn't arm for two seconds.
Hunters suck against everyone. There's a reason they're dead last in 2v2 representation, and it's not because all the 2v2 teams are made up of warriors.

A rogue is probably one of our best 1v1 matchups (pre-BC I'd clean up against rogues, if I spotted you first you'd never even touch me. The reverse, sadly, was also true. I remember getting stunlocked and dying before I actually got forced off my mount) now, but rogues still have a significant edge.

Threash:
Because warriors and rogues have a large number of ways to close the distance, and to break snares and stuns. We really don't.

As for "not stopping our DPS" -- haven't you heard of polymorph, any of a huge variety of fears (our trinket doesn't break fears), stunlocks, stuns, and a huge number of other ways our DPS gets shut down?

30% mana regen while casting, YES TYVM!  I guess they reconsidered the nerfs they made to all that "+15% extra on top of the talents" Tier 2 gear, but figured it wouldn't work to add the 15% back into gear, since they make tiers obsolete with each expansion.  Also, maybe it's just me, but I'm finding lots of +heal / +dmg gear, but very little +mp/5 gear.  This is a nice boost to spirit as a stat.

The other stuff is nice, but I'm waiting for the nerf patch to follow 2.3, heh.

Side-stepping specifics on why, I'd like to point out again that the class participations of the top-20 Arena teams by brackets has Hunters dead last in 2v2 and 3v3 (despite Hunters being a VERY popular class), and in the bottom three classes in 5v5.

I'd suggest that Hunters utilize in 5v5 is basically that individual class performances start to average out, and Hunters's "steady over time" DPS starts to actually have a mild effect. They work well in a few setups, although I haven't seen one that wouldn't work better with a skilled mage.

Ideally, you'd have a PvP makeup that followed the general population. In specific, with the sort of synergies between classes that are possible, you won't get that in 2v2 and 3v3, but Hunters totalling something like 4% of the 2v2 teams? 3% of the 3v3 teams? I think last I saw they got up to 8% in 5v5. That's a sign of a real problem. Hunters are something like 16% of the WoW population, and are highly active in PvP, yet they're non-existant in higher brackets. That's a significant problem, given that Arena PvP is the high-end of PvP, and given the gear that gets handed out there.

Someone obviously is going to be last, but being last in all three brackets? Having a representation in 2 brackets that amounts to one or two players, from the most popular class in the game?

I think last season's winning 5v5 team had a Hunter, who said something like "The only reason I'm on this team instead of a mage is I'm running it". I'd say he's probably got a pretty good feel for the class.

Morat: You've said this a few times now, but I don't understand where your getting this idea. A Hunter trap is no more resitable then any other CC/Spell in game, nor is it "visible" if it's already laid down (Your the hunter can see your OWN trap yes and your allies can see your trap, but your enemies can not see your trap). Yes if you see a hunter put the trap down on your feet, you may have a chance to escape it before it arms, maybe. But that trap that was dropped before either team got into range of each other, there is no way to see it unless you are a rogue with trap finding up. Also, nothing is stopping you from standing on your own trap when you drop it. Trap trigger range is not less then melee range last I knew  :-P


Your trinket breaks all CC now, as does everyone else's, it was changed a few patches ago.


And things like Poly, Fear, Stunlock? Those aren't hunter specific issues in terms of stopping DPS. Remind me the last time you were Counter Spelled for 10 seconds of uselessness as a hunter though, or had your offensive and defensive abilities neutered by a single lock pet (fuck that stupid fucking demon dog ><)


Yes, the dead zone is to stop your auto shoot, If your getting wailed on by a rogue, but getting heals from your local paladin, you can still shoot that priest across the map. 6 second instants are not 'long' cool downs either.


You asked how the dead zone "defined" the class, I explained. I agree hunters have issues in the arena, I've said as much in this very thread. What you seem to want is a different class though. The issue is much more the venue of the arena then the class abilities. No one ever thinks "boy that hunter sure did suck at defending the flag in WSG" or "man that hunter totally wasn't picking off all our cloth casters across the bridge at Dun Baldar" because those are places where a hunter can do what it is designed to do. Stand off, steady, "safe" dps.

Then Blizzard either needs to redesign Hunter or redesign the Arenas (they seem to be trying to half-ass figure out what to change on Hunters right now).

Because Arena's ARE the high-end PvP, and if one of their most popular class sucks so badly there that they've got less than token representation, something's going to change.

As for defending the flag in WSG, good lord -- that's a bitch and a half. You're either on the second floor with half the room out of LoS, on the roof with half the room out of range, or in the room running around trying to GET range. Why the hell would a Hunter defend a flag in WSG? It's an exercise in futility.

The only reason -- the ONLY reason we're not as bad in BG's as Arenas is that we have a lot of room to stand off, and we're low priority compared to everyone else. If it's not up in your face, it tends to get overlooked. Which is why we do best in AV, since there's generally at least ten other people occupying the enemies attention at any one time.

(The trap change I alluded to was making traps 'stealthed' instead of 'invisible'. Given the huge amount of stealth detection people use, it's really hard to step on a trap. As for Hunter's standing on it -- good lord, just stick the someone 7 meters away and the Hunter will move, I promise).

I've found it basically a waste of time trying to convince anyone who doesn't play a hunter (or that one particularly highly skilled hunter who is so skilled that everyone else sucks against him) that hunters need love.  Since TBC, hunters are very broken compared to practically every other class.  The fact that one particular spec doesn't suck doesn't mean hunters aren't broken.  Any class that can only spec 1 way to be effective is broken.

We're broken three ways in the Arena.

1) Lack of Burst DPS and effective CC -- 2v2 and 3v3 matches focus on burning down someone so you can go 2v1 against his opponent. A freeze trap as CC is nice, but requires someone to stupidly step on it -- kind of more luck dependent than a sheep, with a far longer cooldown. Not to mention kind of obvious these days. Lack of burst DPS means frankly the match is over by the time our general "We can still pump out OK DPS when everyone else has blown all pots, and is OOM".
2) LOS/Deadzone issues -- those fucking pillars. They're either out of our LOS, or they're in our goddamn deadzone. We cannot kite in the arena, which is really our only effective PvP strategy (which costs us considerably DPS to do anyways). We're useless in melee range, and we can't ever stay at ranged.
3) Lack of any synergy -- we don't have shit with anyone. TSA is too small, Ferocious Inspiration is decent in 5v5 at least, and we're reduced to a single trick -- stacking viper sting with multiple scorpid stings to mana drain and avoid cleanse (and it's getting nerfed).

Our pets are inferior to Warlock pets (yes, even BM specced pets). Our CC is seriously hampered by it's arm time, high resist rates, and small trigger zone (we can't target it). Our snares are small, and generally available only AFTER we're fucked. Our stuns are too small, require high-specced talents, or have low chances of proccing. The very design of the arena means we're screwed with delivering damage.

In short, a Hunter brings nothing to any decent 2v2 or 3v3 that another class doesn't bring better, and we have less utility. In 5v5, we're of marginal use but we still are inferior to mages and 'locks.

If the thing you want trapped is 7 meters away, great, it isn't meleeing you anymore, problem solved, continue shooting the priest in the back  :-P.

You're really overestimating the stealth detection and how its used against traps. I have my doubts that people are popping perception to see where the hunter dropped its trap.

As to WSG flag defense, exaggerate more please  :-P, I don't think we truly understand how much you hate your hunter yet. But yes, why would the class that can Track people, mark the FC, have both ranged, melee and stationary snares and depending on spec be totally unCCable, ever defend the flag and flag room? Futility? Really?





Which is what I've been saying for the last half dozen posts, have I not? When a hunter can stand off and shoot, its all gravy. Arena's don't facilitate this, I agree, I also agree this should be changed and there should be more variety in the types of Arena map styles in play. Currently we have LoS pillars, LoS tombstone and LoS Bridge+Pillars. No, it isn't any wonder why the class designed around max range stand offs really suck in a 5x5 effective box.

As a melee class how awesome AV is when there is a big standoff over a Graveyard, or the dreaded bridge of doom. I'm sure they love charging in to die before the charge even finishes closing the gap. You can also ask any protection specced character how awesome it actually and sincerely is to be useful in WSG or AV, when being the giant meatshield carrying FC or actually having something to tank matters. Back when the BGs where the 'premiere' PvP around, other classes got the short end of the stick, the same way hunters get it now... and it isn't like hunters are alone at the bottom of the shit list for Arena usefulness.


Just don't bank on a hunter class redesign that will suddenly make them not suck in the Arena's (as the arena's stand today), as it would basically require Blizz to create a entirely new class from scratch for the most part. We'll sooner get viable ret paladins then see blizz remake hunters.

You do know that you've described Warriors, Mages and Paladins in terms of the Arena?  :-D

Except that I'm not talking about just arena.  I don't even play arena on my hunter.  Actually, I don't even play my hunter anymore at all.  Playing a lock instead.  FOTM, that's me all the way.

Do you even HAVE a hunter? Because you sound like someone whose entire experience with them has been from the outside -- all good in theory, no practice.

WSG? You want Hunters midfield, not carrying and not guarding. They've got the high range, the track, and can use Cheetah in midfield (usually not being attacked at that point) to try to intercept the Shaman carrying the flag, and try to land in a concussion shot and mark before someone tags and dazes the Hunter. Midfield means a hunter can use his range and steady DPS to pick off stragglers trying to make it TO the flag room, and be the first to start slamming into a runner coming the other way.

Hunters don't belong in the flagroom, where they don't have range to DPS. About all they're good for is a big frost trap on the flag proper, and after that they're just dead meat to the flag-capture team. (For all their mail, Hunters die VERY quickly. No bubbles, no frost novas, no blinks, no ice blocks, no shield, and certainly no offense power in a closed room).

Guarding the flag room, about the best tactic I've found is to drop an ice trap on the flag, leave a stealthed pet next to it, Cheetah up to the second floor or roof and hope to hell they come up the tunnel and don't send anyone up the second floor route. Then you can generally use Intimidate, Concussion shot, and the trap to hold the flag runner still enough for the rest of the flag team to kill him. But you're better off leaving a warrior and a pair of rogues, which can do that but better.

It's like your "How Hunters get to range in melee". It doesn't actually work in practice. In practice, you both snare each other, you both trinket, you snare each other, you limp to range but don't clear melee+ deadzone by the time your wingclip wears off, and you get hammered. Or you drop a trap he simply avoids and continues to hammer you.

My favorite is "Well, you keep shooting at the priest while the other guy is on you". Yes, that works. The priest that only ducks out from behind the pillar to drop a heal? I get in single great arcane shot on him -- which won't crit, and won't really even bug him, while the guy on top of me is set to kill me in about 5 seconds because he's doing insane DPS and I'm in mail with no shield, and certainly no clever damage absorbtion spells or talents.

If a warrior or a rogue is DPSing me, my life span is less than 15 seconds unless MY healer is focused on keeping me up. But here's the thing -- that's a losing battle. My healer will go OOM keeping me alive, but I won't be doing jack to the warrior, so his healer can simply heal himself. So I have to focus on getting to range, so that my healer isn't going OOM trying to keep me up and start making HIS healer work for a living. Which doesn't work, because the rogue or warrior beating up on me won't let me get to range, and I don't have the toolkit to do it -- despite what your theorycrafting says -- and I can't melee against him.

What if it's a mage I'm attacking? Well, if I'm BM-specced I can pop "TBW" and hammer him. He can ice-block, blink, or otherwise keep the hell out of my way and soak a ton of my 18 seconds of damage (or just get close to me so that he's really only eating the pet and my awesome melee damage) while his healer either keeps him up, or his partner melts me or my healer while I'm uselessly focused on him. (Odds are, he sheeped my partner the second I grew big). The second big red fades, I get double teamed having blown my one decent ability for and still not had the burst to kill anyone, because anyone I'm focused at can drop my damage to 15% just by being next to me.

In the end, though, no matter WHAT my spec, the following always holds true:

I can be reduced to 15% of my not all that impressive damage by closing to within 8 yards of me and staying there, or even less by staying on the other side of a pillar and popping out for DoTs or instants. (It doesn't require a degree in math to realize why if you're running circles around a pillar, I can't really kite you, since I'd be running a circle 8 meters wider than yours).

And once you've closed to within melee range, I lack useful tools for getting back out. I have Wingclip, and traps, and either SS or Intimidation. It doesn't work 90% of the time, unless my opponent is really stupid. Not just for me -- for even the best, as a glance at the top arena teams would show.

On the other hand, my mage is turning into pure awesome. I don't even bother PvPing with my hunter, but I'm having a huge blast just leveling with my mage. Whole different feel to the class that I like.

I don't know about Mages, but I've seen some Ret pallies (in excellent gear, true.) kick ass.  There's a 5-pally team on Rampage that does pretty well for themselves, 3 ret 2 holy.  Fuckers.  Warriors prot has never been damage, which is their usual complaint. They can't even excel at PvE like Prot Pallies, since they gots no heals.   Fury, though, I'm surprised doesn't do well.  We've got a lolzfury warrior who dishes out damage fairly well met be that it's over time like hunters, with no spike.

A friend of mine plays in the 3v3 and is the top PvPer on our wargroup or whatever.. it's actually my character, I gave him my account shortly after burning crusade was released (I got bored of the game).

He's a rogue in a 'rogue rogue priest' group. It works great against all comers except against a war druid pally combo; If they can burn down one of the opponents before they can take out their priest, they can generally win. Priest is discipline specc'd, both rogues are combat, one maces one swords; one is specc'd imp expose armor... so you've got cheap shot openings, they both burn blade fury and adren rush, and then one pops kidney shot and the other expose armor at 5 combo points.

Mace is going to spec to fists next patch. Tasty, tasty crit.

Umm, that was changed ages ago, pre-bc when everyone was crying about hunters saying that we were broken and way over powered. (And we were due to talents changing for BC prior to BC gear showing up.)  Trap activation radius is now the same size as the graphic, AND everyone has a chance to see it.  The only way you don't is if we're standing right on top of it.. which means you're in melee range of us anyway.


All the time.  Damn succubi.

It's clear now that you're just a clothie - probably a mage -  bitching about hunters from 6 months ago.. Things changed.  DPSing that priest? The rogue is interrupting our Steady Shot (which gets pushback, but no channeling talent) and our Arcane/ Multi shot MIGHT hit for a total of 3k off the start.  After that it's a fucking stupid priest that stands there for the 6s for them to cooldown so we can shoot him again... and then another 6s to shoot him the 3rd time for a grand total of... 9k.  Oh yeah, we're raping face there.

I raid on my hunter now, where I can actually serve a somewhat useful purpose.. but only after I was forced to prove myself once again, because the common belief is that Hunters are worthless in PvE as well outside of 5-mans. Screw PvP, I've got a Pally for that.

Xanth: Outside of Arena's both Marks and BeastMastery are viable pve and pvp specs. Survival is at best confused, at worst total suckage.

Merusk: For mages to be competitive in the Arena's they almost always have to be frost, IceBarrier, IceBlock, improved snares, the water pet. Fire and Arcane just tend to die too quickly to too many things. Fury warriors fail not because of spike, but lack of MortalStrike. Take away MortalStrike and arms effectiveness would plummet dramatically. Ret pally's are a joke as it stands, pve, pvp, everything in between. Probably the only thing really saving that 5 man pally team, is the fact its 5 damn paladins. Brings new meaning to "Kill the healer first!" :)


Morat: I fucking *AGREE* with you that Hunters are fucked in the Arena, as does everyone else here for the most part. No need to write out 14 pages on how LoS pillar games fuck hunters. I've said so myself more then once in this thread.


Despite the fact we both seem to be writing in English, neither of us can understand the other. IE:

"My favorite is "Well, you keep shooting at the priest while the other guy is on you". Yes, that works. The priest that only ducks out from behind the pillar to drop a heal? I get in single great arcane shot on him -- which won't crit, and won't really even bug him, while the guy on top of me is set to kill me in about 5 seconds because he's doing insane DPS and I'm in mail with no shield, and certainly no clever damage absorption spells or talents."

This was not meant as a claim on how hunters could work in the arena. Yes in your example the hunters effectiveness is nil, I agree. Hunters are fucked in the Arena's.  Inverse the situation though (for debate purposes!  :-P), remove the LoS pillar, say your defending the blacksmith in AB. Do you agree or disagree that being able to put constant DPS pressure on enemy healers despite yourself being pressured by enemy melee is an advantage?  This is all my original statement was addressing. In most other venues, LoS isn't an issue (or even a concern, hello trees in AV, and hills, and the entire geography of the damn map really).


You somehow took "hey a hunter can defend the flag in WSG" and turned it into "Hunters must only defend the flag in WSG, never do anything else in the zone and are unquestionably the best at it!". You called the idea futile then went on how highlight how it wasn't. Where are we having the disconnect? We seem to agree, hunters are useful outside of the arena, yet we are debating the same point?



Again yes, close into 8yards and a hunters effectiveness goes dramatically down, stay 8 or more yards away, so does a warriors (ret paladins, enhance shamans, feral druids, rogues etc.). A warrior whose intercept is down and hasn't landed a hamstring (or had them both countered) is a wet noodle until intercept is back up again. Ret pallies and enhance shamans are in even shittier boats in that regard. The size and geography of the Arena's just makes keeping inside 8 much easier then staying outside of 8.

Design some arena's where the emphasis is on stand offs, kiting and range and Hunter effectiveness will increase dramatically.



Side Note: "It's like your "How Hunters get to range in melee". It doesn't actually work in practice. In practice, you both snare each other, you both trinket, you snare each other, you limp to range but don't clear melee+ deadzone by the time your wingclip wears off, and you get hammered. Or you drop a trap he simply avoids and continues to hammer you."

I really do not understand what you are attempting to do. You have a rogue on you, put down the trap, stand on the trap. Rogue either moves away to avoid the trap taking him off you melee wise, or he continues to melee and is encased in a block of ice. I've been on both ends of this, I do not understand the issue or why this in particular isn't plausible. How is anyone "avoiding" the trap if you are on it and they are meleeing you?

Which means they are encased in a block of ice again.  :-P

And because being seduced by the succubus is a hunter only issue and comparable to being locked out of all your abilities while still taking damage 5-10 seconds? I'll take the bus over the mana dog every time.

No I am not a "clothie" my main is a Balance druid. If there is any class I can kill on a regular basis, it's a hunter. I just have so much armor in moonkin form that all the physical DPS classes just kinda bounce off of me for the most part. No need for deadzone shenanigans or anything like that either, 14k armor will do that for yea. In terms of 1v1, the only classes that give me real pause are locks (who isn't screwed by a lock?) and lucky mages. A mage that can string together a good CS/Stun/Daze chain is really annoying and usually means I die.

I'm the class that will abuse the shit out of pillars in the arena, and I agree it's a fucked up dynamic as it stands currently.

Well, on a totally different topic than Hunters, in 2.3 Drain Life and Siphon Life are going to start being affected by Mortal Strike and Wound Poison.  That annoys me not because I think it's a bad or unjustified nerf, but because it's a buff to the most overpowered debuff in the game - Mortal Strike.  Not that MS is that powerful, it's the complete lack of any way to remove or dispel it that's the problem...oh, except for abilities that are on 3+ minute cooldowns, 2 out or 3 of which are self-only for paladins and mages, vs. it's 6 second cooldown.

Mortal Strike seriously needs an effective way to remove it.  Wound Poison at least isn't completely unremovable, which in my book makes it fine and dandy.

Wound poison also takes a little more effort to get to max effectiveness, need a 5 stack to match MS? 

Yeah.  The stacking can make it pretty difficult to remove, but it also has the disadvantage of needing to be stacked in order to reach full effectiveness, so it goes both ways.  Mortal Strike has no downside either way - one hit gets it at full power, and it's pretty close to unremovable.

Maybe you already know but they aren't nerfing rogues' mace spec.


More like frost. Using cloak of shadows will nullify the freeze trap easily but does nothing against frost trap. In fact nothing works on frost trap which is why it's so amazing. We snare each other - me with crippling, you with frost trap, we both trinket.. and i'm still snared.

I realize I'm quoting this from a ways back and I haven't played in about a month or two but even I remember this changing.

Actually, wounding poison is worse than MS. BOP doesn't remove it, it stacks up to 5 *really* fast if the rogue uses shiv, and most rogues have that "make my poisons harder to dispel" talent. Even with abolish poison + poison cleansing totem running (which presumes a resto druid + shaman combo, which itself is fairly unlikely), they are going to get applied faster than they are being dispelled. Using cleanse is completely hopeless (unless the target has magic debuffs too) because it'll get reapplied faster than you can cleanse it off, you are better off just sucking it up and spamming heals.

There are also tricks with MS, ie. waiting until the 6 sec cooldown is almost over and then stunning/CCing the warrior so he can't reapply it; it can also miss or get dodged, giving a small window of no MS on the target, you can rage starve the warrior, etc etc. Wounding gets reapplied constantly, so you need extended CC on the rogue, which is harder.

Re hunters: 80% of the time they are using the slowing (frost) trap with entrapment, the rest of the time it's a snake trap. Hanging out in the center of the arena the trap will affect most everyone (unless it's blade's edge) including pillar dancers, and BOF on a hunter + frost trap means melee is never going to catch up (unless they themselves get BOF'd, which exposes the paladin). Viper sting with a scorpid pet (or snake trap) is a major pain, also. No, I don't play a hunter, but my arena team has one (he respecs between BM and MM occasionally).

(disclaimer: my arena team is only around 1800 rating, so I am not THAT qualified :P)


-- Z.

I thought scorpid pets got that atk bug nerfed this past patch.

Supposedly. I haven't checked but I'm sure it's possible the fix isn't working as intended. I believe hunter's are still having problems with other abilities like FD.

Since we are on the "hunter" argument, I want to pop in a few points.

While I understand Morat's concern, and agree with most of them, he is coming off in this thread as a frothing at the mouth "hunters are the worst class ever and I am a masochist because I continue to play one" person. Kind of like Paladins were a couple of years ago when they could not do mad DPS. Morat, my good sir, please calm down before your next post, we don't need you to have a coronary over this.

Onto the "important" hunter points that are gamewide issues, PVE and PVP:

DeadZone: Only ranged class with one. It is retarded, has no logic behind it, and it simply something that gets exploited by any caster class that wants an easy kill. Hunters have 1 (and only 1) spell that can do ANYTHING in that range, Scatter Shot. A 21 point talent that is on a 30 second cooldown and barely lasts long enough to get out of the deadzone, much less get to a range where the hunter can fire more than a sting or arcane shot before being in the deadzone again. If you are frostbolted or hamstrung, good luck even getting there.  For PvE, it makes playing a hunter on certain encounters a pain in the ass, especially full on Dragons. Range is designated by the outside of the hitbox on the mob, and dragons have a hitbox that encompasses the entire area that their animations do. I had many instances when we were fighting emerald nightmare dragons where I could not in any way keep within 20yds of the tank to keep the NR aura on him while at the same time being out of the deadzone to do DPS. On many fights, you end up being out of healing range if you are being healed by someone who is healing melee. I have not heard a single sensible argument in the 2+ years I have played this game as to why the dead zone needs to exist at all.

Traps: For PvE purposes, it is the ONLY single target CC in the game that has a cooldown that is longer than the maximum duration of the effect. Why? Because someone thought "well FD trap whining is why we made them useful in combat, let's just give it the cooldown of FD, problem solved". I don't give a rat's ass about the arming time, or the only one trap at a time thing. Not being able to re-CC a mob for 10 seconds in a heroic instance can mean the difference between me and probably the healer living and dying. I can usually make a 2-trap chain work by pre-dropping the first trap, but after that it is toast. Thus why a mage, or even a lock with a succubus = better than a hunter for CC. I love the ability to retrap in combat, don't get me wrong, but the 30 second cooldown is retarded. Make it 15 seconds and take all the "reduces trap cooldown by x" effects off of gear and replace it with something else. In PvP: they suck pretty bad now, but I rarely used them before the expansion anyway so /shrug. FD/trap macro never made much sense to me as FD was much more useful as a spell-interrupt for me than a "oooo look I can trick you!" effect.

Viper Sting: Used to be spammable (though it really never took that much mana away and was dispellable so I don't get the complaints) so they put a cooldown on it. A cooldown that is 2.5 TIMES LONGER than the maximum duration of the effect. Not even useful on mobs you need to keep from getting full mana anymore (though I don't know if there are any in BC at this point).

Hunters need some serious looking at, but we won't get it. Blizzard is obviously not concerned about it, and I am not enough of a PvP head to care. I would like more viability in Arenas, simply because I would like to make my team more competitive so the other people on my team who enjoy PvP and have no PvE gear options can get better gear.

There was a bug with scorpid poison that made it so as long as the stack was being constantly refreshed it kept doing the same amount of damage it did when the stack began so popping beastial wrath + all trinkets + ferocious inspiration from several hunters meant you could have a dot ticking for 600+ damage every 2 seconds for a whole fight.  I dont know what the fix is but thats not the reason hunters use scorpions in pvp anyways, we just use the poison stack to block viper sting dispels.

Pretty sure that was removed, at least according to the screams from the few remaining high-ranked Hunters.

Chimpy has basically my irritations with the class rolled into one. Doesn't help that it can be, occasionally, really boring. Also doesn't help that, at 15% or so of the WoW population, it also contains a proportional amount of idiots. And all the bots. Hunter is darn forgiving in PvE to stupidity, which leads to bots and Hunters who learn painfully that it's not as forgiving in groups.

For instance, I can FD out of my stupidity and let the pet die and the mobs reset. It's not so effective in groups, since it leads to a bunch of dead and pissed off people. I still have problems with warriors and rogues who want to do the pulling. They can't seem to get it into their thick little heads that if I pull badly, and they're far enough back, I can reset it. They can't.

Shit man, I gave up on that nearly 2 years ago.  Now  I just stand in back, let them pull and dismiss/ feign when they fuck it up. Laughs are had by me.

The super damage bug was fixed, nothing affecting scorpions in pvp was changed.

My VERY first Ramparts run was with my Hunter (sadly, not too long ago -- I had real life things to do for six months or so) was with a guild rogue, and a PuG -- an arms warrior, a fury warrior, and a 59 priest who SWORE she'd run Ramparts 10 times at least as main healer.

It was fucking wipe after wipe. Not for me or the rogue -- we're not stupid. The priest was poorly geared (at least she wasn't shadow-specced), would go OOM trying to heal whichever of our two fucking idiot warriors was trying to tank (not even equipping a shield), and then get eaten alive since no one could yank aggro off her.

We ended up letting my pet tank for awhile, before the Rogue and I just bailed and found another group. Repair costs must have been 5+ gold for both warriors and the priest. Neither me nor the rogue had died.

The other group let me pull (it's not hard to pull, and I only fucked up once -- didn't know a set of mobs was linked. I FD'd out and it reset), and it went darn smoothly.

As long as we're on hunter complaints - I wonder if Blizz will ever do anything about hunter costs?  Food and water, pet food, arrows and repairs all add up.  I think my hunter cost was at least 2x the cost of playing my lock, probably 3x.  My pet tanks, so why should I have to repair?  I already have to buy arrows on hunter, plus pet food.

Marksman Hunter and affliction warlock are both 70.  Warlock is by far the more satisfying to play. Leveling up a priest, tried holy for 2 levels and it was so painfully slow I switched back to shadow at 65.  Seems like ezymode, but then that's what people say about hunter and 'lock too.  Just finished Zangar, heading for Terokkar.

I haven't really played my hunter since I hit 70 and was so disappointed with the loot itemization (quest rewards were largely for shamans, not hunters), not to mention the nerfage of the amazing pre-TBC hunter performance.  Warlock's been more fun, although never tried demonology spec.  I didn't like BM on my hunter, so figured I won't like demonolgy.

Now, though, I'm considering trying BM again, especially after getting eaten by big red pets.  Anyone have a link to a BM spec they particularly like?

My personal pet peeve is pet leveling. Between quests and rest XP, I outlevel my pet constantly -- and that's just one. We're limited to three stable slot, pet leveling is glacial for lower-level pets (they have to level on shit that's green TO YOU not to the pet), and there's no point in it.

All pets are the same, loyalty levels (yet ANOTHER grind) means even if pets were insta-your-level, I couldn't train one up instantly, and fuck they're all the same anyways. All boars are the same, all bears are the same, all cats are the same -- it's just skins.

Also, why can't we learn pet tricks from watching them in combat, instead of taming a damn pet for it?

They need to insta-level pets -- your level, whatever your level is, upon taming. If they want to leave in loyalty -- which is just a heavy fucking food payment, which should be removed -- maybe make me visit the pet trainer if you've got some worry I might be oppurtunistic with pets -- I guess it's okay, but they should modify it. It's just another sink.

It's not like I can whistle up ANY pet I want (I have to visit the stable master to shift pets), nor can I retrain pets without visiting the pet trainer. So why, exactly, do I have to bloody well level my pet -- which always lags behind me -- or go through the agony of leveling another pet?
All of them. :) Seriously, 41/20 is common (getting all of lethal shots? Mortal shots? whatever the talent is past aimed). I think I'll end up 41/17/3 for all of Hawk's Eye.

For pets, though -- improved mend pet is a must have (chance of clearing off curses, poisons, etc with each tick). Improved Revive pet is helpful, but not a must have. Ferocious Inspiration is a godsend (it boosts all damage -- even spells. BM specced people tend to end up in mage groups for that reason), as it Serpent's Swiftness.

Pet spec is a bit important -- you want cobra reflexes, because you really want the crit chances to go up to keep FI alive.

I will give you links when I get home. I have tried out pretty much all of the talents in the new BM tree, and I can give you a spec or two to look at.

The reason why the time trapped is shorter then the reuse is because the trap is universal CC. Things like shackle, poly, hibernate etc, only work on certain types of mobs, the trap will work on just about anything that can be CC'd.



As to hunter pulling... why? There are like four pulls in the entire game where you would want a hunter to pull over the tank (outside of some old school raid shenanigans). For 5 mans though? Why would you even want to pull? As the tank, everything always goes so much smoother when I don't have to worry about removing the mobs from the hunter on the pull. Just seems like extra hassle for the hunter as well, some dungeons are terribly unkind to ranged fights.

Doesn't seem worth all the extra steps, sure you can reset the pull, as long as FD isn't resisted... (I am going to go out on a limb and say most hunters don't have the Imp FD talent.) but when it is, you still have a shitty pull but now all the mobs are defaulted to the hunter instead of the tank. In all the groups I've been in, I haven't had the hunter pulling, nor have I had the hunter wanting to pull.



That was in a PTR patch note months ago, that they intended to change/fix the skill learning system for pets so you wouldn't have to tame a new pet for a new skill (and free up a stable slot for another 'real' pet), then one patch update, the note was gone and no Blizz poster ever spoke of it again.

Mystery to this day as to why that never went in.

Misdirection comes in nicely. And Hunters have a variety of shed-aggro tools (especially since each mob checks a FD resist seperately, not together). I pull all the time -- from raids, where we'd make sure extra mobs went to the designated tank instead of zeroing in on the healers who were generating threat the minute the main tank started getting hit) to groups, where experience will pulling (and extra range) generally come in handy.

Why WOULDN'T a Hunter pull? It's one of the few things the class is designed for. I can acquire and hand-off aggro to a tank quite smoothly. I have a variety of tools to do that, and worst case scenario only I die -- the healer can rez me later.

I can tank briefly, given I have mail, and my pet can easily pull someone off me if I can't shed aggro properly. And FD rarely gets resisted -- you can tell when a pull goes bad immediately, and unless it's a boss I'm already down before they're close. Pet eats it (I dismiss the pet on tricky pulls), of course.
I don't know. It's like they're afraid of "overpowering us", which is hilarious considering warlock pets are superior to ours in every possible way.

Simplicity for the most part. I throw my Holy Frisbee, generate a large chunk of initial threat and guarantee the pulled mobs head to me without any middle man management. It also lets the hunter focus on pulling the mob its trapping away from the main pack into it's trap zone, so it can re-trap from firing position quickly and preemptively if need be.   

And if your Misdirection pulling, you can't reset the shitty pull either way. We usually save MD for mobs that aggro wipe, it's absolutely glorious for that  :heart: . (well that or "accidentally" Misdirecting towards the person currently leading the DPS meter  :evil: )

It's probably different in the large raids, but for most of the 5 man stuff I've done, it's almost always simpler to just have the tank pull.



My theory on the pet taming/skill learning thing disappearing, is the programmer who was coding it failed miserably at the task and is now pretending it was never planned to begin with now.

Cause they're gonna NEED to focus on it to get it off the paladin.  I often have hunters complain that after my Avenger's shield hits something, they have to DPS it down to 50% before it'll even look at them so they can drag it away for trapping.  :evil:

But yeah, unless there's a really good reason for me not to pull, like an extremely hazardous pull that's likely to get agro from another group, I'm gonna be pulling with Avenger's Shield.

Pft, if you're not tanking 2-3 things as a pally you're not doing your job right, anyway.  I get ticked when it's a simple 3-pull in Botanica, but the group wants to sap one and sheep the other.  So incredibly mana-inefficient for me that way.   I tanked one of those 5-pulls in Shadow Labs the other day and my group expressed surprise.  It's really not that hard, so long as your healer is properly geared and knows what they're doing.

Yea it's fine for the regular versions, but swarm tanking heroics is still kinda dicey unless your in gear that makes doing heroics moot.


The worst about the shield is when you need to sap. You can have a 8 mob pull, have the sap on one end of the room, and your shield on the other end of the pull, and somehow, every time, the damn Frisbee skips the other half dozen mobs in between your target and the sap and zaps straight for the sapped one.

THOSE pulls are when you get your hunter to pull.  :lol:

Patch notes are up. Hunters are fucking boned.

Other than that -- some decent stuff. Some new daily quests (random instances, random battlegrounds, etc), some changes to NPC interaction (if an NPC only has a single function, you go straight to it -- so clicking the flightmaster brings up the flight map), you can send 12 items at a time in the mail, auction times changed to 12, 24, 48.

Guild banks, a few other nice bits.

Hunters and engineers -- still fucked.

Eng isn't so bad http://www.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2007/october/engineemount.jpg

There are no nerfs there so why do you say that?

Patch notes are up where ?

Website - http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html
Forums - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2288042225&sid=1

Lots of neat new heroic badge stuff. It seems to be on par with tier5, only differently itemized... only have to run 200 more heroic mechanars to catch 'em all! Woo!


-- Z.
(I should really post in that meatplace thread, I've had this annoying signing-my-own-posts-thing for years now!)

All good stuff as far as I can see.

Countdown to first notable abuse of guild bank... starting... NOW!

Someone brought up a good question in Vent yesterday.  What happens if a guildleader types /guilddisband?  Who gets all the lewtz in the guild bank at that point?  The Guildleader? Does it just dissapear into the aether?  Does it remain locked to the guild name, waiting on a GM to restore the guild?  Inquiring minds want to know.

Mostly because Blizzard stated that 2.3 would address Hunter problems in the Arena and....it doesn't. They're still just as fucked. Plus, it appears most classes got a nicer buff than we did, so when you're already dead last and everyone just got a bigger leg up than you did...amounts to the same thing.

As for engineers: As an engineer, let me assure you that a flying mount does not even begin to address the complete useless suckhole that is engineering. Especially when, not to put too fine a point on it, every faction and their fucking dog got a new faction-grindable flying mount.

I think I'm going to switch to leatherworking, so I can at least have the joy of seeing new patterns from every faction, and having the ability to make useful shit.

Holy shit, way to make Kara obsolete Blizz.

http://www.wowhead.com/?latest=additions

Pretty much all of those epics are new Badge of Justice turn-in rewards, and they're on par with SSC/Eye gear.

Didn't we get all of the "Waaah my stuff is obsolete now!" out of the way when Burning Crusade hit and all the equipment people catassed for was rendered useless?

Um, can I be the one to say "Thank God?" Karazhan is horrible. It's a shitty instance with a shitty design that never should have been the ridiculous cockblock that it was to endgame raiding. I hated the place and I still do. I think it's fairly evident that Blizzard realized people wanted to raid the Black Temple, but they had zero shot at getting there before the new expansion was supposed to come around in about 6-9 months.

According to Wowjutsu only 1/3rd of the raiders have been involved in SSC/The Eye. Less than 5% are involved in Hyjal/Black Temple. This gear shift will give those guilds gearing up in SSC/The Eye the ability to fill out the spots in their gear that they are missing, and even perhaps bypass waiting on the last bit of loot from a final boss that is holding them back. How many of us would have loved an option to get some T2 type pants out of lots of something like a ton of UBRS runs instead of having to fight Ragnaros over and over and over and over again waiting for the damn drop?

Where on the doll did Kara touch you? I'm loving Kara myself outside of the trash respawns on some bosses. I've gotten to watch some friends on other servers raid The Eye and a bit of SSC and good fucking god do those look boring and awful in comparison.

I'm also not complaining about the gear being better than Kara stuff. You still need an obscene amount of badges, and most of the items are catering to offspecs that have been just FUCKED in terms of itemization (Prot pallies anyone? Moonkin?). It's great news, but wow, I never thought they'd put in rewards that good.

Don't do leatherworking. Just don't. Trust me.

Have you tried engineering? All my fun shit got nerfed post-60. Flame and shadow reflectors, for instance. Mind control helmets got fucked when they first couldn't be used when you had a pet out (Thanks, Blizzard! Fuck the class with the most engineers, why don't you?) then couldn't be used in combat. Jumper cables fucking don't work enough, and grenades and bombs are too damn expensive to use.

We've got the invulnerability belt, which is nice in Arena if you don't mind that it can be dispelled, you're forced to wear a level 55 green belt at 70 PvP, lasts like 8 seconds, oh and when it backfires you take double damage -- so it's nice if it works, you're dead if it doesn't. Rocket boots, the parachute cloak, and......we can make a decent gun for tanks. And we have a nice T4-quality hat.

It's an expensive waste of time. I miss my shrink ray, death ray, netgun (why the fuck do tailors make 100% working nets?), rod-that-turns-people-into-gnomes, and all the other shit I used to do to annoy the fuck out of people in PvP or to turn easy boss fights into nightmares because everyone lost 25% of their AP when the Shrink Ray backfired.

Sure I'll point out the places:

1 - Respawn timers on trash that they have/are progressively nerfing.
2 - The fact that the place has 10 bosses in it. Optional or not, they could have combined those loot tables into fewer bosses. Someone always wants to do them until they have everything.
3 - The opera event, while fun, shouldn't be random. That's just stupid.
4 - The trash past the Curator. My lord are you kidding? This serves absolutely no purpose but to screw over people who don't have Aran on farm yet. It's punative, boring, and it makes me groan the moment you walk past the Curator and look into that room.
5 - Aran and Illhoof used to be horrible, but they nerfed the shit out of them.
6 - The random elemental dropping factor of the Prince. Fights shouldn't be that heavily dependant on the luck of the draw. You can say blah blah blah you can adjust etc, but imo you should never wipe on any fight you've won 10 times in a row before that unless you absolutely fuck up. The Prince fight doesn't qualify.
7 - The sheer fact the place takes FORVER to farm even if you're awesome at it and sharding everything until the Prince.
8 - The 7 day lockout timer for a 10 man instance. It may help people farm, but it also locks out any chance of getting T4 for your group for 2.5 months bare minimum with perfect drops. And that never happens.
9 - Originally the loot was shitty, but they fixed that too.

Things I liked:

1 - The first boss is a cinch and doesn't take long to get to. It inspired confidence.
2 - The feel of the place and the graphics were spot on.
3 - The Opera events were fun and well-designed.
4 - The Chess event is a ton of fun and well worth doing for no other reason than that.

So yeah, I'm actually very excited that I'll never have to go back again, even though I didn't get everything I needed off Nightbane. Also, big thumbs up for basically being able to skip Magtheridon because I'm no fan of that fight either, and the BP isn't really worth the hassle. Gruul was fun, but back to back Lairs weren't a great design choice, imo. We needed more variety.

The Clefthoof population needs time to recover.


The new loot doesn't obsolete Kara, if anything, it'll get more people in Kara for Badges. Lots of class/spec don't even bother with Kara atm due to it's shitty itemization for them. Now they can grab a handful of 'easy' Badges for shit they can use.

I have attempted engineering several times. I cannot imagine rending my soul in two leveling that all the way up, only to turn around and grind it into a fine powder by leveling up leatherworking.

If you're going to dump engineering for something else, do jewelcrafting or turn to the gentle craft of alchemy. At least you'd have a hope in hell of making money.

The only thing I think really needs work is the Prince...I was watching someone I know fight him and they had a bad pull. Well, they couldn't even reset it because an infernal dropped right in front of the door. They just had to eat a wipe on a minor screwup.

I hear lots of bitching about the Prince, including from my own guild who downs him regularly.  The complaint being, that he's all luck and no skill based on the infernal dropping.

From what I understand, he's fucking nothing compared to Lady Vaash and her random bullshit.


Ed:  Also, here's vid of the engineering mount in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTp9uYnyGLA

I understand complaints about Kara.  That said, if it was the same every time, you have a completely different set of people who complain about it not being random enough.  Arguing which side is right or wrong is like arguing over pie or cake.  It's good.  Eat it. 

Only complaint I feel they could still address in Karazhan is the sheer, mind numbing, repetitive, stupid, asinine volume of trash, especially post-curator.  Whoever is in charge of 'pacing' dungeons for Blizz needs to die.  You can point to several instances where this person(s)'s idea of fluidity even though the term is  largely subjective is just flat wrong.  You can start with Molten Core, and the amount of trash was easy but, well, too much.  BWL was fine.  AQ speaks for itself, and so on.  Seriously devs.  Trash is not cool.  Is it necessary?  No!  Think outside the box.  If it was something we wanted, we wouldn't call it trash, would we?

Biggest barrier to the BC endgame for most people wasn't Kara though.  Everybody and his neighbor is/was in Kara.  It was SSC.  There again.  Trash.  Yay. 

My first thought on them was, I need to get my alt his own guild. That's the answer to my storage problems right there.

They removed the dead zone.

If blizzard was worth a fuck they'd have auditable tracking on all transactions made with the guild bank, as well as enable permission lists on a per-player basis as to who may and may not make use of an item placed their.  So i can put up mana pots for X, Y, or Z to use, but players A thru F can fuckoff.  Hopefully, if the guild leader /gdisbands, the same auditing system would be used to mail a given player back all items placed their, assuming the cockmuncher didnt simply make off with the guild bank like so many guild leaders do.

What, in the last six hours? You're shitting me.

Ah, I see they're looking at a reduction or removal. It's about fucking time they at least tested it. That 6 to 8 yards of nothing was bullshit, and I still think it was just a beta mistake they never removed. Ah, blue statement:
So we got three yards of "You're fucked" to prevent double white attacks? That's the lamest goddamn reason I've ever heard. We don't do that much white damage, especially with resiliance gear in the game. (We certainly do jack shit with melee, and our white crits aren't that fucking high). Why the hell didn't they just link auto and ranged cooldowns? Aren't they both linked to the global cooldown? So how the hell can you take both?

That'll seriously change the dynamic, though. No more having to find the one damn corner with an 8-yard range and LOS to target in some instances, and mages and druids will have to eat our massive (sarcasm!) melee damage if they want to nuke us to death.

And in case anyone bitches -- we have spell pushback on aimed shot and steady shot, and channeling interrupts on volley, just like every other mana user does on non-instants.

Man, not having to find the single spot in a hallway where I can shoot from? Rad.

From the forum crying, it appears that most non-Hunters think this means hunters can aimed shot from 0 yards without spell pushback.

Instead of from 6 yards, with spell pushback. The crying of the rogues and warriors is like sweet mana from heaven, although eventually they'll figure out that nothing's really changed for them and that their tactics haven't changed. Mages are screaming themselves hoarse, which makes me laugh. Apparently they think we can fire every shot in our arsenal on the run.

It's nice to see that I've put up with that shit not for gameplay balance reason, but as best I can tell, because it was a cheap solution for NPCs.

The practical upshot is to give hunters about two or three more yards to play with in the arena, which means a much better chance of having a target at range. Getting away from rogues and warriors will still be damn difficult -- but we might get an arcane and CS off before they intercept and hamstring us again. Then we're back to "Hunter pathetic melee damage" against "OMG WTF DID HE JUST CRIT ME FOR?" warrior damage.

I once meleed a rogue to death.  True story.   I've also never laughed so fucking hard in my life.  My god, he was a pathetic excuse for a rogue.

Hah. That has to be the world's shittiest rogue. I did hear a Hunter discuss what happened when she got jumped while AFK (this was below level cap prior to TBC). She had her pet on defensive and in prowl, and she was sitting off in a corner of Azhara, I think.

Rogue jumps her, gets jumped in return by her pet. Between her pet and the occasional Chili burp, she killed him. Didn't even find out until she sat back down and saw herself at 1/4 health.

Between an equally skilled hunter and rogue, it boils down to whether the rogue gets the jump. If I spot him at range, he's dead. If I spot him after he hits me, I'm dead. I once had (at 60, prior to TBC) a very good rogue stunlock and kill me while I was riding from SP down to the Field of Strife. He killed me so quickly I never actually dismounted.

Once? I've done it so many times that I began to think that hunters were good at melee. Then I realized that I was on an RP server.

I don't recall seeing this anywhere, but the minimap now shows you a ! or a ? (blue or gold) for your quests.   I flew over about 5 quests I didn't even know about between Shat and Area 51 on test.

Is it still level specific?  They REALLY need to give you an option to turn on the ! for quests you out leveled.

No more deadzone + MS component to aimed shot (which I will still probably never use) makes me actually looking forward to the upcoming patch.

Plus Z'A looks promising if only because there is a pretty nice bow out of there, which I am probably more likely to get than a prince bow at this point......god I hate the drops we get in kara :/

I think it is, yeah.  I haven't gone running through Dun Morogh or anything to test it, though, just outland.

Hope you're geared. ZA is tuned pretty fucking hard.

Yeah.  I can see ZA getting some tweaks.

ZA is NOT going to be a walk in the park for most Kara geared groups.

I got in on a guild ZA run.  For reference, my guild has BT / Hyjal on farm, however i am not a Prime raider, and as such, my druid is geared only in T4 / heroic loot.  We went in somewhat cold (a few people had some ideas as to how fights work).  We killed up to the 3rd boss in the timed run order and then wiped.

Bear boss was fairly easy, but shit hits HARD.  I was offtanking / Second tanking, and the first boss can put out a LOT of damage ( i was down to 1k HP a few times with healers focusing on me due to the sheer amount of damage his Rend dots do).

Eagle boss himself was a joke (get under the storm and you live).  The clear up to him was not however.  Think of it like the suppression room, but a bit faster paced.

Dragonhawk boss was a bitch.  The clear to him was so so (CC is a MUST here, as some of the trash mobs can put out REDICULOUS amounts of damage to your whole raid if not managed properly) and someone always need to be watching for scouts (they will run and summon adds, but have really low HP).  The boss himself is going to be the the hard part for most guilds, as he requires a LOT of coordination.  The fight involves a fair amount of positioning and timing. because you have to avoid Breaths + exploding bombs + allow hatchers to hatch SOME eggs but not too many eggs or you get overrun.  Lots of somewhat delicate balances involved, and a fair number of potential issues that can totally fuck your raid up.

That was as far as we got before people wandered off for dinner / arena groups / other stuff and the raid died out.  Going back again tomorrow to mess around some more.

I really hope they turn it back to what Blizzard said it was supposed to be at every turn, a 10-man for guilds getting out of Kara but not quite to TK/SSC. Right now it seems like a loot bank for T5 raiders who can't get the drops they want from TK/SSC.

I have decent gear, some t4, random other kara loot. But I will be running with at least half the group being people in T6.

Has a date been announced for 2.3?  Surely it's not today, with the downtime?

Today was just your standard tuesday downtime. No patch today. My guess is next week at the earliest, probably one of the next two after that being most likely.

They said there would be a two week notice before season 3, so as long as the notice hasn't been given the minimum time it can come out in is 2 weeks.

In that same post they said that they would not necessarily have season 3 start right with the release of 2.3. Which could mean 2.3 next week, s3 2 weeks later. Or somesuch.

They are still actively testing different talents and AV changes.  I'm sure ZA is tuned well as it can be.  They are still doing some other things. 

Engineering apparently got some love. The new repair bots mats have been toned down to something reasonable (and it makes 5 at a time), the new ammo boxes are cool, and it appears they've added a passive cloud tracking to the engineering helms -- like the new fish tracking, so it stacks with "Find Minerals" or whatnot.

So engineers with a Mote Extractor might have a much easier time of it.

I think potion injectors can now be used by anyone.

It's silly, but the potion injectors might be the biggest change of them all, it might give engineers something to actually sell on the AH other then mechanical squirrels.

Don't make light of tracking clouds -- only engineers can harvest the damn things (I think. You need the Mote extractor, right?), and they tend to give off several motes. And they're adding at least one new type of cloud.

It's like giving engineers a tiny extra harvesting profession to offset the incredible fucking goldsink that is engineering.

My god tracking would be awesome.  I can never find the fucking clouds as it is, flying around so damn low to the ground mobs aggro me the whole time. Fucking ridiculous.

Potion injectors used by anyone is huge, too.  I use the things all the damn time, because 20 potions in one slot is goddamn love.

The cloud thing is meh, there's only like 2-3 per zone at any time, the extra half dozen motes you can grab won't offset costs.

An engineers can sell a mithril casing or two a day, also one or two gyrochronometers, and, of course, scopes of all levels.

These are items that are usually not on my auction house, despite people needing them.

I'll sell mithril casings if I've come across a mithril vein recently and have the ore.  Gyros and scopes tend to sell for less than the mats to make them, so I've said fuck it, they're not worth my time.

For example: the 28 crit-rating scope from Kara I can only sell for ~120g if I'm lucky. It requires 2 Hardened Admanantite Tubes, 6 Felsteel Stabalizers and 2 Star of Elune

On my server those stars are 30-40g each.  The mats for the other parts breaks-down to 120 Admantite ore, 72 Fel Iron ore and 48 Eternium ore.  Stacks of Adam go for 20g if someone's undercutting and Fel Iron is ~15-18g.   Eternium is some ridiculous price near Khorium ore, but let's say ~15g.  Total cost at those prices?  270g for the scope if I'm only covering mats.

Yeah, that's why I only make it for guildies who bring me the mats, and screw selling it on the AH.

Lower level scopes are hard to come by.

Why are you only selling high level scopes?

Nobody sells the other level scopes.

On my server, gyros sell for about 2g each.  That's pretty good for 1 iron bar and 1 gold power core, when a stack of iron bars goes for about 6g and gold bars go for about 8g/stack.  Cost for 3 gyros = 1 gold bar plus 3 iron bars = 70 silver. 

Investing 70 silver for a 6g return is not bad.

One of the mistakes people make in this game is to only try to make and sell high level stuff.  People are still leveling up, and still need lower level stuff.  That's where the money is, simply because no one else is doing it.

I agree with Xanthippe.  The money is in the lowbie stuff to mid-level stuff.  Easy access to the mats and buyers galore!

I predict this to be even moreso after 2.3 launches.  The number of people holding back for the leveling changes to either finish their alts or start new ones will be huge.  Expect prices on crafted items for the 20-60 lvl toons to jump big time.

Leveling my rogue I can tell you that there is almost nothing I can buy in the 20 - 40 range.  I'd think that selling to those folks would be bank.  Lots of people are leveling alts and are rolling in gold but not gear. 

I owned the herbalism market on my server because I was the only one selling the stuff beyond the absolute high end materials.  My other alts do pretty well in cash themselves since they harvest materials for their mounts.

I must be one of those somewhat odd individuals in that I have leveled 3 different characters to level 60 and have probably never spent more then about 20G combined between the 3 of them buying gear for them off the AH.

I honestly have never, EVER seen the point of buying something i know i am going to replace in 3 to 5 levels.  If i was planning on twinking a character and locking them at a fixed level, sure, all bets are off, but if the goal is to hit 70, i just wouldnt bother.

I'm with you.  Kinda.

I'd never buy gear;  but I may try to level my professions that little bit quicker.

I've tried selling low-end engineering stuff. It doesn't move for weeks at a time, but there's at least a semi-frequent demand for higher things. (Adamantite frames, scopes, the odd repair bot now and then.)

The few items that are needed from engineering for the low-end quests I actually expect the demand to bottom-out for after 2.3.  With the faster leveling, you can skip those damned annoying quests like Chasing A-ME-01 and whichever one it is in the Badlands. (Hell I skipped both on my last 2 alts as it is and I can make the stuff.)  I tried selling about 10 gyros over the course of a month, and finally just gave up.  It was costing me more to list a few of them every day than the amount I was selling, and I was undercutting the other 2-3 people selling them.

Demand for low-end mats? Sure, that's there.  Low-end items not so much on my server.  Every server's different.. mine's more raid-focused than others, apparently. Makes sense what with people transferring there to join Risen and Premonition since they can't do pve -> pvp transfers to join other Hardcore raiders.

Yeah, I wasn't really talking about gear.  That really doesn't sell very well at any level.  At least, it never really covers the actual cost.

I was talking about materials for skills and consumables.  The only reason people purchase consumables at low levels anymore is to make leveling that much quicker.  Quicker kills, less deaths, etc. make for fast levelling.

The profession building is just a no-brainer.

For me it depends upon the character I'm levelling.  If it's a Mage, Warlock, Priest type then I mostly ignore the AH.  However, it's worth it to always check for the most up to date weapons for a Warrior, Paladin or Rogue.. More damage = quicker levelling..

Depends on your tradeskills too. My mage is a tailor/enchanter. Other than occasionally looking for cheap recipes/patterns that I might not have, I use the AH solely to sell stuff with.

Between the gear I make (for skill-ups), the enchants I put on my gear (for same), I don't need anything else. Bags always sell well, although not too profitably, and some stuff (like the black mageweave stuff) tends to sell really well -- and since I had to make a bunch to skillup, I sell that.

Mostly what I do, however, is if I've got a bunch of crap greens from any alt (jewelcrafter, tailor, blacksmith, leatherworker, even engineer) -- I just mail them to my enchanter, melt them, and send the results back. There's always a brisk trade in enchanting materials of all levels, and at least I get something back.

I have a level 16 alt that sells bronze tubes for 1g each.  And Aquadynamic Fish Attractors, 5g/stack.  I sell 2-4 tubes a day, and about 12 stacks of lures a week.  I should probably make those low level scopes and sell them.  I can rarely find scopes on the AH other than the khorium scopes.

Just started a leatherworker who's 29.  Been selling the two blue items, about 1 per day.  I even sell some of the green items, because there's not much on the auction house. 

I can make more per hour going to Outlands and farming, but sometimes I can't or don't want to go farm, and it takes less time to make crap and put it up.

With regard to gear - I buy a lot of it.  Why not - my main's rich, what else will I do with the gold?  Save it for housing?  (Even buying gear, and buying mats to level up new professions, I still have a pile).  It makes levelling that much easier.

People say they can't make money from crafting but they're focused on the wrong things.  High end crafting rarely pays unless it's enchanting or jewelcrafting - the two most expensive to level up.  Alchemy's screwed since TBC for profit anyway.  I think I break even on my potion master making mana pots so that I can discover more recipes.  Plenty of people make pots for free.

The logic behind scopes is probably this:  I'm trashing this soon, do I really need a scope?  Prior to level 40 and the sniper you can only add 2-5 damage to your weapon.  Depending on the speed, is it worth the gold?  Hell, I didn't think it was even worth it to put scopes on the weapons I used after replacing my Rhok' while leveling through BC.

Now I've got to ask. How many bronze tubes to you sell in a day on your server? And gyros?

2-4 bronze tubes per day, and I don't sell Gyros anymore because my engineer isn't big enough to make them, but I used to sell 2 -4 a day on those also.  Also sold Mithril casings, one or two per day.

Before TBC I sold Thorium Bullets for a decent price - marked them up about 40% only, because I sold so many of them. 

Then stupidly I went back to alchemy/herbs because engineering was so bad at TBC launch.  I guess I should go back to engineering on my hunter - alchemy is shitty shitty shitty for a nonraider, and engineering is looking pretty good with these newfangled things in the next patch (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=20475).

In what way is alchemy shitty for a non-raider?

Can't buy mats, make potions and sell potions and make money doing it.  Not good money, anyway.

Transmute mastery is a joke; potions mastery allows a person to break even if they're careful and don't make or sell too much at a time; elixir mastery is the only one that can make money.  People are beginning to figure that out, though, which means ... lower prices, less money.

The discovery thing is just bullshit. 

The whole change to Guardian or Battle elixir doomed the business of alchemy.  It's far more lucrative to sell herbs than potions these days.

I'm thinking about dropping herb gathering to pick up engineering so I can make arrows or bullets for my hunter.  I'd drop alchemy but I already have discovered and purchased enough that it's an investment I don't want to turn my back on.

Starting with a revamp to Alterac Valley here:  http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jsessionid=3DD9BF4DBC252B1FA8E1EF40FBE000AE?topicId=2215842565&sid=1

Per the PTR and devs, we won't get the bonus from those quests unless there's a win.  Which brings in the controversial AFK factor that is the bane of BGs.

Much to the AFK-crowd's chagrin, at the 11th hour, we are endowed with this little bit of ammunition:  http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/9811/

"Details CattleProd allows you to add a monitor to automatically report AFK users. This monitor can be configured to automatically start when entering a battleground."

Apparently Blizzard opened up the door that introduced leeway to script writers which allows an API function call to ReportPlayerIsPVPAFK().  So in addition to the manual report placed in the players' hands, we now have an addon that automates that process.  Of course there are addons on the other side of the spectrum that are countering it with alerts to the debuff so it should be interesting to see how this pans out.  It's a war zone within a war zone.

I'm with you here. And I don't think faster leveling is going to mean a better market. The game is still balanced to let you go 1-70 on quest gear and what you get for drops alone. Doing something faster that you're already going to be doing much faster due to patch doesn't seem to generate a big market opportunity.

 The only money I've ever made has been from Herbs. That was before switching to Engineering. I've invested so much in it now I'm not giving it up without a fight. At least I can use the teleporters, which as a Mage means I'm 5 minutes from anywhere on both worlds.  :-P

I'm really liking alchemy for leveling, but it's not much of a money maker on my server.  I'll likely respec my tradeskill at 60 or so, but I'm not sure what I'd switch it to.

For a consistent money maker, mining is probably the best one to have.  Mining, skinning, herbs.  The next would likely be the ones that provide stuff that gets used up or replaced a lot - enchanting, alchemy, jewelcrafting.  The downside is that you need to buy or acquire recipes at 100g and up.  There is zero cost to gathering.

My active toons are a 65 priest (tailor/enchanter) who mostly makes bags and DEs stuff for me - not a lot of money there, but it's nice to be able to make bags and cloth (primal mooncloth bags are awesome to have); a 70 hunter (alchemy/engineering now, just switched), a 70 lock (mining/jewelcrafting - trained up and bought all the recipes as soon as I saw them right after TBC launch, so it was very lucrative until recently - not so much now because a lot of people have picked up JC so supply is high).

My alchemist is a potion master on the theory that I can discover more recipes.  I'm not in a raiding guild, and rarely hawk my vocation.  Maybe I can sell potion injectors after 2.3.

I have a 29 shaman who is skinning/leatherwork.  I sell plenty of low level greens daily - can buy leather off the AH and still make a profit.  Timewise, it's more profitable to go hunt in Outlands on one of my 70s, but not as enjoyable for me.

My 19 warrior is mining/blacksmithing.  I have not so far seen much that's impressive for blacksmithing - can't sell what I can make for a profit either, because ores are so expensive (in comparison with leather).  This is an experiment.

Btw, another reason to drop alchemy - you can almost _always_ find an alchemist to make whatever you like, for free or tips.  They will do it just for the chance of discovery.  Plus, depending on what you want them to make, you can find the correct master - potions or elixirs.

Transmute mastery is bogus - poorly thought out.  The proc rate is the same as for the other masteries but you can only transmute once per day.  With potions and elixirs, there is no daily limit to procs, no cooldowns.

Another place Blizz screwed up with alchemy is that the cooldown timer is the same for Azeroth alchemy transmutes and Outlands transmutes.

Tailors can make mooncloth and primal mooncloth on different timers.  Alchemists have to choose between an arcanite bar, an essence of something to something, or primal might, or primal something to something.  One transmute per day folks! 

I hear that the Gladiator set (Season 1 Arena gear) is purchaseable with Honor points now in the respective Halls (Champion's Hall for Alliance) on PTR. Can anyone confirm and point to a site that lists their costs?

This site (http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?;tpstart=18#post_aprice) has the old and new arena point and honor point prices for season 1-3 sets.

On my server you can make 20 g a day just logging in and transmuting earth to water. Earth sells on the ah for avg 5g, water 25. Seems pretty good money to me. Earth to water has to be one of the easiest formulas to get being as it's sporan faction and one repeatable quest gives you 750 faction. Took me 2-3 1/2 hrs on my rogue to go from low honored to revered and get it.

Put in the perspective of daily quests, no trade skill is particularly interesting atm.

Thanks Chenghiz

any word on when 2.3 hits the servers?

I haven't heard a date, but the patch has been downloading via the background downloader for the last 3-4 days. Perhaps within the next couple of weeks? Just a guess.

I heard they just patched test last week so it still might be a while.

That's an interesting thought Xanthippe, but then if you make a few extra potions it's a few extra gold, but if you get 3 primal mights, that's (on my server) about 75x2 additional gold.  Then there's the point that Phred brought up - transmute stuff found on the AH to better stuff and maybe make 60g instead of 20.  I've even seen one proc for five primal mights.  That'd be 375g, not bad for a single shot.  To match that with potions or elixirs you'd have to do a lot of brewing.

Guys that is all great, but there is supply and demand.  If transmutes were allowed to be done nonstop, the prices would all drop like a rock.  The reason they are so high now is that their supply is throttled.  I assume Blizz has thoguht through all of this and felt it kept the game balanced in some way to have a slow steady stream of the higher sought after motes and gems being fed to the market.

I'm transmuting Stone to Water myself until I get more faction in other areas and/or get a discovery.  I don't mind it as the value I gain in doing it is nice, but it would be nice to at least limit it to 1 per day per type of transmute.  As it is now, ANY transmute can only be done once per day.  Hell, even tailors get to make one of the 3 specialty fabric types every 4 days. (Doing this with my tailor.)

Make it so you can make one primal transmute, one gem transmute, and one essence transmute.  That seems more fair.

How many primal mights are you going to make that you lose money on?  Ie, that don't proc?  Cost of a primal might on my server right now is:

Primal Earth 3g
Primal Mana 15g
Primal Water 18g
Primal Air 25g
Primal Fire 22g

about 83g

They are up at the AH for 80g/each

Now that's without factoring in deposit (which is lost if you don't sell them) and AH cut.  So you HAVE to proc plus you have to sell enough of them.

So while it sounds good, in theory, you'll proc perhaps what, 10% of the time? and end up with 2 or 3.  You can try once per day.  You might go 20 days without a proc (as I did once).

How much money are you losing/gaining really?

If you say, "but I farm all my primals!" then I say that there is still a value assigned to that primal, and you are either losing money or barely breaking even.  You could instead be selling your primals.

Ok, now consider elixir mastery.  Buy or find fel lotus, price 22g each.  Sell flasks.  There is no limit to how many procs per day you can have.  You might proc, you might not, but you eventually will - it's not a one time per day thing.

You can sell some flasks for 45g each (eg, Flask of Pure Death).  You might be breaking even on buying the herbs and lotuses, but you'll profit on procs.

My server may not be like yours - there are a lot of raiders on mine.

(I'm potion mastery though, because I don't use elixirs and I make a lot of mana potions - I don't make much on them, but still focused on discovery).

According to Drysc: Planned patch date is next Tuesday(/Wednesday/Thursday, depending on where you are), with Arena S3 starting the following week.

On my server it's not hard to find someone in trade still offerering the transmute for free and paying you if they get a skillup/discovery.
Same with riding crops minus the discovery.

Has anyone here ever been ripped off for their primals?  I am always nervous of those transmuting for free, because I figure if they charge they probably aren't scamming.  But it's scary to put 5 primals, representing a night or two of work, into the inventory of a perfect stranger.

I am sure it happens, but I don't know anyone who has had it happen.

I never charge for combines, never ask for tips. Of course, I also don't go around hawking my skills to the world either, if I have my transmute up and someone asks in /2 for a certain trans I can do, and I feel like bothering with it, I will send them a tell.

But as a lot of people have said, even by undercutting the current market value on the primals and selling them, then buying a pre-made might off the AH is usually going to be better for you economically than farming the primals and then transmuting.

Thats a reportable offense, and you will get your stuff back if you contact a GM.  In the very early days of wow (nov/dec 04) their were people playing fresh off D2 addiction, where such scamming was commonplace and expected.  I can remember people getting scammed out of their stuff in a similar fashion, and getting it back after paging a GM.

Interesting.  In the past, in most games they couldn't do this because it would lead to a he said-she said sort of thing (I report player x for scamming even though I gave or sold him the stuff, so I get it back and he has nothing). 

I wonder if they log player transactions and can check on the truth of the claim?  That would be cool but I'd have to think the volume of information would be legendary even if they kept it for a day.

Wow logs everything.  They can literally check how much gold you had before/after any given transaction. What would said in /guild during that time, or in whispers, or in private channels.  I'm not sure how long each char log extends time-wise but it's very extensive.  Some of the funniest posts on the official forums are GM's responses to people who have tried to scam others.

Do you have anything to back that claim up ?

Asking Seriously.  I'm interested.

anyone got the final patch notes?

They won't be posted until the patch is ready for D/L in the morning most likely.

mmo-champion has the most recent PTR notes, which will be pretty close to what goes live.

http://www.mmo-champion.com


As to the Blizzard logging thing, every single item/gold transaction in the game is in the database. Nothing ever gets over-written unless blizzard fucks up (which they have done in the past i.e. last december with the pre-BC patch they corrupted several thousand people's entries that left them with nothing but the items they had equipped on their character at the time the patch went live). It just might take them a while to dig the stuff up, and most minor things they ignore.

I'd expect WoW to back up everything, as a division of a public company. Not sure what they have for Sarbanes-Oxley compliancing where Vivendi is based (France?), but I gotta imagine they have some very strict home-brew standards anyway. All records retained for X period of time, etc and so on.

That's not as ironclad as you might think.  I am pretty sure that EA is public, yet scammers were/are? on every corner in UO.  I don't think SOX explicitly addreses virtual property  :wink:

So...is there extended maintenance today, or what?

Edit: Apparently so. 2.3 is live.

Unfortunately no, I don't save the little blue snippets I find now and again.  Mostly by browsing the wow forums you come across actual blue responses to in game query.
A good example I saw was someone posting to complain they had lost their tradeskills and gold in a char server transfer.  To which the blue replied "Actually it shows right after your transfer you deleted both professions and then retook them."  It's late and im horrible at paraphrasing.  In short they log a LOT, and love shoving back in would-be scammers faces.