A Hunter Raid Cooldown Idea

Many hunters including myself have been asking for some kind of raid cooldown. I've been pondering this for a while, trying to think of what our CD should look like. I want it to be different and obviously useful. The other night an idea finally hit me. While it's (hopefully) too late in the Warlords development cycle to get a new ability implemented, I really like this idea and want to share it.

Lots of classes get really useful raid cooldowns and enhancements these days. You've got your Heroism/Bloodlust/Time Warp, Rallying Cry, Lock cookies and portals and summons. Seriously, why so much Lock love? We need hunters to get something along these lines. I want other raid members to feel grateful we're aound, like the way I feel about a Warlock when a cookie saves my ass.

Some of you are probably thinking, "We get lots of those CDs! Our exotic pets can bring hero, a battle res.." Let me stop you right there. For starters, you have to be BM to bring those. Next, bringing them can mean giving up a different buff your raid needs. Most importantly, those are other class' abilities that we borrow. What I want is a new hunter raid cooldown. Something no other class brings, and is helpful for the whole group. As I was trying to figure-out what it should be I knew it needed to be pet based. We are the pet class. It's our thing. I was having a hard time thinking of something cool until a flex run I did recently.

It was a situation every raider has experienced. Earlyish in the encounter something tanky or healy want awry (I won't pretend I really understand what those guys do. I should, but I don't.) and both our tanks were dead. It takes a few precious seconds to get a tank targeted and ressed, not to mention buffed-up. As this process was happening and the boss was running around clobbering characters that aren't tanks I thought, "Man I wish my pet could tank. Just for 15 or 20 seconds while we regroup." Eureka.

Hunters and huntress' I present to you what should become the new hunter raid cooldown: The Oh Shit Let My Pet Tank For A Bit button (name TBD). It's useful. It's different. It's pet based. I'm not going to pretend that I'm not pretty proud of this idea.

What I'm envisioning is a single button that gives a short time (for some reason 20 seconds seems good to me) where our pet takes no damage and sits on the top of it's target's threat table. During this time maybe the pet's threat could be magnified so a skilled hunter could MD other mobs to it, for adds or council fights. And when the ability is over the pet dies and can't be immediately ressed. Maybe it can't be ressed for a minute or two, or possibly until combat ends. I'm not calling this an 'Oh Shit" button for nothing. This isn't Heroism. You don't normally plan to use this. You just thank Elune that you have it when you need it.

Speaking of Heroism, the same rules apply. You get this ability exactly once per fight, regardless of how many hunters are in your raid. No stacking hunters and rotating pet tanks to replace a real player tank or to cheese some fight mechanic. But even with these restrictions, this ability could come up huge in at least a few raiding situations. We have the aforementioned dead tanks scenario. The ability might also help before or during a high damage phase to give healers a chance to top-off real tanks. I think the coolest application of this ability would be the last stand. I'm talking about that all too familiar situation where 1 or 2 DPS are trying to finish off a 98% dead boss. This ability could be the difference between a kill and the super frustrating 0.5% wipe. It just might buy us an extra 10 seconds of DPS to get the boss down. Imagine the heroes we would be every time a hunter and their pet take down the boss with everyone else watching from their corpses! Their children and grandchildren will sing songs that tell the Tale of The Sporebat that Killed Hellscream.

What do you think of this idea? Got your own hunter Raid CD idea? Let me know. We won't get anything until there is a conversation taking place in the hunter community.

Don't freak out

Ever since Blizzard announced that gems will be random and there will be less gear that takes enchants, I have seen a lot of gloom and doom in the gold making community. On the surface, it does seem like they may be killing the golden geese of WoW. While it's way too early to tell for sure, after doing some thinking and even number-crunching, I'm happy to stay in both markets moving into Warlords. The only way I didn't drown in the combinations and permutations and get totally confused was to tell myself a story. A story about the luckiest hunter in the world...of Warcraft.

He's strictly a PvE raiding hunter. This hunter is lucky. He gets every drop. Literally every drop from a tier. He always puts the same haste enchant on his gloves. And he collects two sets, so that he has optimal secondary stats for both of his specs. So under our current gear system he gets:

• Raid Finder gloves
• Raid Finder off spec gloves
• Flex gloves
• Flex off spec gloves
• Normal gloves
• Normal off spec gloves
• Warforged gloves
• Warforged off spec gloves
• Heroic gloves
• Heroic off spec gloves
• Heroic Warforged gloves
• Heroic Warforged off spec gloves

I told you he was lucky. Anyway, under our current gear system we have a chance to sell him 12 enchants each tier for his glove slot. Not bad. Until you look at the lucky hunter's possibilities under the Warlords system. He's gonna get all the gloves listed above, but there will also be Warforged (whatever they end up calling it) Raid Finder and flex drops, so we're up to 14. Any time he gets gloves with either a random gem socket or his favorite tertiary stat he upgrades and enchants them (28). Then he starts collecting the drops with a gem socket AND his tertiary stat (42). There's more than one tertiary stat he likes, so he's building a second set of that (56). A gem slot for each of this set brings us to a whopping 70 opportunities to enchant this guy's gloves each tier. Almost six times as many as the current system. Even if there are half as many enchants in Warlords, we still have nearly triple the opportunity we do now. Imagine how many possibilities there would be if this guy decides he wants to collect all the tertiary stats! I tried to calculate that, but it got into scientific notation pretty quick. We haven't even considered PvP gear, two sets of non armor gear for hybrid classes, etc. I think it's safe to say we will still have plenty of opportunities to sell enchants in Warlords. Gems are going to be random, so it's a bit different, but in the example above we have at least 28 gems sold as opposed to 12 in the current system. More than twice as many chances per slot per tier. I'll take that all day!

Obviously this is an extreme, unrealistic example. Nobody gets this many pairs of gloves per tier. The point is I can't see any scenario where we don't get more sales opportunities to enhance gear under the new system. I certainly don't see the gem or enchant markets collapsing. If you disagree, feel free to drop out of those markets. Especially if you're on Aerie Peak.

What I'm up to

The WoW Insider community blog topic is asking what everyone is doing in-game these days. The premise of the question is essentially "Now that MoP is over.." Well, for me a lot of MoP isn't over at all.

I don't rush through content the way a lot of people do. I have only seen the first 8 bosses in Siege. This is the raid we have for quite some time, so I have been kind of saving the last bosses. I hope to do flex 3 this week and possibly 4 as well. I'd also love to clear the place on normal and maybe get a few heroic kills when I'm geared enough. MoP isn't over for me at all. At least not the raiding.

Daily quest ARE done. I don't do them anymore. Getting my charms via pet battles. I'm pretty bad at PvP pet battles, but they sure are compelling. Along with the farm they are my biggest surprise in MoP. I am quite surprised by how much I enjoy doing them. I'm still doing my daily scenario, mostly to get my last MoP rep grind done without doing dailys. I'm not really playing the AH as aggressively as I used to. I have enough gold and the fun isn't really there anymore. Still doing my daily CDs, because you're just crazy to ignore that instant gold.

While I haven't really started yet, I think a big part of how I'll be playing in the next months is learning how to heal on my priest again. I have not healed since the end of Wrath, and if you had asked me before Blizzcon I would have said I probably never will again. I love DPS. I love Shadow. But those crafty bastards at Blizzard are taking away my best excuse to get out of healing. "But, all I have is DPS gear." I don't know how many times I have used that story, but with the upcoming changes to gear (what they now call "armor" to be specific) I can't really say that. My Shadow set won't be optimal for healing, but it's going to be good enough. So before I'm needed, I should learn how healing is even done these days. Do people still use Healbot? Seriously, help me out in the comments. The last time I healed anything my hunter still had mana.