Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Christmas Comes Early

This week's buffs to Survival and Beast Mastery mean all three specs are close enough in DPS to allow player choice. Obviously, certain specs will still shine on certain fights, which has and always will be the case. The important thing here is play the spec you want (and hopefully excel at). If people give you crap for playing with a pet (or without one depending on their level of hunter ignorance) they are wrong-not you. Get good at your two favorite specs, grab some pets, and go be a hunter again.

And there was much rejoicing from the hunters.

For about 5 minutes.

I have already seen a TON of comments and tweets about Survival needing more. Some mention the rotation's feel, the lack of on demand burst damage, and no execute ability. These are all valid points. I've said myself (before the buffs) that there is plenty of room for Kill Shot in Survival's toolbox. So I share the feelings of these other hunters. But now that we have decent spec parity, CAN WE JUST NOT FUCK WITH IT FOR A WHILE PLEASE? Clearly balancing hunter specs is pretty hard. Blizzard couldn't get it done before releasing WoD, even with months of beta evidence to guide them. Now that we're in a decent place, adding Kill Shot back into SV is just going to lead to more months of adjustments.

Ok, that said SV does need something. As much as love the spec's flavor and utility ability pruning has left it feeling just a little empty, especially compared to BM. I would propose giving SV better interrupt options than the other two hunter specs. SV seems to be the utility/PvP flavor of hunters these days. On top of that, Counter Shot's cooldown feels long a lot of the time. I mean looooong. I would love to trade Enhanced Entrapment for a perk that gives us a 12 or 15 second Counter Shot. Even an SV only glyph that reduces the CD would work. Or hell, give SV Scatter Shot back and remove the damage part of it.. When you have those fights where you can be the interrupt person, throw on the glyph and go. Managing your dots and procs AND interrupting every 12 seconds or so would certainly add some complexity to SV that so many hunters are asking for. I dare say it would be much more interesting than just adding Kill Shot back into the last 20% of the fight. And it wouldn't effect DPS balance at all.

Final thoughts: Personally, after the last month I'm happier about hunters than I have been in a while. I'm willing to just sit tight until we have to do this all over again due to set bonuses and gear scaling. But if you really want to muck around more with Survival, maybe damage dealing isn't the place to do it. Obviously Blizzard isn't as good at balance as they used to be.

I want to acknowledge the work that Bendak and Delirium are doing these days. Bendak has been really vocal on his blog and the Hunting Party Podcast about this ridiculous spec situation. And Delirium supports the community with amazing theorycrafting I could never hope to accomplish. I owe both of these guys a beer or five.

My last thing: A lot of hunters will be picking up Beast Mastery this week. There is a ton of conflicting information out there about secondary stats and when to use Focus Fire. This post by Delirium convinced me of when to use it, but my point is be a critical consumer of information. Know WHY you believe one side or the other. Also know that we as a community have a lot more testing to do, especially with all these adjustments over that last few months.

Hey Blizzard, I predicted this bullshit months ago.

2 comments:

  1. "Be a critical consumer of information. Know WHY you believe one side or the other."

    Everytime I post something I end up terrified that I forgot something, or did something wrong, but, at some point, I just want to get it out there, even if it's off a bit, so other people can critique; the peer review of WoW blogging, I suppose. That's why I go into so much detail, even to the point of making posts a bit boring.

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  2. I get worried about simple things like a pet buff list. I can only imagine how you can second-guess your stuff sometimes. Probably why I usually just do opinion stuff:)
    And for what it's worth, I love the detail in your posts. Never boring to me.

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