I'm probably one of the few voices here that enjoys the hunter class now, regardless of how clueless Blizzard might be. What you think is "outrageous" to me is to test your ability to think outside of the box. Sure, it defies conventional wisdom that haste can possibly reduce dps, but with enough background knowledge, you would know why it happens and can opt to not spec IAOTH. You also mention latency, which affects the dps/healing/tanking abilities of ALL classes, not just hunters. We do take the biggest hit, though, due to fps and latency issues. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'd really NOT want autoshots firing off independantly of our specials as a fix; to me, it will take away the attention required to play the class.

And to reply to a few points, imho

1. hunters at top skill level are not fun to play (on longer term at least, quick burn out rate)

I'd highly disagree with this, as I find it highly enjoyable to play my class.

2. itemization is broken (INT, MP5; AP instead of RAP; no melee weapons with lower dps and better stats like caster ones)

This was more of the case right after BC was launched. The horrible itemization has be improved with item buffs. Though it is the problem with a good number of hunters wearing leather over mail.

3. mana bar don't fit the class (energy would)

Too drastic of a change now, and nothx to ranged rogue!

4. arrows/bullets are just annoying

That is our equivalent of reagents. I can't complain.

5. difference between average and good hunter is GIGANTIC

True, which is why I came to appreciate the current state of hunter. The effort you put in shows.

6. no synergy with melee nor caster group (getting from not giving out); only truly benefit from SP (pet heal + mana for hunter)

Agreed. We're the only mana-using ranged dps that doesn't get (most of the) physical or magic buffs.

7. terrible pet controls (I think Dune2 had better)
8. terrible pet aggro when grinding (with good gear)

Yeah try grinding with survival =P

9. no nice enchants for ranged weapons (like mongoose)

The crit scope is nice, but we could use more loving!

Too simplistic, because if you are a BM hunter above 1.8 (i think that's what it is!) attack speed, haste proc would still increase your dps.

You posted your experience, I posted mine from the point of view as a tank who has to be the one to try and get aggro back after some newbie DPS pulls it off. I didn't take it personally, but you certainly seem to be. As a tank, I almost always see people that pull aggro generally do it in this order: rogue > mage > hunter > warlock. It is also not usually as debilitating when a hunter takes aggro vs any of the other classes. Mages almost always end up dead, rogues can hit evasion but will sometimes die, hunters just feign out of it most of the time and the mob comes back, warlocks do the same with shatter, though they don't pull aggro as often as anyone else.

So sorry if you somehow took my post as an assault, but your experience does not match up with mine, nor do I believe your experience would match up with the majority of the player base. I simply found it amusing that a rogue was calling hunters bad at managing aggro.

If a hunter gets the DST, pairing it with improved Aspect of the Hawk and moving to a 1:1 rotation will increase DPS substantially. The DST is, in general, about a 10% DPS boost for most builds. In some cases it can cause a 15% DPS boost for hunters.

On a related note, this thread jinxed me. I pulled aggro on a boss for, I think, the first time in all of TBC last night. I've been having internet issues, so I've been playing with somewhat high (400) latency recently, with enormous spikes. Big enough to knock me offline. Anyways, two feign resists back to back, so I cut back to just autoshot while waiting on my feign timer. Amazingly, autoshot pulled aggro. I'm probably one of the least tolerant people of hunters pulling aggro around, so naturally I felt like cutting myself.

Anyways, when my net is acting up, I might as well just sit there and autoshoot. Trying to time things when my latency is switching between 300 and 1200 by the second is extremely frustrating. DSL is in the mail, and hopefully it proves more stable.

Unlessss you were right on the edge of timing your specials correctly, or have less than stellar latency- Then the quoted poster would be correct.

I also just wanted to throw my hat in as yet another hunter re-roll. I played a raiding hunter since the dawn of wow, enjoyed an Ashjre'thul before weapon normalization, and went all the way up through nearly the end of Naxx (Expansion hit before we could kill sapph), and after leveling to 70 in the BC beta, threw in the towel. The effort required just to stay comparable to other classes was just not worth it, not to mention the laughable utility/synergy aspects. Going from the hunter to a shaman was a decidedly pleasant change, as either sort of dps spec or healing. The difference between the effort/enjoyment related to a hunter and related to any other class I can think of is night and day.

Question for the more experienced hunters here:

Do you think that if hunters could do specials independent from an auto-shot timer, that it would "over-power" hunters to degree?

I personally love the attention needed to play a hunter properly, so Im not suggesting a change. Just wondering what others think.

First, this thread is a nice introduction to your forums. I was linked here via Blizz forums.

I wanted to make a few comments on some of the observations in this thread, reinforcing a few of those points and hopefully modifying a few others. My hunter is my primary character and has been since game release. I took a 6-month absence from WoW this past semester to focus on school. The adjustment, as others have eloquently stated, has been surprisingly severe. Before I left on my WoW hiatus, I had pretty much burned out on raiding. At that time, I was on dialup: sub-1000 latency was a rarity, and some encounters I simply couldn't stay connected for, such as the first three bosses of BWL.

I've been back pretty much since May, with broadband, and have been trying to play catchup to the few friends who still play.

I have always tried to stay more or less up-to-date on the best way of playing the class, so I am certainly aware of clipping issues, and also aware that, in general, BM spec is superior. There are three trees, however, and MM has always felt right, felt closer to how I imagined the class should be, and so I've tried very hard to make MM work for me in the new context. But honestly, my reluctance to go to BM has little to do with that feeling: it has to do with a lack of confidence when it comes to dealing with the effects of haste on the shot rotation. I just don't know what to do when haste jumps into the equation. Pointing me to formulae and charts sorta helps me with a general idea that "you can screw this up" but I just don't know how to apply the information. Awareness of the clipping issue is great, but I don't know how to use that information. I still am not sure I know what the MM shot rotation should look like. Right now I try more or less the following: auto, steady, auto/arcane kinda simultaneous, steady, auto/multi, auto, steady, etc.... I try to toss a scorpid sting on melee bosses. KC is generally an afterthought. I run through mana like crazy.

The last two days I visited Kara for the first time ever, only hunter, filling into a guild's "Kara B-team." My experience the last two days has been like a rollercoaster.

Day One: I wasn't sure if I was doing well or poorly until our second (successful) Morose attempt. I trapped one add and MD Morose onto the secondary tank. I felt myselt get into a rhythm, and I just knew that my shots weren't being clipped. How do I know? Only from the visual feedback of the hits. My two RAP trinkets were on constant cooldown. Without going into all the details, most of the raid was dead, leaving the two tanks, me, and a priest, with Morose at 30% and an add shackled. I was glad at this point NOT to be using shot macros, because I was struggling to keep mana, using pots when I could, a demonic rune, and, on one of Morose's vanishes, FD-drinking. I still am not sure I understand the strategy, but the raid had said that the add must outlive Morose or he would be buffed. Most of the dead players wanted a reset of the encounter. With Morose at 8%, the priest died. About ten seconds later, the add came out of the shackle and you could hear about six people on Vent sigh. I managed to trap the add just in time for another mana pot. We killed Morose and I was hero for the encounter, with the raid leader posting the damage meters with me on an easy lead (30% of the damage for the encounter). Since I outlived most of the other dps by several minutes, to me the results were badly skewed, but it felt nice to be applauded by strangers. And I got a whisper about guild invites, etc.

Anyway, we went through up to Curator and called it a night.

Day Two: Curator. Ugh. I had felt so confident the previous night, I went into this with a hugely positive mindset. I spent the morning preparing for the raid by farming herbs for my heal/mana pots, agility elixir, and int/sp elixir. Well, we wiped three times on Curator. My dps was abysmal, as the adds would beeline at me and I could no longer hit them. The raid party was discouraged. The raid leader asked for a volunteer guest to leave so they could bring in a guild boomkin. I volunteered. They killed Curator first attempt after I left. I felt pretty embarrassed, and I don't know what I could have done to do a better job. After Curator, they had me rejoin. But no matter how hard I tried to weave specials into my autoshots, I just couldn't find that rhythm I'd had the night before. On our three attempts on the Shade (before server shutdown), my damage output was beneath the tanks' (granted, these weren't proc spec tanks, but still....). First night, I was being whispered by multiple people to apply to their guild. Second night......nothing. Pretty mortifying experience.

I'd say the situation is like this:

Lazy/afk hunter on autoshot: fair damage
Active hunter, trying hard to do it all right....but not: abysmal damage
Math major: top ofthe charts

Some of the reluctance to be concerned with the shot rotation surely is the result of the above. By trying to weave in my special shots, unless I somehow find that magic rhythym, I screw up my damage output severely. And I am afraid of haste items. I struggle as it is....haste makes it even harder to do it right, when one would think haste was intended to be beneficial.

Personally, I think the inherent complexities and difficulties in optimizing hunter DPS are a good thing in some ways.

According to Blizzard, hunters seem to be intended to be about 3rd-4th in the raid DPS hierarchy, after rogues, mages and occasionally warlocks. The appropriateness of that is certainly debatable, but I think most would agree that that is Blizzard's intent.

The thing is, Blizzard also seems to use aggregate parses (as well as theorycrafting) in designing its balance tweaks. Its not uncommon to see blue posts along the lines of "XXX isn't exactly where we want it to be..." or "after we evaluated XXX changes, they seem to need a bit more tweaking".

Because so many hunters do suck, and do suck so badly, the Blizzard hunter class tuning benchmark or average is probably a lot lower than it would be for say, a mage. And it is this larger gap that allows a better player to break out of Blizzard's intended raid DPS bracket and shine.

Nothing in this game is really all that difficult. Playing a class that does require at least some skill (or at least attention to detail) can be rewarding.

Haha that's great! But even so, in DDR the arrows don't move so fast that you have .5 seconds to see the arrow, find the step and hit it. It would be awesome, but still require insanely fast reaction times and focus. :P

Thats a tough question, but i'd say you wouldn't see a *drastic* DPS increase. This is because:
- Mana will be a crippling issue. You'd be spewing out so many more Arcane/multi's to max dmg potential, and steady shots when there on cooldown. Without a shadow priest you would probably see very little change to the Hunters total damage over the encounter.
- Most hunters are using specials pretty much all the time anyway, ie steady shots are casting most of the time, arcane shots etc. So the biggest bonus you'll see is the remnants of the clipping autoshots that arn't being clipped anymore.
- We still have very bad raid synergy.

Personally, i'd rather them keep the way rotations work as is, but lower the GCD to match your haste (like bloodlust), and allow haste effects to influence the 0.5sec autocast CD. That would preserve the "feel" of a rotation, and not be so god damn punishing!

I believe that was the philosophy pre-BC, where there was no such thing as viable "off-specs". A lot has changed in the way Blizzard take on issues like "ranking" classes in performance.

Also, what the hell do Hunters do that is so important apart from DPS in a raid setting to justify taking them to your raid if not for their DPS? MD? I mean utility-wise, they probably have the least uses, second to rogues that is.

To be completely honest, I think Blizzard has done an amazing job with DPS classes in raids. They have greatly widened the and detailed the way classes weigh up in DPS, on an encounter-to-encounter basis. Gone are the days that rogues/warriors > all in virtually every encounter in the game. Now you see Hunters/mages smashing Melee on Lurker, Melee smashing ranged on Gorefiend, Spriests/warlocks smashing on Al'ar etc.

PS. Is anyone else spewing that the new Executioner enchant doesn't work for hunters? Looks like its Savagery forever for us =(((

A recurring theme in this thread is people saying that the thing they love about the class is the complexity. I love that, too, but I think it goes too far. All classes can be fairly complex and involved if you're trying to get to 100% of their damage potential. The difference with the Hunter is that if you decide to take it easy, you drop down to 50% of your potential, while a Rogue or Mage can coast in at 80% no problem. That's the big disparity, and that's what drove me away from the class.

I still LOVE my Hunter, and I do miss raiding with her from time to time, but damn if it isn't nice to *relax* on farmed content once in a while and still do respectable damage (or healing, or tanking, in my case =P)!

To the salvation issue and hunter agro: ss there not one buff you could give up? I know that Salvation in any threat-sensitive situation is literally the BEST DPS-increasing blessing I can receive. I would prefer it over wisdom or kings, and this is generally perceived to be true among everyone I have spoken to. That is, if you can be threat-capped without salvation, salvation is your FIRST choice for a blessing. Is this not true for hunters? I realize you have feign death, but several hunters have spoken against using it pre-emptively, or it being resisted, or various problems with it. Would Salvation not serve as a better blessing than say, might or kings in a situation in which you are not confident in your threat reducing ability? It seems to me that there is a divide in understanding here, where hunters are taking might, kings, and wisdom because hey they have feign death, while ignoring the various downsides to feign death that have been brought up here by other hunters. In threat-limited situations, is there no one of those blessings that it would be beneficial to sacrifice in favor of a higher threat ceiling?

Salvation would be the better blessing in the extremely rare case we chain multiple feign death resists in a row. Its rare, but it happens. The other 99% of attempts, we're better served with might, kings, and wisdom.

edit: I'd give up wisdom for salvation in a second if I had a shadowpriest.

There are rare occassions where Salvation is important to Hunter, and it certainly is vital if your guild's Hunters aren't really on the ball, but a FD 15-20 seconds into the encounter and another 30 seconds later really puts you low enough that you don't have much to worry about. The key is the start of the fight, where you go up extremely quickly as a Hunter. I've almost pulled aggro early on Vashj a bunch of times with crit strings when I'm on my Hunter.

The other thing is just how good those other buffs are for us. We are extremely mana inefficient, so Wisdom is huge. And Kings and Might offer us a good boost to DPS (and Kings is vital for SV spec Hunters).

Aye, when Kings is nearly 100 Agility for a survival hunter, you can't be messing around with salvation. If you luck out and have lots of paladins raiding with you (which horde does not have quite enough of yet), then salvation might be an option. But with how mana starved most hunter specs are, I take wisdom over all else because we don't do DPS if we dont have mana whether it is a threat limited fight or not. I normally run with about 150 MP5 with raid buffs, and even then I can run myself out of mana if I'm not careful. Slowing down DPS slightly is preferable to a hunter over running out of mana entirely. For both MM and BM might is incredibly important, but often I get limited to a choice between 2, sometimes a choice of 1. Based on the duration of the fight and what I know will benefit me the most, I make my decision between Might, Kings, and Wisdom. Salvation is not even an option unless the tank for the mob we're burning is under 500 TPS and its a DPS race, but again that has to be weighed against running myself out of mana.

Am I the only hunter who finds JoW to be better mana return than a shadow priest? Given the choice I'd give up my SPriest group spot for a melee group if I knew JoW would be up consistently.

Judgement of Wisdom is a proc from the debuff on the boss. It is independent of what group you are in. In other words, the entire raid gets benefit of it being up, regardless of which group you are in.

In a perfect world, JoW would always be up. But unless you have a Ret Pally (and that's pretty rare), uptime won't usually be 100%.

That was one of the nice things about 40-man raids...there was basically zero exucuse for JoW not to be up.

Edit - For clarification, it is about a 50% (I think it's technically 60%, but I could be wrong) proc on hit for 74 mana. It's certainly not as good as a SPriest that knows what he/she is doing, but yeah it does rock. Both is even better! =P

A shadow priest does about 200 mp5 to the group, depending on the gear of the priest in question. JoW would need on average 66.667 attacks per minute to produce the same mana returns. I am not current on how many attacks per minute hunters average, but at most you are doing auto + 1 special between each auto, for close to 50? attacks per minute assuming a 2.2-2.4 attack speed.

I'm well aware of the mechanic of JoW, which is why it means I get out of that coveted SPriest group. Having both is quite unnecessary. It seems that Hunters/Enh Shaman get the most effect out of JoW, while casters (With less attacks in a given timeframe) are best served by a shadow priest.

In personal experience, I have gotten more mana back from JoW than I did from a competent Shadow Priest. But this is as a BM hunter using Steady/Auto almost exclusively. Again, I think the sheer number of attacks a BM hunter puts out is the deciding factor.

But I think this is starting to derail a bit, so I won't go deeper into the subject.

Back on topic, I still think Steady Shot should be given to new hunters far earlier than it is currently. (62)

You're right. It's very important to distinguish between complexity and over-the-top timing requirements. MMO's tend to constantly fight this battle between making game mechanics interesting versus just adding "things to do" to keep players occupied. An example might be the various "combo actions" that Everquest had (i.e. if I cast my healing light spell, then player X can get a bonus to his healing nova spell, and after that player Y can get a bonus to his shadow nova spell!), or making the "challenge" of playing a paladin be reapplying raid-wide 5-minute blessings. There's certainly a point where complexity isn't fun, and instead just tedious.

If steady were changed to an "on hit" ability similar in fashion to heroic strike or maul, and steady scaled with the damage of the weapon providing a 100% increase in weapon damage rather than being static (steady currently does only slightly more than an auto-shot), it would provide hunters with something that would alleviate the weapon speed dilemma. It would definately need to be balanced, then rebalanced, then balanced some more, but there has to be a way for blizzard to stop making this silly mistake over and over again where weapon speed is the primary factor in ranged slot choices.

As it is, hunter rotations favor specific weapon speeds (not to mention there arent exactly a lot of weapon choices in the end-game), the all steady shot managed to do was force faster weapons to become the new Ash until we can stack enough haste to take advantage of slower weapons.