not slacking, per se. that was a 0 death pre-berserk kill, so everyone was certainly pulling their weight. none of our mages were flasked, though - we haven't used flasks since our first kill - and i don't think any of our melee had any extraordinary buffs. it was also from before our mage crew collectively respec'd to fire, so there isn't crazy ignite damage in there. it's nothing amazing, but it shows that hunters can do respectable damage even on a fight that doesn't play to our strengths.

You are referencing the one fight in which Hunters have the major, major advantage to illustrate Hunters are on par? As opposed to the many fights in Naxxramas which show the opposite? Be fair.

Well I think the dps is a more valuable benchmark than damage done. From looking on that thread some guilds kill him more quickly than others. You have some screenshots in that thread of faster kills, some of slower kills. For example look at page 6 and 7 of that thread. Elendril's kill shot of showing top 20 dps versus the one of Forceful Entry's on the page before. The top guy on FE was at 283k dmg done. In fact the number 5 guy at 251k was 10k in front of the top guy on Elendril's guild. This doesn't show that FE is a much better guild and has better dps. Just shows that their dps is much more unbalanced. All 20 of El's guildies in the dps meter there cleared 143k. 13 over 170k. In comparison FE had 10 over 170k and only 17 over 100k.

umm- that's precisely my point. hunters have advantages that shine in certain fights. the benchmark dps fight everyone's referring to is patchwerk, which plays to none of a hunter's strengths. i was pointing to a fight that does.

I think Hunter DPS is fine where it's at. The real issue with the class is Aimed/multi shot, epic range weapons and pets. Do all these damage metres on Patchwerk include your pets damage aswell?

The hunter class should be more attuned to his/her pet than what we currently are, sometimes we can't even have our pets by our sides on some bosses. I think we all know that the major issues with hunters will not be changed intil the expansion comes out.

It would be nice when you dismissed your pet you got some sort of buff. Eg a bear would give aspect of the bear and like a +20 stam boost or something or maybe dismissing an owl gives mana regen, I really dunno. having a wide range of buffs from all the pet families would mean people might use different pets for different things instead of COUGH wolf COUGH. People might think do I want my pet out for the dps boost or do I want this buff from dismissing it?

To be fair, yes, our mages were flasked then. As has been said, Patchwerk isn't the best measure of hunter DPS to compare to others in many cases, though it does seem like fury warriors and non-flasked mages outdamaging hunters by a wide margin is a problem, and our non-flask kill tonight still featured that.

because the gap pre-normalization was even bigger. the damage difference between ashjre'thul and other weapons back then was just stupid. it was literally like going from a grey weapon to something like sulfuras.

this is from my first week with ash'jrethul- completely unbuffed, on a full-epic lvl 60 warlock - back when i was still rocking bone-slicing hatchets, band of accuria, and mostly giantstalker.



and here's a damage meter from back when i was the only hunter in my guild with ash and the others were using rhok (1-4 on this meter are all hunters)



with the attack power levels hunters have now, the gap would be that much bigger. i'm actually fairly sure ashjre'thul hunters would outdamage pretty much everyone

Fair enough then. I'd forgotten how ridiculous some of the crits you could get pre-normalisation were.

When I first got my Ash I was in various GS and other Blues with only the DS helm. I was rivaling the top rogues in DPS(or beating them) on most fights in BWL. If normalization didn't happen I would have rediculously high damage. Easily #1 in every BWL fight by 5%.

In fact, I am only just now starting to get back to the damage I did back then ( my autoshots cap out around 1350ish now).

Patchwerk and Ouro are two fights, and far from the norm.

Add new pets that are only found in raid zones. (Big spider thing from Naxx, etc.) - so instead of requiring to scale, you can just add alot more flavor to pets. More syngeristic approaches to pets (i.e the wolf howl).

Unfuck the retardedry that is Aimedshot.

Address Horde PvE Raid issues.

Add more Flasks - for Rogues, Hunters, Healers, and a Mana Regen Flask.

Bam everything fixed!

I agree with that. I can't catch the rogues unless there is mobility, and I can't catch most of the mages where AoE on multiple mobs is needed. It would probably help if I had Earthstrike and DFT, but I don't think it would be enough.

The biggest advantage of a hunter is that we are theoretically aggro-less DPS. We're "free" DPS in terms of how stable an encounter could get. I mean there's a reason why the 10 man Onyxia kill had ONLY hunters and rogues as the DPS.

That said, yeah I think there should be a few changes:

1.) Aimed shot is still a talent. Why is Aimed a talent? Everyone who has 2 brain cells or plans to do something (anything) other than farm gets Aimed because they know damn well you are a massive gimp without it. Aimed IS our raid-viable DPS. There is no alternative. Gimmick +dmg specs do not work nearly as well. Arcane and Serpent sting cannot and will not ever match it. Aimed should be a class skill, NOT a talent.

As for what would replace it in Marksmanship... I've always thought it was silly that the only moderately useful debuff we can put on a mob (Scorpid Sting) that would have any effect on the raid at large is useless in that everything is immune. If Scorpid is still doomed to uselessness, why not give us a new 11 point Marksmanship talent that provides a new sting which reduces the armor of the target by X amount for Y duration. It'd give us something else to do to aid a raid other than random tranq shot spam, AND we'd still benefit from it. On top of that, if it's a sting, it's a poison. Meaning certain mobs would still be immune, AND it could be removed in PvP just like all the others, so it wouldn't be some ungodly death sentence (*coughmortalstrikecough*). The only caveat being that it'd have to stack with Sunder Armor, or else it would be just another useless sting. Ask Rogues about Expose Armor!

2.) We have ONE timer. One. Rapid Fire is nice and all, but for those times when you really need to burn something down (enraged Ouro is a good example) you find yourself wishing for more. This is part of the reason why I am desperately seeking the Badge of the Swarmguard. ANYTHING that allows me to temporarily pump out more numbers is a good thing in certain situations. Warriors have Enrage and Execute spam and all their lovely toys. Mages can get Arcane Power. Warlocks can get their demon sacrifice stuff (although this is, admittedly, weak in comparison).

Hunters get...Rapid Fire. Woo? Once that's done there's no such thing as "unloading" as a hunter. Unless you can somehow manipulate your crit rate at will you're just doing the same thing you've been doing the entire fight: Aimed->Multi->Aimed->Multi until either you or the target die. Why not give us something similar to execute? "Head Shot"? Works only at 20% or below, has a decent cast time, shares either the aimed or multi cooldown, but otherwise works like Execute in terms of damage calculation (i.e., weaponry/ammo have no bearing)? The actual numbers would have to be tweaked, obviously, but at least it would be SOMETHING I can do to help burn something that really needs to die now, especially considering that there are an increasing number of things that gain enrages or other abilities past a certain health threshold in AQ and Naxxramas and presumably beyond.

3.) Paladins >>>>>> Shaman for Hunters. Alliance Hunters are given, what, 33mp/5 by default in a raid, so long as they have paladins to buff (which, ideally, they should). Horde get GoA (which, admittedly, is awesome), Mana Spring, and MAYBE Mana Tide. All of those are negated in terms of outright damage output for a hunter by Blessing and Judgement of Wisdom. The mana regeneration provided by JUST blessing of wisdom is ridiculous for the class with the smallest mana average mana pool out of any in the game.

Note that the only real way to compensate for BoW/JoW is mana tide, a thirty-one point talent. Even that is on a 5 minute cooldown. Speaking from the perspective of a hunter (and a former shaman), that's insane. Why is a spell that every single Paladin gets just by visiting the trainer, regardless of their spec, outright better than mana spring/tide, especially when you factor in that boss encounters are becoming increasingly mobile and that the largest detriment to totems is that they CANNOT MOVE. Blessings do not have this issue, obviously, and Judgements turn your boss into a gigantic health/mana battery.

There is absolutely nothing a shaman could ever pull out of his totem bag that would make them roughly equivalent to what a single paladin can provide for EVERY SINGLE HUNTER IN THE RAID REGARDLESS OF GROUP COMPOSITION. There are some glaring, and, frequently, quite frustrating examples where the larger Alliance v. Horde differences come to light. They are slowly tending to balance one another out (enjoy Viscidus, you shield-hearthing communists! :wub: ), but strictly referring to Hunter DPS in a raid, there is no comparison. Alliance Hunters, by and large, do not have to truly consider mana as an obstacle. I, on the other hand, even with drinking potions as if I were a fish, am ALWAYS out of mana. That's a massive, massive difference which has yet to be addressed.

4.) Flask of the Titans. Flask of Supreme Power. Flask of Distilled Wisdom. Flask of Petrification (lol). Flask of WHAT ARE ROGUES/HUNTERS? NEVER HEARD OF THOSE! THEY MUST SUCK LOL! (not bitter)

5.) Pets are for getting killed on raid pulls, and perhaps tickling Fankriss or Patchwerk. Not even Furious Howl saves them. It is painfully obvious that Blizzard is grasping at straws in this regard when you recall the original 8 piece Cryptstalker bonus...

6.) Traps? In raids? What are traps?

Essentially my purpose for being on a raid is Aimed Shot and Multi-shot. Then I generate DKP for everyone else by taking X item that no one else could possibly ever want for anything other than gimmick use (and thank god for those or we'd all still be using Rhok), and wait for every single warrior and rogue to get a melee weapon to hang on my hips/back for stat whoring. Tranq is a gimmick and a desperate attempt to provide raid-level utility, on top of being even less interesting now that you can just stand there and bash your tranq button when it's your turn. Auto-shot->AFK indeed.

Kongo you forgot your supersecret-yetawesome pet!

I still remember those days when I owned anybody in Molten Core
but then all the mages and rogues got some crazy weapons and spelldamagegear and my world collapsed

on our recent BWL raid i just did 65% of the damage our top mage did
ok I'm the raidleader and most of my concentration is instantly gone if somebody fucks up and I have to give some orders, but its really depressing how much the hunters in our raid fell once everybody else got some items which really seem to work for them

itemization for hunters is just totally wrong
at my stage (just cleared BWL the first time) the best weapons you can get as a hunter to improve your dps are the hakkari main-hand and the fotf

but what is the next step....
the silithis claw? wasting DKP for 2AP?
hatchet of sundered bone? 10AP more... wow... but in the hunteruniverse this is the best you can get, proving again that we are all just crazy, running around searching for items that improve us slightly

No! My precious debuff slots! Tseric has already stated only 16 is going to be the norm for the forseeable future.

There's really no such thing as a "hunter-friendly DPS fight" except maybe emps, and then only if your guild lets you use multishot. If it's a mobile fight, rogues/DPS warriors have a huge advantage, they don't even have to stand still to do their damage, whereas we need to be in place for at least 1 or 2 seconds to let our shots go off. On non-mobile fights, mages will beat us, because, well, they just do more damage.

Now, I don't have a problem with this. I don't want to be #1 on the damage meters, there are already 2-3 classes competing for that. What I want is to feel like i'm contributing something to the raid that another class couldn't.

Last I checked our hunters still pretty much rape anyone else on the emperors. The range itself is a massive advantage. Remember that they're spaced quite a distance away from one another, AND melee have to get out early. I only have to travel half the distance and can feasibly stay in as long as possible. A LOT of their output is mitigated in simple travel time. (Ask your rogues or warriors.) Coupled with the mages and warlocks generally not killing the emperors it is a severely hunter-favored fight. If you're not on top of that fight as a hunter, congratulate whatever melee class is because they've had to work about 900 times harder to get there. (Curse you, Cryingrogue and your crazy crits! :wub: )

I cannot believe that anyone would point to Arcane Power and Demonic Sacrifice as a balance issue and an example of wanting more timers. Please, erad up on those classes and understand that 99% of mages who raid have *no* timers to activate when we need to burn anything. The best you can get is a firemage switching to fireball spam and that's it.