It's fine for farming/leveling, but it's not going to get a cunning pet back to max happiness after being rezzed in a boss fight like Loyalty will (or whatever it was renamed). This is sort of a big deal, and it's another blow against cunning as raiding pets - a 50% nerf to Roar of Recovery doesn't help much either. If a spore cloud nerf comes (and I bet it will), then cunning is dead.

The key failing of hunters arena is the ability to get to range. Unfortunately for hunters, like stun lock, no one enjoys being kited. PvP changes to the hunters base abilities should probably reflect this. Perhaps the solution is to make the hunters harder to kill in specific cases.

Base changes.
Aspect of monkey – add base stun immunity to all physical stuns.
Aspect of viper – add base poison immunity to snare poisons.
Make Deterrence a lvl 40 trained skill.

Add more physical defense (hp, armor, dodge) talents in the BM. (anti melee, anti hunter)
Add more spell defense talents in the Survival tree. (anti caster)

The talents could be designed force the hunter to choose between increased survivability from either physical or spell damage but not both. It could also force the choice between increased survivability versus personal dps.

Yeah, they're people they make mistakes. There is no Black Arrow in Beta. That is an *ancient* and I mean *ancient* part of the spell files and probably should be purged.

Black Arrow would be real nice for PVP though! They should throw it in! Looks fun!

Focus currently does not regen like that yet, but hopefully its only a bug.

Post on beta boards about mana potions

There is some discussion on the beta boards, and some of the replies make me weep when I see what kind of people get beta keys over valuable testers left in the cold..but thats for another thread...


Anyways.

In regards to the restriction on mana potion consumption, some things to keep in mind:
-We have not seen level 80 itemization
-Nothing is finalized talent wise of course
-Reasonably expectable to see JoW nearly always up

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-It has been shown that Hunter mana consumption is going to increase by a large amount due to more frequent steadyshots.
-Base costs of hunter abilities have increased in the range of x2.5-2.7, with SS seeing a near x3.0 cost increase considering all factors.(Other classes cost increases range from x1.5-1.7, with hunters mana pool already being the most strained and smallest)
-Blizzard seems to think switching to AoTV is an acceptable option when mana issues arise, which is simply not true in a competitive environment considering the Haste and AP aspects of AoTH


The way mana costs have ramped up for hunters, with the recovery of Invigoration/Hunting party, and now this potion restriction...the overall balance wont be seen until level 80. However, it is looking to balance more towards the issue of mana starvation as opposed to having enough. I obviously cant test anything, but do any hunters in beta have anything to add to this?

I believe the idea is that Blizzard has the intent of making "support" functions more valuable and more difficult to reproduce with potions. Class powers that allow others to restore mana and bestow buffs become more important in the absence of potions.

I think it's so you're not chugging a million haste pots or mana pots in one raid. Hopefully they'll balance around that and healers will rejoice.

I don't know that the entire point of the potion change was aimed at making the mana regen capabilities of different classes more important, but that certainly may happen to some extent. Too much dependance on other classes for personal regen will make some classes far more required than they already are. Blizzard wants to make each class more desireable in a group, but not require [read: balance encounters around] a surv hunter, a shadow priest and a ret pally for every dps group in a raid. This change may have that effect anyway, but I hope it doens't because I don;t think that is the reason behind the change.

I'd hope that the point of the change would be to make potions more interesting. Both the potency and the function of "normal" potions [as opposed to flasks, elixirs, etc] could be greatly expanded and made into a more interesting set of choices. Imagine if alchemists made more than 2-3 useful potions...mind boggling isn't it?

In that case I hope such mana restoration and buffs are raid wide, not party wide or selective. If it is the latter, many hunters will find themselves starved for mana. When was the last time you saw a hunter get innervated, for instance. Hunters arent exactly high on others priority as far as replenishing mana goes.

Im against situations where hunters have to hope for a friendly raid leader to group them correctly or be tethered to another class.

Also, I'm all for having multiple options to deal with mana deficiency issues as long as its not unreasonably limited, such as being limited to a talent tree. I can accept a single hunter tree being "better" than another hunter tree at managing mana as long as all three have reasonable abilities at mana management without undermining their viability in a raid, but if 2 out of 3 is 'awful' and only one is 'acceptable', then all three trees need to be looked at.

For instance, when all three hunter trees have poor escape-to-ranged defensive capabilities and are suffering from it, its not okay to have only one hunter tree have a slightly better chance than the others. All hunters should benefit from any buffs or new abilities that improves defensive capabilities, and when the baseline is acceptable, having one tree be a little better at it than others is okay.

This is my roundabout way of saying that as a baseline, hunter mana needs serious work overall to make them viable for the class as a whole, and this should take place before we begin to look at putting points in talents to improve them.

Because I've stood in as a surrogate tank for some abject stupidity, I've been innervated myself. Doesn't make a bit of difference in mana, though, as it is a spirit-based ability. I think I got two extra combat rounds out of the deal, and that's in today's mana system.

I am really intensely uncomfortable about the attitude that we've taken that mana issues will be okay because of JoW. Assuming no nerf to JoW, that might be true in the 25 man environment, but 10 man raiding is far less certain of a (ret) paladin, and 5 man grouping certainly cannot expect to have one at all times. Because this is EJ, the focus is of course on the end game, but we have to get there first. There are going to be factions and tokens and items from 5- and possibly 10-man content that are germane to the 25-man aspirant, and I'm doubly worried about the fortitude of our mana pool in small group situations. I'd rather not have to drink to full every pull. That's frustrating for everyone involved.

We're not the only ones looking at huge increases in mana consumption. It looks like everyone's focusing on hunters needing shadow priests, but just about every class will need a shadow priest. We're definitely missing something and I think there's going to be some big changes.

Keep in mind that we always have to remember that we're not going to be perfect at everything. We're a DPS class with utility. Obviously having utility helps in larger groups than others. Obviously our utility will help some and not everyone. Blizzard keeps getting better with balance in everything they do. I think it's good to have a discussion on any topic, but I think we keep getting to the point of beating dead horses already. It's still quite early. I think we need to leave it to them to start balancing the obvious and then we'll help them with the finer details (as it usually goes). It wasn't until Naxx that we saw MP5 gear

I'm hoping that we get to a point where we have to pick and choose when we'll dps/use mana/timers etc. I don't want to chug pots. I want to use my abilities at the right point in time. I don't think it should be about us staying at >0% mana while DPSing an entire boss fight. I think a little more thought should go into how/when we DPS. Sure there will be fights where it's timed and we're on the clock in a race (where mana may matter), but I'd rather doing something the lines of active combat where you focus abilities during a weakness phase, or something to that effect. I think if we don't have to look at our mana use/ability use in terms of making judgements than we'll be left to just spamming the same stuff over and over rather then actively making constant decisions on what to do.

I might be getting a little off topic here, but we can look at our class in terms of progression. We've come a long way. I'd like to see some of Blizzards philosophical reasoning to where they see us at level 80 before I start commenting on where I think we should be. I'm going to give it more time, and for now it's back to lurking for me.

Potions have been stupidly over-strong for far too long, they needed to be nerfed and other things need to be adjusted where necessary to suit - look at how people thought of MP5 and any forms of mana regeneration on gear, shunned off into "just use mana pots and stack more damage/healing".

Now that this has finally been done there will be better emphasis on all forms of mana regeneration (MP5 / Int), mana control is an excellent form of the game where the previous 'chug mana pot on every cd and act like you have energy' just failed horribly to exercise any player skill or knowledge of the game/class.


Just don't go all frantic over mana costs right now in lieu of the potion fix until there has been time testing raiding content and the general flow of how Blizzard want it to work is known - unless of course people are going OOM 30 secs into a pull on a 5 man normal instance...

I've seen this post in WotlK beta forums alledging that steady shot has become a 2 sec cast:
WoW Forums -> Steady Shot now 2 second Cast

I was pointed at a similar post in this thread but can not seem to find it now.

Can anyone confirm this? I've not seen it mentioned anywhere else yet, not on wotlkwiki.info, mmo-champion.com or wowhead f.ex.

It has been said before in this thread. Steady Shot is now 2.0 sec cast and is affected by haste. The GCD remains unaffected. Steady shot is also un-linked from AutoShot and can no longer clip it.

It is a 2 second cast. The actual tooltip is described in my post here: WoW Forums -> Steady Shot bonus dmg against dazed target

I havent logged in with todays new build, but that is the cast time last time I looked.

Yeah, and I later corrected myself that Haste DOES effect it - it just doesn't show up on the Tooltip like it should. The info is all in this thread.

Thanks for the swift feedback. I'm really surprised this haven't been picked up elsewhere as it's quite significant change.

I'm a bit disappointed, as it would make Steady shot less viable for pvp again unless you're a BM hunter.

It will also keep the gap between MM and BM as strong as before which I hoped it wouldn't. Had hoped to see MM be a semi decent PvE raiding specc (if not as good as BM atleast viable).

But I suppose having haste only having a real effect on our auto shot and aimed shot would be an unfair "nerf" of haste.

But still, will be quite sad to see this go through. Had hoped for steady shot being viable in pvp for others than BM now with the anti-push back talents and MM becomming less of a bad choice for PvE raiding.

In a raid situation it's pretty irrelevant - Windfury will now be raidwide and effects both melee and ranged haste. Windfury untalented gives 16% haste which puts it right at like 1.49 for a Mark's Hunter with a quiver which is just about perfect. Talented it's 20% which far more than enough.

It's very possible that Marks will be a viable raiding spec since they got a lot of deep DPS talents and the haste thing won't be an issue.


... But Devilsaurs are just too damn cool and I'm speccing 51 BM no matter what. Roar~

Did some quick calcs on mana in raids:

The mana returned on JoW is 9%x(Spell Power + Attack Power of Paladin).

Assume a ret pally has 3500 AP at the start of raiding (so starting Naxx with buffs), and no spell damage for simplicity: A JoW proc will return 315 mana.

I think the proc rate is around 50% so that means every shot is on average returning ~160 mana. So with a simple Steady/Auto rotation, we will gain approximately 300 mana every 1.5s using up 280 mana during the same time period. To put it another way, we'll get ~1000mp5 from one debuff at the start of raiding ni WotLK.

It seems a little strange that one simple debuff can mean the difference between running out of mana quickly, to practically never running out at all. I can actually see Hunters not specing into Invigoration after the first tier of raiding if not sooner.

Compare against the only other mana return we'd likely get: Hunting Party returns 2% of total mana no quicker than 8s. So at the best possible return, with a 10k mana pool, that is ~37 mana gained per 1.5s, with 280 mana spent in the same time period (or 123mp5).

Ignoring spell damage? They get 1/3 of their AP as spell damage. That's an average of 210 every shot.