Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Aimed Shot, Barrage, and You.

Why does it seem to me that every buff we get is something we have needed for years?

Apparently Blizzard knows that we blow.. Ghostcrawler has flat out said we suck in arenas multiple times. They try to fix the problems by tiny little tweaks.. which basically all the tweaks are doing is making the class less of a pain in the ass to play, but not as much towards balance, while we don't get anything "new".

The new fun and shiny thing we would have gotten was camo.. but that has not only died, it was hung, beaten, flayed, and then burned, ever so cruelly. It was replaced by the crap sho.. uh.. trap shot. It's good and all that they removed the arming time (which was totally bogus to begin with) but it isn't very much a trap, nor is it hidden.

Dictionary.com says a trap is:
2. any device, stratagem, trick, or the like for catching a person unawares.


Okay, not only are traps not hidden, but the shot makes a pretty blue rainbow and then makes a frost nova when it lands.. totally inconspicuous.

I know I am beating a dead horse with trap shot.. but it's just a great example of "whats not new" Its the exact same as freezing trap.. just with range and a lot more noticeable.. even shares the CD.

Disengage? We needed that, sure, but its not like we haven't been needing it forever.. hunters have never had any escape abilities short of freezing trap, and that was not even an escape ability, it was a CC. We also got masters call.. but it has a longer cooldown than any other snare remover, and requires LoS of your pet, and requires your pet to be alive. It also removes stuns.. but it can't be used while stunned. I won't even bother with that one.

Instant Aimed shot? The moment arenas entered we needed this one.. honestly anyone who got hit by an aimed shot was either CC'd or a moron. The need for this increased once we got a MS effect on the shot... which made it the worst MS in the game. It also got its damage removed with a swift kick to the groin. "It will do more damage than multi-shot" they said.. it didn't. Granted, in the end, the new aimed shot will do more damage than the old one, since you can actually get it off whenever you want, including being able to jump shot it, but our burst is gone.. they just replaced multi-shot in our burst rotation with aimed shot. We are "Casters" thus we should have burst.. but we don't anymore.

Deterrence? I asked for that buff at level sixty. Hunters never had caster mitigation, and now we still don't. Deterrence WAS a good buff, but they nerfed it. I guess a worse ability than CloS on a five times as long CD is op.

Scatter shot? I like this change personally, although in the end it does absolutely NOTHING for me, since I feel explosive shot is fail and I would rather get scatter over it anyways, now, instead of getting scatter over explosive shot, I'll get readiness over explosive shot. It needs to be trainable.

Tranq shot? You can't tell me the first time a hunter got this book from luci they haven't wanted it to dispel frenzy/enrage effects in PvP too, or remove rage/energy. This change is only like 5 years late.




Basically, hunters in WoTLK = we get everything we have been needing for years (Except caster mitigation, bastards.) but nothing new and shiny.