I don't like this patch anymore..

[Miyon]

Seriously, I barely do any damage anymore..
I may have specced wrong, and still needs to learn new rotations, but seriously, a shadow priest does 5 times the damage i do..

Oh, I auto shotted for more damage before the patch, than when I really do whatever I can now :p

[Antares]

WoW Insider
Scattered Shots for 4.0.1

WarCraft Hunters Union
MM Hunters in 4.0.1

SV Hunters in 4.0.1

BM Hunters in 4.0.1

Further testing on Live

[Nimizar]

Shadow priests are a bad example, since SW:Death was doing excessive damage until they hot fixed it.

I believe that hunter passive damage (i.e. autoshot and pet automatic attacks) is down from where it used to be, so we're far more reliant on getting our ability usage correct, right when the definition of "correct" has changed substantially.

For BM, we now have to:
- use Kill Shot on cooldown when it is available
- use Kill Command on cooldown
- use Focus Fire when the proc alert goes off
- balance Steady Shot vs Arcane Shot to avoid both delaying KC and focus saturation

As usual though, the place to go to read up on the latest and greatest theorycrafting is over at Elitist Jerks (although the Frostheim links Antares offered are useful, too)

[Antares]

As usual though, the place to go to read up on the latest and greatest theorycrafting is over at Elitist Jerks (although the Frostheim links Antares offered are useful, too)

I think EJ is falling by the wayside. Most of their forums haven't seen posts since August and their main site hasn't been updated since June.

[Saturo]

I'm hardly surprised, the game is getting so dumbed down you don't even need to theorycraft any more. -.-

[Rhyela]

As of right now, I'd have to disagree with you a little, Saturo. We did a raid last night and while I did more DPS than what I used to (50k on some AoE trash pulls, eat your heart out, Volley!), I am having a difficult time trying to get a good rotation down. It may sound silly, but not having cooldowns on abilities is actually kind of goofing me up more than I thought it would. I'll get it eventually, of course, but I don't feel that the game is being dumbed down. At least not from a hunter perspective.

Someone in the guild last night mentioned a bit sarcastically that WoW is making things easier by putting things like chance to miss against a boss in your window when you mouse over hit ("Well, isn't that convenient?" or something along those lines). But like I told him, people are going to read all that on forums or websites anyway. So putting things like questhelper and threat meters and such in the game isn't making things any easier on people than they were making it for themselves already.

Of course, you could be talking about something completely different, in which case I'll go sit in my corner and be quiet.

[Saturo]

I was mostly referring to the new talentrees. Basically, you have two ways to go down for each spec. PvP and PvE. They've removed the choice. The choice that made it possible t customize. The choice that enabled us to make mistakes.

Of course, stuff like that hitrating calculator helps this, but...

I'm sorry. It's just not a change I like.

[Rhyela]

I both agree and disagree, to an extent. There was always pretty much that choice in every talent tree for every class of grabbing PvP or PvE talents, so in my opinion, not much has changed on that front. People tended to pick up a "cookie cutter" spec regardless to optimize damage (PvE) or utility (PvE). At least, from what I could tell (I'm not an expert at either, I'll admit).

However, what I don't really like, is the lack of option to do a hybrid spec. Some people enjoyed doing that, and while it probably wasn't optimal for raiding, I'm sure hybrid specs had their advantages for many people. So yes, I agree with you that the talent trees feel too restrictive right now and that you are pretty much forced to spec a certain way depending on whether you PvE or PvP.

What I'm trying to say, is that people sort of restricted themselves by picking up cookie cutter specs pre-patch anyway, so not much has changed. What has changed, though, is giving people the option to choose to do that or not. Now we kind of have to.

Did that make any sense?

[Saturo]

Yes, definitely. We had that one, SPECIAL spec before too. But now it's pretty much impossible to do otherwise. There are, essentially, eight things on each tier to put talents in. 5PvE ones, and 3PvP ones (varies, of course). But... Let's put it this way. Improved Frostbolt or Frostbite+Ice Floes? No such choice any more.

[Worba]

I was mostly referring to the new talentrees. Basically, you have two ways to go down for each spec. PvP and PvE. They've removed the choice. The choice that made it possible t customize. The choice that enabled us to make mistakes.

I've noticed that too - by the time I've got my 31 pts allocated I usually have everything (that I want) maxed out...

That being said I think rolling the trees back to 31 points kind of makes that outcome somewhat inevitable - my guess would be they felt there were getting to be so many tiers in the talent trees that if they just kept adding on more, it would start seeming diluted, e.g. next expansion I imagine they will bump it back up to 41 pts, and it will feel a bit like it did when they rolled out TBC.

That's my speculation anyway...

[Saturo]

My idea behind why they nerfed down our talentrees was that they were lazy. :D

31 talents are much easier to balance than 51! :D

[Worba]

My idea behind why they nerfed down our talentrees was that they were lazy.

31 talents are much easier to balance than 51!

That too.

[Raydex-of-the-dawn]

My idea behind why they nerfed down our talentrees was that they were lazy.

31 talents are much easier to balance than 51!

Not true. The more variables you can spread stuff out with, the better.

But yeah, I miss mixed specs. I had a lovely BM/SV hybrid spec I used for leveling (it was like...40/0/30 or something). I was planning to level Voltera with the same spec...but I guess not.

[Saturo]

Okay, maybe so, Raydex. But Mastery was DEFINITELY added to make balancing easier. "OMG MM IS OP!" "That's okay, we'll just remove ten percent of the benefit they get from mastery."

[Antares]

EDIT: Nevermind. This isn't worth it.

[Worba]

One other bit of speculation - doing the talents this way ensures that even if they keep it going all the way to level 100, players will never be able to get 2 31 pt talents from different trees, the way they would have started doing if they'd just kept with the previous system.

[Raydex-of-the-dawn]

Okay, maybe so, Raydex. But Mastery was DEFINITELY added to make balancing easier. "OMG MM IS OP!" "That's okay, we'll just remove ten percent of the benefit they get from mastery."

I think they even said that directly xD Yeah, Blizz wants to make their lives easier. At the moment, I'm seeing my MM DPS lower than SV/BM, actually, but that's probably because I have no clue what I'm doing.

[cowmuflage]

No its ture they ruind MM *sigh*

[Slickrock]

Some thoughts here...

Yeah, the talent trees are dumbed down. Your only real choices come with your choices in the secondary trees. There are still some real choices there. But your main tree? yeah, it's cookie cutter. (However, any raiding hunter generally followed 2 or 3 EJ specs, with the variance in just a few points, so it's really not that different). On the flip-side however, I put in talents for my now lvl70-frost-dk-bank-alt, and I still had no idea what I was doing, since that tree changed so much.

So the only real loss in the new talent trees is hybrid specs, like frost-fire mages.

The hunter forums at EJ have been slow for a while, but that is partially due to the extreme theorycrafters working on new characters, and partially because after a while there wasn't much to say. Also perhaps that hunters were down a bit in wrath. Expect more activity there now that 4,0,1 has hit.

But it does also feel like we are in the 4th quarter of WoW.

And I totally absolutely completely totally hate seeing a holy-combo-points bar on my pally. I despise it. My pally will not get played, and the tier 10 will likely get vendored soon.

[Slickrock]

Okay, maybe so, Raydex. But Mastery was DEFINITELY added to make balancing easier. "OMG MM IS OP!" "That's okay, we'll just remove ten percent of the benefit they get from mastery."

I think they even said that directly xD Yeah, Blizz wants to make their lives easier. At the moment, I'm seeing my MM DPS lower than SV/BM, actually, but that's probably because I have no clue what I'm doing.

Wait to see how scaling turns out. And we are already seeing waves of buffs and nerfs, which will continue. It's gonna be a wild ride to 85. Just play a spec that you enjoy now, and be glad you have 3 dps specs to choose from.

There are other hidden changes that Blizz has made that we haven't figured out yet, like the latest BM nerf. (KC no longer effected by Mastery).