The New Aimed Shot

Instant cast Aimed Shot. Amazing. Sadly, while the new aimed shot was not going to have any negative effects to it's new instant cast status, Blues have rescinded that change and decided to lower the damage output.

I was expecting something like this to happen, but was really hoping it wouldn't. Hunters need more instant cast damaging abilities because of our inability to keep a target locked down in one place, as well as our inability to easily escape from most targets. We've gained a number of abilities to help us escape, but our ability to deal the appropriate arena style damage had been lacking. With an instant cast aimed shot, we gain another shot that can be used on the go that provides real pressure.

Often times people compare us to mages in that both classes are effected by line of sigh issues. This just isn't the case. Mages have a number of skills to help keep them moving and their target in one place. Frost Nova, Sheep, Pet's Frost Nova, snares built into their damaging attacks, and also many, many, instant attacks. Hunters lacked any form of spammable instant attack that was considered worthwhile. Mages major issue wasn't their ability to combat LoS but their survivability, which they gained some major ground on with trainable Ice Block and now their armors being non dispellable.

Often times people compare hunters to Elemental Shamans. This is a better comparison then to mages, but the problems are that Ele shamans can still deal damage even when they're locked down by melee in one spot. Not to mention they have the ability to provide high damage burst almost instantly to any class regardless of armor.

Aimed Shot has a decently long cool down and its mana cost is already going to make spamming it prohibitive. Since it will never be a non mitigated attack I don't think it needs its damage output nerfed, and if Blizzard does go through with changing it, then by a very small percentage. The danger with the solution Blizzard has come up with is that they could potentially lower our burst DPS. While it was very hard to set up a Aimed Multi Steady Arcane combo, when it was pulled off that was a large amount of damage. With Aimed Shot providing a very good portion of it. Mortal Strike debuff on an enemy is a good thing, lower burst damage is not.


On another note: Trap Mastery and 41 Points Survival
I am disappointed in the movement of Trap Mastery all the way down the Survival Tree to a 41 point talent. It was an amazing 11 point talent that I was planning on taking no matter what my build as long as I was at least 15 points in the Survival Tree. The ability to extend the duration on Freezing Traps by 30%, allowing me to lay multiple trap coverings for excellent pillar humping techniques, was imo a very nice perk and worth a talent point. I'd probably even sink two talent points into it for that looking at the current alternatives. Thankfully Blizzard isn't going to link Explosive Shot and Trap Mastery, and hopefully it will regain it's 11 point status as soon as possible.

And updated again:
Ugh, the new new Aimed Shot... talk about a major let down. It goes from the damage of multi shot to the damage of possibly only higher then arcane shot? Arcane shot damage is nothing! I hope that we get to keep the major damage on this shot, as we need some abilities that do large portions of damage instead of just constantly chipping away at a target.

Introduction

I am Averice from the server Warsong in WoW. A hunter.

This blog is just meant to review and offer opinions on the happenings that go on with Blizzard and the hunter class. Only new information will really be posted about, as anything before this date would be too tiresome to actually slog through poorly indexed news reports to discuss.