The Current State

Hunter's don't appear to be receiving any love from reading the Blizzcon coverage, though then none of the classes are really having anything new unveiled for them. I'd actually even forgot about any game Blizzard was working on besides WoW.

The new D3 class is out, Wizard. Looks so much like a Sorcerer... well, let's just say you have the Barbarian from D2, and now there's a Barbarian in D3. You had the Necromancer in D2, and now there's the Witchdoctor. I wonder what's going to be next? Definitely something along the lines of a Holy or Spiritual class. Whether or not said class will be decked out in plate who knows.

Starcraft 2 is also being worked on, but the Blizzcon coverage didn't really say anything about it and I really don't care about RTS's. Activision Blizzard is still working on their "next-gen" mmo, supposedly in a whole new universe that we've never seen before. Sounds interesting to me, maybe they'll release some tidbits.

Back to the hunter class. In PvE we are currently destroying any and all other classes. By a good margin too. The damage pass has not gone through yet. As explained by the devs, it was either Koraa or GC I can't remember at the moment, the only class /spec currently slated for a definite damage reduction is unholy DK's.

Though with hunter DPS topping chars the way it is right now, it's hard to imagine a class that puts out such pitiful numbers in premade level 80 PvP gear in arenas also putting out such huge numbers in the raid environment. I mean, either we scale really really well with raid buffs or that's just how huge the difference is between us standing still and us moving when attacking something.

On that note though, it was recently rumored on the beta forums that with the new placement of readiness in the Marksmanship tree as the 21 pointer, TBW and Intimidation were both resettable. In other words, back to back TBW for a total of 36 seconds. That plus the addition of Freezing Arrow in it's new, sleeker form, could spell out some nice options for BM in arenas.

So just like all the other classes, there's confusion as to how we are going to do in the future. Blizzard seems to switch stances constantly. Sometimes pushing through changes that make no sense, it's as if none of the class developers have ever played a hunter before. And even though the label "huntard" has been given to... well, basically every hunter, even those players with only one for farming, it's still irksome. Blizzard's stance that we'll be a viable arena class in the future doesn't appear all that convincing all the time either.

I posted the following on the main forums earlier but here it is again in a concise manner: It's nice that there's a lot more developer/customer communication than there was with the TBC beta, it's very annoying to sometimes have great communication and other times there just being a huge wall. Blizzard only came halfway with their developer/beta customer communication, which ultimately left a bad taste in everyones mouth. Also, from the class panel, it's fairly obvious that the hunter concerns going into WotLK were not the major concerns of the developers.

Freezing Arrow - meant to assist hunters in 5 man and 10 man content? The fact that the developers actually believed this was a worthwhile PvE buff is one of the reasons some of those in the hunter community don't believe any of the Dev's have ever played a hunter. If you don't have to chain trap it, it's normally not worth trapping in the first place. If you do have to chain trap it, freezing arrow does NOTHING to help.

Here's a list of the problems that hunter traps have in 5 and 10 man content: 1) Heartbeat resists. 2) Flat-out resists. 3) Some baddie dot'ing up the target in some way making it impossible for a hunter to CC with a Freezing trap. 4) The CC not lasting as long as the cool down.

Freezing Arrow helps with NONE of those complaints. Freezing arrow actually makes #4 worse because it removes the ability to pre-trap, waiting for the cooldown to complete before pulling so a second trap is immediately ready.

Freezing Arrow was meant to help with caster mobs in the enemy party, or any of them really, as it doesn't cause aggro when it lands, allowing the hunter to throw a trap out there and then everyone can do their thing. Okay well the hunter throwing that trap out there and Then letting people do their thing causes a less amount of time to kill the other mobs before the trap needs to be reapplied. Laying a Freezing Trap on the ground and LoS'ing the target into the trap is just as effective, if not more so, then using Freezing arrow in a PvE situation.