I’ve been very good so far and restricted my bloggage to generally acceptable real life sorta stuff. However, a concatenation of circustances have arisen that requires drastic action!
- It was pointed out that my blog reads like a recipe book (err, good?) and hasn’t been updated for too long
- It came up in conversation that if you spend x units of time a week on a hobby, where x is a significant fraction of other, more socially acceptable time sinks, such as working and sleeping, then said hobby is definately a part of your life
- Blizzard are soliciting detailed feedback on all the classes, and dammit, the noobs are hurting the signal to noise ratio in the Hunter feedback threads (US EU).
Hunters, then.
I, along with about 214,647 other people, have a level 70 hunter. Since I first picked up a box in Tesco with World of Warcraft written on the side in 2005, I’ve spent a frankly embarrasing amount of time in the company of my cartoon archer-zookeeper. I’d like to think that with practice, experience of the types of content the game has to offer and a not insignificant amount of playing with spreadsheets that I know the class reasonably well.
That having been said, the amount of whining and unreasonable wishing going on in the feedback threads is really quite annoying. Sieving through the various comments gives two strong trends that I really hope Blizzard can see are the spam that they are:
- Marksman (and to a lesser extent, Survival) hunters use mana and we’d like not to, please.
- Marksman and Survival hunters are marginally more complicated to play than standing there and mashing the “I pew pew stuffz” button
I would write a small essay on the subject of why these noobs are not doing the class stereotype any favours, but thankfully BigRedKitty has done it already, suffice to say that hunters have enough going for them already, we have the best burst dps available in the game, we have a pet running around doing a bonus 150-300 melee dps and we wear the second toughest armour and can occasionally tank for a short while in emergencies (Deterrence ftw). If we didn’t get through mana like a consecrating paladin, we’d be so powerful we’d be greeted by cries of ‘Nerf!’ wherever we went.
I mean, look at the difference between a hunter and, say, an arcane/fire mage on taking care of one of the zones of elementals on the Lady Vashj fight? It’s not a complicated job, but it does take some effort to kill one 7.6k health elemental every 8-10 seconds for about 4 minutes without going completely out of mana. I get away with just knocking back a mana potion whenever it’s off cooldown, but the mages have to pause to evocate too, making life busier for the meleers in the middle for those couple of elementals that get through on full health. It’s a bit similar to the arcane flares on Curator but there’s only you doing the dps and it lasts twice as long. Oh, and you might have to stop every 50 seconds to play a bit of netball. And dodge some randomly spawning invaders from mars who send you fleeing for 10-seconds-going-on-eternity.
I think it’s really to do with the current crop of players not having to go through the quest for Rhok’delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers any more, which means people get to the mid to end-game raid content without having learnt how to play things like jump shots and learning the difference between dps and damage dealt.
Ahem, rant off. Normal service will be resumed shortly.