A Shift in Priorities in 3.3?

There are a few upcoming changes in 3.3, but few for Hunters so far:

Hunters


Call Stabled Pet: Cooldown reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas. (Yay! I like to switch between Fenris and Varaha for group and solo stuff)

Deterrence: Now also increases the chance for ranged attacks to miss the hunter by 100% while under its effect. (Yay? Is there a PvE use for this?)

Talents


Beast Mastery


Intimidation: If the hunter’s pet is in melee range of its target, the stun from Intimidation will now be applied immediately instead of on the pet’s next swing or attack. (kewl)


Pets


Avoidance: This talent has been replaced by Culling the Herd. Hunter pets now innately take 90% less damage from area-of-effect abilities like all other class pets. This does not apply to area-of-effect damage caused by other players. (pet management just got easier)

Cower: Redesigned. This ability no longer affects threat, and instead reduces damage taken by the pet by 40% for 6 seconds with a 45-second cooldown. While cowering, the pet’s movement speed is 50% of normal speed. Cower now only has a single rank and is available at pet level 20. (This seems like a nerf...not sure as I honestly never use cower, been a long time since my pet has been able to pull aggro off of a tank, may affect BM more than other specs, it may however be awesome sauce in addition to the changes to Avoidance for certain AoE bits of fight, definitely a boon to pet survival, but will require a macro to maximize usefulness, unless the pet gets smart enough to only use it when taking damage...)

Culling the Herd: This pet talent has replaced the Avoidance talent in the pet trees (Hunter pets now gain that benefit automatically without expenditure of talent points). Culling the Herd increases pet and hunter damage by 1/2/3% for 10 seconds each time the pet deals a critical strike with Claw, Bite, or Smack.(sounds good and will merit a closer look at the Ferocity tree as it exists on the PTR

Demoralizing Screech: The attack power reduction from this ability has been increased by 40%, equaling the maximum possible attack power reduction from the abilities of other classes. (sounds good to me)

Improved Cower: Redesigned. This ability now reduces the movement penalty of Cower by 50%/100%. (ah, synergy)

Pet Leveling: Hunter pets now need only 5% of the experience a player needs to level, down from 10%. (Yes! Moonfire, my Spirit Beast, will make it to 80 before Cata!)

Venom Web Spray: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards. (good, I'm glad)

Web: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards. (see above)

Wolverine Bite: This talent is now enabled when the pet lands a critical strike rather than from the target dodging the pet’s attacks. In addition, this talent no longer has a prerequisite. (this definitely sounds like a buff, but I'm not sure how often a mob dodges when the pet is behind it...)

So, generally speaking no many changes to the class as a whole, a lot of pet changes though, which I'll cover in a later post. Today I want to talk about my favorite change, an overdue change in my opinion:

Misdirection: Redesigned. Instead of having finite charges, it now begins a 4-second timer when the hunter using Misdirection performs a threat-generating attack, during which all threat generated by the hunter goes to the friendly target. In addition, multiple hunters can now misdirect threat to the same friendly target simultaneously.

Nothing is more annoying to me than hitting my Misdirect macro only to be told a "More Powerful Spell is Already Active". I wish they'd at least change the wording to something that didn't insinuate that my Misdirect was a lesser spell...

Anyway, we will no longer have that issue, stacking Misdirect and sending huge amounts of threat to the Rogue....TANK! I meant tank! But a poster on the WoW forums got me thinking. His 'concern' was that he would do less damage in 4 seconds compared to the 3 shots (or really 3 damage sources) that Misdirect utilizes now. I think, and many others who posted after him, that you can do a lot more damage in 4 seconds than compared to 3 shots. Especially if we consider the possibility of adding Rapid Fire to the top of our priority list. Currently the highest DPS priority list includes RF at the top:

RF>KS>ES>BA>SrS>Multi/AiS>SS

Of course this is a theoritical shot priority and not an opening shot rotation.
RF is used at the top of the priority list as it would maximize opening DPS, but is only actually used situationally. Could the change to MD shift the paradigm? Will RF become an actual opener now?
It may become more common that not using RF at the top of the opening rotation would be based more on specific encounters, bosses with a short enrage timer for instance.

Or would opening with Volley now be an option? No, no that's just silly, but at least we will be able to pull multiple targets again, haven't been able to do that since early BC.../sigh. I remember how one hunter in Karazhan discovered the change to Volley/MD....I guess I should've mentioned something before the pull, oh well.

Gearscore? Gearscore! GEARSCORE!?!?!

Oh GearScore....how I loathe you...no, I don't loathe GearScore, I love it, no I hate it...I, I'm undecided.

As anyone who's played WoW in the past few months knows GearScore (and others of it's ilk) is a handy little mod that will, at best application, give a smart player and guilds an idea of what level of content a given character will work best in based on their current gear(score). At worstest it's a tool for tools to be elitist jerks (and not the cool spreadsheet type of EJ either). It lends weight to the myth among 'bads' that gear=quality of performance (not going to say skill per se as bads don't know what skill is, skillz? yes, skill, no). One problem with 'raw' GearScore (checking score without checking the actual gear) is it's based on ILevel and not the actual gear so much. I could put on a caster ring that's Ilevel 258 and it would give a healthy bump to my GS. As long as no one inspected me in great detail, they'd never know. I've had people in my guild joke about gettin inappropriate gear for their class just to increase their GS (at least I think they were joking...it was Punx).

Despite the abuse of GearScore, I like it for almost the same reasons. I like having an in-game mod that says, yes, you are ready for ToC raids, at least 10 man content. It does bother me that I let it affect my gear choices. When I switched from Cryptfiend's Bite to dual Rondels I was able to switch out my hit trinket to a crit trinket and my GearScore dropped. I checked the numbers on femaledwarf and the change to the daggers and crit trinket was a noticeable increase, but the slight decrease in my GearScore bothered me needlessly.

I beleive players have embraced GearScore due to Blizzard's removal of 'gating' for progression. In 'Vanilla' WoW the paths to MC, Onyxia, BWL, AQ and Naxxramas were a series of attunement quests that involved a guild working together to get at least 40 members ready to just walk through the front door to begin raiding, to say nothing of minimum gear for raiding. Gear itemization in pre-BC was horrendous and really only a consideration at endgame levels. The same was true of Burning Crusade's early raid content, a rather simplistic quest series for Karazhan, that just meant running a few instances. And a series of raids and quests for Black Temple that was so complicated an actual flow chart was needed to follow it. But all of these were removed at some point near the end of BC and there are none in Wrath content at all. So with a lack of gating imposed by the devs, players have found third-party mods and in-game tools to create their own gating. If GearScore isn't enough of an indication of preparedness, and it's not, raid leaders will demand linked Achievements that prove that the player has at least attended the raid to a full clear at least once.

Some players complain that the whole thing smacks of elitism, and it does, but in the case of a successful raid environment, some elitism is required. But the system isn't perfect, myself and other guildies have been in plenty of scenarios where a person with an 'indicative' GS (a GS that suggest that the player would do well in the current content) fails in the reality of a raid. A Naxx 10 pug raid my friend was healing on his Druid where the average GS on the DPS (mostly hunters and mages) was around 4000, high enough for Ulduar and ToC 10. The highest DPS was around 1500. They wiped on Patchwerk when he enraged with 40% health remaining, the raid quickly disbanded after that. Players with a GearScore just under 4K should be able to produce at least 2500 dps, with the proper talents and rotations (read that as knowledge and skill).

I love GearScore, I hate GearScore, I think GearScore is filling in a gap that Blizzard left when they removed gating from the raid experience, I have to stop including GearScore as a stat when I'm itemizing!

Tired of waiting for Marrowstrike to drop.....

So I decided to start duel-wielding the Black Knight's Rondel. According to femaledwarf.com it's actually an upgrade for me from the Cryptfiend's Bite.



I think it may have to do with the fact that the daggers have enough hit rating that I can afford to trade out the Grim Toll and replace it with Mirror of Truth. My hit rating is now two measly points from cap. 99.99% chance to hit...I'll live with it for now. Also I have got to get a Nightmare Tear and start converting all my AP based gems and enchants to pure agility. All in all I've pretty much discovered that my current gear configuration works for me and I'm happy. Marrowstrike is still a slight upgrade from the Rondel's, but so slight that I'm no longer going to obsess over the polearm (or obsess less).