11-23-2007, 05:09 AM
Quote:Knowing what I do of your playing, I'm interested in some expansion on this point. From everything I've heard and the WWS' I've seen, while hunters are no longer simple MDBots in a raid, they are still pretty close, being topped by just about everything (other than mages) on end game 25man raids...but you are saying that they are tops in the ranged dps category. Does this imply that all ranged dps needs some help, or that what I've been seeing is atypical?
Well, let's throw out a couple WWS parses. Check quick because they expire today.
Teron Gorefiend
Essence of Suffering
These are two Black Temple encounters. Teron is commonly considered the fourth boss of the instance. Essence of Suffering is the first phase of the Reliquary of Souls encounter. Both of these encounters are simply "stand still and nuke away" encounters with DPS essentially standing still and performing max-DPS cycles until the boss falls over. Teron has a "ghost" mechanic that causes randomly selected players to have to run to the back of the room and die, but of the top DPSers in that parse, only Fayne received the debuff and died from it prior to the boss death. Essence of Suffering has no such mechanic at all; the special attribute of that phase is that aggro is not a concern, so DPS classes can go all out. Rakuten and Voomer are BM hunters in this parse; Twistedone is Survival.
The numbers more or less speak for themselves. I wouldn't say what you've been seeing is "atypical" because the typical case for players of any class is that they're not very good at it, and hunter class mechanics are far more punishing of mistakes than the mechanics of any other class. Weak hunter parses are, for the most part, quite typical - but they are also not what Blizzard is balancing around. Beastmaster hunters are 100% viable and powerful when properly played.
The problem is pretty specific to mages. While there wasn't any mage on Teron, you can see me down at eighth place on the EoS parse, in a dead heat with our enhancement shaman - and, as you can see, using the broken 2.2 MSD/TLC/AM build. While 2.3 undid the coefficient nerfs, they also applied heavy nerfs to a spec that was...competing for eighth. Unnerfed fire is about the same, perhaps a little higher than that 2.2 build.
As long as you're looking at the parses, you can take note of Noxt, a destruction warlock. You'll note that he beats me in the EoS parse and comes in fourth in the Teron parse. He does not have his 4-piece Tier 6 bonus (+6% to shadow bolt and incinerate damage). I do have my 4-piece Tier 6 (+5% to fireball, frostbolt and arcane missiles damage). Despite the fact that I substantially outgear him and that I am using a talent and equipment setup deemed abusive and nerfed by Blizzard in 2.3, he still has an edge of about 150 DPS on me. Now, the 1528 DPS I'm doing is fine; you can beat Essence of Suffering with all of your DPS classes doing 1528 DPS. On the other hand, why, exactly, when he has so much more utility than I do and is so much more survivable than I am, does he need to also dominate me in DPS?