August News/Discussion

[Mirajj]

Please tell me what I'm missing here, but hunters have beeen pretty good all throughout TBC, when looked at from a PvE perspective (which I'm assuming is the perspective you are using). I think mages are much more the joke of TBC. They went from top of the heap on ranged DPS to bottom of the barrel. It was especially ironic that fire was the best raiding spec, and when TBC started, they were virtually required to be spellfire tailors... but that required farming primal fire from mobs immune to fire and primal mana from mobs that are generally pretty caster un-friendly.

What you are missing seems to be from when Patch 2.0 hit (Giving TBC abilities to the crowd without launching the expansion itself) to a point about...5-6 months later, give or take.

First, yeah, Mages are in a hard place damage wise right now. There is no denying that. And they've not had an easy time of it either. I really hope that they get some damage output love in WotLK.

But for a hunter, our troubles (this time) started with 2.0. We got a ton of new abilities and some core mechanic changes that changed everything for us, and we started going nuts with the dps, jumping leaps and bounds above where we had been. Of course, this was pre-TBC, so all the sudden, hunters were blowing old content apart in a way they never had before.

Then TBC hits, and hunters continue to blow things apart because folks are still not used to new mechanics, have none of the new gear, etc. However, about 2 weeks into TBC, massive nerfs come down the pipes for hunters because of a lot of the QQing of other classes (Particularly mages, actually). Hunters get hit so badly with the nerf bat, that it gets to a point when asking for a dps for an instance, hunters are turned away because other dps can outdo them without even thinking about it (Yes, I have had this happen to me, and no, not just in pugs...). I am not saying that at that point hunters didn't need some tuning, as we did. The damage we were doing was nuts, and needed to be looked at some, but the kneejerk reaction really hurt hunters for a long time.

However, the main problem at that time was that hardly anyone had been 70 for hardly any amount of time, so it was really hard to judge just how OP hunters were in relation to anything else. Over time, hunters have again slowly come back up as we get used to the newnew mechanics, and make things work. The macro's are figured out and posted, "how tos" are written up, and hunters are finally desirable as dps again.

I'm not sure when you were doing Gruul that hunters were desirable on him, but he is the kind of boss fight in which hunters excell at (so is Brutallus, btw). On a fight where a hunter can (these days) stand and spam their 3:2 steady/auto macro, they are going to be able to do insane damage. But this wasn't always the case. Trying to get a group (be it 5, 10 or 25) early in TBC was very difficult for a hunter, due to the nerfs brought about by other classes QQ'ing.

Again, I'm not saying that hunters didn't/wouldn't have needed some tuning at that time, they did. But they did not need the massive kneejerk nerfing they got.

And yes, right now Mages could really use some love. In big ways (overall damage output) and in little ways (WTF why can I not make a stack of 20 of whatever food/water I'm conjuring when I get the spell, instead of starting at 2 and having it go up BY 2's?) as well.