August News/Discussion

[Concillian]

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

I wasn't talking about our group in particular (though I'm pretty sure we had 2 hunters in the top 5 on our first Gruul kill, we definitely move slow on progression though, this was well after the Gruul nerf and at least one of the major patches). I was mainly talking about when the the top raiding guilds were working on Gruul and using him as "the DPS benchmark boss," because using heavily progression oriented guilds who are very selective and exclusive takes the factor away of people who don't know what they're doing, and focuses on the potential of the class.

There were no fundamental mechanics changes you're listing, just that people, effectively, learned to play. I interpret what you wrote as something to the effect of:
"Hunters who didn't know how to play were the joke of TBC"
instead of
"Hunters were the joke of TBC"

and to that my response is that Hunters who don't know how to play are just plain the Joke of WoW. 1.x, 2.x, TBC, old WoW, whatever, hunters who don't know how to play are pretty much the joke of WoW.

I agree that Hunters had more fundamental changes in HOW they play than any other class in TBC. As a result they definitely had more of a learning curve. They are probably the most complex class in a 5-man anyway, their CC is difficult to apply, they have to manage their rotation and a pet, potentially the pets health, their mana, etc... This doesn't speak to the potential of the class of the class though
I don't agree that that in any way made them a joke in TBC. There was no patch that suddenly enabled Hunters to start pwning. It was merely the player base collectively learning to play. Well, those who learned to play from the start were not a joke. In fact, they were probably laughing the hardest at the Hunters who were QQing at that time.


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Also a DPS check fight generally is as you describe, standing there putting out your max DPS. This is true of Mages and Warlocks and Shadow priests too. Ther have less moving to interrupt their highest DPS rotations. This is every classes chance to show it's potential, and why the DPS numbers on fights like that are used as fairly standard comparison points.