How I Learned to Stop Worrying

Ever since the Blizzcon '09 announcement that, in Cataclysm, "focus" will be replacing mana as the resource that Hunter abilities draw upon, there has been much speculation and commentary in the Hunter blogging community about what this will mean for our shot sequences, talent choices, and overall DPS. As with most changes that have ever been announced for this game, the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative.

Now, I'm not about to say I'm totally confident that the developers will be able to implement this change in a balanced way right off the bat, but there are a few things I'm keeping in mind that have kept me firmly at "wait and see" on the RAINBOWOFOPTIMISM <--> SLAPINTHEFACEWHERE'SMYPONY spectrum.

First, the majority of complaints about the proposed system are based upon the assumption that the key abilities of each talent tree (i.e., Explosive Shot, Chimera, etc.) and their relative power levels will remain the same as they currently are, and we will be dependant upon the sub-optimal Steady Shot for focus regeneration. However, it has been stated that talent trees will be massively overhauled, as part of a trimming of passive-bonus talents. So, why should we assume that the primary abilities we have now will remain as such? And with five more levels and a tree-pruning, I can easily see room for re-scaling attack-power coefficients, to say nothing of the possibility of new abilities. Steady shot will likely remain a 1x or 2x filler shot, only now it will be recovering focus rather than killing time during cooldowns.

Now, admittedly, I generally welcome changes to the game; the opportunity to learn and optimize under a new set of conditions is one of the things that keeps the game interesting for me. At the same time, I can see that a change of this magnitude won't appeal to everyone; the same kind of playstyle preferences that lead players to choose Beast Mastery or Survival or Marksmanship will likely divide those who prefered being cooldown-constrained to being resource-constrained.

But I don't think focus is going to sound the death knell of the class.

D-emblem-ocratization

I've been putting off commenting on any Patch 3.2 changes, in anticipation of further revisions rendering anything I might say obsolete, but I feel I can at least throw in my two cents on a topic that's been the focus of much angst among raiders: the consolidation of pre-Triumph emblems, allowing players to purchase up to tier 8.5 gear by potentially running nothing more advanced than heroic 5-man dungeons.

The argument against this is that it devalues the accomplishments of raiders who successfully progressed through Ulduar, by giving the same gear to people running hNexus every day. Now, I would have agreed with this point if the change were implemented before a new tier of content was opened. But the fact is, is hasn't been - on the day that Conquest gear is available to the unwashed masses, all of the serious raiders are going to be diving into Triumph-tier gear.

And I'm cool with that. Progress through the current endgame content has always been the metric by which the relative hardness of a player's core is measured, and that isn't changing. So, my fellow elitist jerks, catch you in the Coliseum.

Requiscat in Pace

A long time ago (the 70s, man!), in a land far away (Minnesota!), one man thought it would be cool to pretend to traipse through a dungeon, killing monsters and taking their stuff.

May all your rolls be natural 20s, Dave, wherever the astral winds may take you.

This is the Greatest and Best Blog in the World...

Tribute.

As you should have heard by now, the bar-setting, internal-dialoguing, mass-marketing, pod-casting frontman of the Hunter community, Big Red Kitty, has made the hard, but undeniably right, choice to turn away from WoW for his wife and family.

BRK's was the first WoW blog I regularly read, upon returning to the game a year ago. He never went into the same obsessive depth of theoretical exposition as some other bloggers (and Lord knows, I loves me some math-craftin'), but he presented important fundamentals of the class in a highly entertaining manner, and I credit him with my Hunter becoming my main, rather than my Warlock, all those months ago.

Good luck, BRK. I'll raise a cup o' raspberry latte to ya.

Oh, no you di'n't!

Oi, what a week.

The guild was hit hard by a rather unexpected dramasplosion, when a simple disagreement over loot procedures brought long-simmering personal differences to a head. Things were said. Prominent members left. Mistakes were made.

That being the case, we are no longer able to put together 25-person Naxx raids, as we had just begun to do, which leaves many of us in the unexpected position of basically stagnating until Ulduar (Malygos and various iterations of Sarth notwithstanding).

So what am I doing? Well, leveling my Death Knight, for one - we're perpetually short on tanks (some of the best of which left in the schism, along with some great healers). On my hunter, I'm mainly just doing dailies for gold (soon, my precious, soon) and rep achievements.

Still, Naxx isn't entirely barren of upgrades - just tonight, I finally replaced my Spaulders of the Black Arrow with Heroes Cryptstalker Spaulders, finally scoring me the 2-piece set bonus, for what it's worth.

I'm hangin' in there - more to come, no doubt.