Wipus Frequentus

Oh dear, Blizzard.

I've been rather looking forward to the return of the BM hunter as a viable and fun playstyle. Blizzard's put in more and more effort into the pet classes and there's been a whole lot of changes, as well as the new Hunter focus system. After taking the hunter through heroics, we did ICC10 normal and I quickly realised that my concerns regarding the class and the spec were well founded.

Firstly I think there's a problem with the hunter class in general, and it boils down to something fundamental about why we play WoW.

Compare World of Warcraft to similar MMOs like Warhammer and the first thing that strikes you is "polish". The second thing is the immediacy of everything you do - in WoW, you press a button and there's instant feedback. Your character's movement is crisp and responsive, and the combat that underpins the whole game is spectacular and vivid.

Consider a Warrior. There's your character, bristling with gear, carrying fuck-off huge weapons in each hand, smacking things very hard and hearing all kinds of satisfying sound effects as you chop things into bits. The animations rock and each signature ability usually has a unique action to go with it. It's immediate and visceral - your lizard brain loves this shit.

Consider a Mage. You get a wider view of the fight - you stand back a bit and can see the bosses better. Virtually all your abilities are supremely flashy and gorgeous spell effects, leaving you in no doubt as to what it is you've just done. You're shooting huge fireballs or balls of ice or walls of flame or rapid-fire arcane bolts. Again, you're really being rewarded for the buttons you press. The only down side is that the player animations tend to be one of two - "instant spell" or "casting time", so it's imperative you've got a race whose casting animations you can live with.

Now here's the first problem with the hunter. Hunters have bows, crossbows, and guns. The default shot for a hunter is a tiny projectile flying towards the target. It's about as uninteresting as it gets. Unfortunately most of the hunter abilities are minor tweaks of this default shot, using the same animation for the character and with no real flashy abilities. It can be hard to tell if you've even fired a shot that's different to autoattack. Something like Steady Shot - a focus builder for the "new" hunter - is basically just a stronger autoshot with a cast time. Woop-de-fucking-do.

So right off the bat, the hunter is at a disadvantage when trying to provide a player with an exciting game style. The other half of the hunter setup is of course the pet, and what better tree to show off the pet than Beastmastery? Surely Blizzard would have added abilities which make the hunter's lack of excitement a thing of the past?

Oh. Right.

Let's examine what the deal is with the pets. Firstly, they all do the same damage - allegedly. I think there's an inbuilt damage modifier increase for Exotics, but I'm not 100% certain on that. They have their own talent trees, but for pure DPS only ferocity pets should be considered and realistically there's only a point or two of variation in these talent trees, so there's no genuine customisation. Tenacity pets might well turn out to be a waste of time, or PvP-only, given that the tanking talents from the BM tree have been removed. We'll see.

So the pets have to shine from special BM talents and their own abilities. In the latter case, all pets have a damage move (bite, claw, smack, etc) that does exactly the same damage. Most pets have a buff/debuff spell that does no extra damage but replaces a raid buff/debuff. Exciting.

So that leaves us with purely the BM talents. Firstly, the signature spell for the BM tree is... Intimidation. Great. A threat-generating stun. Fine, it's a levelling skill or a very limited raid ability, but still it's not anything very exciting. The Mastery is purely pet damage, but that's to be expected, if astonishingly unimaginative. 

And here we come to the killer blow to the BM tree.

There are two talent combinations that "make" the tree. Firstly, you have Frenzy+Focus Fire. Frenzy increased your pet's attack speed, stacking 5 times for 30%. Focus Fire is a hunter ability that you use to nick that attack speed buff, taking it from your pet and giving it to yourself. This boils down to a button lighting up every 30s or so (maybe longer), allowing you to do slightly faster autoshots and slightly faster steady shots, whilst reducing the damage of your pet. How exciting.

Secondly we have that old favourite, Bestial Wrath with its little buddy The Beast Within. This was the Big Red Kitty ability that used to terrify casters in AV, where your pet turned into a ravening monster and did gross damage (+50%!) for about 20 seconds. Now, it's a more regular buff (good) that last for 10 seconds (sigh) that does +20% damage, which is pretty fucking dull really. The Beast Within is only 10% for the hunter, but halves the focus cost of shots which is fairly entertaining (but not amazingly so, for reasons to be explained shortly). 

What's the killer blow? Well, that's two button presses - one a short term buff with upsides and downsides, and the other is an even more boring buff. Everything else in the tree relating to the pet is a goddamn passive. Cobra Strikes? Passive ability with a 15% chance to trigger pet crits. Ferocious Inspiration? Passive 3% raidwide damage buff. Invigoration? Passive energy buff. Killing Streak? A talent that triggers off Kill Command - one of our few abilities but the biggest one in terms of damage. What does it do? After 2 crits in a row, it makes the 3rd KC do 20% more damage (woo...zzzz) and cost 10 less focus (zzz). You know the funny thing? It barely lasts long enough for you to actually use Kill Command thanks to its punishingly short buff time and KC's long cooldown. Awesome work, Blizzard!

The third and final nail in the coffin is one I alluded to in a prior column: the BM rotation / priority system is dull as fuck.

This is it in its entirety if you're trying to make it complicated.

Kill Command when it's up. Bestial Wrath when it's up (every 90s or something). Focus Fire when it's up (every 40s or something). Arcane Shot spam. Steady Shot to build energy. Fervor once a fight to generate energy. Zzzz.

When Bestial Wrath is hit, spam Arcane Shots and Kill Command till Bestial Wrath runs out.

And that is it. 90% of the time, you're spamming Arcane and building with Steady to make sure you have energy for Kill Command, then waiting for Bestial Wrath to give you its mild dps boost. Sometimes you press Focus Fire. Nothing more than that, and that added to the complete lack of excitement from actually using this abilities means that it fucking sucks. It also sucks that Kill Command, your highest damage ability, triggers the pet to do something you won't see because it's in a mob of melee at the back of the boss - so you get NO feedback except for the big damage number.

You may as well play with a fucking calculator. How do they screw up a pet class so much? Why put so much effort into pets and then make them into little more than portable auto-attack machines with a duplicated buff?

What gets me is that there are two other pet classes that actually have fun mechanics. The Demonology Warlock has the Felguard as its pet, which on its own isn't all that exciting. The interest comes with the fantastic range of cool abilities the Warlock gets, and the Bane of Doom talented to spawn extra demons to attack your target. That is classy! Why can't hunters have something that summons a cloud of birds to attack, or a pied piper ability to swarm rats at the enemy, or *something* that isn't just a damage/speed buff? The hunter has no abilities that match something like Hand of Gul'dan, or the talented Soulfire w/Devestation. Bestial Wrath is pathetic in comparison to the Warlock turning into a demon and getting a major damage buff and new abilities for the duration. 

And then we have the Unholy DK. Unholy DKs have their own melee abilities, with a playstyle that a lot of people loved before you factor in their ghoul. Now, however, they have the ability to turn their ghoul into a twisted abomination via Dark Transformation, which is again a superior buff to Bestial Wrath both visually and mechanically - the ghoul transforms into a new model and its abilities get cool secondary effects and do more damage. Plus the DK gets the Gargoyle. I may not like the Unholy DK play style but it's still a damn sight more fun than the BM hunter.

And you know the funniest thing? At 85, the extra pet talent points from Beast Mastery won't even matter. All they'll do is add a bit more survivability to a pet that's already far less likely to die than you are. At 85, a Survival hunter can give all the good talents to a Ferocity pet.

Top work, Blizzard. You really thought this talent tree through, didn't you?