How Many Abilities are Enough?

A recent post over at Warcraft Hunters Union & WoW Insider talked about hunters having too many buttons and explained the problem with the class right now better than I could have. 

It is almost frustrating trying to explain it to someone that is not in the situation that all hunters are in right now.  The fact there are so many active abilities going on at the same time devalues the abilities we do have to the point where they do not stand out among each other all that much. 

So to maximize your DPS you need to know the difference between hitting the 7% ability or the 8% one but if you have an agility proc the 7% one would now be worth 9% and that would be the better one to hit, but if you have a haste proc the 8% one is now a 9% one making the gap bigger and the mistake you can make hitting the 7% one instead even larger.

So many moving parts, so many abilities with comparable damage they do, so many changes based on your current focus level, the duration of cooldowns remaining, the condition of what procs you might be under, all changing those little numbers around.

Being the gap between abilities are so small one little change in condition could change your rotation priority completely.  While most damage dealing classes have minor changes under a proc, if any, hunters might change completely, all for 1% here and there.  Like using focus fire or not when you know bestial wrath will be off cooldown in 3 seconds.  Waiting 1 second on the kill command to line it up with your wrath. 

Super simple things like that should make a difference in your DPS and they do, but the margin they make a difference by is so small now.  So small and it still will add up to be a great deal over the course of a fight, but also so small that it makes it harder for a new hunter to understand and learn.  Sometimes you think to yourself 1% is 1%, does it really matter?

Yes, it does.

That 1% here and there does not end up being 1% over all.  If it were 1% over all no one would really stress it except for the best of the best elite style players.  But 1% of each ability every single time you hit an ability will add up to a great deal more than 1% overall.  Not sure if that makes sense, but trust me, that 1% is a lot more than 1%, so it matters to each and every hunter out there, not just those elite players.

The only reason hunters are in a bad place right now is because there are too many buttons.  Not because our DPS is low because if done right it is not.  Not because it is harder to get the maximum potential out of our class than any other class, we do not shy from the challenge.  Not because of any one reason people seem to hang on often.  It is all about the buttons. 

The fact that having so many abilities is watering down our rotation into one of two things, whack a mole or whack a mole priority.  And that is the difference between the hunters you see doing 100K on fights and hunters you see doing 50K on fights.  One is hitting whatever they can and another is remembering all those various priorities that seemingly change under various conditions.

Can hunters be fixed?  Yes but they won't be.  Mr Street has already made it abundantly clear that they have no intention of doing any sweeping class changes in the middle of an expansion.  Personally I not find his statement acceptable.  They can do it, they choose not to.  Two completely different things.

How many abilities are enough?

At what point did adding new abilities to hunters reach the point where our abilities no longer felt like signatures and felt more like numbers only? 

While I can not speak for anyone else, all specs of hunters feel the same to me now.  Hit what gives you the most DPS because it gives you the most DPS, not because it is "our shot".  While both end up meaning the same thing, hitting what does the most, hitting KC because I am BM, explosive because I am SV, and chimera because I am MM because those are my big shots feels more natural than hitting them just because they are the top number because now, with all those new abilities, that top number isn't really all that big any more, taking away the signature feel.

How many abilities are enough?

What we had seemed fine.  Adding stampede fells fine.  Even adding readiness to BM and SV felt okay.  All those other buttons did not feel fine.  Each one, as it was added, lowered the power of the signature shot for that spec and that feels off.

How many abilities are enough?

Each person will see it as what they feel comfortable with.  I've learned to adapt to all those extra buttons, but that is all they feel like to me, extra buttons, clutter, useless junk I need to do that could only be called busy work because none of it was necessary to add to the game.

How many abilities are enough?

Perhaps it is not a real number we can put on it, but a concept, like explained in the post I linked.  When there are so many abilities that the difference between them damage wise is so minimal in an effort to make you use them all, there are too many abilities.

My suggestion to a fix?

Take some of the new abilities off the global cooldown.  Things like dire beast, blink strike and glaive toss could be taken off the global cooldown and macroed in, like any good MM hunter had silencing shot macroed into everything in wrath because it had a damage component.  By doing so, they could increase our real abilities to a hit higher, as they should, and lower those off the cooldown abilities to hit lower, so it does not make us over powered, but enough that it would be noticeable that the hunter that used them would see a reasonable, if small, DPS increase from macroing them. Just like you could see the MM hunter that macroed in silencing shot did more in wrath.

Make some of the other abilities replace current ones with a slight boost to them, like some other classes have talents that remove one ability and replace it with another.  Make barrage replace multi-shot and boost it a little.  Make crows replace multi shot and boost it a little and make the crows unkillable.  Make binding shot replace snake trap and have a little boost.  Make power shot replace concussive shot trading in your instant slow for a cast time knock back with damage.

It can easily be fixed, and lower the number of abilities by changing some ability and taking others off the global cooldown.

This would leave use with one new ability across the board, stampede, with its long cooldown, and one new ability, readiness, for two of the three specs.

How many abilities are enough?

I can go either way.  I've adapted to the new way of doing things but it felt better before, in my opinion.  I want my signature shot back.  I want to see few numbers on the screen but bigger numbers instead of a whole bunch of smaller ones that add up to the same thing.  Like I said, I can go either way, but it does not change my opinion that we have way too many abilities now as it is.  How many are enough?  We had enough before.  That was how many in my opinion is enough.

If you have not read that post I suggest reading it.  I had adapted, I had accepted, I had been just living with it.  But after reading that, it made me understand that there is more than just more buttons that was the original problem, it was the watering down of all those buttons. If you had accepted things as they were, maybe reading it will change your mind too.