Lets All Take A Moment to Mourn The Death of Marksmen

Doing my morning read through some blogs I popped over to Del's place, a fantastic blog with some great theory crafting posts if you dig that stuff, and read his newest post Dumbing Down Marksmanship.  You can read his post for all the gory details about the death but I will cut and paste my reply to him here just to share my opinions on the matter.  Might clear up some of my typos here however ;)

My reply to his post (again read his post) was as follows.

I popped over to read my blog list before even going over to MMO-C and in a way I am glad. Reading your post was better than reading a list like that on MMO-C and raging.

Seriously WTF?

I was so looking forward to being able to play marks again for the first time since wrath. It had always been my favorite spec and now it just feels so lackluster. Even if they balance it, even if MM still works out the be the spec of choice for raiders. They just took all the life out of the spec.

The chim 5% heal was a nice little bonus in PvE, it helped the healer some and with the way we know healers always get screwed at the beginning of an expansion they will need all the help they can get. I called it a nice little bonus, no, that 5% heal was HUGE. Even more so in PvP.

The removal of master marksmen leaves me perplexed. It will come back, trust me on this one. Blizzard design philosophy for all damage dealing classes is reactive play. With no procs, which MM would have none now, there is no reactive play. I can make a macro and do my 100% maximum DPS rotation with one button now without having to ever react to anything. This will never happen, trust me. If not this coming back, something that procs and changes the rotation will. They will not let a spec go live that can be put in a one button macro for 100% DPS.

Concussive barrage should not be removed. I know they are trimming the PvP CC bloat, but this is not CC. It is a slow and it is weaker than slows other classes have by a long shot. If they are leaving other classes with spammable abilities that not only slow but stop movement, this is just a case of "we hate hunters" going on to remove it from us and not others.

Careful aim, believe it or not, I have absolutely no problem with this as weird as it might sound. With it being tied to rapid fire now it just seemed too powerful the way it is. The main difference is we will now need to wait until the second or maybe third tier before crit capping for CA time instead of getting there in the first tier.

Steady focus is the one that made me want to respond WTF. This is the heart of the MM rotation, this is what sets the good marksmen away from the bad ones. Hunters are lucky enough that they can do okay even if they mess up priority a little as long as they are always casting something. But that was not as true for marks. You needed to keep steady focus going, and that was the skill of the spec.

Actually I loved the spec for the brief time I could use it in cataclysm because of the short span steady focus lasted for and the tightness you needed to perform at to get maximum DPS while keeping it up. As I explained to someone in guild once about it when I called MM one of the hardest specs in the game and he said hunters were not hard. I said, you have half a second leeway, which means any lag, any indecision, and you lose steady focus and your DPS goes in the tank. Half a second every 7 seconds and you can screw it all up. Name one other spec that requires you to work at that rate of precision to do it well.

Sure it was made a lot easier in mists, but it was still the entire draw of the spec. You actually needed to do something. There were actual decisions that needed to be made. Steady focus was a skill ability. Rarely do I agree when people say dumbing down. Even when they raised it to 20 seconds I did not call it dumbing down, I just said they are making it easier. This time, no doubt, they are dumbing it down. Removing one of the things I loved most about MM. Sad day, sad day indeed.

Piercing shots, and the related perk, just make no sense. I do not see what was wrong about a physical bleed effect. This might be removed for balancing, but if it is there is one side effect that might seem nice. Our shots can be stronger, so we would feel like we were stronger, because they would not have to keep them down knowing they were leaving bleeds behind. But with no bleed, and no buff to the shots, this is a huge nerf. A very huge nerf.

Today is a say day for hunters.

Lets all take a moment and bow our heads for the death of the marksmen spec.