Monday, February 14, 2011

Why I Love Being A Hunter & Haste Questions

I think I have come to a conclusion about one of the best parts of being a Hunter.  There are many reasons I love being a Hunter but this is one that never occurred to me until doing a run on my Shaman this weekend.

I queued up for a heroic on my Shaman as a DPS/Healer as normal.  I always get thrown in as a healer.  I can not even remember the last time I ran as Enhancement.  I had to remember how to play it again.  I was rusty of course but still managed to pull at least 8K on bosses, so I did my part.

While doing my Enhancement routine I remembered why I hated it sometimes.  What is with this waiting crap?  I hate not doing anything.  There are so many times where a whole comes up in my rotation where there is nothing to do.  Blah, boring.

Then I thought about my Rogue.  There is always something to do on my Rogue but there is rarely enough energy to do anything.  If I had a nickle for each time I was spamming keys and heard "not enough energy" I would be a billionaire.

Then running on my bear and screaming, to myself of course, hit me, hit me, I need rage, hit me.  There is nothing more frustrating then not having the ability to do anything at all.  Even more so when you are the tank.  Rage starvation is the worst aspect of this game as a whole.  If there was anything I hate more then the others that would be it.

All classes have limits.  Anyone with mana has a personal enrage timer of sorts.  Once they are out of mana they are basically useless.  Tanks it is more about aggro and damage control which means you have a tight leash on your taunts and butt saving abilities that you now need to wait for.  Kitties and Rogue have to listen to need more energy over and over all fight long and my Enhancement Shaman, who might as well not even have mana as I am never below 98%, have to wait all the time on things to do.

Since the change to focus, the addition of fox and now auto shot while moving Hunters improved on what was already the most active rotation in the game.  There is never a moment where you are not doing something.  You are never starved for resources.  The damage is always flowing.

This is something I always over looked with Hunters but is one of the things I love about them.  Maybe it was because I took it for granted but when playing on my Shaman the other day and waiting on things it reminded me how incredibly awesome Hunters are.  When it comes to playing the game Hunters have the most up time for play time.  There is never a moment where I am not doing something.  God how I love that.

This ability Hunters have to be perpetual motion machines, never stopping, it also why there are so many bad Hunters out there.  When you have nearly an endless array of things you can do at any given moment the possibly to make a mistake is a lot higher then if you are playing whack a mole. 

Getting into the steady/cobra over and over habit because you are not moving means you are over focus all the time meaning much less DPS.  I see this happen all the time to new hunters.  They forget to use focus because they are not moving so they do not use their instants.  Being everything is available all the time means you actually need to choose what to do.  That leaves a lot of room for mistakes whereas other classes just do what is up when it is up.  Less room for mistakes when you never have any options to begin with.

I love my pets, my personal tank, my ability to solo, my crowd control, my traps, slows, debuffs, tranqs, etc.  There are so many things to love about being a Hunter.  I can't believe I never noticed that the reason I love it more then anything else is that I can always do something.  I love always being able to do something.  It is exciting.

That brings me to a question about haste.

With auto shot firing while moving now that brings me to an interesting thought.  It is possible to ever get to the point in haste where you could become nearly 100% mobile?  Cobra and Steady change your direction to face the target so it will never be perfect until that is fixed but there might be a possible option to weave them in as best we can for limited time facing the target while moving with increased haste.

Being haste directly effects our auto shot (as well as lowering steady/cobra cast times) and we are not losing auto shots while moving now and auto shot is always one of our top damage dealers anyway, does this mean that haste has increased value now?  If so, by how much?

I would think, without any testing, that getting the steady/cobra down to 1 second cast time would now be something worth trying to attain, if it is even possible.  That would limit the amount of face time while shooting.  If only they fixed that bug where it makes you face the target, then it would not be as much of a concern for me.

I think haste means more now.  I can't wait to read what some of the theory crafters have to say about it.

Random Number:
10478 haste for 1 second Steady/Cobra shot as Survival.

Okay, not happening then.  It was nice to dream for a minute at least.

1 comment:

  1. I totally agree with you. I mean, I have 4 85 hunters and working on my 5th one right now, and often time people ask me "why so many hunters" or "why do you love playing them so much" then it got me to thinking, why do I? And most of the time I simply answer with, well because I'm never bored. Now, with your post I have an explanation as to why I'm never bored with hunters. I've always wondered, why is that when I play a druid or a class I REALLY want to try and learn how to play - I get bored at level 20-ish then I always go back to my hunter and forget about my lowbie.

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