Patch Gripe

I am not going to go through all of the Hunter changes that happened in patch 3.whatever yesterday. I will not be commenting on the new Talent tree, the new Inscription profession (Nostik hasn't learned it yet), nor any of the other changes that came with this patch - save one.

Before I go into the change that gets my ire up it is necessary to give a bit of background on shot rotation. This will not be extensive because it is boring for anyone other than a Hunter, and even Hunters start to yawn (Dinah, Anathema's guild leader, has told us Hunters to "blow it out our asses" on many occasions). This explanation is specific to Beast Mastery Hunters, relative to the old talent tree.

GHOSTKID is a SSC, HT, Gruuls, Mag (no BT or Sunwell) level Beast Mastery Hunter in T5/badge gear (proper enchants and gems) and can top the WWS charts with raiders at similar gear level. Ironically it takes time to get to that gear level, but with the two piece T5 set bonus the game gets easier. Barring nuances of the class to top the WWS charts all I had to do was make sure I wove my Steady Shot in between my auto shots.

Auto Shot has a 1.5 second cool down, and Steady Shot had a 1.5 second cool down. The trick is to use Steady Shot every time it's off of cool down without interrupting (clipping) Auto Shot. Of course there are other things being done to deal out DPS, but this is the most significant part. Done properly a Hunter can get an Auto Shot or Steady Shot off every .75 seconds. Please note that this is over simplified and takes no other shot rotation formulas into account. This post is a gripe session, not a theorycraft session.

Blizzard has increased the Steady Shot cool down to 2.0 seconds. I believe they did this so a beginner Hunter, or dumb Hunter (Huntard) can now spam Steady Shot and clip much less of the Auto Shots than he/she used to. In theory one could spam Steady Shot and never see an Auto Shot on the old system. Auto Shot does more damage than Steady Shot at GHOSTKID's gear level by the way.

I have been gimped! Not only do I shoot 10 less Steady Shots per minute than I did, but all of my crit procs just lost 10 chances a minute to proc. If I'm at 30+% crit, that's roughly 3 times per minute less procs. ****Please visit Criticall QQ for mind bending math. It's mage stuff, but the math gets detailed. I will not be doing any more today. That's Rip's job.****

So now I have to get GHOSTKID's talents past 375, train an exotic pet, get glyphs, and LEARN HOW TO PLAY ALL OVER AGAIN!

This blows. I hope my soon-to-be-acquired Devilsaur makes up for it.