New Toys for the Huntars!

As well as the variety of new items that The Burning Crusade offers us, and the sundry upgrades to exisiting class abilities, each of the even-numbered levels past 60 give the class brand new abilities.

At level 62, Hunters gained Steady Shot, which works as follows:

"A steady shot that causes (Ranged Attack Power*0.3+150) damage. Causes an additional 175 against Dazed targets."

On paper, it doesn't seem much, it costs me 110 mana and has a 1.5 second cast time for a shot that hits for a little less than one of my normal shots. What the cast time means, however is that I bypass the normal Global Cooldown applied to spells and can usually fit a shot in between normal shots, effectively doubling my damage.

The downside to Steady Shot is that this extra shot costs me 110 mana, and since a tight rotation will leave no time for the Five Second Rule(FSR) to take effect, I have little or no time to recover mana.

Which is why I'm glad of Aspect of the Viper at lvl 64:

"The hunter takes on the aspects of a viper, regenerating mana equal to 25% of his Intellect every 5 sec. Only one Aspect can be active at a time."

Since this mana regeneration is independant of the FSR, It allows me to keep up a high rate of damage even in an extended fight. I'm almost never out of this aspect these days, since I've found my playstyle now requires a ridiculous amount of mana most of the time.

Level 66 is round the corner for Wulf, and with it comes Kill Command:

"Give the command to kill, causing your pet to instantly attack for an additional 127 damage. Can only be used after the Hunter lands a critical strike on the target."

Reports back to me seem to suggest that it's not that efficent as an extra source of damage, especially since it inexplicably resets the Global Cooldown on cast. Where it seems to excel is when the Hunter accidently pulls aggro off the pet's target with a lucky critical strike. In that case, if you pop Kill Command, the sudden damage spike from the pet should give it a chance to regain aggro.

Level 68 will see Wulf getting the potentially amusing Snake(s in a muthaf**kin) Trap:

"Place a trap that will release several venomous snakes to attack the first enemy to approach. The snakes will die after 15 sec. "

I haven't heard enough about this ability to work out it's usefulness, but given that each of the snakes poisons have different effects (Slowing, Damage over Time, Direct Damage, etc) it has the potential to either be an incredibly crowd control tool or a shambolic mess that you only pull out on fun runs with your mates.

Finally, at level 70, Hunters get a role-defining ability in the form of Misdirection:

"Threat caused by your next 3 attacks is redirected to the target raid member. Caster and target can only be affected by one Misdirection spell at a time. Effect lasts 30 sec."

This elevates us from the role of Raid DPSbots to "pullers extraordinare". We no longer have to rely on a warrior's Taunt ability or our own Feign Death to smoothly transfer the hate from us to the tanks. It's so simple I dunno why they didn't think of it years ago.

But I'm going to go back and talk about damage now, since that's changed a lot with the introduction of Steady Shot. Before the changes in December our damage was centered around a tight 9 or 10 second shot rotation based on the cooldowns of Aimed Shot and Multi Shot. Under that system, only a few of the many guns in the game were truly viable as Hunter weapons. It also had a strong reliance on Multi Shot, which isn't always a useful or desireable shot to use in a raid situation.

With the changes in December's Patch 2.01, we came to rely more on our basic shot damage than ever before, punctuating it with Arcane and Multi Shots wherever appropriate. doing this, we were able to produce damage that was actually higher than before the patch, although I suspect we were still lagging behind the boosts the other damage classes got.

With lvl 62 and Steady Shot, we now have our full damage abilities. As long as you can keep up the mana cost, SS effectively doubles our damage, but it does so in a different way than before. Rather than hoping for a big Aimed Shot or Multi Shot critical to boost our place on the damage rankings (which can lead to over-aggroing and death), we have a spammable, controllable damage increase which we can stop when it looks like we might be taking over from the tank.

I presents some interesting itemisation challenges: The mana requirements will mean we need to use Aspect of the Viper more in long fights, and to invest more in gear which gives bonuses to Intellect or more mana regeneration. At the same time, a wider variety of ranged weapons become viable. Ideally you want a weapon that will allow you to cast a Steady Shot in between each of your Auto Shots, so depending on your reaction speed/network latency, anything with a weapon speed of 1.6 second or greater can be used. Wulf got a nice bow last night which, once his speed bonuses are applied to it, gives a final attack speed of around 1.92. Not exactly optimal, but just about right for my slow fingers to accomplish a smooth shot rotation.