Back when I first started playing WoW, my only experience with hunters was playing a beast master in E.Q. – and while they are both pet classes, they are quite different, as a beast master was more of a melee character, while a hunter is meant to fight from a distance. The problem with the whole ranged fighter thing comes in that for the first ten or so levels of a hunter’s life, they have no pet to help them keep mobs at a distance (or they didn’t until Cataclysm…). Thus, hunters started out with a few melee skills so they could fight monsters up close if they couldn’t keep their distance. This made learning my actual rotation as I finally did level up and get my pet rather difficult, as I didn’t have a clue just what skills I should keep up on my action bars and which were obsolete.
However, as the game has evolved, low level hunters have evolved as well. While I can’t remember just how every skill changed as new patches came out, I clearly remember when patch 4.0.1 was released and level 1 hunters finally had a pet! The pets were technically only guardians, not allowing the hunter to have much control over their pet, but the pets are able to at least hold aggro long enough for hunters to shoot their targets down without being forced into melee range too often. The starting skills have also been adjusted to reflect this change. Many of the key shots in a hunter’s rotation appear quite a bit earlier than they did in the past – especially Steady Shot. While this particular shot used to be just a hard-hitting filler that hunters didn’t get until around level 50, it is now available as early as level 4 so that hunters can regen focus while beating down the baddies of Azeroth. Hunters could finally attack from a distance from their birth, and have abilities to do so without relying on Auto Shot to always do the job for them.
The only skill I can distinctly remember getting removed from the game was Volley. With this skill, hunters used to rain down a ton of arrows/bullets onto a designated area, making for a great AoE ability. However, with the change from mana to focus, this ability was removed from the game as Blizzard figured channeling the ability was too similar to caster channeling one of their spells – and since hunters deal physical damage, not magical, channeling the skill didn’t make much sense anymore. Instead, they finally changed Multi-Shot so that would hit anything near the hunter’s target as a cone effect, compared to the original “target plus two others” model. However, when this change was first implemented, Multi-shot didn’t really put forth the kind of damage expected. It felt very week, and many hunters didn’t bother much with AoEs at all. Blizzard did finally up the damage output of Multi-Shot, and it has become quite satisfying seeing a large number of arrows flying from my bow to hit a huge slew of mobs in front of me. I just wish it didn’t take up so much focus all the time – I miss the days of chaining AoEs the way I used to chain Volley…/sigh.
Since I’m on the subject, let me go ahead and delve into the whole Mana/Focus aspect of hunters. Throughout most of WoW, hunters dealt mostly physical damage, yet used the magical resource mana to do so. While many took it for granted, there were plenty of other hunters who felt this was very odd. Most of our shots were instant casts compared to our spell-casting, mana using cousins. The other physical damage dealers all had their own resources – rogues and feral druids have energy, warriors have rage, and death knights have runic power. Something just didn’t quite feel right for the hunters. Blizzard was very much aware of this and kept telling the community that they were looking into the matter, trying to figure out something that would feel right.
Well, finally Patch 4.0.1 was released, and with it Hunters lost their mana and gained focus. While focus wasn’t entirely new to the game, it was new as a player resource (it was previously only used by hunter pets). Of course, with this new resource came a lot of new challenges. Just how should a hunter set up their rotation to ensure they had enough focus to keep their most powerful shots going when they’re off cool-down? Steady shot got a revamp as a focus regen shot, while Cobra Shot was also introduced to do the same thing, as well as refresh Serpent Sting. The idea is to simply weave in enough Steady/Cobra shots into the rotation to keep the focus up for the bigger shots in our rotations, yet use Arcane Shot to keep the focus from hovering at 100 the entire time the other shots were finishing their cool-downs. It makes for a rather interesting balancing act if you want to remain at optimal dps output.
Some hunters figured it out quite quickly (especially if they tried it out on the Beta or PTR before it went live), while others simply gave up and never played their hunter again. The majority of hunters played around with the whole thing for a couple of days before they finally felt comfortable with it and could pull off their rotations without thinking too hard during combat. I was one who started testing out focus on the PTR, but it still took me awhile after the patch was released before I fully grasped the whole thing. Of course, do still find myself struggling with focus from time to time. If my group is killing a pack of trash with low hit points, I can at times find myself struggling to do any damage once my focus is gone, as nothing lives long enough for me to cast a Steady or Cobra shot. Granted, it’s not something I should really worry about – things are still dying at a quick pace, I’m just not helping all that much. The main thing I have problems with is getting into too much of a Steady/Cobra Shot spam, keeping my focus maxed out for too long when I could be casting an Arcane Shot for more damage, or on the other hand, I’ll start casting Arcane Shot a bit too much and by the time Chimera/Explosive Shot (or Killing Blow) is off cooldown, I don’t have enough focus to shoot them. This doesn’t happen to me quite as much nowadays, but I do at times get myself in a zombie-state when I’m not thinking enough about it, or someone in my group makes a mistake and we’re all kind of panicking, at which times I do start to miss the endless mana pool I had back in Wrath…
Another resource we had to deal with until Patch 4.0.1 was ammo. We started out with stacks of 200 arrows/bullets, which ran out very quickly if we didn’t stuff an ammo bag full of ‘em. We then finally got the stack size upped to 1000 during Wrath. This made things a bit easier on our bag slots, but it still felt rather clunky. I hated having to buy stack after stack after stack of arrows in the AH on a regular basis, especially when engineers had them so overpriced at times – which is the main reason I finally made my own engineer. I get why Blizzard wanted to keep ammo around for so long – I enjoyed knowing my arrows were actually flying out to deal damage to the evil monsters in front of me versus some magical arrows that appear from nowhere, but most hunters agreed it was finally time to get rid of the bulk in our bags. The whole idea was just starting to feel tiresome and outdated. I still think it would have been need to have a static arrow/bullet in the ammo slot on our screens to compliment our bows/guns with some cool effects, like extra fire damage or something…but then again, most of our shots cover most types of damage (fire, poison, etc.), and scopes are there to add extra stats…
So really, when I think about it, hunters themselves have changed, but not quite to the extreme as a few other classes have. That is to say, if you don’t consider their pets – And what kind of psycho doesn’t consider hunter pets when thinking about hunters?? If anything has changed drastically when it comes to hunters, it’s their pets… However, I will save that discussion for next time. Till then!
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