The Cataclysm Hunter preview has been posted! And not, as I suspected it would be, at 3 a.m. EST. Of course everything in it is still subject to change, since they've just started sending out the press invites for beta, so we're a while from release yet. At least a likely late-summer date of some sort means I won't be standing for 45 minutes around midnight outside a Wal-Mart that lost power in an ice storm, waiting for it to reopen. (That was TBC. I could have gotten a collector's edition, but didn't.)
Anywho, stuff:
The new abilities: Cobra Shot, Trap Launcher, and Camouflage.
The first is supposed to act as a nature-damage version of Steady Shot, which says to me that, basically, Armor Penetration (besides going away on gear) is definitely not going to be like it has been in Wrath. Instead of stacking a stat and dropping non-physical shots for heavily armored targets, we'll instead have something in our arsenal to deal with it. (I wonder how it will work in PVP versus plate wearers.)
Trap Launcher just makes me squee because I want to throw snakes at people. Actually, the idea of traps being less situational and more useful from a distance (you know, add pack over there just aggroed on your mage) is awesome all around. And not having to run up to drop frost traps for Saurfang's blood beasts...
Camouflage won't, unfortunately, be quite as awesome as Aimed Shot+Shadowmeld was in Vanilla, but since it will provide immunity to ranged attacks, we can be over on one side, dropping our traps safely, and the mage or pole-dancing dot/hot Disc priest that won't die will have to actually come over and, you know, hit us to break it... setting off our carefully laid traps, muhaha.
Focus
We've known about this for a while. From what the preview said, focus will regen slower than a rogue's energy, but Steady Shot, Haste, Rapid Recuperation, and other things will help us regen faster.
I'm looking forward to this change, even though it means I'll need to relearn what I'm doing. My rotation macro will be completely dead, and to some extent it will be more like playing my rogue, but at range, without finishers or combo points or any of that to worry about. No, it'll be more along the lines of hitting Chimera, Aimed, Arcane whenever they're available, keeping my stings up, and hitting Steady/Cobra in between. Not really much different, but almost certainly not cast-sequence macroable. I've got 3 hunters to level and learn on, though. I may see if I can train myself to keyboard exclusively without the mouse in combat so I can keep using wasd...
Other changes
Ammunition is going away, and quivers become large hunter-only bags! (Note to self: make a large quiver for each hunter before change just in case. Since Iceblade Arrows are Gnomish Engineering-made only, I've actually been considering going back to a quiver. Just so I don't have to bug my husband for ammo as often. I'm not too keen about the idea of going back to a 4-slots open normal bag crunch, though.
Stables being expanded with limited active pets is nice - I have pets I don't want to ditch, but probably won't use much, or would use in rotation. (Bored with the cat for a while? Switch to the hyena.) That cat was leveled up the old way from 8-70 at 70, damn it. I don't want to get rid of him. Since they're making more pets have varying utility skills, this is especially nice. No lock in the raid? Bring your wind serpent. No kitty druid? Bring your hyena, and your Hunger-for-Blood Assassination rogue will love you.
Hunters starting with pets I think will lead to less confusion for people picking up the class who aren't long-time or intuitive gamers. I didn't start sending my pet in to tank for me until I was in the 50s - I'd shoot something and let the pet pull it off me before that.
Alas, poor Mongoose Bite, we knew you.
The Mastery bonuses all seem pretty straightforward, although the mechanics of "Double Shot" aren't really laid out. Whether it will act like Lightning Overload, or like a Black Mage's "Double Cast," we don't know yet. I kind of doubt the former, actually, given that we already have Wild Quiver (unless that's going away), but if it just randomly procs a "next shot is free, causes 50%, and does not trigger the global cooldown" buff, kind of like Surge of Light, it could be neat.
4/9/10
Something is off when...
Something is off when I'm thinking about booting my own alts out of the guild. But no, I should try to figure out what it is and if it can be fixed.
The feeling is the same as when there was a rogue who would bully the officers, and we were just taking it, rather than just kicking him. He would swear at us, throw tantrums when things didn't go his way, and so forth. I considered just leaving the guild rather than having to put up with his antics.
Well, I'm much more invested in the guild than I used to be. I put anywhere from 3 to 15 hours a week just into administration, depending what's going on at the time. Some nights my entire 1-2 hours of play time is eaten up by the guild bank, or roster management. So just ditching it and going solo again (which is much more feasible than it used to be) isn't really a good solution. I've invested too much of my own time to just let it go down the tubes because something needs work.
I'm just not sure what. Yeah, we've got some personnel issues, mostly a bit of a healing shortage, that's made me question some of the decisions we made two months ago regarding our healer corps and some of our more recent recruitment decisions.
I have a gut feeling about what part of the problem is, but I don't know if I can really... fix that, or if it would just make more problems.
But I'd imagine me kicking 5 of my own toons to put them in my bank guild would cause quite a lot of consternation (even if the bank access would be oh-so-awesome).
The feeling is the same as when there was a rogue who would bully the officers, and we were just taking it, rather than just kicking him. He would swear at us, throw tantrums when things didn't go his way, and so forth. I considered just leaving the guild rather than having to put up with his antics.
Well, I'm much more invested in the guild than I used to be. I put anywhere from 3 to 15 hours a week just into administration, depending what's going on at the time. Some nights my entire 1-2 hours of play time is eaten up by the guild bank, or roster management. So just ditching it and going solo again (which is much more feasible than it used to be) isn't really a good solution. I've invested too much of my own time to just let it go down the tubes because something needs work.
I'm just not sure what. Yeah, we've got some personnel issues, mostly a bit of a healing shortage, that's made me question some of the decisions we made two months ago regarding our healer corps and some of our more recent recruitment decisions.
I have a gut feeling about what part of the problem is, but I don't know if I can really... fix that, or if it would just make more problems.
But I'd imagine me kicking 5 of my own toons to put them in my bank guild would cause quite a lot of consternation (even if the bank access would be oh-so-awesome).
4/6/10
Five years, and the tune never changes
One of the things I discovered when I was going through our guild's forum archives, deleting about two years worth when we were being evaluated by our forum host for suitability for Google ads, was that with regards to raiding, there have always been, and always ever seem to be, the same arguments about raiding.
1. We're becoming too hardcore/casual!
Since we are, at our heart, a casual guild, this comes up any time we set up standards for progression. We're still casual; we're just not going to stick our heads in the sand about what kind of requirements are needed for actually getting all the way through a particular tier of content. People have been squealing about this in our guild since Molten Core, but it's never really been true. We're not going to be a "raids 7 days/nights, you have to be at every raid" kind of guild. None of us have the time.
2. Loot Distribution.
Do long-time raiders have first dibs over newcomers? Do you roll for loot, use a point system, etc.? We've gone through several loot distribution methods, and there are still people who are worried about getting their shinies first. First shouldn't be as much of a concern as keeping the raid as a whole improving. Starving your newer players of loot through overly restrictive system doesn't help the raid as a whole, and if their butts in the seats are what's making the raid happen, you're not being fair to them.
3. Raid slot distribution.
Who gets to go when? I think this is something we generally do fairly well - we take people who are qualified first, people who aren't quite there but qualified for the next tier of content down next, and so on. Within each pool, the attendance gets shuffled around so that people still get an opportunity to raid. We don't have as many raid nights as we used to - a peak of six or so in late Vanilla, and we're down to about three - so it's harder to fit people in that it used to be. We used to just do roll outs, and if you were only available certain nights and had really bad luck, you could end up raiding next to never. Scheduling in advance at least lets people know they can make other plans some nights.
4. Mains and Alts.
What's a main? What's an alt? Which gets priority on invites/loot? Yeah, this is a perpetual topic for debate. Do you look at every character that person has ever played when defining the terms? Their active toons? Their toons on your server? Their toons in your guild?
I think what frustrates me the most about any of these topics is when someone takes one side at one point, and then when it's personally advantageous, or no longer personally advantageous, to support the other side, they switch. What that tells me is that neither position is right or wrong. So I tend to go with what seems to be in the best interests of the guild in the long term.
1. We're becoming too hardcore/casual!
Since we are, at our heart, a casual guild, this comes up any time we set up standards for progression. We're still casual; we're just not going to stick our heads in the sand about what kind of requirements are needed for actually getting all the way through a particular tier of content. People have been squealing about this in our guild since Molten Core, but it's never really been true. We're not going to be a "raids 7 days/nights, you have to be at every raid" kind of guild. None of us have the time.
2. Loot Distribution.
Do long-time raiders have first dibs over newcomers? Do you roll for loot, use a point system, etc.? We've gone through several loot distribution methods, and there are still people who are worried about getting their shinies first. First shouldn't be as much of a concern as keeping the raid as a whole improving. Starving your newer players of loot through overly restrictive system doesn't help the raid as a whole, and if their butts in the seats are what's making the raid happen, you're not being fair to them.
3. Raid slot distribution.
Who gets to go when? I think this is something we generally do fairly well - we take people who are qualified first, people who aren't quite there but qualified for the next tier of content down next, and so on. Within each pool, the attendance gets shuffled around so that people still get an opportunity to raid. We don't have as many raid nights as we used to - a peak of six or so in late Vanilla, and we're down to about three - so it's harder to fit people in that it used to be. We used to just do roll outs, and if you were only available certain nights and had really bad luck, you could end up raiding next to never. Scheduling in advance at least lets people know they can make other plans some nights.
4. Mains and Alts.
What's a main? What's an alt? Which gets priority on invites/loot? Yeah, this is a perpetual topic for debate. Do you look at every character that person has ever played when defining the terms? Their active toons? Their toons on your server? Their toons in your guild?
I think what frustrates me the most about any of these topics is when someone takes one side at one point, and then when it's personally advantageous, or no longer personally advantageous, to support the other side, they switch. What that tells me is that neither position is right or wrong. So I tend to go with what seems to be in the best interests of the guild in the long term.
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