90 thoughts on “Ghostcrawler’s Arcania: Hunter Mechanics”

1. 37- Well, as far as my server goes there seems to be alot of MM hunters around… And with all the ArP on gear now it makes sense, but often i see Wolfs/Raptors for them, but I prefer Wasps for the Arm. reduction. And yes, i know, any druid worth his/her snot (trees excluded) should be able to keep Faerie Fire up, but i relied on this Cat in Nax 10 (fun/badge run) for the buff but he always ended up dead, so i wanna pull him around anyways now.

2. as a second- I feel SV, by name should be a more Melee oriented spec, that way my melee weapon is more then just a stat stick, i mean, the name of the tree is somewhat reminiscent to it being melee too, that would make us more hunter-like in terms of other fantasies/ even real life. B/c be honest, have u ever seen a ranger/hunter class that doesnt have decent melee too? i haven’t… but this may seem silly to all of you, but i think it could work, and besides, if SV becomes useless again who will give me my dam replenishment? xD

3. I just wanted to chip in really quick to say that now that I’ve had time to test my new cookie-cutter Survivability Build (with cookie-cutter Wolf) that even though I haven’t even mastered the rotation yet, that my DPS has jumped literally 400 points with the same exact gear. I went from being #3-#4 in DPS in most Groups to being #1-#2, and instead of hovering around 2600 DPS (at best), I’m now consistently 3000+DPS with a couple buffs now, and can get up to about 3500 dps on boss fights.

   The difference between BM and SV Raiding is quite a bit bigger than I expected, and the SV Shot rotation isn’t all that hard!

   I don’t see why Ghostcrawler would ever say that BM should have lower damage because it’s easier to play. I mean, why doesn’t he stop and think “Oh hey, just -who- is it that designed the BM tree?” and realize that the next thought that should pop into his head is: “Oh yeah, us… Blizzard. We designed that tree that way.”

   If he’s blaming the ease of BM play as the reason for the DPS being lower, he’s just blaming himself and his comapny. Hopefully, Blizzard’ll see this and give some much needed buffs to BM. I love playing a BM solo (and my solo build is still BM) but I just can’t go back to BM raiding after I’ve tried SV. The damage I do in SV now is just way too good, and it’ll probably only get better once I’ve mastered the shot rotation.

4. Kinda funny. I was SV on my main hunter. I then leveled a second hunter as BM. After hitting 80, I can say that my BM dps blows my SV hunter dps out of the water. I only have one or two pieces of armor that has a rating of over 200, and I am doing over 1000 more dps. No exaggeration. Bm has the potential to do the dps. i think it is a metter of using the best gear (not necessarily the gear with the best rating), and the best gems for the spec. Everybody seems to think that AP is what makes the BM hunter go. I have to say that it is important, but I stack Crit rating and Arm Pen. 35% crit and 42% arm pen can be dangerous. And I only have around 4350 AP. So, I do think that people put more emphasis on their pets when they spec BM, but BM can be a potent raid spec. When my guild raids, I am regulary second on the dps meter (we have a warrior who does 6100+ dps, so second is respectable).

   I guess the point I am getting at: I love playing BM, and hated playing SV because I felt that I had to or I couldn’t do raids…. so, I figured out a way to make my favorite spec respectable. If I can figure something out, than anybody can, cause I am far from a great player. Just wish people would spend as much time working around “weaker spec limitations” as they do complaining. Then there really wouldn’t be a problem.

5. Sorry for the double post, but I hope that didn’t come out the wrong way. BM seems to get the most nerfs, and goes through the most changes, and it is mostly Blizzard’s fault that people get frustrated. i do get tired of figuring things out because Blizz feels the need to nerf BM, or change one of it’s mechanics. I do complain about it for a lil while, but thenI get back to trying to be the best hunter possible. Blizz needs to figure out what they wanna do woith hunters and then try to accomplish that. it seems liek they have no direction for hunters. No wonder we hunters constantly cry and complain… we are constantly being made to relearn our spec.

6. Nimizar, why must you make me think of intelligent responses? I’ll…..do that tomorrow. Just got back from a family trip to Niagra Falls, and if you knew my family you’d understand why I am tired.

   We’re all insane.

7. Blizz don’t mind some specs having simpler rotations – some players aren’t interested in (or genuinely can’t handle) the cooldown management of a spec like SV, and BM provides a more relaxed playstyle (send pet, use Arcane Shot when it is off CD, fire Serpent Sting if it has expired, otherwise fire Steady, hit BW/KC when they’re up). Firing an extra Steady when Arcane is off cooldown as BM is nowhere near the DPS loss of a Survival hunter doing the same thing with Explosive Shot.

   However, Blizz also want to reward managing a more complex rotation with an increase in DPS. So the PvE DPS potential of BM is currently the lowest of the three hunter specs. That’s OK in principle – something has to be lowest on the list. The disparity is a little high though, which is why Blizz keep tinkering with it, trying to close the gap without making BM “OMG Ezy-mode chart topping DPS” the way it was for most of TBC.

   While providing more complexity within BM itself is something that’s on their radar (since they have said so), I can’t imagine it being particularly high on their priority list (BM is a popular spec anyway, hardcore min/max’ers have the option of going SV or MM instead, the hunter class rebuild around focus instead of mana is coming in Cataclysm, and BM is tricky to buff in ways that stay within the theme of the tree but don’t leave the hunter completely crippled when the pet dies).

8. Did a little thinking, and thought I’d respond to one thing at least before I went to bed. Nim, part of the problem with the argument of ‘When the pet dies’ is duel speccing. This is from a PvE standpoint, mind you. We can now change our spec mid-instance if the need arises, to avoid those AoE heavy boss fights that might mutilate the pet. Come a future patch pets won’t be affected by boss AoE period. So why then is it such a risk? I have to say that that is rather contradictory of them. “We’re going to make it easier for you to avoid situations where your pet dying is a problem…..but we’re, uh, also going to make you not depend on your pet so much.” So…..why bother doing both?

   From a PvP standpoint, it could potentially make more sense. The key word there is POTENTIALLY. Right now, pet’s aren’t high priority. As a BM hunter who can do a pretty good job of topping damage charts in AB or WSG, I can attest to the fact that not many people pay attention to your pets. HOWEVER, if it ever came to the point where a BM’s pet dying TOTALLY crippled the hunter, then you might see a swing in tactic, to targeting the pet first to cripple the hunter.

   All in all, I really think GC is just talking in circles around the issue. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think HALF of what is wrong is even going to matter come Cataclysm, and so GC just has to worry about stalling until then.

   I’ll get the rest tommorow.

9. It makes a bit more sense when you consider that a major factor in designing something like WoW lies in balancing competing design goals. BM, for example, is a tree where you want to emphasise the pet – the tree is called Beast Mastery after all. On the other hand, pets are largely “fire and forget” in many situations, so you don’t want to emphasise them *too* much or what the hunter does with their own attacks starts to matter too little. On the gripping hand, pets are also a little brain dead and asking players to not only not stand in the fire, but also explicitly tell their pets to get out of the fire through the rather limited pet controls is fairly unreasonable.

   So you end up with the current situation where Blizz don’t really want to buff BM pet DPS any more (because more DPS through the pet is dull and if anything they would like to shift the emphasis a little more towards the hunter), but also feel that pets die too easily to certain boss attacks (because being forced to switch to a less pet reliant spec or suffer a huge DPS loss for certain fights is lame).

   When you see devs (both in WoW and elsewhere) making seemingly contradictory comments about things they’re considering, it’s worth taking a step back to see if you can figure what design objectives they are attempting to satisfy. It is usually possible to come up with some concepts where the seemingly contradictory ideas are actually consistent with each other, just in service to different aims. You may not agree that those design goals are worthwhile, but they usually do make sense from a certain point of view.

   And of course, sometimes devs just change their minds, so recent comments may contradict older statements (a couple of notable examples are the changes in philosophy between TBC and Wrath in relation to raid buffs and hybrid class DPS potential, as well as trying for four equal-but-different tanking classes, rather than having warriors front-and-centre as the expected raid main tanks).

10. I CALLED IT! I TOLD YOU PATCH DAY WOULD BE AROUND THE 22ND!!!!

    *Coughs* Sorry, moving on. I have to disagree, Nim, but I know your not surprised by that. I’ve mentioned several ways to make BM still focus on the pet while requiring player interaction, making them less fire and forget. They started that with the afore mentioned intimidation and the original kill command and even masters call now, but just sort of dropped it, and started doing massive passive buffs for the pets instead, which was, to me at least, a bit of a mistake. They had the chance to do a minor redesign, and provide more emphasis on hunter/pet interaction. But instead we just got a flat 10% here, 10% there, and maybe a bit more there.

    It’s one thing to have a design philosophy change over a number of years, as in the examples you stated, and to have GC contradicting himself within the span of about a month. And I do not take it for anything less then a contradiction. I understand the desire to shift some of the focus off of auto-cast pet abilities, but that isn’t the direction they took with the changes to BW and TBW. Both of those were arena nerfs, which GC then had to try and justify through his usual fast talking, and BLIZZARD had to make seem rational through a series of PvE buffs. These nerfs came not to long after Blizzard stated that they wanted to make BM ((And by proxy Demonology and unholy)) suffer less during boss fights because of relying on a pet. Then GC had to try and explain the reasoning behind it, even though that reasoning was deep seated in Pv….in Arena. ((Sorry, I just….can’t think of the glorified dueling as PvP.)) So what we got was a half assed response that might make the ‘weekend BM warriors’ happy, but just sounded like so much politician-ing to me.

    In short, half of what GC says is sophistry, plain and simple. He has to weave whatever the !@#$ he can in order to prevent a mass fallout on the boards. I don’t think Blizzard knows WHAT they want to do with hunters right now, BM in particular. So they are trying lots of little things behind closed doors, and we get the ‘sort of how it might kind of go’s from GC.

    I do so enjoy these discussions though. If Blizzard ever changes and everything is as it appears, we wouldn’t have anything to debate about, Nimizar.

11. I would be happier if Beast Mastery gave a % bump across the board to pet stats. Like, +20% to all stats. Armor, core stats, etc. Then Exotics would truly be something to look out for, and worth having, and would be extremely worthwhile in PvP.

    Right now, my pets get ROASTED in PvP, it’s not even worth having them out. Enemy players either turn on them and burn them down (clothies) or flat-out ignore them (tanks).

12. My other solution to fix hunters’ lack of survivability in PvP would be to let us do a LOT more on-the-run.

    It’s a quick and easy fix. Take away the “must stand still” component from a lot of our shots, and the problem is a lot less. Most of why I get massacred in PvP is because I get a tank up in my face, and even if I can get away, I can’t do jack for damage when I am running for my life.

    If we’re not allowed to take hits in melee, or have more ways to escape from it, let us do more of our damage on the run.

    One last suggestion would be letting our speed bonuses STACK. There’s like, what, four different speed increases in the BM tree? None of them are additive. At least if we were faster, we could run from place to place, and get some shots off.

13. I’ve read all the posts here, seen a lot of numbers getting thrown backwards and forwards, posts saying MM is best, Survival is best, but whats it really come down to in the end?

    I’ll tell ya – its Blizzards total lack of love for the BM tree thats what.

    I’ve been BM hunter since day 1. True the other trees give slightly better DPS but thats not the point of playing a hunter is it? Being forced onto one tree or another simply because it gives an increase in DPS. Let me direct your attention to this little quote I found on wowwiki:

    “All hunters create lifelong friendships with animal companions, who are also often their best and only friends, if the stereotype of the reclusive huntsman is to be believed.”

    Our pets are what set us apart from the rest of the classes. Granted warlock and death knights can have “pets” but they are not actual pets, they are summoned and enslaved against their will. Our pets stay with us because they chose to (remember the vanilla days or loyalty and the pet possibly running away? /sigh)

    When Blizzard overhauled the BM tree and only really gave us the ability to tame more exotic beasts they were basically giving us a /facepalm

    Might I suggest that a nice dev at Blizzard reworks the BM tree to make it much more viable. An example would be the 51 point talent – instead of making it possible for BM hunters to tame exotic beasts (see point below), make it so that the 51 point talent increases our pets stats by a certain percentage. (10% maybe?)

    Do away with exoticness all together (ducks from onslughter of outraged BM hunter comments), personally I cannot see why they were implemented like that in the first place. A reworking of some of the less desirable minor glyphs and you can have the exotics stay and then they become viable for everyone.

    At the moment there’s too much elitist nonsense – “you’re not going a raid/hc with us, you’re BM” and I don’t like it one little bit. I was forced in the last raid guild I was in to swap from my BM spec to a Survival spec for raids, then I get complained at because my DPS was actually lower!

    Just to bring up one final thing – if Blizzard ever do take our pets away from us not only will I quit the class, I think I’d quit the game. To me, part of being a hunter is having my constant companion by my side, to help me finish off enemies and to live free.

14. Combine what Boudica said with what I said.

    Drop “exotic” pets. Make the 51-point talent give a +20% bonus to pet stats, which makes ANY pet a BM hunter has “exotic”.

    Done.

15. @Palla: I didn’t get the impression from anything GC said recently that he was trying to disguise the fact that the BW change was a straight up Arena nerf. I thought he was quite open about the fact that the other tweaks were just ways to minimise (or even reverse in the case of long fights) the PvE impact of the nerf without affecting the rest of the talent tree. Since TBW was one of the two talents they were nerfing, it made sense to stick the countervailing buffs there as well (rather than on another talent that some affected players may not have).

    That said, GC has also been quite up front about the fact that he can’t always say what he wants to say or the official forums would melt :)

    Regarding monkeying significantly with BM abilities and rotations… that just isn’t the kind of thing Blizzard does in minor content patches (see GC’s various references to player complaints about getting whiplash with the rate of change in Wrath). Tweaking numbers they can do fairly safely, especially when it is simple things (like a flat +damage buff to the hunter) that don’t affect the optimum strategy choices for the player.

    We may see a little something along the lines of a BM rotation change in 3.3 though. This is especially the case if they do end up bringing in full pet scaling with that patch – warlocks and hunters are going to need some fairly significant rebalancing at that point anyway, so it would be a good opportunity to mix up the BM rotation a bit more.

    I’m really not expecting a lot even in 3.3 though – I have higher hopes for Cataclysm, when focus and the mastery system will rebuild our (virtual) world :)

    (And yeah, I find these discussions fun, too!)

    @Boudica: Nobody can truly force you into a different spec. Nobody forces mages to go Fire or Arcane to raid, nobody forces hunters to go MM or SV. Players *choose* to do those things, because the higher DPS potential matters more to them than playing as Frost or BM. But wait, you say, what about the raid leaders who tell their raiders how to spec? Well, then, you still have choices – listen to the raid leader (the DPS potential in those other specs *is* higher if you learn how to produce it), argue with the raid leader (reaching that DPS potential requires experience in playing that spec, which you don’t have) or find a different guild (since guilds where the raid leader doesn’t care about whether or not their raiders are having fun are probably not going to be a pleasant environment in other ways).

    If someone is a good player and someone else refuses to run with them because they don’t like their spec, then that’s really the second player’s loss. Hell, for all the first player knows, the second player may be some arrogant know-it-all teenager that simply doesn’t understand that these days a well-played BM hunter will out-DPS a poorly played MM or SV hunter every time (ditto Frost vs Fire or Arcane). Only when skill and gear are at least vaguely comparable is the choice of primary talent tree going to start to have an affect on matters.

    (Now for the caveat: that’s all well and good coming from a confident, self-assured 30-something who is perfectly able to figure out when the problem is with the other guy, and who has also spent the last few years in a nice relaxed guild that enjoys raiding but isn’t obsessive about it. I feel sorry for the folks that aren’t so self-confident and don’t have such a laid back guild environment and hence may be pressured into playing the game in a fashion they may not particularly enjoy because they think they have no other choice. Such situations are unfortunate, but they don’t actually make the above any less true – perception isn’t reality, after all).

    As for why you think Blizz would ever even consider taking pets away from hunters… where the heck did that come from? Going from “de-emphasise a bit” to “remove from the game” is a hell of a leap…

16. Oh, I meant to mention that BM could actually be far and away the best hunter spec and you would *still* get clueless raid and group leaders going “lolBM-come-back-when-you-have-a-real-spec”.

    We don’t even have to speculate about that scenario – it is exactly what happened during The Burning Crusade. The only reason for a hunter to spec anything other than BM during TBC was to stack agility, spec SV and bring along Expose Weakness as a near mandatory raid buff. A lot of non-hunters were only just starting to learn that by the time Wrath came out.

17. Some recent comments from GC regarding how he perceives the nature of his interaction with the role forums.

    And for my previous comment, the second last sentence should start with “The only reason for a min/maxing hunter…”. If you aren’t worried about min/maxing, then DPS potential clearly isn’t going to significantly impact your choice of spec :)

18. I actually think GC outright said it was an arena nerf, Nim. The problem is that while the nerf hit arena and PvP, the buff didn’t really give those two areas anything substantial for beast master in return.

    As for the changes, I understand that it is a lot to work with. However we’ve had, count’em, three major content patches ((Including the change to Wrath)) since GC said they wanted to make hunters more viable in melee range, and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of ANYTHING in regards to that. Not only that, but in Wrath beta we were given bear trap, which worked as a snare that broke after so much damage ordeal, which was pretty good as far as I could tell. And then they changed frost ((Or was it freezing? ICECUBETRAP, DAMMIT!!)) so that IT would break after so much damage instead. So that made bear trap redundant, and it was removed. EXCEPT THAT LATER, they removed the break after so much damage component of freezing trap, BUT GAVE US NOTHING BACK. They have had two major patches since Cataclyms release, but all BM got was the nerf bat to the face.

    And I agree, Nimizar, I don’t expect any major changes before Cataclysm. The opposite, actually. I don’t think they’ll bother with anything other then minor rebalance, because everything is going to fly apart in Cata anyway. It’ll all be so much different that it’d be kind of a wash to worry with it right now.

    Boudica, my stable consists of no less then THREE exotics. Three. Three beautiful, exotic families that I can only get by speccing into beast master, and beast mastery.

    And I totally agree with you. Exotics don’t offer enough in the ways of uniqueness to really qualify them as an amazing 51 point talent, and Blizzard doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to fix that. As some one who has multiple high level characters, my BM 51 point feels pretty close to the weakest of them at the moment. I realize that the 4 talent points is supposed to help a lot ((Though I think I’ve heard that story change a few times, don’t quote me.)) it doesn’t feel quite on par with talents like Titans Grip or Spirit wolves. I’d happily let SV and MM tame my exotics if it meant something useful being tacked onto Beast Mastery, like an additional attack that varies based on pet family or an on activation type ability for me personally. HELL, even a wrath of the master shot or some such.

19. Er, since Wraths release, not Catas, whoopsie.

20. Would you believe my brain actually replaced that particular “Cataclysm” with “Wrath” without my even noticing? (well, not until your second post, anyway).

    I think the only thing they gave back on the PvP front was to turn TBW into a true CC break rather than just an immunity. Other than that, I got the impression that they really were trying to nerf the ability in an absolute sense rather than just changing the way it worked.

    Regarding the 4 extra pet talent points for Beast Mastery, making those work as intended is the reason the extra tier of pet talents was added. A non-BM hunter can put at most 1 point into Shark Attack and Wild Hunt in Ferocity, while a BM hunter can max out both abilities. Before the new tier was added the max DPS Ferocity build only needed 16 pet talent points, so the BM talent wasn’t actually providing the appropriate benefit.

    The choice to have exotics be largely cosmetic was also a deliberate one – Blizz didn’t want BM hunters to feel like they *had* to take an exotic in order to max out their DPS potential. The idea was to give BM a wider selection of pet choices than the other two specs, so making exotics consistently better in an absolute sense would have been perversely limiting. So long as at least a few different exotic and non-exotic pets are duking it out for max DPS (and I believe wolves, cats, raptors, devilsaurs and spirit beasts are all up there at the moment) then I would be surprised to see Blizz mess too much with relative pet damage.

    Regarding the overall value of the BM 51-point talent… it’s not spec defining to the same degree as things like Chimera Shot or Explosive Shot, but it isn’t terrible either (once you’ve gone 50 points in BM, you’re usually going to spend that extra point).

21. Which is part of the problem, Nimizar. How many 51 point talents are HALF cosmetic?

22. Metamor-*cough*-umm… :)

    Although if you want to look at it another way… how many 51-point talents offer a major cosmetic effect for free? (since the exotic pets don’t count against the rough and ready DPS budget that Blizz assign to talents)

    Anyway, I can’t say I know all 30 51-point talents well enough to truly answer your question. Still, I’ll give it a shot… (“spec-defining” below means “you play your class significantly differently once you get this talent”. Having lots of other talents in the tree that refer to the 51 point talent is also a strong hint that it is spec defining. For feral druids, for example, Mangle is spec defining in a way that Berserk never will be.)

    Hunter:
    BM: Beast Mastery – pet talent points are nice, not wildly exciting though. Exotics are cool.
    MM: Chimera Shot – spec defining
    SV: Explosive Shot – spec defining

    Death Knight:
    B: Dancing Rune Weapon – extra DPS cooldown
    F: Howling Blast – AoE replacement for Obliterate (I believe Oblit is still better for single target)
    U: Summon Gargoyle – extra DPS cooldown

    Druid:
    B: Starfall – extra DPS cooldown, extra AoE (non-channeled)
    F: Berserk – extra DPS cooldown, extra AoE (bear only), fear break
    R: Wild Growth – excellent AoE heal

    Mage:
    A: Arcane Barrage – spec defining (this is the way an arcane mage spends their Arcane Blast stacks)
    Fi: Living Bomb – spec defining (especially in CC free environments like most current raids)
    Fr: Deep Freeze – extra stun (predominantly PvP talent)

    Paladin:
    H: Bacon – spec defining
    P: Hammer of the Righteous – pally cleave
    R: Divine Storm – AoE damage

    Priest:
    D: Penance – don’t know any disc priests, but looks like a decent heal to me
    H: Guardian Spirit – great healing cooldown
    S: Dispersion – 90% damage reduction and 36% mana recovery (predominantly PvP talent)

    Rogue:
    A: Hunger for Blood – straight DPS increase
    C: Killing Spree – DPS cooldown
    S: Shadow Dance – PvP cooldown (I believe)

    Shaman:
    Ele: Thunderstorm – mana regen and point blank AoE with knockback (glyph to remove knockback in PvE)
    Enh: Feral Spirit – DPS cooldown/self heal/other niftiness (spirit wolves)
    R: Riptide – Shaman heal-over-time with Chain Heal synergy

    Warlock:
    Afflic: Haunt – spec defining (I believe)
    Demo: Metamorphosis – DPS cooldown with psychotic point blank AoE potential (and looks cool)
    Destro: Chaos Bolt – spec defining

    Warrior:
    A: Bladestorm – AoE DPS cooldown (cc immunity in PvP)
    F: Titan’s Grip – spec defining
    P: Shockwave – additional AoE threat

    Grouping those up we have:

    Spec-defining (8/30):
    Hunter (MM & SV)
    Mage (Arcane & Fire)
    Paladin (Holy)
    Warlock (Affliction & Destruction)
    Warrior (Titan’s Grip)

    Predominantly DPS cooldown and/or AoE ability* (12/30):
    Death Knight (Blood, Frost & Unholy)
    Druid (Balance & Feral)
    Paladin (Protection & Retribution)
    Rogue (Combat)
    Shaman (Enhancement)
    Warlock (Demonology)
    Warrior (Arms & Protection)

    *Lumped these together due to the assorted abilities that serve as both single-target and AoE DPS boosts

    Additional Healing ability/cooldown (4/30):
    Druid (Restoration)
    Priest (Discipline & Holy)
    Shaman (Restoration)

    Predominantly PvP (3/30):
    Mage (Frost)
    Priest (Shadow)
    Rogue (Subtlety)

    Miscellaneous (3/30):
    Hunter (BM – indirect pet buff, typically +6% damage, +20% stamina and +15% AP for Ferocity pets in PvE)
    Rogue (Assassination – straight damage increase)
    Shaman (Elemental – mana restoration cooldown and PvP knockback)

    Overall, I’d agree that BM is definitely one of the weaker 51 point talents from a pure numbers point of view. I’m not sure that automatically translates to the BM talent itself automatically being the place where hunter numbers need to be adjusted though.

    Buffing Shark Attack and Wild Hunt again is a possibility. Increasing BM to 5 pet talent points (as I believe it was at one point during beta) would let BM hunters max out the two top tier Ferocity talents and still pick up Heart of the Phoenix.

    Tweaking numbers elsewhere in the BM tree entirely may also be a reasonable option. Bestial Discipline, for example, could be buffed to the point where it makes GffT redundant (75/150% would probably be enough), or it could have another effect added to make it more interesting (such as an additional 3/6% crit chance for pet special attacks).

    Then again, if we just wait for the pet scaling changes in 3.3 then those are going to have some *very* interesting interactions with the abilities in the BM talent tree. The rebalancing of hunters, locks and DKs for that change (especially BM, Demonology and Unholy) is going to be interesting to see.

23. Bah, the comment software ate the comment between angle brackets… before the first smiley they was meant to be the comment “[tries-to-think-of-example-that-isn't-overpowed]“

24. I can’t call beacon of light spec defining. That’s the only place I HAVE to argue with you. Paladins are still niche, single target healers, but beacon allows paladins to heal another target while still healing the tank. It sounds great in theory, and the numbers probably look good, but in practice it’s !@#$. It was a gimmicky way to address the paladin group healing problem while trying to allow them to remain ‘the’ definitive single target healers. The recent ‘buff’ to it brought it up to being where it should be, but murdered divine illumination. That, by the way, was another one of those ‘tradeoffs’ like they are pulling with TBW.

    This is another case of beta being better then current. Back in beta, beacon of light made one target a beacon of light, and healed everyone in a fifteen yard radius for so much every three seconds. It was amazingly sexy, but it was also fire and forget. Maybe thats what they didn’t like…..

    Oh and yes, it used to be 5 points Nim. I have NO idea how they thought that was to much.

25. The way a Holy paladins heals with and without Beacon is completely different though – without Beacon, they heal the tank and that’s it. With Beacon, they Beacon the tank and heal everyone else (or heal a second tank in a raid situation). When a single talent leads to that big a difference in playstyle it meets the criteria I gave for a talent being “spec-defining”.

    Before they made overheal count I would have agreed with you though (since it was too situational then and only affected Paladin healing when there was lots of raid damage or two tanks taking comparable amounts of damage).

    Regarding the time when Beacon of Light was just-another-AoE-heal (which I do vaguely remember), I expect they didn’t like it because it was too similar to Circle of Healing and Wild Growth. No matter what other complaints one might have about Beacon, it can’t be said that it isn’t a unique class mechanic.

26. Circle of healing I’ll give you, but wild growth came along at the same time.

    And not….quite on the paladin healing. It depends on the group make up, but a paladin usually has time to pop off a heal to another target and get back to the main target before they die. Part of the problem USED to be ((Before mana and mana regen inflation)) that the heals cost so friggin’ much to actually make them worth while. So you had to time your cooldowns to coincide with enemy AoE.

    The ONLY difference beacon makes is that we don’t have to worry about the tank dying while we heal something else. It lets us be even more effective main tank healers! A niche that ONLY paladins are still forced into, might I add. AND it takes a set up! Paladins require a set up for damn near everything, it seems. Shield of the Righteous for an HoT, beacon of light for a multiperson heal ((Not including the often beaten around glyph of holy light)) potentially needing to judge every thirty seconds to assist in healing or mana, using a talented skill to cut mana cost at the right moment…….all if requires some form of management most other healers don’t have to see to. Most other healers do HAVE some form of what I just mentioned….it’s just not usually required for them to get some basic mechanic out of it, as in earth shield or guardian spirit. And priests even got a souped up form of holy shock in penance! Yet we get this weird, niche healing ability? Just…..wrong.

    Blizzard has a very strange way of looking at things. I’ve actually ranted about this before. They want all tanks to be equal, so they boosted them in so many areas. They want all healers to be equal, so they gave everyone the tools they needed…..except paladins. I remember Blizzard said once that they didn’t want glyphs to be spec defining, and yet you more or less HAVE to have glyph of holy light in order to do any sort of real AoE healing….and that’s just within eight yards. It’s stupid, and I have actually stopped playing my holy paladin until they fix it. If that means he’s retired permanently, then so be it, but I refuse to be the only niche healer out of the four because of some weird idea of Blizzards that paladins should ONLY be tank healers.

27. Except they *don’t* want all healers to be equal – GC has explicitly said that they’re happy maintaining healing niches for the moment. They want all of the healing specs to be *capable* of healing a 5-man (hence Beacon of Light to allow paladins to more easily handle party damage without risking the tank and Revivify as an out-of-combat res for druids), but in raids there are only 5 healing specs competing for 2-3 spots in a 10-man raid and 6-7 spots in a 25-man raid. That’s fairly different to the tank case where 6 specs are competing for 2 slots in both 10 and 25.

    I won’t argue that you should like healing with your paladin – if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. But there *are* plenty of paladins out there that don’t think holy needs fixing (especially now that Beacon once again counts overhealing).

28. But that’s total crap. Nimizar. Right now two specs can handle every ‘niche’ in existence, restoration druid and holy priests, shaman can more or less handle most of them, and holies are left at the bottom of the barrel. And I see far, far more complaints about holy then I do praise. Not only that, but have you ever tried to heal with a paladin on a running fight? It isn’t pretty. At all. And don’t even talk to me about PvP, we’re the easiest healers to shut down, period. At most we have twelve seconds of invincibility to work with, and that’s blowing a five minute cooldown, THAT CAN BE DISPELLED. By both priests and the much hated warriors.

    I won’t like that having beacon of light work with overhealing helps out a ton, but that’s how it should have been in the first place. In order to get even THAT out of it, we had our mana regen talent HALVED, which suddenly forced three fourths of the remaining holy paladins to rethink their gear. Keep critical to try and squeeze what mana you could out of our talent, or regear for spirit and MP5?

    I’ve not even touched on the solo aspect of holy paladins. I absolutely would not be lying if I said they are the single worst class to solo with in the entire game. It has nothing to do with survivability, and everything to do with a total lack of damage. The difference in damage between most other damage to healing trees is fair sized. The one between retribution or even PROTECTION and holy is insane. Do you remember how every class received a damage buff when the Wrath patch came around? My damage was cut, almost literally, in half. My seals went from hitting for around five hundred to about two fifty, my judgments went from doing over a thousand to about five hundred. Retribution auras damage went up, and holy shocks damage got a minor damage boost, but a major cooldown reduction, which is the only thing that makes soloing tolerable. What else is funny in an ow-you-poked-me-in-the-eye sort of way is that every nerf that hits the damage of protection and retribution usually hits holy as well.

    In the end I am not actually arguing with you over whether or not the paladin class can heal. It can, and I’ve healed damn well with it in the past. I am going to refute something you said, with something GC said once. Do you remember how GC stated that they were happy with ‘healing niches’? GC also said they wanted to fill out the druid toolbox by giving them a ‘small, mana efficient heal and a revive.’ in order to make them better healers. It was only when some one brought up the fact that holy paladins had been bereft of new HEALING SPELL for two expansions now that Ghostcrawler stated the whole niche thing.

    Try to understand Nimizar that I don’t want EVERY healer to be exactly the same. I like the flavor, I like having different healers. But when it is so much easier to heal with my FERAL SPECCED DRUID then it is with my holy specced paladin, something is very, very wrong. All I want is for every class to have roughly the same healing capabilities, so that we can choose how we want to heal, and not just be forced into healing a certain specific way, and sucking major nose at trying to do anything else.

29. And if your wondering, I’ve soloed restoration druid and holy priest before. The priests only problem was mana conservation, while the druid was just fine. I also soloed a restoration shaman up before letting go of some of my preconceived notions and trying enhancement. I’ve healed high level as restoration druid and shaman, so I know what it’s like. I’m speaking out of experience, and out of a sense of sadness that my favorite class in the game is pretty much literally the worst healing class of the bunch.

30. Fair enough. Since the pally healer I talk to most often (RL friend & guildmate) doesn’t have any other end-game healers, it may be he just doesn’t know how bad he has it :)

    One of the co-GMs of my guild has a level 80 of each class (yes, all ten of them), and he definitely has a healing spec on all 4 of his healing toons. I’ll have to ask him at some point how limited the pally feels relative to the other 3 (there’s certainly no question that holy pallies are the most restricted of the bunch now that resto shaman have a HoT in Riptide and resto druids have a short CD AoE heal in Wild Growth and a short cast time direct heal in Nourish).

31. Yea, it really depends on your experience. The paladin healers I know who have other healing classes tend to understand, while the ones who don’t are USUALLY ((But not always)) satisfied with how it feels. But the difference between them is really astounding, especially now that paladins are more or less relegated to just holy light and sacred shield. I haven’t actually healed since the changes to beacon ((Did an instance with it, and it felt better, but the mana regen nerf hurt)) so I can’t remark on how it’s changed since then.

    In their niche, holy paladins are fine. IN A SINGLE TARGET OR TANK HEALING NICHE. But that, as I have stated, is a niche that can be filled by every other healing class, while paladins are relegated to ONLY single target healing. The Hot requires sacred shield, the two person healing requires beacon of light, and mana regeneration now more or less requires replenishment and some MP5 equipment.

32. And actually, just getting me to admit that even as single target healers paladins are okay is progress on your part, Nim. Bravo.

33. Just to jump in here Nim and Palla, with Nim talking bout his friend w/ all 10 classes, there are actually 5 healing class/specs b/c priests have 2 healing specs while you said 4…. =D

34. Heh, Gimlion it wasn’t until Wrath that Discipline really became a serious healing spec. At least I am pretty sure it wasn’t considered on par with Holy during TBC. And it just feels weird to have one class with two healing trees. But you are right, and I just said four myself.

35. I never really paid attention to who healed and who didn’t except on my shammy and druid until wrath anyways, so ur prolly right. I wasn’t ever cap lvl until wrath so i didn’t know a whole lot, just figured i’d point something out and feel WoW-smart

36. @Gimlion: yep, but I said he had 4 healing toons, not specs. I counted all 5 specs in the earlier post about Blizz being happy with the existence of healer niches because healing specs are competing for a proportionately larger number of raid spots :)

    One of the specs on his priest is shadow, the other one is a healing spec, but I’m not sure if it is disc or holy. His druid is resto/feral, his shaman is resto/elemental and I believe his paladin is holy/ret.

    About the only reason I could see for someone having a holy/disc dual spec as a priest is if they preferred to PvE heal with holy and PvP with disc.

37. Actually, i don’t believe Disc is just PvP, because my guild has several very good disc healers for raids in my guild, im not sure what their job is, but from the way we use priests in our guild one of the specs is better at solo heals while the other is good at small group/raid-wide healing and are used accordingly

38. Yea, that’s what I’d heard Gim. That disc were now pretty good PvE healers as well as PvP. They got a fair sized boost in Wrath that made them PvE-worthy.

39. Yeah, I wasn’t trying to suggest that disc can’t be used for PvE healing – just trying to figure out why anyone would ever use disc/holy as a priest dual spec. So I guess the other option would be if they had a holy spec when they were on raid healing duty and disc when they were on the tank, or if they had one as their accustomed healing spec and the other as an alternative healing spec they were just experimenting with.

    I expect disc/shadow or holy/shadow would be by far the most common priest spec combinations though. (I wonder if anyone has ever created a popularity ranking for the 4 possible dual spec combinations for each class…)

40. Oops, 6 combinations (each of tree A, B & C as a single spec, then AB, AC & BC as dual spec)