The Hunting Lodge is a World of Warcraft Hunter community website. Feel free to join in the discussions in The Hunting Lodge Forums or read other articles written by Taxera
I’m going to write bout the upcoming changes for Hunters in Cataclysm. First and at the forefront all Hunter changes will be the removal of our Hunter mana bar and the inclusion of a focus based system for all Hunters. This change will forever remove our mana bar, need for mana increasing gear and greatly challenge the way we have done all our work on rotations and effiecency.
This will be a giant change for the entire Hunter class since we have been using mana since orignal vanilla Warcraft. This change however confusing it may seem makes the most sense because we are a pyshcial damage dealing class that should not have to rely on mana due to the actual nature of of what a Hunter is.
The only details that we do know about with this change over from mana to focus at this time is that our focus regen rate will be at 6 focus per second and jump to a 12 focus per second while we are using our Steady Shot ablity. Rogues themselves regen at 10 focus per second so these numbers do not seem to bad, but acutal implementaion and testing will be needed to see how well this works.
It has been suggested that our shots will cost between 30 to 60 focus each. These numbers may seem high and limit our rotations, however with the additional addon on them removing and/or changing our cooldowns, this may work out better then mana, but more details and or testing will have to be seen to confirm this as good or bad in the future.
That they are simplifying stats. What this will mean is that Attack Power is now gone. Instead we will get our Attack Power from Agility and how that will work is we get two AP from every one point of Agility.
They are removing Armor Penetration as well. Which means theat we no longer have to worry bout how much we have and when we need to stack for it.
We have some new and old races joining our ranks. The new races that are joining the Hunter class are Worgen and Goblins. The old races that are joining the Hunter class are Humans and Undead. I personally thing this is a good change as it will let more people play my favorite class.
There making arrows and bullets a static item.Which will be a very welcome change since the way arrows and bullets are right now sucks. The last patch (Patch 3.2) they made boxes cost less mats which makes arrows and bullets cheaper but I’d rather have this change and I can’t wait for it.
It has also been announced that the entire racial system will be overhauled and revamped. So all you Orc Beast Mastery Hunters stuck with a racial that no longer benefits a good spec can fret no more as the option to change to a more fun race will be open to us all. With the mention of all racials changing to ones similar in effect to the announce Goblin and Worgen racials this, at least to myself means that the racial bonuses to pet damage or bow/gun crit rate will be a thing of the past. It would seem that Blizzard wants to make all classes equally appealing so they will in theory remove any and all racials that benefit a specific race/class combo.
Taxera is a blogger for The Hunting Lodge. Feel free to contact him on Twitter @jamesrosario.




