Rindis.com

(Cross-posted with WoW_Muradin because I’m too primitive to have an editor that’ll post this to both.)

Well, WoW went to v3.0 yesterday.

It’s different. I don’t remember the Burning Crusade engine being quite so big of a shock, character-wise.

Hunters have changed a lot. The fact that Scatter Shot is now a 10-point talent in Surivival makes sense (I always thought it was a little odd in Marksmanship, but it worked well with the ‘utility’ feel that BC Marksmanship had), but it caught me flatfooted. Since I’ve been needing that to survive a trap that breaks early, Dunain is currently invested in a little Survival rather than Beast Master, and won’t be trying Chimera Shot until 71.

Everything else is weird. The reactive abilities have had that stripped out. Mongoose Bite no longer requires a dodge before I use it and Kill Command no longer needs a crit. Instead they’re just on timers.

Aimed Shot has been massively depowered. In fact, it really doesn’t do much more than anything else, and less than Multishot does per shot. It’s pretty much Arcane Shot with a ‘no heal’ debuff now. The good news is it’s now an instant. However, it shares a cooldown with Multishot now. The only shot with a cast time I have now is Steady Shot. I should check if they fiddled with that.

Aspect of the Viper changed, but is still pretty sick. Before it increased mana regeneration, with the effect getting stronger the lower the hunter’s mana was. It meant that it was effectively impossible to run Dunain out of mana for more than a few seconds. Now, it halves damage done, but returns mana per shot (I approve of the idea of making it a real choice). I was getting back ~380 mana per shot, and interestingly, I got mana back on each hit with a Multishot. ~380×3 – ~340 for Multishot = ~700 mana profit. When out of mana, it will get a hunter going again even faster than before.

Lance is very different. I’m noticing the AI seems to have changed, and he *sometimes* charges a target as soon as I attack. (Or else I’m way too used to hitting control-1 now.) Don’t know why sometimes he does and sometimes he doesn’t. I’m going to have to study this and try to understand what the heck he thinks he’s doing.

The guild managed a quick run through Heroic Steam Vaults Slave Pens last night to see how things were working.

The only way I could tell that it was Heroic is that we got Badges of Justice off the bosses. I know that SV is a really weak Heroic, but… this was a pushover.

Part of it is definitely Blanc. They have really upped the DPS on Protection Warriors.