by C. Christian Moore

Drain teams were exceptionally successful in The Burning Crusade, so much so that developers went out of their way to make burst damage, and only burst damage, a successful strategy in Wrath of the Lich King. The problem, of course, was that it went completely overboard, and we were stuck looking at extreme dominance from classes that did best under high-burst-damage conditions.

In season eight, we’re seeing a return to some strategies that try to get an enemy’s mana to 0 percent before they make a serious attempt to kill anything.

I have a special place in my heart for drain comps. My first No. 1 title came from playing a drain team with fellow gladiators; it was our first time hitting No. 1 together and it was an amazing time. I probably sounded like a little girl when I screamed ridiculously loud as I saw that coveted title attached to my character’s name.

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?by Brian Wood

In Wrath, the SV rotation is more reactionary, and in Cataclysm, it is that and more so.

Despite the frantic gyrations from being focus-starved to actually having too much focus, the SV rotation is probably the least-changed hunter spec rotation in Cataclysm. We use Cobra Shot instead of Steady Shot, we don’t have to worry about reapplying Serpent Sting and instead we get to actually use Arcane Shot from time to time. Join me after the cut and we’ll take a look.

Standard disclaimers

This is still the beta, so while the feel for the specs seems to be solidifying, everything is still subject to change. The current level cap in the beta is level 83. We are not going to discuss what spec does more DPS, or how much DPS each spec does, because that stuff is not yet final.

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by Brian Wood

As the Cataclysm beta continues, the different hunter specs are finally beginning to settle into place. There are still a lot of bugs, a lot of things not working or working oddly, and some talents that clearly need tweaking — and of course, focus regen is being tuned weekly at this point — but the overall PvE feel of each spec is becoming increasingly solid.

Today we’re going to start by looking at the MM spec in Cataclysm, which seems to be the most polished spec at the moment. We are not forgetting SV or BM, which we’ll hit up next week (though BM, as the most changed spec, is also the least finished, with big stuff not working right now). Join me after the cut for rotations, key abilities, how those talents really work and to bask in the awesomeness of the Cataclysm hunter.

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by Brian Wood

As promised, Blizzard has completed a massive overhaul of the talent system in the Cataclysm beta. It’s a change of biblical proportions: only 31 points to the bottom of the trees, no more Mortal Shots, no more Hawk Eye, Explosive Shot for free at level 10, dogs and cats living together … mass hysteria!

A lot of what we’re seeing right now looks a little bit crude. We have vastly different numbers of talents in different trees as well as some truly odd choices of what talents remain and which ones were removed. Suffice it to say (as we always say), this is just the beta; this is a first implementation of the new talent system, and expect many changes moving forward.

Talent specialization benefits

At level 10 when you get your first talent point, you’ll be asked to specialize in one tree. Thereafter, you can only put talent points into your specialization tree until you get to the very bottom of the tree (which you’ll reach at level 70). However, once you choose your tree, you’ll get a free, super-awesome ability right there at level 10. In concept, this should be something that will really give you the feel of your tree and will scale with your level appropriately.
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by Zach Yonzon

A new, exciting build of the Cataclysm beta has been released, implementing the promised overhaul to the talent trees. It’s still raw at this point, but we get a glimpse of the direction the developers want to take. The basic or starter abilities have been defined and although some of these may change, such as Divine Storm for retribution paladins (Ghostcrawler, lead systems designer, mentioned that it would probably go back into the talent tree), the changes feel solid and refreshing. One of the ideas the developers have is that “both the 31-point and the 10(-point) ability need to have more single-target use,” which means we should get very good one-on-one abilities early on as well as at higher levels. The trees are a long way off from being done, but that shouldn’t stop us from taking a look at them and picturing the possibilities.

One of the cooler, less noticeable things to come out of this build are the one-liner descriptions about each of the talent specs, allowing players to quickly grasp the concept of each spec. Blizzard seems committed to keeping this model, complete with talent tree lock-outs to prevent players from straying into other trees early on. As you might have suspected, the real culprit (or at least the most notable one) behind this change is PvP

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by Brian Wood

For almost every hunter who raids — and the vast majority of those who don’t — addons are an essential tool for optimizing gameplay. While it could be argued that the only addon the hunter class needs is a pet (and possibly a frothing mug of awesomesauce), addons can contribute a lot to your performance. Properly used addons can help you avoid void zones, keep you alive and improve your DPS.

Join me after the cut as we take a look at some of the key addons that every hunter should consider using. We aren’t going to cover every possible addon, of course, but instead look at what I consider the most important hunter addons.

Where to download them

Every boss mod mentioned here is linked to its download page on Curse.com. Curse also has thousands of other mods that you can filter through at your leisure.

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by Brian Wood

As hunters, we spend a lot of our down time engaged in awesomeness. On long weekends, we strip down and roll around in awesomesauce; we drink it and bathe in it it and steep ourselves in the awesome until we reek of it, until we radiate awesome so strongly that it even starts to rub off on those around us. Pet tanking is yet another example of this principle in action.

Grandpappy Frostheim always used to say, “If you want a job done right, do it yourself. But if you’re getting a good drunk on and good enough is good enough, send your pet to do it.”

With the right pet, the right talents, a bit of gear and a pinch of forethought, our pets can make surprisingly formidable tanks. Our pets can easily tank, for example, any dungeon and any heroic in the game. We can even tank raid bosses. And I’m not talking about just the easy stuff in Naxx, either. We can tank a goodly number of ICC bosses including, as you can see in the video above, Sindragosa (and we don’t even need another tank to help out in Sindragosa phase 3, either). So join me after the cut and learn how!

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by Brian Wood

Now, the loot lists we have access to may not be complete. I want to stress this. I really, really hope they’re not, because, all joking aside, the hunter loot selection is grim as all heck. I’m seeing three hunter drops from 25-man, which is fine. But in 10-man I’m only seeing one hunter drop, and it’s probably not going to be used by any hunter — basically no hunter loot in the 10-man version. On the bright side, awesome new trinket!

Twilight Scale Shoulders (10-man, shoulders)

We do not yet have a convenient Wowhead tooltip for these, so here are the stats:

98 Agility
90 Stamina
52 Intellect
Red Socket
Yellow Socket
+12 attack power socket bonus
153 attack power
66 armor penetration rating
48 haste rating

About the only thing these shoulders have going for them is the ArP and even with that they are worse overall than our ilvl 264 tier 10 shoulders — and that’s without the set bonus. The fact is that every hunter out there is absolutely going to be using the shoulder slot for the set pieces. Our set bonuses are totally awesome these days and are not worth sacrificing even for a gear upgrade, let alone a downgrade or sidegrade.

Sadly, this is the only piece of hunter loot currently known to be on the 10-man loot table. QQ.

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by Brian Wood

As hunters, our main job in a raid or a dungeon run is to do as much eyebrow-searing DPS as we can, and do it without pulling aggro or standing in void zones. This is the primary difference between hunters and healers — healers don’t worry about any of these things. One of the secrets of end-game hunter DPS is to stack our cooldowns together, and to time those cooldowns with trinket procs. Over the course of a boss fight, this stacking can yield very real DPS gains. While every hunter spec benefits from this stacking, marksman benefits the most, being able to use our big cooldown, Rapid Fire, four times in a typical four- to five-minute fight. The key here is to stack abilities that combine multiplicatively, rather than additively.

One of the interesting benefits of the DPS gain of stacking cooldowns is that you could actually do more DPS than spreadsheets would indicate. Spreadsheets use averaging of all abilities over the course of a fight, rather than assuming that you’re combining them intelligently. Join me after the cut as we take a look at how it works, when you should stack and when you should not.

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