All the other cool blogs have Cata preview entries. They have talents up so they can theory craft and cheer or cry. Hunters are still in the dark, left to wonder (and whine) as to what Cataclysm will bring us. This expansion is bringing us a pretty big change, focus instead of mana. But with all the whining on the boards you'd think Blizzard said we'd be forced to throw arrows instead of using a bow.
Most Hunters playing today are newish to the class, they haven't played since the game went gold. While Cataclysm is bringing us the biggest change to the class since release it isn't the first big change to the class ever.
Mr Peabody doesn't exist in Warcraft but if he did we could use his WABAC Machine to take us back to Vanilla WoW.
Back in my day, my day of being level capped at 60 we had only a few stats. We had intellect, agility, hit and crit, and well that was it. And our hit and crit were straight percentages not ratings. There was attack power, but no hunter took AP gear our agility gave us two attack power plus some crit so there was no need to waste the stat space.
Getting gear was a painfully slow process. To get 40 people geared up to run Molten Core you needed to run 15 man UBRS a billion and a half times. I cannot express to you in words how unpleasant a place UBRS is. There are only sounds, moans really. Like a dog in agony. Oh and Strath runs. God that place still makes me itch. Stupid Maleki and his stupid axes that never stupid drop. And do you know how we had to find a group if you weren't in a dedicated progression guild? We had to sit in IF and spam in IF over an over "hunter lf group for Strat or UBRS pst". We had no LFG finder. Do you have any idea how often a hunter got a group?
Changing the topic before I become a danger to myself. Way back in the day traps sucked. Really sucked. Not all that long ago they shared a cool down timer BUT back in the olden days you couldn't use them in combat. Horrifying I know! I spent a good week, week and a half in Un'Goro Crater practicing getting out of combat and re-trapping on the elite Devilsaurs. The ability to chain trap a mob was a true skill that separated the raid level hunters from the rest. You don't see Hunters today needing to practice any skills to be functional in a raid.
Then there is the hunters best friend, our pet. Oh how we hunters love our pets. I've always had a cat, Humar specifically. But to train a new level of claw for him I had to put him in a stable, go find a beast with the appropriate level of claw, tame that beast. Play with that beast till I learned claw from him, abandon him then teach it to Maethor. I also had to do that for each level of dash, bite and prowl. All this for a cat that added very little dps in a group or raid situation. Now he just auto learns claw when he hits the right level.
When we did get talents we had to use them for fire resistances so the pets could survive Molten Core or Blackwing Lair. The pet had no avoidance and just died anyway. We'd wind up just stopping everything to rez then and send them back in to die again anyway.
We had no rotations. Aimed shot had a 3 second cast time. We couldn't use serpent sting because there was a limit to the number of debuffs you could use on a mob and the warlocks QQ'd if the hunters knocked off their stuff. Couldn't really blame them, their sucking dots were better then our sucky dot anyway. So we just aim'd shot and auto shot and rezed our pet.
Over the past 6 years Blizzard has changed and tweaked the class. They've made it a better class. Its a more fun, easier, more accessible class. They do make mistakes but for the most part they make an effort to correct them. There's really no reason to think that with this new expansion they'd suddenly destroy an entire class.
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