Passing through the WoW Hunter forum on Tuesday, I spotted this lovely tidbit of information:
The developers believe hunter dps is too low, so today we are implementing a change to ranged weapon damage to improve dps across the board.
Bows, crossbows and guns of item level 226 or higher (which means weapons from Kel’Thuzad, Ulduar and the Furious Gladiator pieces) will do around 30 more dps. This should translate to a hunter damage increase of a few percent.
We don’t think this will be quite sufficient in boosting hunter dps to where we think it needs to be and we have another buff that we plan to get in sometime over the next couple of weeks. F**kin A!!! That’s what I’m talkin’ about! (<–that bit wasn’t in the official blue post, but you may have guessed that). We’ll announce that change when it gets closer. (We have some plans for other classes as well, but we ask that you please keep this thread on the topic of hunters and the ranged weapon changes.)
As hunters may recall, we had an ambitious plan to change the way ammo worked for 3.1 that ended up being overly ambitious, causing us to scale back. However as part of that change, we stopped itemizing bullets and arrows. Since hunters could not upgrade from the ammo available at the launch of Lich King, their damage had started and would continue to fall behind as other classes upgraded their gear. This change basically incorporates the ammo damage into the weapons — as you get better ranged weapons, it’s as if you got better ammo to go along with them. This is likely to be a design we continue for the next few tiers of content until we have the opportunity to overhaul ammo completely.
I foresee there being some, as they say in the gaming culture, QQ over this change coming from the other DPS classes. But hey, ya know what… Hunters are a pure damage class… no hybrid BS in our talent trees. We’re supposed to be at or near the top of the meters.
Now all I need to do is get my mitts on an ilvl 226 or better boomstick. Well, if my partner and I can put together a few wins this week, I will be sporting this very soon. The tooltip DPS is not accurate at the moment, but I checked it in-game and this baby’s been buffed to 187.1 dps I believe. It’s low-end damage is only 13 below Final Voyage‘s top-end damage. O.O I’ll be able to administer some headshots with this thing for sure.
85 more rating is all we need. Wish me luck. 🙂
Keep in mind that “super uber woot DPS” is something you really do not need everyday (casual player). iLevel 226 items are the endgame ones that only raiding and hardcore players need. Playing heroics and sone 10man I rally have no problems with my Nessy.
What I do not get is… Blizzard nerfed us because we were OP. Now we need to be buffed. Doh!
My first thought when I saw this was…..”AWESOME”, then I took notice of the ilevel that is being buffed. WTF? I’m still kicking with my Nesingwary 4000 that I made the second I got to 80, and am not even close to getting my hands on an ilevel 226+ gun. I don’t raid, and have just started arena for the first time ever.
Blizz does know that the rest of us hunters are still using Mammoth Cutters too, right? I like this change, but there should have at least been some tiering to it. Say a 20 DPS increase for iLevel 200+ or something. This change is simply going to make it all that more difficult for me to learn how to play arena better going up against hunters with 30 more DPS.
Maybe I am making this seem more than it is, but I had hoped that there would be an increase in all ranged DPS since ammo effects ALL ranged DPS.
That said, once I do land one of these weapons (such as http://www.wowhead.com/?item=42486 ) I’ll be very happy.
I also strongly agree with your “F**king A!!!” comment. In the next couple of weeks? WOW. Looking forward to that!
Nice thing they upgraded iLevel 226 weapons but. After all lowe iLevel stuff does not need to be “uber” as we’ll be just doing dailies or grinding or heroics (where in MM I almost always end being 1st on Recount, no matter how bad/good I play).
Bad thing they threw us the bone “new ammo feature in 3.1!” and then nothig. Terrorshaft arrows are a bit sad and overall the ammunition mechanism is just annoying. Our class would be really MUCH more interesting with stuff like “fire ammo”, “ice ammo”, “poison ammo” and so on.
They should at least sell stacks of 1000, I do not get why vendors still sell them for 200.
GL for the new weapon of course 😉