Beta Class Analysis Part VIII

Blizzard is asking for feedback on class balance in the Mists of Pandaria Beta. This article continues our coverage of hunter-related discussions in the thread. For previous hunter-related posts by Ghostcrawler see:

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Dedralie, a shaman, asked, “GC, is it intended for the Mastery buff that shamans provide to give us 3,500 Mastery instead of a flat increase to our Mastery Points?”

Haste and Crit buffs give 5% haste or 5% crit; when I get the Crit buff, my Crit percentage on my character sheet jumps up from 9.75% to 14.75%, but my Crit itself stays at 1,465.

Grace of Air actually increases the amount of Mastery on my character sheet by 3,500; taking me from the 3,647 I have on my gear up to 6,147. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, as it works out to the right amount of Mastery Points, but it is inconsistent with how the other buffs work.

If this stays the way it is, then in the future if you wanted to design any trinkets or weapons that give you a stat boost to your highest secondary stat (like the FL trinkets), people in a group with a Shaman will always get a Mastery buff. And for those who do not value mastery as much as haste or crit, they will be mad at us :-(

Balhale replied, “My guess is that it’s like that because of how they changed mastery from being x points like in cata for everyone to actually displaying the percent from conversion for each spec.”

Ghostcrawler replied, “We tried to simplify the concept of mastery. Before, mastery rating converted to mastery points which converted to an individual number for your spec (such as Deep Healing for Resto shaman). We cut out the middle man and just have mastery rating and your individual mastery now. It is intended to be analogous to crit rating converting directly to crit percent instead of crit rating converting to crit points which then convert to crit percent.”

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Adarant, a hunter, wrote, “http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/5888889787 While the title and a few other pieces of the thread have been updated for the new Fervor, which grants 100 Focus total, I did not update the entire body of the thread. However, my question remains. My testing showed that Fervor provides, for all specs, significantly more Focus than Thrill of the Hunt over the course of a fight. While another poster posited in this thread that the talents’ expected returns were equal, their results were unfinished and I have not seen a completed examination from said poster. Therefore, I am forced to retain my current understanding of the issue.”

Does your data support the conclusion that Fervor is significantly better than Thrill of the Hunt, or is my experiment flawed? An indication of which statement is correct is sufficient for my purposes. I am willing to return to the drawing board and test these talents again.

That said, as I made the case in the linked thread, I feel that Dire Beast is a much better fit for the Fervor/Thrill of the Hunt tier than it is for the Lynx Rush/Murder of Crows tier. From a mechanics standpoint, Dire Beast, Fervor, and Thrill of the Hunt all serve the same purpose. They provide additional Focus to enable more actions. While there is some debate about how different Dire Beast and Fervor are from a mechanics standpoint (you push a button every 30 seconds and you get Focus), the theme is the same.

While it is a weaker argument to make, there is validity to the statement that Readiness is treated as an Execute-style mechanic. That is, I use Readiness, unless specific strategies require otherwise, during the opening of a fight and during the Execute phase of a fight. A Murder of Crows has the Execute mechanics built in with the cooldown reduction. Would it be possible to add an Execute phase component to Lynx Rush and turn this tier into an Execute phase tier?

Ghostcrawler replied, “Thrill of the Hunt is weak. We are considering moving Dire Beast up to the “focus tier” and redesigning Thrill of the Hunt a bit.”

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