Different Can Be Fun
“Dear BRK … I’ve heard a lot of circulation about “arcane” hunters. Hunters that get a lot of +spell damage gear, then go and crit arcane shot constantly for over 5k damage.
“I’ve seen the youtube videos, and was left with a bit of shock. They’re really glass cannons. Yeah, you hit me for 5k, but that’s only half my health, and I can box you in 2 regular shot hits. So, what’s the point? Matt.”
The point is: It Can Be Done.
A long time ago, pre-Burning Crusade, there was Hunter Versus World guy. He would make videos of his hunter soloing basically everything there was to solo in Azeroth. You’d watch what he could do and wonder just how much time this guy had on his hands to think of and implement his eyebrow-raising techniques and strategies.
Then there was this one PvP hunter who just could not be beaten one-on-one. His jump-shot videos were mesmerizing. None of the horrible, metal-thrashing movies and epeening crits cr@p that infests YouTube today, he simply showed how to run away from an enemy forever while still doing damage. His fights against Paladins, our personal nemesi, were legendary as he’d Viper Sting and Kite them for what seemed like ages until their mana was exhausted and then became easy pickings.
The Kite Guys. You must have seen movies of Stitches running around Goldshire, yes? How about Doom Lord Kazzak laying waste to Stormwind? One of the Scourge from the EPL to Booty Bay? An Un’goro Crater stone gollum to Astraanar? And we mustn’t forget the modern marvel of kiting Fel Reavers to the opposing faction’s headquarters in Hellfire Peninsula, Feigning Death, and then /popcorn the fun.
Oh! Then we’re not sure if this was the same guy as Hunter Versus World dude, but this one hunter crammed himself full of +Healing mail gear. His pet was indestructible and he made a video of him and his pet soloing a world-boss dragon in Azashara. It took him almost an hour, as we recall, but he did it. The video was sped-up and covered the hour in something like five minutes, but his pet tanked that dragon! Blizz nerfed +Healing for Mend Pet specifically because of this guy.
The +Spell Damage hunters have been around a while, and the 5k Arcane Shot crits aren’t unheard of. While not the traditional method of providing MQoSRDPS, it’s just another was to roll your hunter. You’ll want to put five talent points in Improved Arcane Shot to get the one second cooldown reduction on Arcane Shot, and one will drastically lower one’s RAP as one isn’t gemming and enchanting Agility/AP anymore.
But Arcane Shot can be fired on the run, unlike Auto/Steady/et. all. If you’re good at kiting and can jump-shoot, the Arcane Hunter can be very effective. The whole, “That’s only half my health” argument can easily be switched to, “Holy Crud, he just took half my health with one shot!”
Well if you read the comments, you’ll understand why we nuked the preceding two paragraphs. Apparently, in the dead of the night and in total silence - except for a possible patch notes that we’ve forgotten - Blizz nerfed +Spell Dmg for Arcance Shot. Now we knew that RAP boosted our Arcane Shot but hadn’t heard that the nifty +Spell Dmg buff was wiped out. It’s actually kind of depressing. All this cool stuff we used to be able to do getting the Ban Hammer.
So this post has turned into a “Way back when I was a pre-BC hunter” stroll down memory lane, hasn’t it. Back when PvP gear could be used for raiding and The Rookery was the schiznit and running Molten Core 27 times before you got your first piece of tier-gear was standard and Alliance owned AV and Shaman/Paladins were one-side only and one didn’t see Dranei/Blood Elf women in short, revealing winter-wear all over the dang place.
You realize that we’ll be making similar judgements about pre-WotLK, yes?
Note: So a while back we linked to one of our favorite Cuban lunch spots. Today we’re going to give a shout-out to the independent coffee house we frequent whenever we can.
You know we go for the raspberry latte, natch.
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I’m 99.9999% sure that they made it so arcane shot didn’t scaled with SD any more. Prior to that they also normalized it as an instant so it wouldn’t crit obscenely.
If you all remember though hunter tier 2.5 (AQ40) had spell dmg on it.
If they nerfed +Spell Dmg for Arcane Shot, we didn’t hear about it. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but we really would like to know, one way or the other.
Yeah, they made spell damage useless to hunters a while back. Arcane shot scales with RAP now.
The old spell damage videos were made…well, a while back. Pre-BC even, I think. Which gives you a whole new appreciation for someone doing 4k-5k with an instant cast arcane shot, when they were level 60.
Specifically, your arcane shot will do (RAP * 0.15 273) damage. Well, at rank 9 anyway.
BRK, would you kindly swing by Ron Jon’s on your way home and mail my Hunter some Mr. Zogg’s Sex Wax. He keeps falling off his mount. Thanks. Happy New Year.
Are you sure that Kazzak in SW was the responsibility of a Hunter? I thought it was a druid with lots of +MP5 doing Moonfire/travel form every 8 seconds.
Great post, even with the retraction. One small nit: it’s “nemeses,” not “nemesi.”
My druid was a Field Marshal and the rank 13 PVP gear was better than anything outside of Naxx. I wore that stuff all the way to level 68, when I finally replaced it all at once. The set bonuses were too good to break up piece-by-piece.
RIP pre-TBC.
Kazzak in SW might not have been a hunter, and we’ll be happy to give proper class-credit if required.
We really like “nemesi”, can we keep it?
No, this bug for Arcane Shot has NOT been fixed.
However, Arcane Shot only gets the bonus damage from + Arcane Damage ONLY!
For example, if you get a cloth hat that has +40 spell damage, Arcane Shot will get nothing.
But if you have a hat that has +50 Arcane Damage, that WILL give Arcane Shot the bonus damage.
As a note, due to the scaling of “Instant Spells”, which Arcane Shot is classified as, it only gets 42.9% of the bonus damage.
So, if you have 500 arcane damage, Arcane Shot will have a bonus 214 damage tacked on.
The scaling of this, for some reason, was fixed a while ago. Arcane Shot used to get the full value of Arane Damage, but now it registers properly as an “instant”, and scales as such.
That other guy uses “fora,” so keep “nemesi” for yourself.
@ Euripides
Hrm…I may just have to attempt some tests…
Although if they fixed it so that the arcane spell damage scales, it’s not broken like it used to be.
Euripedes are you sure? I was bored one day and messed around nude and then with +200 to all spell dmg (includes arcane obviously) and recieved no increase. I did still recieve increases to imolation trap and serpent sting. I didn’t try viper sting but that could be interesting as I wish that ability would scale some.
Shifttusk… Exactly. Spell Damage DOES NOT affect Arcane Shot.
Its + Arcane Damage only.
Like, if you put on a robe that increases all spell damage by 60, you will get no bonus whatsoever on Arcane Shot.
It has to be Arcane Damage only. Like, [Thingy] of Arcane Blast, or the Spellfire gear.
Stuff that flat increases spell damage won’t do it, it has to state ‘Arcane Damage’ in order to get a bonus from it.
The Hunter vs World “guy” is a girl by the way, or at least his/her character is.
Being a denizen of Winter Park, I feel obligated to try this “Wahoo Coffee” business… Not far of a drive at all, and I do love coffee.
If it’s good and you can expect your Awesome-Place-Referral Points in the (e)mail.
Wait wait wait! Did I read above that PvP gear is not raid worthy? I’m going to have to take issue with that. My season 1 gladiator chest is an upgrade over my scaled breastplate of carnage. Many of the Season 2 and Season 3 Gladiator gear are better for crit and ap than a lot of T4 & T5 pieces. Sometime people take it upon themselves to do arena and BG’s to improve their gear because there is so much competition to get into Karazhan in a lot of guilds.
I would gladly take someone who took the initiative to duke it out in the arena for gear upgrades than take someone who waited for all the Karazhan welfare pieces to come to them. So many people just endlessly run Karazhan in hopes that their pieces will drop and never take any action outside that one instance to gear themselves up.
Between Heroics and Arena, you can actually gear yourself up better than you can by just counting on Karazhan gear.
[...] Someone (no, not that Someone) recently made a statement that currently available PvP gear is not suitable for raids. I cannot disagree more. Granted, PvP gear is not the best possible choice for raiding, but it should certainly not be dismissed out of hand. A lot of people resort to arena and PvP for gear upgrades in addition to heroic upgrades because competition for slots in 10 mans is fierce is you are in a guild capable of running 25 mans. And let’s face it, more often than not, a raid leader is only going to want to bring one hunter into a Kara run. [...]