So, here we are; the Legion pre-patch likely less than a week away, and hunters are still in a fairly terrible place, from my perspective. All three specs received complete overhauls (now having only the names in common with the previous three hunter specs), and all three ended up significantly less fun than they have been for the last two expansions.
To be clear, I'm not talking about the specs in relationship to other classes. Overall, "tuning" is something that I care about, but it's not make or break for a class. It's important for determining what spec you want to play in high-end raiding. It is not, however, something that makes you love a class. For the last 6 or 7 years, I have loved playing hunters, and at this point, I think they're just ok.
Having fun playing the class, for me, is the basis of the entire game. If I don't like the playstyle of a character, none of the dailies or dungeons or raids will be fun, regardless of how compelling their stories are. And on the other hand, when everyone else hated the grind of 5.0 dailies, I was still having fun, because I just loved playing my hunters back then.
This is, unfortunately, no longer the case. While I'd like to think that in general I'm appreciative of the developers trying new things, experimenting and trying to make the game better. In the case of all three hunter specs, they've ended up with results that are significantly worse than what they had when they started. And really, that wouldn't be a problem either, except, as far as I can tell, the developers who are in charge seem to legitimately think that they've made a good class, despite months and months and months of feedback from hundreds of different hunters in the beta expressing dissatisfaction with every single hunter spec.
Thrill of the Wild Going Forward
For any of you who follow this site regularly, you probably noticed I took an extended break from posting alpha/beta updates. I had actually taken a break from playing WoW too, for the most part. I've officially stepped back from raiding in the more "hardcore" team I was on. And am planning on only raiding on a 6 hour per week weekend team in legion.
As such, I don't know how much "cutting edge" theorycrafting I'll be doing. In the past, anything I've posted on this site happened because I was having fun, got excited about whatever I was working on, and then decided to write it down. When I was covering "news", it was because I was excited to hear about whatever changes were coming, and wanted a venue to express that excitement.
For the time being, I'm planning on starting to blog on here again, at least once legion drops, but really, it depends if I can find something to be excited about: a reason to love playing hunters. I don't want this to turn into a blog where I just complain the current game, and talk about how much better the good ol' days were.
I'll be out of town next week, taking a group of kids from my work on a camping trip, and will miss the actual release of the pre-patch (most likely). Part of me is holding on to hope that perhaps we've all been playing the specs wrong so far, and once they're released into the game, someone who wasn't on the beta or ptr will find a way to make them fun again. Even if that does happen, I want to try to give these new specs as much of a chance as I can stand to. I plan on finishing updating my DPS spreadsheet before the end of August, and I'll try to post any fun spreadsheets or theorycrafting I come up with while trying to optimize my hunters.
