Another day, another patch...

Not much to note in the patch notes this time around. But I did come across something interesting in the Wow Forums...which I am going to rant about.
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. 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.


Well, I am S.O.L.. I may have Accursed Bow of the Elite, but as a lvl 200 item, no damage boost for me. And I am unlikely to see 25 man Naxx or 10 man Uldaur any time soon. But what I really want to know is...
What percentage of hunters have these level weapons and thus will get a damage boost? I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority don't, and won't.
I am all for harder raids getting shinier things, and 25 man gear being better than 10 man is okay, and I understand and respect Blizzard's reasons for doing that. But Blizz, you shafted the dedicated 10 man raiders once already with the tokens in Ulduar (25 man Ulduar drops tokens equivalent to the gear that drops and 10 man drops tokens equivalent to Naxx 25 gear which is half a tier lower), so why are you attempting to raise the damage of an entire class by upping the damage on certain high-end gear (and not including any 10 man Naxx gear?)

And then there's the mind-bogglingness of trying to raise the damage of an entire class this way. To give an example, let's say I want to raise SAT scores in a high-school. Do I a) tutor only the kids in honor courses, or b) tutor everyone? Blizzard appears to have gone with a, and I have no idea what they were thinking. Increased dps across the board? WTF? Increased DPS for the dedicated raiders who have enough peeps to run 25 mans, and for the hardcore PVPers does not equal increased dps for all hunters.

I'm just going to be happy that they have realized that this probably (certainly) won't get hunters to where they need to be.

So now that I've ranted (and yes after rereading I did notice that this is meant to be a substitute for the ammo removal but I am still annoyed), I have other stuff to talk about.

I am now in a progression raiding guild (I didn't change guilds, my guild shifted a bit). Granted, we're a bit behind, but yay for progression. I saw Sarth for the first time last week (stupid firewalls) and will be seeing Maly (for the first time ever) and Sarth again this week, plus the normal 10 man Naxx. There's even talk of 25 man Naxx, since our RL doesn't think we can handle 10 man Ulduar in 10 man Naxx gear. I love seeing new content, and getting new shinies, so this is a yay. I just need to find a nice map of Sarth that shows the firewall safe spots (cause I cannot see them to save my life) and um, Sons of Hodir. I've been putting that off because I wanted to finish Dragonblight before I started a new zone, but I need to get the enchants. That's going to be tomorrow's job, I think, attempting to finish DB and hit Storm Peaks.