Tuesday Maintenance (1 Feb) - JB Disses Hunters

Tuesday Maintenance (1 Feb) - JB Disses Hunters

The Tuesday maintenance was a special one to "improve game performance and reduce the size of the install on your hard drive." It took about fifteen minutes. There have been complaints about increasing disconnects in raids and dungeons. Otherwise, I haven't seen any problems, but anything that gets rid of un-needed clutter on my hard drive is a good thing. There was also a patch significant enough to require re-signing the ToC, and that took all morning to complete.

One of the things I've learned about the shaman class is that every player complains about the terrible itemization of enhancement shaman gear. There are two mail armor wearing classes - shaman and hunters. Since JB is competing with hunters for that gear, I thought I'd learn more about what hunters want, and how their stat priorities on gear compare to shaman.

Enhancement shaman stat priorities are as follows:

Agility - our main stat for dealing damage, we get as much as we can

Hit Rating - Shaman have very high requirements here, 20% for hitting with our melee weapons, and 17% for hitting with our spells. These percentages MUST be met above all other things when fighting raid bosses because misses are a dps loss.

Expertise - this stat helps us avoid being dodged or parried, which is also a dps loss. Shaman have to have 25/26 exp (equal to 541 exp rating) to overcome this (not to mention attacking from behind, not in front).

Mastery - our best secondary stat, first choice after the above three.

Crit - a very small benefit, but mostly useless

Haste - absolutely useless. Even the most efficient use of our spell priority rotation leaves gaps because of cooldowns and not enough spells to fill the holes. So speeding up the spell casting with haste has no benefit at all; all it does is widen the spell gap when we can't cast spells.

Things are a bit different for hunters. I'm using the Marksman spec as the example since that is most favored by raiders.

Agility - at the top of their list as well as for enh shaman

Ranged Hit - Nearly all damage from hunters come from their ranged weapon (bow or gun). Where shaman need 20%/17% to hit with weapon/spells, hunters need just 8% hit to never miss their target. A recent change for hunters allows them to shoot their ranged weapon no matter how close they are to the target, so they never need to use that "stat stick" hand weapon they carry around.

Attack Power - equal to about a third of one point of agi, AP isn't available much anymore and generally only shows up in enchants, not gear.

Crit - This is important to hunters, and they get a lot of benefit from it.

Mastery - Mastery is not as good as crit, but it's useful to hunters as a proc which adds an extra bow/gun shot to whatever ranged spell is being used.

Haste - This is a complicated stat for hunters. Similar to druids, hunters have haste caps to deal with; but unlike druids, the affect is different with different spells. The bottom line, though, is that haste speeds up shooting and that is ALWAYS an increase in dps.

Shaman HATE hunters because Blizz itemizes mail armor gear for hunter use, so nearly all gear an enhancement shaman sees will have one or both of haste and crit as secondary stats, which shaman don't want and reforge if they can.

In Summary -
Agi/AP - good for both hunters and shaman
hit - hunters need half as much to get the same benefit as shaman
Exp - hunters don't need it, so it's hard to get for shaman
Crit - nice for hunters, sucky for shaman
Mastery - nice for hunters, wonderful for shaman when they can get it
Haste - nice for hunters, worthless for shaman

So, what's the verdict? JB should have been a hunter.  :P