They're giving away my Scatter Shot

There’s lots of talk in Hunter circles in the last couple of days about Beta changes. Key points are:

• Aimed Shot - This shot will now be instant cast, its damage/effect/cooldown will remain unchanged.
• Scatter shot - This will now be an 11-point Survival talent.
• Readiness - This will now be the 21-point Marksmanship talent.
• Trap Mastery - This will now be the 41-point Survival talent.
• Surefooted is swapping places with T.N.T. (so Surefooted is now in tier 2)

… and everyone appears to be happy. However, there is a (silent) group who won’t be. That’s the MM brigade and the decision over scatter shot is - well it stinks.

For a long time now we’ve been packaged off as a PvP group and the BM/SV have been hailed as the hunter kings. We’re just a quirky bunch that ‘can’t cut it in raids and instances.’

I’m going to come back to that attitude in a later post because someone around here needs to redress the balance.

We have a couple of tricks up our sleeves for group runs that the BM/SV brigade would die for – and now they’re licking their lips at being handed one of them on a plate. Instead of it being an unreachable 21 points into MM they can now pick up this candy in the SV tree to where it’s been moved.

Let me give you a quick scenario: The team is facing Moroes. He goes down third after say Lady Berrybuck and Dreuger. Daris is kept on ice by the hunter and Catriona is shackled to wrap the action.

Chain trapping is an art form. You have to keep Daris out of the action (so no FD) while everything is cracking off. Trap ends, cd is still not up – so what do you do? Scatter shot, wing clip, kite and trap. A great combination and my record has been to keep him going for six traps in one rather prolonged fight. At the same time I’m pumping out a significant amount of damage on the relevant targets.

Our only other ace up the sleeve is silencing shot. Don’t you just love to watch a BM hunter sweat when he’s given a caster to trap.

Scatter shot is one of the tricks that sets MM hunters apart from the rest and now Blizz want to give it away. The reason for the lack of outcry about this is that MM has been driven so hard into PvP that everyone and his uncle who wants a hunter is rolling BM.

Come on Blizz – instead of firing a scatter shot in to the hunter talent tree give a bit more thought to those MM hunters that still like to raid and run instances and have the skills to hold down a place.