Beastly

Well this weekend nothing much really happened. Once again no tiger from that bastard of a troll but I will not admit defeat yet. Green proto drake is still hiding from me. Got stuck in a failed Naxx 25 and didnt do much other raiding. Then to top things off I still cant get my stupid Battle Bot. All bitching aside though I am rather happy this week. For starters even though that Naxx 25 was a fail boat filled with the bottom rungs of top guilds on D-spine I got the one thing I abosolutely lusted after but had resigned myself to not seeing. The sexy Arrowsong is mine and I one very pleased Ed! *cough* Sorry about that....anyway its not so much I needed it. I wanted it because honestly every stat was better for BM and god knows I needed the hit since am seriously tied down in what I can do since if I lose hit from any single thing I have it on I will drop to just above 7% which is below the hit cap for me (I do wanna actually wear my T 8.5 pants at some point after all). This brings some issues to my mind though and with the looming rumors of an impending BM hunter buff it leaves me with some questions as a raider that uses the spec. Where exactly do us beast masters belong in the raid world?

This question has been bouncing around for months now and seems to not be something Blizzaard has found a solid way of fixing. When the great hunter nerf of '09 stuck I dont think the Blizz folks really thought out just how hard us poor loyal BMers would be hit and bleed out. They took our steady shot and volley power which was....ok. Then to add salt to the wound they took out pets umph away. Now I understood the need for the steady and volley nerfs though i might not have liked them. Those affected all hunters and honestly with damage volley was dealing we had no need for any other move. The problem for the BM hunter comes with the fact that we have no other shots in tree to make up for this loss. I personally speced to get aim shot cause i think its a waste to use multi on a single target or for those cases you dont need to hit but one target in the middle of a grouped mob. The problem with that is that multi and aimed shot share the same cd so in reality i have no extra shots to work with. I have auto, steady, my stings, volley and arcane (which is a joke shot imo with the minimal damage it does) and my pet. In a raid this is a problem. At times I cant have my pet fighting because I need him alive to keep the little boost to my ap up (for example Heigan, as my pet also can die from the waves). Now since my pet is removed I effectively lost a desent amount of damage on that target putting me at a bit of a handicap in the numbers game. Now in previous posts I have pointed out I do pull my weight in raids thats never been an issue because whatever I lack in sheer killing power I make up for in spades with my ability to do the utility jobs I am usually asked to do in raids.

"Why not just go Survival?" I'm stubborn. I also completely fail at learning to control SV. I can do my utility stuff BM allows in my sleep where as SV I cant react because its not second nature to me. I could never feel comfortable in that spec and as such I will gladly take my knocks as the underdog beast master. BM wasnt exactly the raid spec when I started raiding at 70 either Marks was and I still took up the challenge to make it work. Why change now?

That said Blizz is still aware that BM is below where it needs to be. With the last patch hunters did get a buff in general as hunter's mark's damage was buffed by about 200 I believe and all ranged items 226 and up recieved stat buffs to make up for the lack of specialty arrows we had in the BC days. Then there was a buff to a Marks talent as well and thats fine and dandy, but how does that exactly help a BM hunter? We again begin to fall behind as our pets really recieve no boost from hunter's mark and personally the weapon buff has no effect on what i do for the mear fact I have a 213 bow that is the exact same as before this patch came. Mind you I am by no means saying these changes are not good its just not dealing with the problems plaguing BM. Blizz has been commenting on this as well and it leaves me to wonder what exactly CAN be done about it at all?

We got our pets back to just about what they were before the first nerf. So I dont think pet buffing is a fix. We still fall pray to the fact our pets are fragile things and if they die we loose alot so it wouldnt make sense to make a BM hunter live or die with their pet and if your pet cant help at all in that fight then you are even more stuck. We also run into the problem of letting the pet play for the hunter with anymore buff as well. So if you cant buff the pet they maybe the hunter? Now I am all for this but then we run into HOW to do this? Do we buff the amount of ap given from the pet? That could work and could probably be easily done but still leaves us a little too dependant on the pet though its not gonna be as bad as the pet doing the damage itself. Now we could also be given a shot of some sort or a buff to a talent that increases our steady shot or something. Since blizzard said they had no intention of completely overhauling any more classes at present giving us another buff built into an existing talent seems the only possible choice to buff the class. I dont even have any ideas on how they can do this but I sure its being covered since they finally acted on Marks after they saw no changes for a while. I stand really curious of the future of my spec in the lands of Azeroth. Until we see some changes i can only do what I do best and thats take my cat, my spec and pwn some face in a no so direct manner.