Loss of pathing

[Illana]

I wonder if this was an oversight for blizzard? Loss of 3% haste plus the fact we now have same hit/expertise as melee means hunters have to sink a lot of stats into haste as well.

No other class is in this situation, the one that i mean we have to hit a haste breakpoint as a significant change to our resource regeneration mechanic.

I know this will get better as I get better gear (ilevel 448 now) and more stats to spread around but it means we're going to have very little crit in the first couple of raid tiers and we all know crit is a hunter's best secondary stat.

[Cyph3r]

I doubt it was an oversight. In fact I'd wager that increasing the base focus return on cobra/steady shot may have been partially inspired by the loss of pathing. Personally I'm not really worried about it. Yes, it's going to be HARD to get our stats where we want them to during this first tier (especially pre-raiding, using dungeon gear), but whatever, I'm always up for a challenge. As far as how it will effect our damage output, those of us who understand; I mean really understand how haste works for Hunters are going to be fine. It's not even a blind guess type of thing, it's all been tested in beta already, and some very bright minds in the Hunter community were there to make sure we weren't broken.

Basically gearing is going to be more challenging than it's been for us in a long, long time. But I'm ok with that, I've always thought gear selection should actually require some thought and effort to really squeeze the most out of it. And that never felt like the case in Cata. Reforging took so much of the challenge away, so now having basically 3 stats to balance around reintroduces some of that.

[Illana]

hmm maybe I should be looking at a CoS>CoS>random instant filler instead with 2 second cast on cobras...

[Dracodraco]

You aren't ment to hit your caps in heroic dungeon blue gear. Resto Druids couldn't reach their haste cap that made them "viable" in the first tier (2005) without either sacrifising shitloads of stats, or having raid gear. If you have raid gear, hitting the 4K haste we need for 1.66 sec casts aren't an issue.
If I recall correct, hitting our haste cap (757 haste) in cata wasn't viable untill raid-level gear, either.

[Illana]

That's not the point though is it, we used to only have 8% hit requirement and now have 7.5% hit/expertise.

In fact it was possible to get 757 haste in blues and welfare epics in t11

Well either way i'm not too bothered, hunter dps seems fine right now but it's more of a quality of life thing i guess.

[Dracodraco]

That's not the point though is it, we used to only have 8% hit requirement and now have 7.5% hit/expertise.

In fact it was possible to get 757 haste in blues and welfare epics in t11

Well either way i'm not too bothered, hunter dps seems fine right now but it's more of a quality of life thing i guess.

Which was hugely imbalanced compared to every other class, and one of the main reason we did so well at the start of every tier, but fell behind (not saying that our scaling did not take a huge part in that, but getting [864? I dont even remember the hitcap anymore] free stat points out of a pool of 5K over every other class at the start was *huge*. Less so when we had 15K aviable points). As you said, we do fine on the damage, which means we have obviously been compensated.