Focus sounds good

[Maleficious]

People whine for about everything, dont take it too seriously and just enjoy the game.

[Panoramixe]

Sounds great, except that our defensive abilities also cost focus and therefore require planning to use... which is kind of stupid in my opinion.

Master's call, disengage, deterrence all cost 30 focus.

They want us to be ranged rogues, but why dont they make our defensive abilities cost 0 focus? rogue defensive crap doesnt take focus...

personally, I like having mana... if you arent stupid and don't get tunnel vision you never run out now... I dont see a need for change

Those focus costs were examples, during the beta they'll change a lot and some/all defensive cooldowns might not use any focus at all.

[AvA-LaND]

People whine for about everything, dont take it too seriously and just enjoy the game.

No, we're actually not whining. We're concerned hunters who've been playing this class since day 1. Not day 1 1.0 launch, I mean Day 1 closed beta. Like someone said above, if defensive abilities are going to cost focus, I'll make it my job to keep spamming the Rogue boards on the wow forums till either I'm banned or rogues now have energy req's on defensive CD's.

We shouldn't have to energy...oh I mean focus pool for that oh shit moment.

[Yanci]

So is this focus llike energy is for a rogue? That for example aimed shot costs like 50 Focus or so?

[AvA-LaND]

/facepalm

[nightelfhunter]

Focus will be a good thing. I hate having to go into viper so much or have to drink something to get mana back >.........so i am happy to hear that hunters like myself will be getting focus

[Gaexion Ramza Beoulve]

rogue defensive crap doesnt take focus...

maybe it should
/coolface

[Sylv_]

There are some good things about focus, and some not.

For one, our focus should be at a much higher rate so that we are Never starved for focus no matter what.
The vast pool of hunter resource should still exist even in a focus state, which it will not. Hunters are major utilities, specially when you need something quick, asap, on the fly and not planned whatsoever. Focus will probably require us to pool plan our focus ( was it stated otherwise elsewhere? ) so that we know when we need something and then use it.

Big time issues with focus regen in PvP - Cast time for a steady that regens most of our focus? Wouldn't that be like having another 50% less damage going out in a sense? If you lose half your regen, you'll do half the damage or something like that.

There are far to many negative things, and very terribly thought of and put together.

I would honestly say that hunters would be just fine if viper gave less mana in return, but it didn't nerf your damage in anyway, and or it could give you a different debuff then it currently has to something along the lines of, while in this aspect you lose 300, 600, 800, 1000 attack power. Now I'm unsure of a fair ballanced number to allow us to regen mana while still maybe only losing a few hundred dps, not a few thousand.



Focus is pretty much infinite attacking without much thought into preservation, rather then getting rid of energy, or focus etc.

I would see hunters needing to sometimes wait to shoot their shots, rather then them being all instant as they come off cooldown. That mechanic is alot better then having to mimic warriors, druids, rogues and deathknights and just receiving a different color of energy bar.

Maybe I kind of rambled but the change would create a new class out of a hunter, when a hunter should stay a hunter. Hunters are mystic more so, shamanistic I'd say even. Able to communicate with nature and beasts alike there would certainly be magic around to do that type of thing. Especially Night Elves.

[deadman80]

Our rotation/priority lists may change, but Blizz has said they definitely want hunters popping off about the same number of shots as they are now. There are going to be plenty of ways to increase focus regen rate, what with talents, BM Haste mastery, possible reborn AoV, haste rating increasing focus regen, PotT, glyphs, etc (I'm sure I missed something in there and there will be even more ways to increase focus than what I have listed.)

During the class preview itself, iirc Blizz said that they would definitely be looking at lowering or removing focus costs for defensive abilities. Who knows, maybe we really won't have many problems dealing with focus even with defensive focus costs staying at 30 each. Nothing is worth panicking about just yet, and it won't be worth panicking about until we start getting some hard numbers from the beta. SOOOOOOOO much is changing in the game that there is simply no way possible for any of us non-Blizzard employees to have even the slightest clue about how the new play environment is going to feel as a hunter.

Think of the new tank mastery "Vengeance" for example.. Now Blizz has stated that health pools are going to be considerably higher than they are currently, but it seems that most raid tanks running around all have at least ~50k hp unbuffed right now so I'm gonna use that number since its easy to work with. So that means a tank with fully stacked Vengeance will gain 5000ap as a passive buff, and this is stated to be only enough to keep agro vs comparably geared dps... That means that most dps classes should be able to expect a comparable increase in stats to make that buff needed by tanks... Which means there are going to be enough changes to dps classes to provide that increase since I doubt it's going to be all purely 100% based on gear.

And the gear changes will affect our class/specs immensely.. I truly doubt there will ever be a case of non-caster mail armor that will be overly beneficial to one of our specs compared to another. There will no longer be a debate on AP v. AGI (AP no longer being on gear ends that debate,) no worries about INT at all, no arguments about Armor Pen being the best stat or not, no arguments about haste being useless or not... Each piece of "hunter gear" that we get will be equally beneficial to each of our specs even if the stats get used in slightly different ways.

Personally, I agree with the OP that Focus does sound like a good idea/system. How well it works out for us the players though is something that is yet to be seen and can't be determined until we actually have some data in-hand.

[The Painkiller]

I like the idea of focus, put some thinking involved in hunters rotation, rather than just hitting whatever is off cooldown. They probably will make your defensive cooldowns cost no focus though. But to those who said the rogues defensive cooldowns are free, ever heard of Blind? Dismantle? Feint?

[deadman80]

I like the idea of focus, put some thinking involved in hunters rotation, rather than just hitting whatever is off cooldown. They probably will make your defensive cooldowns cost no focus though. But to those who said the rogues defensive cooldowns are free, ever heard of Blind? Dismantle? Feint?

All 3 of those could also be argued to be useful as offensive cooldowns as well...
Blind = CC = easier to focus on dpsing your main target
dismantle = in addition to removing weapon, also removes shield so situationally can increase dps
feint = avoid stealing agro = dps full blast instead of having to pause/hold back = dps increase

There is no way possible to argue that Deterrence is an offensive ability in any situation. Most of our defensive abilities are purely defensive and function in ways to allow us to run away far enough to restart dps, so I agree that they SHOULD be free, unless they have their cooldowns lowered significantly.

I do hope that at least for the first two raid tiers there exists a possibility for a hunter who acts unwisely to focus starve themselves for a few seconds at a time, but at the same time, those who put forethought into their playstyle should not be overly penalized. This is going to be a balancing act for Blizzard to avoid the possibility of a hunter popping off major instant shots every GCD during PVP, while also trying not to nerf our damage in PVE... It'll be interesting to see how the focus system develops once the beta starts, but we won't know that the sky is raining nerfbats on us hunters until then.

[Vismund]

Nobody's looking forward to never drinking again?

[Marymoocow]

Yeah, focus does sound good to me. The odds of Blizz making defensive cooldowns, at least some of them, cost 0-20 focus are very high. People sound very stupid whining about figures that are no way near set in stone yet, with the beta not even having begun yet. Focus will require a lot of tweaking, but I'm sure Blizz will give it a lot of that come beta time.

Maybe I kind of rambled but the change would create a new class out of a hunter, when a hunter should stay a hunter. Hunters are mystic more so, shamanistic I'd say even. Able to communicate with nature and beasts alike there would certainly be magic around to do that type of thing. Especially Night Elves.

Nah mate... Hunters spend most of their time atm using mana on firing arrows... That shouldn't require any magic. Hunters won't be created anew, more like refined.

[Smillan]

Been wating for this change 4 ages, lets just hope its epic insted of gnome..