New Aspect ot Viper (PTR patch notes)Follow

Pretty much old news. Most of this has been discussed a few times already.

It's about time they gave raptors dash, but yeah, it is somewhat old news. The question really becomes how this will impact your mana consumption. Many hunters stay with hawk and chug potions. Many conserve heavily and/or use viper. Many stop mid-fight and drink. The only thing that is clear is that hunters do not have enough mana. Increasing the effect of AotV is a help, but I don't know it's enough of one when it means dropping Hawk, which many players have talented.

for me, all that will change is that Viper now becomes pretty much useless as a grinding aspect besides refuelling your mana to ~70-80%

and in raids/instances i'll stick to Hawk anyway and i'll now switch to viper if my mana pots are on cooldow and i need to keep shooting (instead of FD > drink)

So in my opinion the change made viper worse, not better.

because when you are grinding, you wont e below 60% mana to often, so AotV is less effective then it was before.
and in instances/raids you want(need) AotH for the added dps.


edit: and its worse above 60%, at 60% it gives 25% of your int in mp5, above that it lowers to a minimum of 10%
below that it goes up to a maximum of 50%

Edited, Sep 4th 2007 10:29am by Aethien

Hmm, I like that "more utility" part of it. That's always been one of my pet peeves, that even though we have massive utility in instances and grouping, most Hunters (yes, most) ignore it in favor of Autoshot/Steady Shot DPS. Hunters aren't a pure DPS class. We have so much more to show off than DPS. Granted, once the raid/instance is over, I love opening my SWstats to check out where I ended up, but I am far more fond of getting praise in chat/VT for keeping that mob chaintrapped throughout the entire fight while doing DPS, Scorpid Stinging all the mobs, misdirecting the mob that is killing our healer onto our tank and so on. (Phew, that was a looooong sentence. Try saying that aloud)

Anything that makes my class that much more useful is a good thing. All that then remains, is to beat it into the rest of the WoW playerbase that we can do so much more than stand back and autoshoot. "But we need a Mage for CC in Shadow Labs" my well rounded *******

As for Aspect of the Viper. I like it. Now it works far more like I think it should work. This will allow you to fight for far longer with AotH up, and once you see your manapool (even with potions) won't be enough, you change to AotV. Now lazy Hunters won't have the excuse that "I need the Mana Regen" for those first minutes of the fight. So, in a way I agree with Aethien. They made AotV worse. But not it's impact on the Hunter class. AotV is now useless as a fulltime aspect. Now, it is the Aspect you put on when you actually need it. Which all in all is a good change, in my view.

Well, I never had much problem with sitting down once every nth mob to have a 15 second drink. We are still the class that can grind most efficiently, and endlessly. We just have to drink now. One stack of water will most likely afford me hours upon hours of grinding.

The impact is so low it isn't even worth complaining about.

Well, if you can grind by using Aspect of the Hawk till you're under 50% mana, then switch to Viper and get more mana regen than before, that sounds pretty good to me. It's not like Viper currently keeps up with our mana use when grinding hard.