arcane and aimed shot on 2.3Follow

"Arcane Shot (Ranks 6 and above) now dispel 1 Magic effect in addition to their normal damage." What kind of magic effect? paladin buble and mage ice block will be dispelled? or only priest and mage bubles?

"Aimed Shot (Marksmanship) now reduces healing done to that target by 50% for 10 seconds." aimed shot + mortal strike (warrior hability) will be 100% healing redution? :D (probably not I think)

Probably works the same as purge.

In my opinion, the Aimed Shot buff, really doesn't make much of a difference Arena wise. In a BG/world PvP/Duels, sure, but not so much in an Arena.

Frankly, the casting time on an Aimed Shot is simply too long for viable use in Arenas. No other team worth it's salt will let you get it off.

With a 3.5 second casting time, if someone decides to pound on you, this'll be extended to 5 seconds or so. At the end of the 5 seconds, you get your shot off. Whoo! A well geared hunter's Aimed Shots'll hit for like 1.5-2k damage, crit for about 4-5k. In 5 seconds, pretty much any decently geared melee class could do about 6-8k damage to you. (If they crit, even more!) Not to mention all of the stuns/interrupts that they can do.

Also, when you factor in how easy it is to LoS a Hunter in an arena, it is pretty much a useless skill. The only arena that this could be viable in is Blade's Edge, assuming that your team could take control of the top of the bridge and one of the opponents is stupid enough to stay in your LoS.

Regardless, while the Arcane Shot purge-like effect is good, this buff to Aimed Shot, in my opinion, is not as great as it seems.

I see the buff to Aimed shot being used more in a PvE environment when you're against a mob that heals itself.

And if Arcane Shot took away the pally bubble, pallies would cry, and we'd get a nerf somewhere else. I think the only way they could possibly get away with it is if there was only a very low chance of it dispelling something like that.

I've been in situations with my 3v3 team where we have one person on the opposing team dead and try to focus fire on the next dps class while their Pally healer spammed heals. Kind of tedious. You can't really focus fire on the Pally because they take forever to kill and their partner just runs you over. It can be tough to kill someone through a barrage of well geared Pally heals.

It's often a low-risk scenario when you've got one person on the other team down and they only have one person left who can really hurt you, but certain classes/specs (ie. Fire Mage, Warlock) can really mess you up if you let them live long enough. In those cases, the Warrior on my arena team will lock down the dps class on the opposite team so that I can pewpew uncontested. In that situation, I can see it being totally worth it to shut down my dps for 3.5 seconds in exchange for a moderate damage spike when that 3.5s is up and either shut down half of the Pally's healing ability for 10 seconds or force him to try a dispel which still buys more time to get considerably more damage out than the Pally can recover. Huge advantage? Only time will tell.

It is already a great buff to arcane shot as a normal dispel, a low lvl purge added to a damaging low-cd attack to NO additional cost whatsoever, OMGFTW!. Not to mention with it being a base attack hunters will now run around dispelling every buff in the friggin BG/arena like there's no tomorrow and probably without giving it a nanosecond of thought (bye-bye Fel armor, and rejuvs and renews, and shields... I shall miss ye).

If it dispelled immunity barriers on top of that, it would be blatantly overpowered, not to mention unfair for ice mages, paladins, AND priests who have to shave off a large chunk of their mana to be able to dispell these effects.

Edited, Oct 30th 2007 6:11am by Azatodeth

Maybe its just me, but does anyone feel that Blizz has the effects reversed? IMO it should be Aimed Shot now dispel 1 Magic effect in addition to their normal damage. And Arcane Shot (Ranks 6 and above)now reduces healing done to that target by 50% for 10 seconds. This will give hunters more of a chance against pallys and other healers. With a 3.5 second cast time it would be exceedingly difficult to use Aimed Shot to debuff heals in any situation, especially PvP. Obviously the effects would need slight alteration if switched(which I doubt the will be). Just one hunter's opinion.

But as I right this post, I can see how the current updated shots will still have great potential.

True, but under the same conditions, you can fire off autos and steadys to match it, and unless it's a crit, exceed it...

Now, with the change, this actually makes it more useful for PvP, but we'll kind of have to see...