Adam

You're right this would sell like crack on XBLA. If you don't buy this game for $5 you fail at life basically.

I think the steady shot buff is bigger than you make it out to be. 1.5% seems incredibly low. Yes, arcane shot is out the door if you're a MM-geared hunter (lots of arp)... leaving only aimed shot and steady shot. The alarming thing in my PTR testing is that you can even drop Serpent Sting and Aimed shot from the rotation and just spam steady shot (and killshot below 20% obviously) and maintain similar dps. You might be asking why...and the answer is extra pet crits from cobra strikes from all that steady shot spam. In a raid setting your pets specials would be 75%+ crit rate if you were just spamming steady shot. This also requires swapping glyphs since you wont be using serpent sting at all. Glyphs for this build would be Hawk, killshot, and bestial wrath.

On a theorycraft level, I was only seeing less than a 150 dps difference from doing a full serpent sting / aimed / steady rotation to pure steady spam with new glyphs (on a high ArP build). Since the old rotaiton requires better timing than just facerolling steady shot, the real world result would likely be similar. Again, this only works with a 1200+ arp build. I havent had the chance yet but I intend to try this on live realms soon for kicks. Obviously I will continue raiding as MM for superior DPS but I found it amusing that you can reduce BM to steady shot only and not lose any significant dps.

There's only a handful of things that actually drive people to buy gold.

I'm betting the number one thing that gets people started is epic flying. Then once they've done that they get lazy.

Other stuff that costs enormous amounts of gold like ICC BOE epics and primordial saronites is probably the 2nd leading factor.

Without these major barriers, it's not hard at all to get by comfortably without either excessive farming or buying of gold.

Learn to move away from iceblocks :P And yes both are lucky to have survived. Usually at least 1 dies.

I think the playstyle is going to change quite a bit and we'll be much less cooldown focused. It's going to take hunters a while to adjust probably.

No more mana is good though...means I have to worry about less buffs and not say "damn it!" when there's only 2 paladins in the raid or having to make sure one of the paladins is always judging wisdom.

I would like to see them implement a pet buff sharing mechanic so pet raid buffs are shared with the hunter. Not only player casted buffs like Kings/Might, but boss fight buffs like the Blood Queen bite.

Here's a video of the ingame pets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHRpVe1kDNY

There's never been a better time to use AdBlock (yes adblock removes google ads as well) with firefox.

Ordered both. The plushies should look nice on my desk.

A nice trip down memory lane...

The coolest piece of loot I've gotten til this day is my Giantstalker Legs... on my first molten core boss kill they dropped, and I won the roll against EIGHT (8) other hunters in the 40 man raid. It was glorious.

As for hunter gold farmers, I used to always mess with them back in the day. They were always in Deadwind Pass farming the ogres (as bots, which were checked on by a human every few minutes usually). The bot had a cycle where it would cast hunters mark, send the pet in, then begin autoshotting. You could fool the bot by tagging the mob (usually with our awesome 183 damage arcane shot) in between the hunters mark and first autoshot, and get the bot to kill stuff for you. When they came back to check on their bot they were not happy and many nasty tells ensued.

For those worried about authenticator battery life, they are rated at 7 years...and my guess is that's conservative. Just replace it in 5 years and you'll be fine... remember this can also be used on all future blizzard games. Starcraft, diablo, new MMO, etc. Anything on battle.net.

You are virtually unhackable with an authenticator... its good peace of mind.