Scattered Shots: noun. 1. (Scatter Shot, singular) An ability used by Marksmanship hunters, especially to annoy other players in PvP. 2. (Scattered Shots, plural) A column at WoW Insider about anything even loosely related to hunters, except for high-level raiding and completely improper, sometimes libelous personal commentary.

Hunters are getting quite a few changes in Wrath of the Lich King, but so far haven't covered them all. Today I'd like to go through the newest abilities and discuss them in greater detail.

New Baseline Hunter Abilities:

Nope, no Camouflage. We talked about this before, but it looks like the devs read our article, "Do hunters need Camouflage?" and decided the answer was no. So, instead we have a couple other new abilities to look forward to:

Kill Shot:
This is the new level 80 hunter ability, and it provides us with a bit of utility that help us to stand out and perform better in various situations:

Every Wednesday, Encrypted Text explores issues affecting Rogues and those who group with them. This week Jason Harper, the new Rogue feature blogger, discusses the state of the Rogue class, effects of the 2.4.3 patch and the news from the Wrath beta.

I think I've got a pretty big job ahead of me as the new Rogue columnist here at WoW Insider. Sitting here, freshly unwrapped, I know I'll have to both balance the need to fairly represent "real" issues and not get too lost in "rah-rah-rogue" points of view. I'll need you, dear reader, to keep me honest and call-out the unintentional errors or oversights. We're a community and I absolutely want to know what you are thinking, what you love or hate and what you'd like to see me bring to this column that represent your needs.

Like a "do-not-toast-in-the-wrapper" warning on your box of PopTarts, I'd like to point out that any references I make to skills or talents in the Wrath beta should be taken with a grain of salt since they are subject to change at any time.

The patch went live today, and Blizzard wasn't kidding about the Cheat Death Nerf. In case you missed it, here's how it reads:

Cheat Death: This talent has been rebalanced significantly. Killing blows are no longer 100% absorbed. If the Rogue is below 10% health, the killing blow is still completely absorbed; if the Rogue is over 10% health, enough damage will be absorbed to reduce the Rogue's health down to 10%. For the following 3 seconds, damage is not always reduced by 90%; it is now reduced by a maximum of 90%, depending on how much resilience the Rogue has. The damage reduction will be four times the damage reduction resilience causes against critical strikes.

Needless to say, Rogues are pretty unhappy, especially since Blizzard hasn't taken much interest in fixing the "vanish bug." Skudo of Altar of Storms takes this as proof that Blizzard hates Rogues. On top of that this must mean that Blizzard favors Druids since they rescinded their decision to make Scare Beast an instant ability.

We were lucky enough to get an Azerothian ton (they're like twice the weight of normal tons, don't you know) of news about Wrath of the Lich King at Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational this weekend, and hidden in the Death Knight hands on, there's a ton of great information about the way the class' summons will work. Most of the summons seem to be in the Unholy tree -- Death Knights will not only be able to summon the ghouls we heard about earlier, but will also be able to bring down a gargoyle and summon an insect swarm. But the ghouls are what we're most interested in -- Army of the Dead is a level 80 spell (with a 10 minute cooldown!) that will summon a "legion of your best ghouls to fight by your side."

And our question is: how is this going to work? Obviously the ghouls won't actually work as pets as in the way Hunter or Warlock pets work, but surely they'll have a little more control implemented than the Druid's treants or the Priest's shadowfiends, right? As far as I can remember, we've never actually controlled multiple pets before -- are we going to have one bar to control all three with, or will we mark a target as they're summoned? It would seem that with a tanking class like the Death Knight, more focused pets would be a necessity in some cases.

Or maybe our ghouls will be as mindless as ever, and after we hit a button to summon, they'll just head for the closest thing that looks like it might have brains to eat. Hopefully the Death Knight's ghouls will be a bit more interesting than that (there was a rumor a while back that you'd be able to raise your fallen group members as ghouls, though I don't see that spell in the hands on), and if not, I guess there's always other Hero classes to improve upon the pet mechanics.

Understandably, everyone is begging to know more about the Death Knight class. At WWI, the Blizzard developers discussed the class in depth at both the main Development panel as well as at the Q&A panel. So you don't have to go fishing everywhere to find what you want to know, here's a roundup of new information about Death Knights from WWI so far.

Starting Area

The Death Knight starting area will be an extended area in Northern Plaguelands. The developers feel strongly about keeping people interested in playing in the Old World so they are creating this new zone. I personally hate every zone that has the word "plague" associated with it. Admittedly, I didn't reach either of the current Plaguelands until after I'd upgraded to The Burning Crusade, which meant I really had no time for grinding there since Outland awaited alluringly. However, it will be interesting to see if they make changes to the existing Western and Eastern Plaguelands along with adding content to the North to make these areas more interesting to players -- be they Death Knights or not.

Titan's Grip is confirmed -- dual wielding 2h weapons. Rossi will love that. - Michael Gray from WoW Insider's coverage of the WWI dev panel.

To my mind, the news from the Worldwide Invitational is big enough to push back our discussion of DPS gear for the starter raider. (We most certainly will talk more about it, believe me.) Several statements from the invitational need discussion for us warriors, I think, especially worth considering how they may well change the design philosophy of the class.

Also, yay, Diablo III. It's especially appropriate that we get the news about Titan's Grip on the same day as we get our spiritual forefathers, the barbarian class, back. So, you may ask, what exactly was said about warriors that was interesting?

Warrior

• Wanted to make the class feel more like Warcraft III -- put the Bladestorm Shockwave in, and tweaked Arms and Protection.
• Shockwave will help with Prot damage problem
• Titan's Grip is confirmed -- dual wielding 2h weapons.

While there isn't quite as much shocking news for those of us in the furry set as there was for our totem-spouting Earth brothers, there's still enough information to get us excited about our futures in Wrath of the Lich King.

I have to admit that I was a little surprised to hear Tom Chilton say in the first WWI dev panel that Blizzard isn't planning any Cyclone changes. When an audience member asked if there would be any alterations for Cyclone, Chilton answered in a pretty clear, unambiguous manner: Nope. But he did give us some explanation for it.

Holy moly, Shamans got a ton of stuff they wanted and then some today at the WoW Dev Panel during WWI '08 today.

• Shaman CC! Hex, previously the domain of NPCs only, was confirmed as a Shaman spell -- it'll have a quick 1.5 second cast, and will turn your enemy into a frog for about 8-10 seconds. The frogged person will still be able to move around, but they won't be able to attack or cast spells. A 1 minute cooldown was mentioned, but that's in opposition to the purpose of the spell, which is supposed to be emergency only, so that may change.
  
• The devs mentioned that Shaman were suffering from "Totem spam," so a few totems will be combined -- Strength of Earth and Grace of Air will become the same totem, and the physical school news was re-confirmed.
• Perhaps the biggest Shaman complaint since launch was answered: Shaman totems will now affect the whole raid, not just the local group. That's a big one.
• Weapon enchants are being revamped for more utility. Rockbiter is out completely, and Earthliving is replacing it -- it will give a +Healing buff. Flametongue will give spell damage, and Frostbrand will "more reliably snare" opponents.

A lot of Shaman concerns were answered today for sure, though perhaps not in the way players might have wanted. Will a 10 second CC be enough? It's great that totems affect the raid now, but will their range be extended to reach all of those people?

All of this information is still up in the air, of course, but it's awesome to finally see some official news on where classes are headed for Wrath of the Lich King. Stay tuned for more Wrath information, as well as any other WoW news we hear coming out of WWI.

The future, Conan?

Now, if I knew how the Azerothian calendar worked, I'd have a joke here. But since I don't, let's talk about talents and abilities that may or may not actually come to pass. (Fear not, Shaman enthusiasts, your regularly scheduled Shaman column will be coming to you tomorrow) You know how alphas are, they tease you with abilities that later are removed, changed or totally revamped due to feedback, but there's still lots to talk about. For instance, the image that heads up today's picture might well be waiting for you to meet... or even to be... in Northrend. Man, that's so awesome it makes my brain hurt. I really hope these talents aren't just a lot of hoaxish blue sky, but please make sure you keep your grains of salt handy in case you have to take a few.

Relmstein has an interesting commentary up about crowd control in World of Warcraft, and how balancing it is imperative to get PvP done right. It used to be that fear was the main problem, but now that fear has been nerfed and balanced with so many other abilities, it's just crowd control in general that has become the main issue. Instead of Warlocks and Mages ruling the roost with Fear and Polymorph, almost every class has picked up their own little methods of stopping other players in their tracks momentarily.

And thus, says Relmstein, the quicker abilities are becoming more powerful. Blind and Cyclone are the two main abilities he mentions, and both are extremely powerful in that they can be used by Rogues and Druids in conjunction with their escape abilities. And on the other side of the equation, Relmstein says that burst damage is king-- doing serious damage in between those moments where crowd control can stop you is critical. And that's why Warriors (and to an extent, he says, Hunters) are doing so well in the Arenas. When you can break out a ton of damage and debuffs during someone else's global cooldown, you're going to go a long way towards winning.

And it'll be interesting to see where this all goes in the future. With the recent changes to spell haste and the curving up of gear in the expansion, things are just going to get faster and faster-- players are going to be able to push out damage quicker and quicker, and crowd control will be more and more powerful.

Screwface on the forums has an interesting idea about a PvP tweak, even though his implementation isn't quite right. He says that since healers are so overpowered in PvP (well that's his first problem), abilities like Rend and Garrote should not only bleed blood, but also bleed mana off of casters. Of course, simply making all bleed abilities also take off mana would make them overpowered on their own, so his plan of making a sweeping change like that doesn't quite compute.

But the idea of more abilities that directly affect mana is an interesting one. Right now, there are only four "mana drain" spells in the game (warlocks can steal mana for themselves, priests can turn mana into damage, and hunters can sting mana off of a target). But as much as mana pools and regen have grown in the last patch, it's true that there hasn't been a balance in the opposite direction. No, warriors don't need another buff, but what if shaman were given a mana drain totem somewhere in the next ten levels? Or Boomkins got a spell that negated mana over time?

It's nothing to play around with lightly. But Blizzard does have to come up with ten more levels of abilities and talents for the next expansion, and messing with mana is something they haven't done much of lately. In Northrend we might not only be worried about health and DPS, but mana draining and mana attacks might become another piece of the class balance puzzle.

Drito brings up an interesting question on the forums: Why no taunting in PvP? I really don't think Blizzard will ever implement any form of taunt in PvP, because at this point the general direction seems to be headed away from players losing control of their characters (as in, all the fear nerfs), and no matter what form taunt appears in, it'll likely mean losing control of the taunted character, no matter for how long.

But it is interesting to try and think the dev's thoughts through as to why they didn't include it in the first place. We've heard all along that Blizzard is aiming to make the same spells usable in both situations (so it's not a completely different game when you head into PvP). A Taunt spell in PvP obviously wouldn't create aggro, but it might make the player's next spell or attack target the taunter, or give the taunted player a debuff that lets them only attack the taunter (no other actions for the duration). Distract definitely doesn't work the same way in PvP that it does in PvE, but it does at least work. It's not hard to see Taunt being the same way.

Of course, it's hard to see the devs giving any more cool abilities to Warriors, either-- they're doing just fine as is. But putting in an ability like this would definitely spice up group PvP, and add some extra tactics to taking on human enemies.

We've definitely had this conversation before, but Bhou on the EU forums brings it up yet again: why don't we treat the various races like they, y'know, are those various races? He asks why we can't skin Taurens for leather, but that brings up all the other race issues in Azeroth. Why aren't Undead immune to fear? Why aren't Gnomes tameable? Oh wait, that last one might not be right (though it would be funny).

But besides the game balance problems, the fact is that the racial abilities are about as well-represented as they're going to get (and in fact, if there are any changes in the future, they'll probably be towards conformity rather than radically away from it). You can't skin Tauren because, guess what, they're humanoids. Undead can't be immune because guess what, they're humanoids, too, and while a weakness to holy spells might make the game interesting, it won't help towards balance.

The Warcraft world is a mean one, but would the Alliance really go so far as to skin fallen Taurens on the battlefield anyway? For game balance or for lore reasons, it just doesn't make sense.

A few hours ago, Eyonix posted on the WoW forums regarding another change to the Hunter skill Aimed Shot in patch 2.3. The ability, which has already gained a healing debuff akin to Mortal Strike, will now also have a reduced cast time. The shot will now take a flat 3 seconds to perform, which is a half a second drop from its previous time of 3.5 seconds. In addition, Eyonix also mentioned that the developers are monitoring the ability's effectiveness and may further reduce the cast time after 2.3 goes live.

As is often the case on the WoW forums, there is a rather large outcry over this change, the latest in a series of buffs to hunters. In discussing and defending the change, Eyonix suggests that the developers are trying to make this skill more appealing to the class in addition to helping them be more viable in PvP overall. What are your thoughts on the subject?