Hunters and the Lack of Ranged Weapons in MoP

Hello my two readers,

I've been meaning to make this post many many weeks ago when my hunter had first dinged level 90 and began his epic adventure to find a proper bow or gun to slay baddies with.

It was a horrible experience. Only a handful of heroics dropped guns/bows and on the outset, only one single boss dropped a bow in raid, the 6th boss in Mogushan Vaults. After dozens and dozens of heroics, I finally found a 463 gun and used the JP upgrade to bring it up to 471 in preparation for the release of Terrace.

Heart of Fear was released, and lo and behold, oh, there were no ranged weapons so fuck you hunters go farm Mogushan Vaults. Ok..

Terrace had one single weapon, the only sha-touched weapon that we can use and thus began the cycle of insanity. You would have thunk that Yogg'saron was the master of insanity? Hell no, he's got nothing on Lei Shi.

Ah Lei Shi, the one boss who drops pretty much everything useful for every single class yet refuses to yield anything more than a belt. Speaking of belts, why are there so many belts in TOES? Do I really need to choose between twelve different agility belts? Many times I got so frustrated that I didn't even both staying and facerolling the Sha of Fear.

Weeks and weeks passed, I got sick of my hunter's bad luck and skipped many weeks but according to my log I have a dozen Lei Shi kills and of course every week, gold and any other item but tier and the gun. I've read many other folks have had even worse luck, going five months with no new weapon, and jeez, how do you stand it? Why didn't you just quit and play your warlock? (Jokes, I did.)

Coming from the standpoint of my druid and warlock, I had a 476 through inscription on the get-go and wasn't really too worried about upgrades because it was purple and somehow a purple item will satiate a lot of folks in this regards. Are rogues also as screwed with this system? Do agi daggers even exist?

So I thought, okay, maybe the intention with the game is that upgrades aren't that big a deal anyways and we should just enjoy everything else. This is true, except that multiple weeks of NOTHING is quite aggravating, despite the fight being mind numbingly easy. On one hand was I being too entitled to loot that I should EXPECT an upgrade after 3 months? Well, the game sort of has changed to encourage that sort of thought, but maybe not. And honestly, the thing is that hunters aren't even that fun to play with anyways. To add insult to injury, here, don't have upgrades but also please mind your many 15,20,30,45,60 second cooldowns so don't even both looking at the screen thanks.

Then rejoice, Throne of Thunder is released and there are two relatively easy to get ranged weapons on the get-go. Of course, nothing on the first few attempts and I rage-semi-quit.

Then as we approached our very first real TOES run and we down Lei Shi with relative ease, i burned my token and got...nothing, but guess what was in her stupid treasure chest?

Ermagerd, a sher terched gern!

That's right, Tao'ren the Soul Burner. Pristine and untouched, ready to be shot repeatedly for months on end. I was the only hunter, actually come to think of it I am the only hunter who is still relatively active in our guild and I was elated. This was a different kind of excitement which brought me back to when epics were actually  very hard to come by. It brought me back to when I was freshly new to the game and was still using THOTTBOT to look up all the different bows/guns in the game. Back to when an epic was revered and cherished, and not just something you got and later ignored, only looking forward to replace it with something better. Another historical moment was when I won the ilvl 200 "epic" crossbow in heroic Utgarde Keep. It was scary, since anyone could roll need/greed on anything and we couldn't trade items and there was that tiny risk that someone would need the crossbow for gold or because they were crazy.
First you must understand the viewpoint as to WHY my hunter was so keen on getting an upgrade. It's not being entitled to epics, it's in his nature. You see, when I first started playing, I made sure that at every level I had the strongest possible weapon I could obtain at that level. And this brings us back to Thottbot. I manually mined and saved up gold for Hurricane, a level 34 epic bow just because it was the "best" one then (or maybe not). It was just my thing with the hunter and what MoP did was break this tradition for many months.

With the lack of filler-heroics, the ONLY place to gear up alts is through LFR and we all know what crazy madness can happen in there. Even if the runs are smooth, it's boring and again if you've run a warlock through anything, every other toon will feel weak as hell.

Anyways, that was my little rant/thing on stupid ranged weapons for this expansion. I won't wish you luck because I have a better suggestion for when you are frustrated, go roll a warlock.

Truny the Warlock