Auto Shot with no wind-up and wands that fire on the move: why WoW Forever kiting feels 'too easy'

Classic Hunters learned one skill before anything else: stop, let the shot wind up, move. In the WoW Forever beta, that timing seems to be gone, and players cannot agree whether that is good.

There are no official patch notes for this. Everything below comes from testers in the beta and could change in the next build.

What changed

In Classic, Auto Shot had a short wind-up of about half a second, during which you had to stand still. Wand Shoot worked the same way. In Forever, testers report:

• no wind-up. The shot fires the moment you stop moving, limited only by its internal cooldown (the swing timer);
• you can queue the shot while running, stop for a split second, and keep going;
• a melee attack resets the ranged swing timer, so the old trick of fitting Raptor Strike between shots, melee weaving, no longer works;
• Auto Shot does not switch between melee and ranged on its own when a target closes in. You have to restart the right attack yourself.

The animation has not caught up either. Players say Auto Shot sometimes fires without its animation, which makes it hard to tell whether a shot went off.

“Kiting is too easy”

An EU forum thread says the change lets Hunters and wand users kite almost forever with very little effort. In the old version, stopping cost you ground. Now it costs almost nothing, so a mob can chase a Hunter, or a Priest with a wand, across a zone without reaching them.

On the US forums, one player is blunter: the change does not feel like the original Hunter at all. Others want Auto Shot clipping back, because shots that ignore what you are doing feel disconnected.

Wands are the other surprise

The same smoothness applies to wands, and they hit hard. A thread titled “Wanding Is most OP Spec” says wand Priests melt enemies at level 20, sometimes out-damaging their own spells, so Smite and Mind Blast barely get used. Others point out that wands were always strong early on, and that it is too soon to judge. Our tips article already noted that wands seem to scale with spell power in Forever.

Hunters have bigger requests

For most Hunters, the wind-up is not the main complaint. The biggest thread, “Why do you hate Hunters?”, with more than 130 replies, is about the dead zone, the gap where you are too close to shoot and too far to melee. Other requests include a dedicated quiver slot instead of a bag slot, and automatic switching between ranged and melee attacks. Some players point out that other classes got modern fixes, like a Druid resurrection and a Paladin taunt, so why not Hunters?

Our take

We do not know yet whether the missing wind-up is a deliberate change or a side effect of running on a modern client. Blizzard has not said either way. It makes leveling a Hunter or a wand class much easier, but it also makes it much harder to judge them in the beta. If it is fixed, expect Hunters and wand users to feel noticeably slower.

For the level 20 builds that work today, see the Hunter talents and the class tier list.