Out of ammo in Cataclysm

Never again. You’ll never see the dreaded “Ammo needs to be in the paper doll ammo slot before it can be fired” message again when Cataclysm comes out.

I have to say I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I welcome the fact that we will no longer be caught off-guard, either in an instance or while questing. It has happened to even the best hunter out there. Of course that it can get serious if happens in an instance and some people even state that it’s one of the ways of finding out if someone is a hunter or a huntard. I usually take extra caution when I know I’m going to do an instance and it’s like the very first 3 items I confirm on my mental checklist. Ammo, ammo, ammo, water… And that’s pretty much it. Running out of ammo is bad. And it’s the only “bad” point.

On the other hand there are a few small things that we will lose with the removal of ammo.

First of all I liked the fact that we use ammo and the fact that we use different ammo for bows/crossbows and guns. RPGs are a lot about building your character (your in-game character, not your actual character) and getting ammo for your weapon added to it. Going to the ammo vendor, or getting ammo from an engineer. Sometimes even getting it made for me gave me the feeling of developing my hunter, improving it. Even more when I got my ammo from the said engineer. I was doing stuff for my character.
Now, the other thing that I will miss is the special ammo. The fact that there are special, crafted ammo (the one that engineers do) that increased my damage. You can use the regular vendor ammo or get some special one from the AH or from an engineer. You got some small extra boost that helped your damage. Not much, but enough that, added shot after shot, added up to some thousands of points of damage on the long run. And it feels good.

I wish that Blizzard could come up with some sort of commitment here. Ok drop the actual bullet-count (or arrow count) but it would be nice to still have the ammo slot and just add some sort of artifact that increases damage done by bullets. Kind like a trinket, but for the ammo.  Make some regular ones sold by vendors and then some really cool ones dropped by mobs in instances and crafted by engineers. Therefore you’d remove the infamous “no ammo” messages and still have the nice, warm, fuzzy feeling of fine-tuning your hunter.