Ouch

The nerf bat hurts.

Even speccing Survival - the "new DPS spec" - and working like a demon in Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff to get the hang of Lock and Load procs, it hurts. Badly.

Damage output is down with the clothies, and leading the damage meters is no longer a certain thing, even in fights that should totally belong to hunters, and would have in Burning Crusade days. Warlocks and mages are back in the picture, and Death Knights who know their stuff totally own the meters now. And our raid utility? Still as close as dammit to zero as it ever was... no CC to speak of, a less-than-mediocre mana replenishment capability, and to get the "better" raid buffs one needs to go back to Marksmanship (now even weaker than in early WotLK days) or Beastmastery - the spec Blizzard had in their sights for the nerf in the first place.

Now we're mediocre-to-good damage dealers in fights that totally suit us, and totally underperforming in fights that don't. Raiding is suddenly not fun anymore.

And let's not talk about PvP... our "insane" damage output used to be just about enough to make up for our inability to deal with any of the melee classes - but now that it's been nerfed to hell and back even battlegrounds hold no pleasure anymore. Without Bestial Wrath and Intimidation to save our sorry, scrawny little butts even the clothies are having a field day against hunters on the battlefield - and the melee classes attack as at will with even more complete impunity than before. (The only melee class that seems to respect hunters at all is rogues, a class whose pupularity seems to have taken a serious nosedive since the expansion, and for good reason. I do pity them, honestly.)

When Blizzard blue-posted on the forums announcing the planned changes, there was an outcry in the hunter community. We knew that the nerf was going to hurt, and we also knew that the scale of the imbalance was nowhere near as large as some had made it out to be. Some people responded very rationally and eloquently among the numerous semi-literate probably-on-drugs posts that followed the original blue post, describing that a minor scaling down would be enough to retain hunters' positions in the fights that were "made for us" - especially as more and more Death Knights, warlocks and warriors were getting the hang of the ways in which WotLK had changed their classes. These well-reasoned posts were clearly ignored by Blizzard (including incredulous cries in response to the new way in which deterrence works - I mean, really... when was the last time a melee class attacked anything from the front without an immediate plan to get behind them?), and now the status quo reigns. /clap {sarcastically}

I suddenly find myself no longer looking forward to the boss encounters I once used to relish, and deriving no pleasure from my PvP breaks in the battlegrounds.

It is probably fair to say that I am hardly even enjoying huntering anymore.

And that makes me sad.