Does anyone have a screenshot of Mend Pet / Imp ment pet talent on PTR? I cannot log in at the time being. Does it still retain the chance to cleanse pet of stuff and they added the 10/20% mana reduction, or did they just switch the two?
I really wish they'd make up their minds about the damn talent trees. As it stands right now, making Expose Weakness a 100% proc is just a disgusting raid buff. It'll definitely be up about 99.9% of the time, which... I don't get the point. It seems like the way Trueshot Aura *should* work if it were to scale with gear.
It's going to outperform anything in Marks as far as raid synergy goes; plus, they've just given you 2 points out of Master Marksman (an 8th-tier talent) straight into Survival Instincts (a 5th-tier talent), which is boggling.
Survival's PvP viability hasn't improved much either, they're really just muddying the talent trees in an attempt to fix a few things here and there. The fix to Kill Command is an awful long time coming though, I will actually use it now.
Its really a half-ass attempt to fix the survival tree. Master Tactician is still very sketchy and the first 20 points are all filler. That's a lot of talent points lost on the way towards the good stuff in the mid-bottom.
Aaw, and I just got my Scarab of the Infinite Cycle!
The part of me that liked collecting a +healing set for is a bit saddened to see that taken away. What else was there to do every time we got the "wrong" mail item rewards on the way to level 70.
Guess at least it couldn't have come at a better time along with all the good changes.
Its really a half-ass attempt to fix the survival tree. Master Tactician is still very sketchy and the first 20 points are all filler. That's a lot of talent points lost on the way towards the good stuff in the mid-bottom.
It is indeed no giant fix for the survival tree, but it made it a bit less "guh". Having EW up far more often (as in, all of the time I guess) and 4% AP (tiny, but it's something) isn't anything to sneer at. I can agree however that Master Tact is quite bleh at the moment, and it's disturbing it recieved no second glances.
So after shooting Dr. boom a few thousand times I started thinking a raid buffed Survival spec that will still put up good personal dps numbers. This is what I've come up with. Picking up mortal shots and barrage over getting MT and readiness and getting scatter shot over sting. Anyone have any thoughts on this spec, is losing Imp hawk and FF to big a deal?
The buff to our PvE Raiding DPS was nice, but didn't really address the main issues concerning hunter PvE Raiding DPS: 1) the only way for us to do competitive DPS is for our pet to be attacking, 2) and for us to have no mana concerns (i.e. acccess to a Shadow Priest, etc.). I've topped damage meters on Gruul, Magtheridon, and Hydross, but the only way for me to do it is to have a Shadow Priest. And yes, I still use mana potions even then. (For those who checked my Armory and are curious, I've been playing around with BM since I did those tests on the Hunter Mechanics thread, and so far on fights where my pet can stay out the entire time it's surpassed my MM damage rather handily.)
Increasing our damage comparatively to other classes after the patch is nice, especially when you take into account the consumables changes and slight nerfs almost every class received. However, we are still severely gimped by our mana pools, and nothing I have seen indicates that Blizzard even feels this is a problem. Unless they expect us all to spec >41 points in Survival just to be self-sustaining on long fights?
Also, no one seems to realize that Blizzard just nerfed us in the face when it comes to PvP (more specifically, Arenas). One of the few things you could do as a hunter on high-ranked Arena teams was spec/gear into survivability and traps, and act as a roving Frost Trap bitch that can be healed through focus fire (because hunters = second only to warlocks in kill priority). The "slight" nerf is actually pretty huge in these regards. The buff to our PvE DPS is negated in most regards because: 1) Hunter's Mark can be dispelled, 2) we will rarely get to build up HM because we can rarely even shoot at our targets thanks to minimum range + LoS in Arenas, 3) we can't really take advantage of the new Kill Command because we can rarely shoot at our targets to begin with.
I'm still confused as to why they nerfed Flare yet again... Hunters were barely in any Arena teams to begin with, and Flare lasted barely long enough to be useful as it was.
I've been thinking about the entrapment nerf(the only one I was too concerned with) and it seems pretty weak. Since frost trap's only going to pulse every 10s(afaik), and entrapment's not certain to proc even then, the diminishing returns should never really be a problem. And the 5s to 4s duration isn't much of an issue either, especially if it's just going to be dispelled or overwritten by BoF.
I just wish they'd change counterattack and readiness to provide us with some way other than TBW to escape roots/snares. Maybe I'm biased, but I've always seen survival as mainly a PvP tree, and marks as a PvE / PvP tree(when you have support, such as pallies). It just seems like the EW change could've been better placed in MM along with the SI change, and that survival could have instead received some much needed survivability buffs.
I've been testing against Dr. Boom and I used to do 88k damage in 120 seconds, now I do 97k, gaining close to 70 dps due to new hunter's mark. And no other difference in gear, except my meta gem doesn't work, hence 24 AP less than before even.
There is however a very annoying bug on PTR when casting steadyshot / aimed shot, which spins you around when you try to cast it sometimes.
That said, i've finally gotten on PTR and yes, this new hunters mark is quite swell. Seeing upwards of 60+ dps increase from it. Being able to use our pets much more often (and keeping them alive) should add a nice boost as well. The problem of maintaining mana still remains. I have Imp Aspect of the Hawk, so I am not about to viper for entire fights, but even with viper you can still run out of mana drinking super after super :P.
There is however a very annoying bug on PTR when casting steadyshot / aimed shot, which spins you around when you try to cast it sometimes.
That said, i've finally gotten on PTR and yes, this new hunters mark is quite swell. Seeing upwards of 60+ dps increase from it. Being able to use our pets much more often (and keeping them alive) should add a nice boost as well. The problem of maintaining mana still remains. I have Imp Aspect of the Hawk, so I am not about to viper for entire fights, but even with viper you can still run out of mana drinking super after super :P.
The only way to fix the mana problems outside of JoW and Shadow priests would be for Blizzard to just straight up reduce the costs of all our spells, effectively giving us more mana. But the only way I would see this is a massive amount of QQing on the forums and right now, the hunters there are still deciding whether this patch is good or bad.
I just thought I'd just throw in my thoughts that the effect of Counterattack should definitely be changed into a knockback effect. That'd really make it hard to spec for Silencing Shot for PvP.
I'm a little disappointed that there's no fix for the problem of getting too much stacked haste. With a Wolfslayer, Rapid Fire, Quick Shots, and Serpent Swiftness 5/5, my attack speed drops to 1.22 and it's basically impossible to steady between each auto, or even to use instants between autos reliably. I was kinda hoping they'd unlink Steady Shot from the GCD as well, which doesn't seem like it'd hurt anything.
Has anyone else noticed the "turning" bug when you're casting Steady Shot? From time to time, my character turns around, usually 90-180 degrees. This is of course very annoying seeing as it lowers my DPS by a lot, and having to rotate my character.
This only seems to happen while casting Steady Shot; and I wondered if anyone else has noticed the same thing? Why is it happening?
Edit: I missed that point in the above post, my bad :/ My question still stands though, has anyone got any idea of what is causing this?
After about 7 hours on the PTR last night going between these 3 specs:
41 BM / 20 MM
7 BM / 21 MM /33 SURV
21 MM / 40 SURV
7 BM / 45 MM / 9 SURV
I haven't really been impressed with any huge difference than what I see on live. The real thing I can't test is the potential sustained DPS as full BM on Dr. Boom as I can with survival and marks. I realize that I can use pets in all different specs but as you know the BM pet is a significant part of damage output for that tree. With all 4 specs over several 2 minute intervals using only steady shots I've noticed that all specs seem to hover around 750-800 dps at the end of the 2m period.
This is leading me to believe that including the pet into the scenario will boost that DPS quite a bit and I'm actually on the fence about ACTUALLY thinking about trying full BM as a raiding spec?!!.... (can't believe I just said that).
At any rate, the Hunter's mark boost was a way to counter our indirect nerf by not being able to use several potions anymore to boost our damage. We're basically the same damage output on the PTR as we are on LIVE but we have to wait 30-40 seconds to get to it as Hunters mark stacks up to full power.
I'm still not sure why the hell Blizzard didn't change Master Tactician? /boggle.
P.S. - The bug with steady shot 45-90 degree turning while lining up a shot is REALLY annoying.
Yeah the rotation bug makes reliably Dr. Boom testing almost impossible because a random turn will mess up your timing and cancel a few shots.
Also EU PTR is crowded and loads of people use Dr. Boom to figure out stuff, so I haven't actually gotten conditions to do reliable stuff with. Also the world server crashes every 5 minutes or so, or at least when I try to test.
A few things:
*) Anybody noticed that the paper-doll crit rating may be wrong. I saw a 20% paper-doll on my surv build, but recap measured 30% over 2 minutes for both auto and steady.
*) Mana longevity is huge for a TotH build. In 2 minutes I used only half my mana on a steady/auto rotation with AotH. On a MM or BM build I'd be closing in on oom at that point.
*) Damage levels of survival are still not stellar from what I have seen, but again I haven't had reliable conditions yet. EW should indeed be up almost always, and I also don't really have an agi-buffed kit to test, so this is also kind of gear dependent.
After few hours on PTR I think that:
- KC is still quite useless in rotation unless you have no auto clipping problems and too much mana as its crap damage/mana (steady hit x2 more for little more mana) and cannot be used while steady is casting
- all tree builds can do around same dps using mana-wise rotation which is just steady spam (as arcane1 got nerfed and steady1 seems to be better than multi1 with new hunters mark [besides MM of course])
- every tree has now something:
* MM offer highest dps without pet when using multi6 and arcane9 in rotation (other builds does not seem to benefit THAT much from increased ranks)
* BM offer highest dps when pet is useful even using mana-wise rotation as BM pet seems to do double dps that MM/Surv pet does (however you need to choose -> Imp. HM or mana problems)
* Survival gives nice raid buff that is up most of the time and is best mana-wise (eff + thrill talents)
Note: It is based on blasted land lovely mobs and without raid buffs. I think in raid MM have chance to overpower BM even on pet friendly encounters due to lower pet dps (glancing, miss etc.) and better MM scaling.
04/13/07, 6:55 PM
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