Sean

I'm not sure I'm feeling Longevity - it does bring BW down to a 1.4m cooldown, but that completely desycns it from Bloodfury, Haste Potions, ect.

 

Terp

First thoughts:

Bear Trap would be exactly what hunters needed for PvP, if it weren't a trap. Hunters need some way to not be kited by their dps targets. All other PvP issues aside, it's an absurdity unique to the class and needed to be addressed. And Bear Trap looks to address that. Assuming it'll function like all other traps though, it will still need to be triggered, and it will still cause all the other traps to cooldown. Also depends on if it can be shifted out of (It's a bloody bear trap, it better not be) or dispelled.

Beastmastery seems nice. Pet attack speed is going to be barely above 1.0 with Windfury, SS, and Frenzy. If there's any sort of Cobra Reflexes type thing in the Pet Talent tree, things are going to get absurd along with Lust and Drums and whatever else.

Survival is distressing. I'm not a fan of the Imp Tracking change, as I typically leave Track Hidden up in arena. But more than that, the new talents aside from Hunting Party divide themselves up strictly between pvp and pve, something the other two don't. The entire tree is still very stratified actually, but I don't think anyone was expecting miracles. I suppose having two different specs in one tree is better than having useless junk, but still.

 

Disargeria

True, but it also reduces the cooldowns on the pet abilities, which look to be very powerful.

 

Doodicus

Here's a thought for Chimera shot. When you reapply a sting does it refresh or overwrite the old one?

 

Sean

Somewhat. In the Ferocity tree that brings Rabid down to 7s from 10s, but that's kind of irrelevant as Rabid has a 30second duration. It does bring Call of the Wild down to 3.5 mins from 5 minutes, which is very nice. Though, Call of the Wild has a 100 focus cost - I guess you'd have to do a bit of micromanaging to use it a second/third time in a fight.

Ah, I guess more importantly - it brings Roar of Recovery from the Cunning tree down to 4.2m from 6m.

I've been messing around with both trees a bit and I'm definitely liking both Ferocity and Cunning, but not terribly impressed with the Tenacity tree.

 

Gurth

Marks gonna be top dps again by a mile.

With the change made to Steady shot, BM lost most of its advantage over other specs, and the new talents seems to only help with efficiency rather than dps.

MM, on the other hand had huge dps buffs, regadless of chimera shot, which looks really weak to me. Extremely mana intensive to use and dps wise will probably do the same as arcane shot.


This will probably be my raid build:

7-59-5

 

Norgl

The addition of customisable pet talents/skills is just fantastic, such a great move towards making interesting and unique combinations. The additions to Beast Mastery make it look huge in terms of raw dps, adding a dps specced pet to the equation should lead to some great numbers. I would certainly look to include a large number of the new end-tier talents in a BM PvE spec, something like the 51/15/5 linked earlier sacrificing Aspect Mastery for the more useful Longevity.

Survival looks equally awesome as a PvE spec, more than likely to push Marks out of the equation once again. The 51 talenter Explosive Shot looks highly situational, I would imagine it's rather useless in a PvE build, so would skip it and look towards something around a 7/14/50.

The two things that myself and I'm sure many others are grateful for are the Improved Tracking and Kill Shot (yay ranged execute!). I had been set on playing a Protection Warrior for the expansion but I can safely say these changes will keep me more than happy to stick with my Hunter.

 

Disargeria

Oh, you've found the pet talent trees? I've been looking for a while, but I haven't found anything on them, yet.

 

Zediono

At first I thought the same thing, but I realised that even in fights right now, this can be pretty handy. For example, I'd consider using it for the last 3 ticks of burn on brutallus if pots are on cooldown. If there are some fights like that in wotlk, I can see it being useful in those kinds of situations. And ofc, trying to save money on repair bills for the win :P

 

Gleithan

I'm assuming you are talking about the pet talent trees. Would it be possible to post some screenshots/mre information about the talents (or point me in the right direction if they are up somewhere)? How powerful are five extra talent points from the Beast Mastery talent going to be?

 

Garf

Could you post details about the actual talent trees? I've not been able to find information on that yet. Edit: Wow, that's some fast posting going on here... I'll leave the post up because of the micromanagement question below, though.


And related to focus management - I'm not quite sure how that's supposed to work. With all the very expensive abilities on long cooldowns, this will pretty much mean we'll have to manually manage pet focus instead of having autocast up on focus dumps like claw/bite. That sounds like an awful lot of micromanagement, like playing two characters at once?

 

Beatricx

I was thinking something along the lines of this for BM
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

 

Sean

I'm actually logged on the Beta right now and messing around with them. I could write them all out. It would take me a bit though.

 

Ralnar

BW
120s cooldown -> 30% reduction = 92s cooldown (120 / 1.3 = 92.3)

Let's round to 90s cool down, that lines it up really well with 3m cool downs but breaks it for the 2m ones

000 sec = BW/2m Powers (blood fury/most trinkets)/3m Powers (rapid fire/Troll zerking)
090 sec = BW
120 sec = 2m powers
180 sec = BW/3m Powers
240 sec = 2m powers
270 sec = BW
360 sec = 2m powers/3m Powers/BW
- repeat -

The big swing here is going to actually be trinkets and racial powers.

If you're a troll, you'd definitly want to have the 90sec BW and the 180sec Rapid fire to line up with bezerking

If you're a orc (or trinket lover) you may get more performance out of the 2m BW and 4m RF and but the talent points else where (since there are some great dmg gains at really low tiers)

 

Sean

Here's the Ferocity tree (sorry about he formatting, I've never really put this kind of thing together):

Tier 1:
Cobra Relfexes (2)
Dash/Dive (1)
Great Stamina (3)
Natural Armor (2)

Tier 2:
Improved Cower (2)
Loyalty (2)
Spiked Collar (3)
Boar's Speed (1)

Tier 3:
Avoidance (3)
Lionhearted (2)
Charge (1)

Tier 4:
Heart of the Phoenix (1) Req - 2/2 Loyalty
Spider's Bite (2)
Great Resistance (3)

Tier 5:
Rabid (1) Req - 3/3 Avoidance
Lick Your Wounds (1) Req - Heart of the Phoenix 1/1
Call of the Wild (1) Req - Spider's Bite 3/3

 

Disargeria

Looks like a tanking tree. Meh.

 

Sean

That's the main DPS tree. Cunning is the "utility" tree. Tenacity is the "Tanking" tree.

 

Serpent's Choice

It is going to be difficult to judge the relative value of several of the new talents until we get a better feel for the mana pools and mana consumption rates of WotLK characters. But, several things stand out already.

Beast Mastery

BM gets the best synergy out of its new talents. Longevity increases the rate at which pet specials are performed (and shortens the cooldown on Big Red Kitty to boot). Cobra Strikes turns pet specials into Frenzy engines. Invigoration turns the Frenzy engine into a mana recovery tool. How much of this chain is necessary depends on the mana environment in WotLK; with the way BM hunters currently play, Invigoration might be unneeded. If more demands are placed on mana supply, the full talent chain makes a very self-sufficient character.

Aspect Mastery isn't bad, but also isn't a big a benefit as I would have hoped for as a Tier 10 talent. Depending on need for Invigoration and the overall quality of "Exotic pets", some builds may drop Aspect Mastery to dig deeper into MM. It is of course impossible to comment intelligently on the BM 51 talent at this time. I feel confident that any of the pet abilities linked to currently known pet families won't fall under this talent. Whatever will, though, we're probably just going to have to wait and see.

Marksmanship

MM finally got some talents. The move of Careful Aim and Mortal Shots to Tier 2 make some 13 or so points in MM (Lethal/Mortal/Careful) virtually required for all builds.

Below the shuffled points, in the realm of deep-MM talents, Piercing Shots looks promising, especially if boss armor class increases somewhat in WotLK, as many have expected. Nevertheless, against a 6600-AC opponent, PS provides 396 armor penetration for steady shots, with the appropriate scaling improvement in damage based on worn armor pen. Wild Quiver (hunter Lightning Overload!) and Improved Steady Shot provide proc-based dps upgrades. In the case of ISS, deep MM players will need to respond to procs rather than rolling a rotation, which I think is clearly the intended direction of the expansion. Marked for Death is a solid, undramatic dps upgrade of about 7.5%.

Which brings us to Chimera Shot. Chimera with Serpent Sting is a waste of time and mana, both for the Sting in the first place and for the inefficient follow-up shot. Chimera with Viper Sting has some potential in pvp because it produced drain that cannot be removed with a poison cure (and provokes questions raised earlier in the thread about the use of the "burn" wordings), but is unquestionably garbage in pve. But Chimera with Scorpid? Seriously? 60%/40%/20% damage reduction on the next three attacks will be amazingly strong against bosses if they are allowed to suffer this effect. This is one of two effects that I find worrisome for their potential to mandate effect rotations for raiding hunters.

Survival

Always something of the bastard stepchild of the hunter trees, SV got some attention, but not as much as I would have liked to see, as an SV raider. In early SV, the collapse of the Tier 1 talents into Improved Tracking is a welcome change. Players of other builds with points to spare may consider dropping 5 here (notably, the 13 mandatory MM plus these 5 SV talents still saves 2 points over the previous MM mandate). I'm still a bit sad about the general "softness" of Tier 2-4, especially for the raider. Per the patch notes, Trap Mastery on Tier 5 is being removed (because +hit now applies to traps), with Clever Traps renamed to Trap Mastery. These changes are not reflected on the current talent tree; it is unknown whether anything will replace the Tier 5 talent.

The deep SV talents are questionable. Whether or not SV players will run the new talents depends, in my view, almost exclusively on the mana landscape. Hunting Party is the key talent here, making SV hunters into erstwhile shadow priests. The effect has an 8 second internal cooldown, but calculations on its effective mp5 based on an 8 second refresh time are overly optimistic even for the crit chances boasted by endgame SV hunters. A more likely average refresh time is in the 12 second range. Exact numbers are difficult to determine until we know more about the WotLK shot sequence and can determine hard values for shots-per-minute. Assuming a 12 second average refresh, Hunting Party provides 8.3 mp5 per 1000 mana in pool for each party member. At a likely WotLK mana pool of 15K, the talent is an effective 125 mp5. This is probably good enough for characters already running Expose Weakness to dig for, although raidwide mana recovery is, in general, more available in WotLK (most notably through the raidwide effect of shaman mana totems).

The best path to reach Hunting Party is through Sniper Training, although before 30%, it is only about a 2% dps increase for 3 talent points. Alternative talent routes go through poorer abilities. Potent Venom is subpar; assuming a mana environment capable of supporting frequent use of Serpent Sting, it is +3% dps for 4 talent points, assuming 100% uptime is maintained. While new ranks of Serpent Sting are considerable upgrade, I seriously doubt if the change is sufficient to make Potent Venom even a consideration. The other Tier 9 talent--Point of No Escape--has attracted some attention because its current wording suggests a +6% crit bonus that applies raidwide. However, I am fairly certain that this talent is a red herring in the raid environment (it is, notably, not bad in pvp or instancing). For it to work at all against bosses requires that the Bear Trap dot can land on mobs immune to root, and that said dot does not drop to incoming damage. Even if both those are true, and PoNE can effect raid bosses, the loss of hunter dps caused by moving in and out of melee range to shuttle traps is almost certain to overcome any potential benefit from the buff itself, before even considering the effects of that movement on Expose Weakness uptime or the added risks of exposing the hunter to melee range effects.

The SV 51 is lackluster, but might be viable if mana is permissive. With an assumed 3000 AP in WotLK, Explosive Shot is roughly 2600 damage over 2 seconds to each affected target, every 6 seconds, but at conisderable mana cost. It is "better than Volley" for tightly packed groups, but that is damning with faint praise.

Pets

It is too early to say much about the new pet system, although a couple of the apparent pet abilities stand out. Crocolisks, long one of the most useless and derided pet families, appear to have come into their own with an extremely potent counterattacking effect that will, if it works as it appears to, serve very well for soloing and in pet-tanking situations.

But the tallstrider ability, Dust Cloud is the second raid-defining effect I alluded to in my MM comments. If this goes live and can affect bosses, then three hunters with flamingos can keep a -30% accuracy debuff up on a boss at all times. I find it difficult to imagine that any loss in pet dps from "real" pet families could possibly outweigh this large a change to tank survivability. I fervently hope that WotLK raiding is not defined by three-hunter Scorpid/Chimera and pink flamingo-Dust Cloud rotations.

 

Zediono

Thanks a lot Sean

Oh, avoidance 3/3? That sounds ftw.

By the way, if you can access any info on (some of) the questions I posted here, could you take a while to answer some of them please? Thanks a lot.

 

Sean

Here's the Cunning tree:

Tier 1:
Cobra Reflexes (2)
Dash/Dive (1)
Great Stamina (3)
Natural Armor (2)

Tier 2:
Boar's Speed (1)
Mobility (2) Req - Dash/Dive 1/1
Spiked Collar 3/3

Tier 3:
Avoidance (3)
Lionhearted (2)
Carrion Feeder (1)

Tier 4:
Great Resistance (3)
Owl's Focus (2)
Cornered (2)
Feeding Frenzy (2) Req - Spiked Collar 3/3

Tier 5:
Wolverine Bite (1) Req - Great Resistance 3/3
Roar of Recovery (1) Req - Owl's Focus 2/2
Bullheaded (1) Req - Cornered 2/2

 

Disargeria

Oh, I see... Each tree has similar basic abilities in it. The stamina, armor, and such threw me off.

 

Neruse

How many points does it take to get down to the next pet tier?

Non-BM pets get 15 points, BM pets get 20. But if it takes 5 points per tier then the last tier can't be reached.

 

Sean

Yeah, 3/3 Avoidance is a 75% reduction.

And I'll try:

General - I haven't really played with stuff much yet and I'm not sure on the formula

BM - Invigoration does not have a CD and I don't know what Exotic pets are yet

MM - New Rank of Mark is 300 atk, 30 per hit, stacks up to 1200 - yes that's real. I don't know about the armor values, and yes Chimera shot can crit AND its extra effect can crit (I had the Serpent Sting extra hit from it Crit while testing it out).

Surv - Don't know about the trap/mana stuff. Explosive shot does scale and it can crit. It also effects its own target and is basically like a 3x shot on the target. It's actually pretty nice.

 

Sean

It's 3 points per tier - the tooltips are wrong.