Sean

Er, pets at 70 have 120 sv all naturally.

 

Maax

Family ability is Serenity Dust - Spell - World of Warcraft .

Devs: Our nerfs will block out the sun!
Druids: Then we will tank in the shade.

 

Sean

Okay, new infos on Haste and GCD:

Before I was just testing by using traps and such and different haste gear. Well, I went and tested with shots and everything reset at 1.5 when using any shot - Steady, Arcane, ect.

When I put on haste gear and used mend pet, a trap, any "spell" like ability then the GCDs would reset at 1.401 with 111 haste. This is not the case with shots and haste gear - haste gear does not lower the GCD when using any type of shot.

Sorry for the confusion about this, I should have tested more thoroughly earlier.

Also, the Dragonspine Trophy did not effect either in any way.

 

Chul

Call of the Wild needs its range increased so hunters get the buff.

I wonder how much focus management we're going to have to do. Consider Rabid, which costs 60 focus, lasts 30s and has a 10s cooldown. The last thing we'd want is to crit giving our pets > 60 focus, then having Rabid cast again after the 10s cooldown, with 10-20s of the original buff still going. I'd rather they just gave it a 25s or 30s cooldown, so we can just leave it toggled on.
EDIT: Sorry, it's a stacking buff so is ok - need to learn to read.

I love Loyalty, as not only does it constantly heal your pet, but it means it should always be at 100% happyness. What does this mean? Well, if your pet dies and is resurrected, it should go happy quickly.

I don't understand Wolverine Bite. For 20 focus, it does 5 dmg .. only if the mob dodges?

Is Natural Protection only having 2 points available in the tanking tree right? Over a utility pet, you're really only gainging 2% dodge for 1 extra point going from 3/3 NP to 2/2 NP and 2/2 Pet Barding. Seems a little out.

While I don't expect our pets to tank heroics, they really need more stamina, dodge and parry than the tree is giving. I woudl recommend give Grace of the Mantis a 2%/4% parry chance as well. Also, it could use a sort of 'Cheat Death', where if a blow would normally kill your pet, you take the damage instead but say only 50% of it, and only useable say every minute.

 

Sean

I think that Wolverine Bite is broken, it clearly shouldn't be 5 damage.

Call of the Wild Definitely needs a range increase and I think it needs a focus reduction too.

 

Lhivera

It's a stacking buff, isn't it? With a cooldown that long, a miss means you lose your stack. At 10 secs, you can afford at least 1, possibly 2 misses depending on whether it evaluates the refresh or expiration first.

It's Mongoose Bite, essentially, and presumably will have its damage increased by AP/RAP, and that's probably the base damage at minimum level.

Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would've hidden from it in terror. -Ming the Merciless

 

Conscience

So with all the indepence of your damage from the weapon speed, anyone else seeing SV using really fast weapons? As anyone already pointed out, at current states you would only procc Hunting Party every ten to twelve seconds, which could be very well improved by a fast weapon. A very nice thing in this regard is Explosive Shot's capability to crit, _three_ (the tooltip reads more like two times, but I'm gonna trust the guy who postet about it for now) times - only speaking for affecting one target.
I didn't read the "your" damage in Potent Venom btw, so I thought it to be quite a good ability at first sight. In case SS will actually become a good ability, it might be worth taking anyways.
I think this "nerf" was very much needed, since it does more damage than any instant while having (at least in a raid environment) virtually the same casting time. Only reasons to shoot instants atm is filling the gaps where a Steady would delay the Auto, so in WotLK it might as well be outright Steady spam without this change.

 

Sean

That info is off btw if you read further - Yes, it has a 2s cast time, but it's still effected by every form of haste. My Steady Shots with Serpents and 111 haste rating is 1.4s cast. It's just that the tooltip is busted, I used Quartz for the actual timings.

I suppose this does nerf haste a bit since haste rating does not help shot GCD (only Mendpet/trap GCD) - 1.5 cap on steady shot usefulness and Cheeky said white damage haste doesn't really mean much anymore.

 

• Playered

Regarding exotic pets, a CM posted:

" We're still working on implementing this particular talent. The talent will allow you to train a different "class" of pets which we're calling "exotic" right now. Only hunters with this talent will be able to train those pets. They won't necessarily be "stronger" (though will all have unique abilities that you can only get from exotic pets), the extra power you should get from the talent will be from the additional pet skill points (pet talent points).

Devilsaur anyone?"

Could mean that there is a 4th talent tree for these perticular pets, guess time will tell how the extra points help out exactly (being able to aquire all the upper tier talents will be nice) - Hopefully the pets will get some visual perk.. like being a tiny bit larger (or less shrunken) or so.. naturally Devilsaurs would have to be a reduced in size a tad from their natural selves else Dalaran is going to be very crowded.

 

Sean

Just to reconfirm the Explosive Shot infos - I just respecced and went to test it again. It does hit 3 times. It has an initial tick, then 2 more super fast ticks for a total of 3.

And it can crit on every single one. Also, those three ticks apply to every target - not just 3 on the main and 2 on others, it's 3 on every target.

Edit: Also - it shares a CD with Arcane Shot.

Edit2: Explosive Shot crits do *not* give mana back with Thrill or Hunting Party.

 

Chul

Has pet scaling changed in any way? I'm curious if pets gain any of our crit.

 

Sean

Not that I can see. The character select still just shows Armor, Stamina, Resists, and Ranged Attack adding to them - nothing else.

 

Sean

Btw, Windfury totem reads as "The totem provides 16% melee and ranged haste to all party members within 20 yards. " - the patch notes only mentioned melee. I kinda assumed it was supposed to work with Ranged too though. Unfortunately, both the haste totems are broken and don't provide anything to anyone currently (went and found a shaman to test it out).

 

Frogar

does kill shot have the same CD as arcane?

 

Sean

I don't know. Kill Shot and Bear trap are no where to be found on the trainers or such. The spell data is in there, they're referenced in talents, but they're not actually in game.

It very well could be considering it's on a 6s CD too.

 

Tabiss

I was thinking about this for a raid MM build. There is one left over point that I would most likely place in focused aim. Unless Chimera shot/sting mechanics change.

I do like the changes to aimed shot. I believe I read that you can now shoot an auto while casting a steady shot, and if that's correct then what if you could do the same to aimed? This would be more of a MM thing than a BM since their auto shot speeds are different and aimed shot more than likely will still reset auto shot.
Just something to think about.

 

Negative

Shouldn't the haste be raid-wide?

 

Maax

Raid-wide totems are planned but NYI.

Devs: Our nerfs will block out the sun!
Druids: Then we will tank in the shade.

 

Negative

Ah, ok, thanks for the clarification.

 

Chul

Do pet families still offer different stats (i.e. cats have +10% dps, but -2% health), or are they all the same and the talent tree covers any differences?

 

Suspiria

Any news from Beta about Camo?

 

Arcazua

Wow, for once picking up and reading an EJ thread wasn't painful to go start to finish.


Like most of you, I've done a lot of thinking about the future of hunters in the expansion. My thinking has mostly been constrained to talent info, but unfortunately I'm finding that I've made a lot of assumptions on what I know of the game now, or what seems like it should be the case. I even went and made an entire thread over at TKA something analyzing the prospective DPS of each talent...with completely aberrant ideas of what damage will be like. (Cheeky, for example, suggested earlier that specials outclass auto damage, while I made an assumption they would be close to 50/50 since I didn't know how the delinking would play out.)

In the interests of discussing what could work for rotations, could someone spell out, in plain terms, what all the shots are that we conceivably could use and what the upside/downside to that skill is?


Off the top of my head, we have:

* Steady Shot
* Arcane Shot
* Multi Shot
* Kill Shot
* Explosive Shot
* Aimed Shot
* Dare I suggest Serpent Sting for surv builds?

But steady shot is now 2 seconds, I read earlier. Are there any other noteworthy mechanics we need to consider, other than that no clobbering ever occurs? I would never have guessed Explosive would trigger the listed damage three times over 2 seconds, i.e. I'd like to make some suggestions as to what rotations work versus other ideas, and how they are differentiated between talent specs, but if I'm operating on bad info, the results will be laughable. (Remember my old AEP system?)

If nothing else, what I really need to know is (1) the mana of each ability, (2) the damage that <somebody> is doing with them now, and (3) what other quirks are associated with them. I'm sure I could look up some of that info on WoWhead, but not everything is visible in a tooltip.




In other news, here are some quick thoughts about the (hunter) talent trees:

* Master's Call - can you use it on yourself, or if you are crowd controlled is it unusable? I don't see it as massively popular in PvE either way, but it's very different if it can get you out of jams.
* Invigoration - is absolutely insane if the tooltip is the complete tale. Combined with Cobra Strikes, you'll have some utterly ridiculous amount of mana regen. Either mana consumed is through the roof in Lich King (and marks is totally skee-rewed) or this is going to get changed.
* Cobra Strikes - synergy aside, it's not half-bad DPS. My pet currently gets about 1/3 of its damage from specials (as non-BM.) If I were to crit for sure on 3 consecutive attacks that would only have about a 15% chance otherwise, that's like doing an extra .85*3=~2.5 free special attacks. If you attack frequently enough that you can keep it mostly active, that's going to be a 20%+ damage increase for your pet.
* Longevity - not remarkable for the Bestial Wrath cooldown reduction, but those pet abilities could definitely see some mileage. Nothing like getting 40% of your mana pool back every ~4 minutes, eh? (Not that you'd need it with Invigoration!)
* Aspect Mastery - horrible. The only worthwhile bonus is off of Monkey, which nobody will ever use anyway. (I speak on behalf of people who do not PvP. Do not be alarmed if you're an arena-goer.)
* Beast Training - I have little to say about this other than I officially nominate this talent to carry the abbreviation of BMT for "Beast Mastery, the Talent," so we don't confuse it with "Beast Mastery the Tree."

* Careful Aim - amazing, but I have some further caveats I'll bring up at the end of the post.
* Mortal Shots - tier 2 helps flexibility with talent builts immensely. Now we have 10 points we can actually put in the other-other tree! Er, oops, I mean 7. Did I say 10? Oh, and GFTT is pretty damn good, too. But at least we can think about putting points into the other tree...for what it's worth, moving Efficiency to tier 4 isn't going to hurt anyone since the other two trees have some incredible mana regen tools.
* Improved Concussive and Improved HM were both boiled down to fewer points, and made stronger. I like the changes on both. Although I think many non-MM hunters will probably end up taking IHM out of duty, if there is a marks hunter, they definitely want to be the one doing the marking if they can help it, so it's mandatory for them to have this (among raiders.)
* Piercing Shots - I'm less than impressed. 6% mana ignore on steady shot does not seem like quality material for 3 points to me. But maybe I'm just horrible with armor mechanics.
* Rapid Recuperation - trash. Plain and simple.
* Improved Steady Shot - so is this, but at least it's less obvious. I have a 15% chance to increase my damage by 15% on a single shot...didn't we learn from Master Tactician that compound percents don't work very well? I have also never heard of an Improved XXX ability that actually encouraged you to use that ability less by making you use something else instead. /boggle
* Wild Quiver - this one's nice. It's 6% of autoshot for 3 points. *IF* autoshot were half of our DPS, that would be 1% per point overall.
* Marked for Death - I had drafted my own talents some time back and made a similiar ability, but even that wasn't as good as Marked for Death. (Actually it was 5% for all attacks against the target, so I guess it was.) MfD is downright good. Easily passes the 1% per point test.
* Chimera Shot - I wasn't the least bit impressed with this skill, but I also didn't perceive the boss hamstringing potential that some of you did. To me, a reduction of 60%, 40%, and 20% was like removing 1.2 attacks from the equation, and negating one big powerful attack was beyond me. It'll be terrible mana consumption to keep up with using this throughout a fight, so I don't think a rotation will REALLY come into play.

* Improved Tracking - very obvious change to make.
* mid-survival - still slumps.
* Master Tactician - still isn't up to 1% per point if my math is correct. It's very close, though.
* Potent Venom - 1% per point, excluding the one for Wyvern Sting. Utility-minded players won't bat an eye at putting a point into Wyvern for that, even if it does make your rotations kinda funky.
* Point of No Escape - aside from having an abbreviation that is pronounced "pwn," I'm not a big fan of this talent. I admit, I missed the "of all attacks" part and assumed it was just your damage. But even so, what does it take to keep targets in that situation with a frost trap? I'm sure a boss won't be affected by bear traps either, so what PvE applications does this have? My guess is none, although it might be ok in 5v5.
* Readiness - no more boat anchor! Yay!
* Sniper Training - +6% on specials for 3 points sounds decent to me.
* Hunting Party - I imagined this as quite amazing, and I didn't even assume a proc rate as high as /12 seconds (5 per minute.) I was going for a more conservative 4 PPM. At that, 8% mana in a minute is still not bad at all for a caster group, in lieu of a shadow priest. Somehow I doubt the bang is there for melee, but at least it has use for them as well.
* Explosive Shot - if this ability triggers three times when it's used, that actually isn't horrible at all. I was fearing for my DPM, but the potential to do I'm guessing around 2500 damage for 540 mana is not really THAT bad. Not good either, but since it can hit multiple targets, that kinda seals the deal. A quirky sort of burst damage, as well. (At least I don't think our other specials will do 2500 pre-crit damage.)

I still don't see marks as really taking off for PvE at all, and I don't see any other spec jumping into PvP and ousting it. BM is still the DPS tree, and surv is still the support tree. I would argue even moreso now. Serpent's Swiftness is a straight 20% damage increase for both hunter and pet with current mechanics.



Oh yes, and regarding Careful Aim...Blizzard wants to centralize equipment. I have strong suspicions we're going to start seeing a lot of intellect on mail armor from now on. After all, shamans like it, and we can sorta maybe find it passable as well, but Careful Aim makes 1 int = 1 agi in terms of attack power gains. Maybe the extended mana pool isn't as good as half a crit rating, where DPS is concerned, but there's certainly usefulness to it. Expect to see int on your set gear and other random mail drops that are itemized for us and shamans, and expect Careful Aim to be a mandatory talent if you aren't wearing rogue leather. Although, currently, I could write off CA as something that is *maybe* overlookable, I'm going to grab it anyway since I doubt I'll be able to ignore it later.

 

Zediono

I guess we can't get everything Very cool that all 3 ticks can crit, I can see Explosive shot doing lots of damage per GCD, which is very nice.

One more question, do we know if Trueshot aura affects people in the raid or only in party?

 

Conscience

Does it at least procc EW? The three chances to crit on one GCD would have been such a very nice synergy with the whole idea of Survival Tree raiding.