i got my quartz to work and i was getting 1.4sec steadyshots as a BM hunter with quiver/SS talents. This was on PTR not beta though.

It doesn't feel like Steady Shot is locked at 2.0 to me.
Doing some very unscientific tests on the PTR with the built-in timer, I cast Steady Shot four times in about six seconds with Serpent's Swiftness and about eight seconds without it.

I could be wrong but I don't have any haste gear to test it further.

Yes, melee = ranged for the purposes of that quote, although that has more to do with ratings on gear being unified as opposed to them affecting things differently than they used to. Whatever "haste" (as opposed to "spell haste") affected before, still affects the same things, which includes ranged.

The tooltips for spells update their cast times but the ones for ranged don't. We can't rely on them for cast speeds (unless this changed on the PTR, which I can't access yet because my account is beta-flagged and there's a technical issue preventing beta users from logging onto the PTR right now). On Live I use Quartz to determine ranged casting speeds. I only got that working on Beta recently, but the world server has been down on Northrend (the server where my hunter is) so I haven't been able to test. I could only log onto the PvP server with my deathknight, so that I could confirm that Quartz worked.

Yes, these are all beta bugs as well. The AotB buff doesn't actually change the pet's attack power yet. If you check the stat sheet you'll see your pet's damage/AP is higher when you have Hawk up (because it is getting AP from scaling).

Thank goodness that Steady doesn't appear to be locked. I didn't think it was right, but I had to ask, if only to have some empirical evidence to back me up. Too bad this doesn't really change the lousiness of Haste. I don't understand why Blizzard continue to hold onto that much Haste for classes/specs that don't want it. I have checked up a bit with the Enhancers, and they don't want Haste either (there have been a bit of rumbling about Haste on one of their set items). They want Hit and Crit to max their spells, Haste being the least effective stat they want, much like us. Yet Mail is the gear most infested with Haste of all. And while Enhancers can pick and choose among physical Leather, or their own setgear, we are stuck.

Well then, into the trashbin with Arcane Shot again. And may it stay there long and comfortably. Yes, I don't particularly like that manahog.

On the PTR, as BM I had 1.5 steady shot with quiver and serpent's swiftness, no other haste rating, I tested without quiver and I had 1.7 steady shot. So with SS & 15% Quiver, I had 1.3 steady shot while under quick shot effect, and 0.9 while under rapid fire + quick shot effects. I do believe, I had problems with GCD at these speeds (not sure, because actually EU PTR is really laggy).
Then I changed my stuff to have 10% more haste, and it seems to me it reduced my GCD.

If someone could confirm my observations? I would appreciate. If I'm wrong, then what's the point adding so much haste and being capped at 1.5 by GCD without any buff/procc?

That was my impression as well, and I got the unchanging 2 sec cast time w/ SS and quiver. I'll grab Quartz tonight and test on the beta. Best case is the tooltip isn't updating when it should.

Edit: Since no one has replied since my post, Quartz shows Steady Shot as a 1.4-1.5s cast with Serpent's Swiftness and quiver, 1.2-1.3s when I popped First Mate's Pocketwatch ([First Mate's Pocketwatch]), 1.0s when I popped Rapid Fire and 1.0s when I popped the Pocketwatch and Rapid Fire simultaneously. No passive haste on my gear.

haste only affects gcd of spells, not physical damage abilities.

If it did affectthe GCD then Haste would remain a pretty good stat, or at least one that wouldn't have you searching for alternative gear.

I did two quick searches on wowhead on gloves. As it turned out Tear-Linked Gauntlets are almost as good as T7.

My main concern with haste at the moment is how much new leveling gear has it. I've only got a single upgrade through all of Howling Fjord because almost all the mail (and leather) has significant amounts of haste on it, and as can be seen in my Armory I've only got Kara level gear at best. Hunters in T6 gear will presumably not being replacing much until the high 70s or even 80.

It's not so much the disappointment of missing out on sexy new gear, but more surprise after the total replacement of this level of gear going into TBC. I was expecting something very similar in WotLK.

Since the ratings are becoming universal for spells and ranged melee abilities, do they also contribute to traps and Feign Death? I'm asking because of the talent 'Survival Tactics' which reduces resist rate for both by 4%. That would be rather irrelevant if the hunter is hitcapped anyway, or am I missing something?

Yes, I think the new combined hit rating does apply to traps and feign. However, they are both (I think) considered spells so they have a higher base miss chance (17% vs. 9% for ranged). So that extra 4% could potentially still be useful.

Oh wait, I just realized we probably won't be trapping things +3 levels, unless they have changed things in heroics - if we are hit capped we should be fine with traps. So the talent will probably only affect feigning on boss fights.

Did some quick testing last night on the target dummies at 80. Nothing terribly ground-breaking but it's a bit more backup for what most people were expecting.

MM & SV both were about the same dps. Both were basically the same rotations of serpent sting, explosive/chimera, and steadys, however MM wasn't anywhere as sustainable as SV, even using a rapid fire for rapid recovery. Though if you're fighitng a caster, MM will be much better off. Viper probably still has some issues though, as I always got the same amount of mana back (~3k) no matter if I instantly chimera'd it, or waited. I only had a 78 raptor available for these tests for my pet.

BM showed higher dps, 3500 or so vs the 2800's of MM/SV, this averaged down to around 3200 or so when I'd viper back to full. This also was with a 75 (76?) devilsaur, so I'd expect those numbers to go up when fully leveled. This was also without invigoration, every time I've played with it, I've found it woefully performing. The thing I did find interesting was that 2/2 Beastial Discipline actually gave a pretty decent pet dps boost over 1/2 even with GFTT 2/2. I tried a few different rotations to work in Serpent Sting and/or Arcane Shot, but it still was much better to just stick with spamming steadys. I'm not sure if that'll stay like that once 4pc T6 is broken.

I couldn't get a Steady Shot glyph to test with, but did have the Serpent Sting & Hunter's Mark ones.


Edit: I just noticed in another thread that the Org dummies (where I was testing) apparently have 0 armor. As such that would definitely skew my BM numbers, though it still confirms my feelings about ArPen heavily favoring BM now.

Why spec that way? It's not like anyone would ever actually use that type of spec in Live. I saw that video too and pet survivability is a joke.

Because the last time a blue responded to issues on pet survivability, they also asked if the hunter had specced any of the pet survivability talents. Would you need to spec that way to test it? No, but it wouldn't hurt our case in showing Ghostcrawler and co. that pet survivability sucks and that the talents are negligable in PvP.

If pets are buffed to the teeth with all sorts of survivability talents and still die within seconds, it's hard to argue that they don't need a buff of some sort.

This is what I was thinking on the PTR when I was fooling around yesterday. 1% mana returned on pet crit is surprisingly bad, at least at level 70.

So now my question is do we have a *basic* guesstimate of where mob armor will be at in, say, 10 and 25 mans (after all applicable debuffs are applied, mind you.) Bit of a rhetorical question for the time being, since if someone had a good guesstimate I would've probably heard about it by now.

Regardless, personally I'll be staying Survival as long as it's *comparable* DPS wise to Beast Mastery in a 10 man/25 man environment. I have a thing for explosive shot <3

The combat rating at 80 thread on these forums has the dalaran 'boss' dummy at 10900 armour, so that seems a decent starting point.

On the PTR I noticed that Charge and Warp trigger each other's cooldowns. What other pet skills are rendered more or less useless by pet talents, or is that the only one?

Anyone care to comment on the new viper? I've seen a few posts suggesting it works out to a 20-30% net dps reduction in extended/no other mana recovery situations, which seems a bit excessive. Also wondering if going to an "auto-only" non-rotation during viper might actually be workable, as you would get passive spirit regen of 150-200 MP5 as well as the per-hit regen... need to do a bit of math.

It's probably too late in the dev cycle, but I sure wish blizz would consider removing the mana cost from steady shot, balancing/offsetting that with significantly higher costs for the other specials. This would give hunters a "zero mana cost" base dps option (auto/steady/pet attack) with relatively decent but NOT maximum dps that allows mana regen via spirit. Then they could get rid of AotV entirely without any more silly and difficult to balance mechanics... Thoughts?

I remember being outside of the 5 second rule in vanilla WoW. Hunters just haven't been built for it since the essential removal of aimed shot (amazed how often I still see it being used in a rotation by pugs, and I use the word rotation in it's loosest sense) and addition of steady. What you are proposing though is essentially the basis of the new viper. Reduce our damage output so we can regen mana faster, same philosophy.

Aspect of the Viper / Mana Issues
The new viper is okay. Nothing amazing (like in it's previous iteration) yet it's not totally worthless either. In terms of general dungeon crawling, if you are chain pulling an instance switching to viper and serpent stinging everything up with a few multis will get your mana bar back VERY quickly. This is also true of bosses with adds where you know your personal drop in DPS will not endanger the raid in any way.

For single target bosses (such as Loatheb) I found as MM that you burn through mana so incredibly quickly and had to switch to viper to fill up 3-4 times in the course of the fight. Despite this switching though, I was putting out decent damage. Also in the raid was an equally geared SV hunter though who had zero mana problems and put out very similar DPS.

There are other things to consider though. In beta the premade characters start out in PvP gear. We can expect larger mana pools with our PvE gear as Int is favoured more in PvE itemisation than in PvP generally. All the big mana regen abilities are strengthened by the size of our mana pools. It's all % based, so the more mana you have the more mana you get back.

Wild Quiver
Incase anyone was wondering about this talent. It accounted very consistently for about 2.5 - 3% of my overall damage (inc pet).

Specs
In terms of what are the best specs to go into for LK and indeed for the more immediate 3.02 it really seems to me that for raiding the extra versitility of SV outweighs MM. If MM's forte is to be single target damage it is not significantly high enough when constrasted to SV to really consider it. As gear levels up SV is likely to crawl away as bigger and bigger agi levels are reached. I haven't conducted any serious testing with BM as I haven't got my Devilsaur to 80 yet which, of course, is a must for accurate results.

Itemisation
In terms of the haste itemisation concerns that most of us have, I suspect that they will go through to live. Only a tremendous set bonus will lead us to pick up the set pieces most likely. In TBC the smart hunters were the ones who picked just the right amount of haste to optimise their rotations, in LK it'll be the hunters that know how to truly weigh up the values of APen and haste when comparing two pieces of gear.

You make some good points Asmo, but I think you may be underestimating the marksman tree; As gear improves, the amount of straight % based damage increase talents in a marks build is pretty absurd and should provide for impressive scaling. I think its something like 20% increased damage to tracked, marked targets.

Could you share with us the specs, gears and amounts of time you tested it? *Someone else* whom i dont remember the name of, did some tests a while back (keeping in mind that things has changed, but not overly much) and that survival was about 200 DPS ahead of MM and BM, over 5 tests with each specs.

Thanks Fendryl; An issue is that SV's present mana situation is based on something which afaik is clearly a bug, that Thrill procs up to three times on explosive shot. Without that, SV's going to be in much the same situation as MM.

"I'm not sure if that'll stay like that once 4pc T6 is broken."

Well, afaik the issue is that using shots other than steady increase your time in viper. I'd suspect that with the steady glyph, it'll be worthwhile for MM Hunters to use serpent, but the other specs are going to have a big issue with using anything other than steady.

(Arcane shot has a terrible damage per mana ratio and dosn't scale well, I wouldn't use it in any rotation)

Perhaps if you're getting a deacent connection (I get disconnected every 2 minutes or so on the PTR where I'm trying to test) you could run a test to see how long your mana lasted for BM, MM and SV using a rotation vs steady spam for each?