Akston

It's interesting how making mortal shots no longer affect auto shots pretty much makes haste even less helpful because auto shots will be doing even less damage without the extra crit bonus. Instead of making haste more valuable the change made haste even less valuable.

 

Ryas

At this point, I'd really like to just hear Blizzard's reasoning behind haste on our gear. So far, everything we know about its reasoning is speculative. I know people have brought it to the dev's attention on the beta forums, however, so far it seems that they haven't answered. I think that is one of the most frustrating things for myself.

Edit: Though, I guess we could always just forget the Tier gear and go for non-tier stuff. Seems like they are itemizing those items well enough. Case in point, the new boots that dropped off of the 25 man version of Malygos.

http://i110.photobucket.com/albums/n...nterweapon.jpg

 

Kaejin

Giving pets crit rating is more what I meant when I mentioned it having a minor effect on them. Something low since they get a lot of talents that boost crit a good amount, but at least something. I really don't get why pets don't scale with ratings in the first place, especially since ratings are rather prominent on our gear.

 

takel

In my opinion, this is more of a result or a legacy of when pet scaling was first introduced and potential implications due to double-dipping on buffs. It really is a tricky situation and one that would only be fully resolved IMHO by an overhaul of sections of the BM tree, the pet happiness system and potentially a rework on how pet scaling works by introducing a mechanic where the hunter's base, not externally buffed, stats are used for pet scaling. It may come to the point where an entire rework of the hunter class may be necessary to rebalance expected pet contribution versus direct hunter damage.

All stats transfer to the pet is what I feel is necessary for certain points of itemisation to be useful for hunters in the same way the itemisation would be useful for our 'item partner', the typical melee DPSer Enh. Shammy.



As for the post on the beta forums outlining the problem with haste, I'm sorry but I'll have to disagree with the argument that is presented in that post. I don't disagree with the premises that haste is a very underpowered stat for us, but the problem is not a cool down related thing. IMHO, locking Steady Shot to 1.5 second GCD is a very good step towards stabilising the balance between the three possible mainstream specs of the hunter class since it standardises the special shot cycles for all three shot selections.

The problem, the absolute underlying problem is the fact that haste only affects a very small portion of our overall damage. With melee classes, white auto-attack damage accounts for over 50% of their damage make up and with the exception of Enh. Shammies (to my knowledge), all of the melee physical DPS classes have some form of 'feedback' mechanics with white damage which directly or indirectly increase the amount of special damage they can utilise.
At the absolute baseline, auto-attacks comprise of at the most 40% of our overall damage, probably close to 20-30% with the 3.0 mechanics. I seriously need to get myself a key or get someone to parse some logs of raid encounters to get the correct numbers.
The only reason why haste was good for hunter DPS pre-3.0 was because of the BM spec allowing for a 100% utilisation of haste for hunter DPS (70%+ overall).

 

KraxisSingular

As far as I have understood their reasoning over at the Enhance thread, they really don't want Haste at all. I remember reading a few posts when the first T7 shots were out, and a few guys 'complained' that one piece (I think the gloves) has Haste. They want Crit to keep their Maelstrom Weapon going at full stacks as fast as possible without gimping actual melee DPS. Crit offers that, Haste doesn't.

So they don't want Haste, we don't want Haste... Who among the physicals who can use mail actually want it? Warriors, Retris and Death Knights? Don't know much about those (save the no-Int clause), but it would be ironic if the mail classes didn't want mail, but the plate classes did. I foresee a lot of lonely and sharded Haste items. Sad really.

At this time I'm furiously trying to look for non-Haste gear of aproximately equal DPS to what I have now so when the patch hits I won't feel stupid about the Haste.

I don't think Blizzard is being daft about Haste. They obviously have access to our numbers and the work being done, and they are bright enough to see the value of Haste is not good. So I can only conclude that they know something we don't. Either there is a change coming (perhaps it was planned but never materialized?) or they use it as a controlmechanism to hold us back in DPS. The latter one is obviously the most problematic since the specs differ on Haste to an extent, and there is the recurrent issue of non-Haste gear available which is now much better (though oddly enough the Mail Engineering goggles aren't better than T7).
Those are the only two viable reasons I can come up with, plain stupidity or refusal to see the bad in Haste is not logical to me. They are silent for a reason. If they had just messed up, GC or Koraa would have made a post saying something like "we'll look into it, thanks for bringing this to light." But the silence is staggering, it even was back when there was a lot of blue contact in the Hunter forum.

Maybe, just maybe, the Hunter forum isn't thep place for this. Maybe it is the gear forum. Tried posting there?

 

Catalept

Actually, although (large) haste buffs were excellent (because they either affected the pet, e.g. Heroism, or allowed us to drop down to a 1:1 rotation, or both), passive haste's returns were underwhelming except near certain critical shot-speeds. The fact that our weapons just happened to put us near those speeds in the first place yielded something of a false positive in terms of passive haste's value to our DPS. It's almost as if the itemization team didn't get the memo about unlinking.

As for plate-wearers getting use out of mail's haste... if we don't want haste, and enh.shammies don't want it... surely completely removing it would be a good way to keep their thieving mitts off our kit?

This is one of those times where having a bug in the class development team's meeting room would help immensely towards dispelling our anxiety

 

takel

Well, according to a blue post which I cannot find the link to any more, Cloth raiding gear is set to be re itemised since the gear was developed before the current state of mechanics (all cloth classes use Spirit in one form or another).

Hopefully this will extend to leather and mail gear as well, stripping stats which are useless or not valuable and putting in the stuff we actually care about.

 

Kaejin

Else we would just hear a lot about druids.

I think a complete overhaul of the way pets scale with us might be the best solution. Scaling by a % of our stats does not seem to be working out so swell. Both survivabilty and the matter of ratings suffer from the current system.

The introduction of pet scaling in TBC was a great step up from when they didn't scale at all, but most of the the problems with scaling were immediately apparent to the hunter community right from the get-go, if I recall. Things only got worse as time progressed, mostly as predicted. I seem to recall predictions that pet stam and DPS wouldn't scale well at all as gear got better and better. People (mostly casters claiming that pets could solo them) had a hard time with our pets at first, but it's pretty obvious that the tables have turned.

Growl still doesn't scale at all, and pet DPS does not scale well enough so that they are reliable tanks for us, even with my horrible gear right now (I still have level 60 epics, and I peel aggro from my pet even if I only fire one Steady Shot for every two Autos).

I've heard they buffed growl in WotLK, but I wonder how long until the same problem shows up.

Edit: Speak of the Devil...

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> More robust pet combat stats

Seems like they want to try and help. I guess this is a step in the right direction.

GC also posted in a Camo thread, but I can't make much of the post. It just seems like damage control rather than an actual responce to the issue of Camo and Freezing Arrow.

 

Steelfleece

Sounds good, but it's too bad it doesn't seem that it will get addressed until after the Expansion ships. I guess they need to really iron out the biggest problems in these next few weeks to get it ready.

 

Halfdann

I suspect they will, but I wonder how that will impact out itemization.

Shaman would be looking for expertise, and strength, unless they've changed that in the Beta. Neither of those are of benefit to hunters, so I would prefer NOT to see our gear become generic.

 

Spiry

Shaman will share the same physical stats as us in 3.0+; Agility, Intellect, Stamina, as they're made more in line with rogues (1str = 1ap, 1agil =1ap) so they can share their gear with them and us.

 

Houze

Shamans wants hit until spellhit are capped, after that I think agi/crit/expertise comes rather close to each other. Strength and haste have very low value for shamans.

It's only expertise the seperates hunters and enhancement shaman item wishes as of 3.0.

 

Sabyn

One thing to hope for: apart from the haste it seems like T7 stuff is very well itemized. Hopefully Blizzard is not ignorant of how relatively useless haste is, and as we progress in tiers we will see comparatively less haste, hence giving us better itemization. Putting a sup-par stat on early tiers lets them have more room for improving loot in later tiers, not just with ilvls, but with better stat allocation.

 

phasedweasel

A quick question on Steady Shot. I see that it says "Unmodified weapon damage" + some number. Does this mean the slowest weapons are best for SS, to get the most damage per SS cast? Thank you.

 

◊ Lactose

Steady Shot's damage is still using a modified weapon damage component. Given 2 equal DPS weapons (different speeds), both will hit for the same.

Searching for Unmodified weapon damage in this thread would have given you 1 or 2 posts regarding the formula.

Look, Lactose, we'd rather you didn't eradicate the whole human race.
- Sam & Max

 

sjogren

I'm a bit concerned that buggy skill priorities is going to kill the Devilsaur... Monstrous Strength lasts 12s and the cooldown on it is 10s, so it looks good on paper, but in my tests the pet consistently fails to stack it up. Often because the dumb thing is using Bite instead of Monstrous BIte even though the thing is off the damn cooldown!

 

Bovii

Blizzard is really walking a fine line with our class. And to be really honest, they've been walking that line since the game released.

Three years or so ago, all we had was Aimed Shot (originally inteded as an "opener"), Auto Shot, Arcane Shot (linked to Aimed Shot and did a poor amount of fixed damage per rank), Multi-Shot (originally inteded when facing more than one target), and Serpent Sting.

Two years or so ago, they unlinked Aimed Shot and Arcane Shot, boosted the base damage of Arcane Shot and added in a RAP component, nerfed Arcane Shot and Barrage/Imp Barrage prior to expansion due to people in T2/2.5 gear owning people in battle grounds and because of the lvl 70 talents impacting our DPS. Then they buffed Serpent Sting, realizing that we didn't use it but not understaing why we didn't use it. During this time, we saw our primary spec become a "PvP spec", the worst of the three specs turn into THE raiding spec, and the tertiary tree turn into an unappreciated support tree that was bloated with terrible talents that impacted nothing. And the best way to maximize our DPS was to actually prevent/delay our white damage.

Now, on the brink of the lvl 80 talent release and the expansion, we're undergoing yet another transformation in DPS mechanics. Blizz has seen that we were fore going our base damage to maximgize DPS and made the move to unlink said white damage. Looking at it, it is necessary to balance out the ratio of white damage to yellow. No other class has had to deal with such changes as we have. Most others get tweaked in the form of scaling and such.

As I see it, the plethora of haste is Blizz's offering to us to balance out our lack of +crit damage on our Auto Shots. Personally, I would prefer that they drop down the damage calculation on our White Damage, add Auto Shots back into benefiting from Mortal Shots, and scaling back their concept of the level of need of haste to balance it all out. As it stands, haste has never been a bad stat as it has allowed us to take advantage, more often, of our crit%, Armor Penetration, RAP, and any talents that are started via crits. But, through their changes, they've pretty much reduced that benefit as we no longer get a damage boost from crit damage and we no longer have access to set gear that gives us ArP. Furthermore, the number of talents that we have that are impacted by crits are rather low (other than SV). So I have to wonder if they're not just grabbing at straws in order to figure out how to prevent our current white damage while boosting our white damage. It feels like two idealogies clashing with each other in order to come to the same end goal.

 

Cranch

Here's the DPS differential per stat point (assuming a 0/18/53 build at level 80 with the best Naxx25-level gear and full raid buffs using Shandara's spreadsheet, v70c.) The character has 442 haste rating so is well beyond the steady-shot haste cap.

Haste is clearly still useful though somewhat worse than AP. Keep in mind that due to the decoupling of Auto Shot, there is no haste cap for hunters. We can and probably eventually will shoot off 3 Auto Shots per Steady Shot...

I don't know the item budget for 1 point of haste rating versus say 1 point of agility, but I'd venture to say that Blizzard's item budget does not come close to matching the above numbers. I find this a good thing, as that means we'll get items that will have more dps/iLvl than Blizzard might have planned.

About the only thing I would like changed regarding the itemization we have seen so far is for Blizzard to make the stats a bit more random; i.e., have an occasional item that is unbalanced, with perhaps a large amount of Agility or AP, etc. (well, fix the 2 piece bonus too, but GC has said that will happen.)

 

KraxisSingular

So 30 Haste is aproximately worth 20 AP in that setting. That is pretty poor. And 1 Haste is only worth about 2 Stamina for Survival Hunters. Ouch!

Wouldn't say that it is very well itemized, but other than the Haste it is pretty solid. It lacks Hit mainly, and a fair bit of it. But the rest appears to be good enough.
Given how the Enhancement sets look on live I wouldn't hold my breath in reagards to less Haste on later sets. They have currently a lot of Mp5 on them, a pretty worthless stats for Enhancers. It goes from a lot on T4 to somewhat less on T5 to a truckload on T6. So their sets start out badly, become less bad until the last set comes along and trumps them all in bad itemization. I would really like that our sets don't take that route, yet it is the trackrecord of Blizzard so far in relation to bad itemization.

I agree however that they know Haste is 'bad' for us. They aren't blind nor stupid, butthey do not share their reason with us, and those reasons have at times been slightly flawed. It is impossible to help them with that if they don't tell us.

Further I woulnd't be happy about us going to have a lot of DPS in non-set gear. Firstly I doubt it will be easy to get this gear since we have to dodge more Haste and Expertise on the other mail. And when we do manage it, and rock the boat in DPS, Blizzard will notice that. Given their stated aim of fairly equal DPS in equal gear, they can't allow undergeared Hunters (using optimal gear though) to trump the other classes by any significant margin. They don't want a repeat of the BM > Warglaive Rogue scenario again. So they will do something to change that situation.
What they will do is anybody's guess, but changing our sets on top of nerfing us (they would have to obviously, or else they just made every Hunter OP) seems rather unlikely. Just nerfs seems more likely. And I think we can agree that such a situation would be bad.

 

Catalept

I'd be interested to see the corresponding breakdown for, say, Fury Warriors or Combat Rogues.

It's entirely possible that we scale better than they do for AP and crit, and haste is being used as a 'budget soaker' to throttle the net DPS gain from new gear without having to spend on stats like spirit or stamina.

 

KraxisSingular

That is what I have been thinking for a while now. Problem is just that the impact is not equal among the specs. Undoubtedly they know that too. So if one spec fare worse with Haste then it will obviously fall behind the others. And isn't that what is happenening to BM at this time?
Further, if one spec dislikes Haste more than the others, it would be logical that it scales better with more conventional stats. Hence making it more powerful in non-Haste gear than the others. If not then there is a scaling issue beyond that of Haste.

In any case, the issue of being OP out of Hastegear remains. Haste is a bad way to control our DPS for the reason of non-Hastegear and the different scaling with Haste.
Stamina, which I would use since it offers other small perks without being too obvious about it, scales worse than Haste for a Surv, and not at all for the others. Again an issue of scaling between the specs. The difference is just that it should be less, and the 'budget soaker' capacity would be less visible to most people. We would wonder at it, but most would happily take it and never think more about it. Haste is however something that stands out. It is visible to a lot of people. That increases the risk of them being irate (which seems to be the case at this moment) and actively seeking out alternatives.

 

Ketari

Well, also to the degree that when you switch to viper it helps your regen considerably to equip a couple of mana sticks. I'd probably even use caster weapons with int enchants, your DPS is allready down and adding a couple of thousand mana would boost regen considerably.

Cranch - I believe that both a primary statistic* and any rating both have an item rating cost of 1. (*except stamina, which is at 2/3)

 

Bloodwrath

Here's a quick thought: If autoshot no longer benefits from mortal strikes what's stopping us from using aimed shot in a dps rotation.. threaded correctly we can fire it directly after an autoshot thereby replacing it with a shot that can crit harder.. quick thought anyone wanna dispell my thoughts on this one?

 

Mysto82

As far as I remember of my Fury Warrior Pre BC (long ago) about 70% of the dmg was white dmg. At this point it is usefull to increase the atackspeed, since a large amount of the dmg is boosted. Especially for Warriors, since increasing white dmg has the result of more Styles.

But for a Hunter this is different. About 1/3 of a BM is white Dmg. So we probably scale better with other stats (or it is a lot cheaper to get 1% haste than 1% crit, what would result in a railgun-hunter and the need of ammonition waggon insteaad of a Ammobag ).


But I also have another Question.

Many of the new talents talk about special abilities of pets

Invigoration, Cobra Strices (special attacks), Longevity

For me it is not totally clear what is meant by special ability. For sure, the unique talents of the pet families are special abilities (are they special attacks as well, I guess so). So these abilities are influenced by all three Hunter skills.

What about bite and claw? Are these special abilities? They don't have a cooldown, so they are not affected by Longevity. But if they are special abilities, crits will restore mana through Invigoration. And putting 3/3 points in Cobra Strices would become more usefull.

I hope my english is not too bad and everybody can understand me.

As far as I know, Aimed shot resets the autoshot. Blizzard said in the patchlog that only Steady is not clipping the autoshot anymore.

 

Greenpiggy

No, haste is not still somewhat useful.
Haste rating is given the same item budget as 1 of a statpoint and 1 of the other ratings(I don't know about ArP rating though) - Attack Power is actually half the budget of other stats.

So normalising your example above,
Agility 1.455
AP 1.222
Crit 0.750
Hit 2.147
Int 0.666
Haste 0.440

I'll check up on ArP rating in a bit.
I'm also surprised how horrible crit has become, it used to be on a par with AP at the start of TBC, give back proper Mortal Shots!