I just don't want to see it get added in with all the other shots and abilities we already need to manage. If it shares a cooldown with arcane/explosive, fine... but I have enough cooldowns, durations, and procs to keep track of as it is.

Someone made a video of playing a hunter to the theme of Dance Dance Revolution, and it was fairly accurate at the time. I'd rather not see it get worse.

Admittedly, I think it's a nice buff for PvP though, since it can be used on the move now.

I noticed that as of last build, the "weaker" hit on Explosive Shot that did 5% RAP + x damage was also hitting the primary target (in addition to the "stronger" hit of 20%+RAP damage--this was causing Explosive Shot to do more damage than the tooltip suggested). I wonder if that will still be the case in the upcoming build.

I don't like sounding like a hater, but this craziness really makes me irritated. "We'll try this and see what happens" is not a robust development process

If Aimed Shot is an instant, even if it does reset Auto's timer, it could well end up in a PvE rotation if you choose a very fast weapon (our you're hasted via Heroism or Rapid Fire). Not only that, but it also seems crack-headed that Steady Shot is a 2 second cast, but Aimed shot can be flicked off on the run. PvPers will complain loudly... and, IMO, rightly so.

"Evaluating" the "option" of making Viper work passively... /facepalm

Deciding this late in the development cycle to reshuffle the trees and deliberately decide to give SV a gimp 41-point talent... until "later" is just plain infuriating.

It's almost as if Blizzard only really looked at what they were doing with hunters a couple of months ago, when they've had nearly two years.

I've no doubt WLK will be fun, still... but stuff like this really doesn't help.

With these changes, it looks like MM is going to be really, really good for PvE now, with a build like

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Remember that Readiness is now where Scatter was in MM, so Marks get the 3-min double Rapid Fire that used to be in Survival. Likewise, Surefooted is taking TNT's place, so 3% hit comes out of our gearing needs.

The change to Lock and Load (15% proc per tick) coupled with Improved Arcane Shot is going to be a lot of added dps, given 100% sting uptime due to Chimera shot. Yes, Arcane still hits softer than the nerfed Explosive Shot, but MM uses both Chimera and Arcane Shot, as opposed to Survival using Explosive Shot alone.

I'm not sure what to do with the leftover two points - options are basically Imp. Hunter's Mark, Wild Quiver, Piercing Shots, or Go for the Throat. All of those but GftT can be maxed out if I were to drop the point from Aimed, but we don't know what Aimed's damage will look like or how it'll interact with autoshot timers. The issue is that Wild Quiver looks really bad - 10% change to deal 50% auto shot damage - I'm assuming this won't be affected by Mortal Shots anymore either. Piercing Shots is equally bad - it becomes worse the more arpen you have, and between Chimera, Serpent Sting, and the constant Arcane Shot spam from Lock and Load, it looks like it'll affect less than 50% of our damage. That leaves Go for the Throat or 90 AP for Imp. HM.

The only thing holding MM back is going to be the obscene mana consumption, but the free Arcane Shots will help that immensely.

Ahh.. well that's where my misunderstanding came from then. Thanks for clearing that up.

So despite the nerf to it, it still does better single target damage than arcane shot. That's all I was concerned about.

Leaving out Go for the Throat with Marked for Death affecting pet specials would confuse me. I'm also not sure why you'd take T.N.T. in a build that doesn't get Explosive Shot...the only benefit you would get is for Explosive Trap, and are you actually going to use that for anything?

They could be dropped into Rapid Recuperation for more mana/focus longevity, thanks to the 3-min double Rapid Fire.

Well, actually I might be something or we see "huge" differently.

If the only change to aimed shot is that it will be made instant this is what I see as an effect on pve:
- it will again be viable for a rotation (fire after an auto shot), it will give an instant mortal strike effect, it will be a high damage shot. The damage is somewhat mitigated by the reset of auto shot.

So implications is = an extra shot in the rotation, with a damage boost, every ten seconds.
I don't see that as huge, but I must fairly admit that I might* underestimate the damage boost of it.

The problem with arena/pvp balancing vs pve for us have always been to increase our damage in pvp without making us already high damage too high in pve.

*edit, missing word

Edit:

I saw a compelling argument for that working in 2v2 burst teams - with 2xTBW and 2xRapid Fire with readiness as a great way for us to burst. That being said, I'll probably go for 44/11/11+5.

I really don't like being a sourpuss, but I don't think the 51 pt bm talent is quite there yet, unless the pet specials turn out to be a lot stronger than they seem.

With the changes listed above, is anybody considering a 50/21/00 build? Is having BW/tBW + readiness worth the loss of points in the SV tree for those people still interested in making a BM spec work? The fact that I'm even considering it makes me think that either a. the 51pt BM talent is indeed pretty weak, and/or b. I'm missing something important by going 21 into the MM tree.

He's going for Surefooted not TNT, the change just isn't reflected in the build.

Edit: Not sure why that change wasn't mentioned on mmo.

In future-world, that isn't T.N.T. though. It is going to be switched with Surefooted, so that's +3% hit masquerading as a bonus to a bad trap.

T.N.T swaps with Surefooted in a future build.

edit: curse you, people who refresh more than I do!

I actually forgot Marked for Death buffed pet specials, so that does make GftT more attractive.

Ah, yes, should probably read the whole post.

Still, I can't think of a build without Go for the Throat anymore, especially now that pet specials scale with AP.

You are right. I was for somehow thinking it would reset (delay) the auto for the GCD of aimed shot, which isn't logical. With the low CD (sorry my bad again) and with no delay to auto shot it would be a rather huge change for PvE which I would think they will adress. Making it reset auto shot for a set time would be a good way. It would not hurt pvp that much since we need to move around a lot while it would make it less useful for pve. Apologies for shoddy reasoning.

Tweaked his build a little for this.

TNT = Surefooted.

Edit* I should wait for an updated talent calculator - 1 pt will need to be relocated to Readiness.

(Redacted post, missed that someone already posted it. Sorry!)

Hell, there's a chance we just got incentive to use haste to whittle autoshot down to 2.0 speed. That 5% haste might have been a better deal than 25% off steady considering an Aimed-Arcane-Chim rotation would leave us using steady three times every 12 seconds.

The cool down on Aimed Shot is 6s + weapon speed.

Since when? There was a change vaguely like it in the BC beta, but it never hit live.

This whole series of changes reminds me of the Arcane Shot dispel/Mortal Strike Shot changes in TBC. Granted, an instant-cast Aimed Shot is along the lines of something we've been asking for (in other words, a usable MS debuff for Arenas), but they're really skirting around the problems in my opinion. This doesn't really change the fact that our pets are made of wet tissue paper, we're still severely lacking in survivability despite them saying that's part of what we're all about (which, I suppose, could be considered erroneous considering that GC also called us casters in the same breath), etc.

But their "fixes" are anemic, if you ask me. I expected Explosive to get toned down to around 12%. Dropping it to less than half is awful, and severely undermines a lot of the Survival tree. Changing Readiness to Marksmanship is strange, but not unacceptable, but replacing it with a Trap talent when Koraa specifically stated that they wanted to get away from Survival having so many awful trap talents is just irritating. The only way they'll ever get anyone to care about trap mastery is if they make traps less excruciating to use in the first place. Failing that, they should honestly combine Point of No Escape and whatever they were going to make Trap Mastery into a single one-point talent in the place of PoNE, and come up with a brand new 41 point Survival talent. Any trap talent as a 41 pointer is laughable at best.

I'm just very put off by all of this. I understand that they needed to change a certain amount of things, in Survival in particular, for balance reasons. Hell, I expected them to. What I don't understand is why they saw fit to make such strange choices so late that some of them won't even be in place until after release, with the net result that we'll have to test them on the live servers as we level.

Again, it reminds me of the band-aid TBC fixes: short-sighted, uninspired, and lacking imagination. It makes me feel as if they don't understand how the class is played, or at the very least that there is a significant disconnect between how the players play the game, and how the developers think they do.

I'm very worried.

(At the very least we'll have an instant Aimed to work with until they inevitably nerf it.)

I'm going to log into the beta now, and I'm going to throw out a lot of feedback, because for some reason I find myself clinging blindly to hope.

Tell that to my 8.17 second cooldown on Aimed Shot on Live. You're right that the change was made back in BC Beta - and wrong that it was ever removed.

Maybe the Spreadsheets are just bugged, but I can't get Arcane to be worth using in *any* situation. I'm not sure why you'd spec into Imp Arcane or Lock & Load for it.

And in real practice Arcane sucks as well. It is not ever worth using a GCD on over Steady Shot. Even with Imp Steady Shot proc'd and Imp Arcane spec'd I've not had it do more damage than Steady.