Sean

The big thing changing for WotLK is that Autoshot is completely uncoupled and independent of everything - it will shoot no matter what other action you are performing. Even if you are dead center in the middle of a Steady Shot cast, it will fire off. Even if you are right at shooting an Arcane Shot or Multishot it will fire completely on its own timer ignoring everything else.

Time between Steadys and Autos is now completely irrelevant.

On GCDs - Auto has no effect on a GCD. Steady Shot has always worked off the GCD and still does, but it doesn't have its own CD.

 

Chul

Now that we can 'chain cast' Steady Shot and ignore Auto Shot, this may bring in to play the server queing that casters take advantage off. For example, if you're casting a spell, you can simply press that spell again before it is done, and it will queue it up at the server, virtually removing the effects of latency.

But how does this work with 1.5s casts? Since the GCD is 1.5s, does pressing the button whilst it is under the GCD still queue up the spell? Or will it only sent the next spell event after the GCD is done and hance our Steady Shots will be cast at 1.5s + Spam Interval (i.e. if you hit the key 0.1s after the GCD) + Latency?

 

orionsfinger

If that's what blizzard is doing to us, that seems to me a bit on the side of rediculousness. Autoshots going off no matter what one does as long as they are standing still, there is very little limiting fator to our dps performance. We could pile on the haste, and the only real barrier would be keeping autoshot frequency from going below it's 0.5s cast time. Hunter DPS relative to every other class would be insane.

 

orionsfinger

Forget i said that. So, the idea of "riding" the GCD with Steady is to no longer have it the spammed button, but to use our other shots while timing Steady to be casting while waiting on the GCD. That really sounds fun = )

 

Terp

I believe there was mention of the .5s cast time being removed too, some said it was firing the moment they stopped moving. It's a good move, bringing autoshot in line with autoattack will make balancing hunters a whole lot easier. Not to mention the no cast time, if true, will greatly improve the ability to deal with pillar humpers in pvp. I can't seem to find the specific post but there's a couple mentioning specials no longer do anything at all to autoshot, which sort of implies the cast time is gone.

I was wondering for anyone in the beta, Bullheaded targets the pet and only the pet right? Every other talent explicitly mentions it's for the pet and the first part of Bullheaded is simply "Removes all movement impairing effects". Too good to be true, of course, but it's certainly odd considering every other talent's text.

 

• Intermission

EDIT: I failed at going to the next page. I'll leave the post in for reference at least.


To set a few things straight:

"our GCD for Autoshot was 1s" - no, autoshot has no GCD. It can fire at near infinite frequency. You will never each a point of haste where you cannot fire more autoshots.
"Steady Shot has no CD and does not affect the GCD" - no, steadyshot is an ability just like Scorch or Arcane shot. It triggers the GCD. It's cast time at the moment is 1.5. With a quiver, Serpents Swiftness and haste items, it gets down to near 1 second cast time or even less with various cooldowns/procs. However because it uses the GCD, you can only fire a steadyshot every 1.5 seconds.

I'm not sure what to make of your second paragraph, but this is how stuff will work in wotlk (so far, still beta etc etc)...

- Autoshot seperate from everything else. You can fire Steadyshot, Multishot, Arcane Shot, etc without clipping or pushing back the autoshot at all. The only exception is Aimed Shot, which I believe still prevents and then resets the autoshot swing timer.
- Steadyshot will be just like before, but a 2 second cast. Quiver/haste/etc will bring it down to below 1.5 seconds, but you can only fire a steadyshot every GCD, which is LOCKED at 1.5 seconds for hunter ranged shots no matter what haste you have.

 

Sean

Yeah there's no more .5s "cast" on auto either. You do have to be standing still for it to go off though and yes it's still tied into Aimed shot.

They basically took out all the broken and stupid mechanics that made hunter abilities terrible to work around.

But by the looks of the new formulas we'll still be spamming steady shot as BM Hunters until 20% or only firing Arcane when Imp Steady Shot procs as Marks hunters pre 20% or just using Steady Shot + Explosive Shot everytime it's up until 20% as Survival. 20% and under it's Steady + Killshot every 6s for everyone.

And really, sadly, that's not much different from other DPS classes. Hello shadowbolt x infinity, frostbolt x infinity, ect. Thankfully they are on a trend of making most encounters more than just "sit there and dps until dead".

 

orionsfinger

Thanks everyone for righting me where i was misunderstood. On a side note, kiting someone to death with 51 yard Kill Shots, (45 yard range + 6 yards from Hawk Eye) seems fun and undoubtedly will get a taste of the nerf bat.

 

Zediono

I see what you mean Sean, but after some thought I think I understand what Blizz is trying to do. They're streamlining all abilities so that they become spammable, but giving you procs and skills that have to be well timed and used to be effective (such as pet talent cooldowns, marks procs and positioning with Sniper Training for example). Personally, I think its a good thing, since you won't be screwed over because of stupid mechanics. Instead you'll be punished for playing badly, which is a good thing Just my opinion of course.

 

Suspiria

Source WotLK Wiki

# Camouflage: (Level 68, 5 min cooldown) You Camouflage, causing you to blend in with your surroundings. Instantly removes all physical and spell debuffs, and you fade into an improved invisibility state. Camouflage will break after the you deal damage. Lasts until cancelled. Removed in beta 8634

Bye bye 2nd FD.
Now, someone had found any, *really* good news for us about new spell in WotLK? I don't believe which Bear Trap is what we need about CC or PvP contest.

 

Æthien

Damn... the more I PvP the more I was hoping for that to go through.


It was too good to be true I guess.

 

Stylfan

Well this was one idea, now they have to come up with something else for us PVP wise.

I have a question thoigh, What do you think will be most deadly rotation in lich king as we have it now? Spamming steadies + Kill shot when under 20% - or weaving Arcane / Multi? (Also take the spec into consideration, will MM weaving give more dps than BM steady spamming?)

 

Conscience

I think while Bear Trap is an obvious PvP Skill, Kill Shot is not to be written off. It has a really huge range, in a completely plane shaped environment you could win practically against every class by staying on 50yrd range and firing off a Kill Shot every 6sec. Of course you won't find yourself being in such a situation very often, but you get the idea of Kill Shot's strong point.

I think you can't tell this from just looking at the shot's damage at the moment, but rather have to look at the direction Blizzard seems to be heading for. While for the Hunter class maybe not yet balanced out, you can look at the other classes and clearly tell that they neither want them spamming a single spell nor a never changing rotation of spells. Instead situational awareness is encouraged, people are meant to decide what spell to cast e.g. based on proccs.
On a further point the usefulness of Kill Shot even on a mob with over 20% Health has as far as I remember already been calculated at current stats in this thread, with the outcome of it being valuable at all times. So it's quite probable you will at least end up doing Ss/Ks rotations whatever specc. As a Marksman player you will in addition have the proc based shot selection I already refered to, with firing off an Arcane every time Imp Ss kicks in, though it has yet to become clear what Shots will share CD eventually. Same point goes for Sv speccs, you probably want to weave Es in as much as possible, what you will also be firing will depend on shared cooldowns. If Ks and Es end up sharing cooldowns things might get quite tricky (and annoying).

 

Gurth

You have to factor in new target debuffs too on mobs, when calculating damage potential.

ES looks even better on a scorched+curse of shadow mob, with 3k RAP would be (0.2*3000+415)*1.1*1.25= 1395 damage each tick, with 50-60% crit look pretty insane to me.

Arcane would also benefit from the new boomkin debuff same as serpent sting.


I guess you will need to wait and see what came out to be better.

 

Jemsky

Leading through on this, I have a question

As auto shot has been uncoupled and depending on which spec one is, with the special shots, how would Bow Speed now factor into it? Will it still be dependant on a previous point made in this thread -
i.e MS in rotation = slower bow and no MS = faster bow be still valid?

"To bathe a cat takes brute force, perseverance, courage of conviction - and a cat.
The last ingredient is usually hardest to come by."

 

Conscience

The [MS -> slow, now MS -> fast] was already a result of the new autoshot. You generally want to have a fast bow for more on-shot talented proccs (especially Sv has lots of them), but when you use MS, the bonusdmg of a slower bow might outweight that. If Autoshot coupling was still in effect, weapons were still to be chosen in regards to your rotation and the usage of MS would be irrelevant.

 

Jemsky

So in effect , being BM and SV spec means a fast bow with some haste ( perhaps around 90) would be good and with MM a powerful but slower bow would be good, based on rotation.
Thanks for that.

"To bathe a cat takes brute force, perseverance, courage of conviction - and a cat.
The last ingredient is usually hardest to come by."

 

Houjit

The top end pet talents like Roar of Fortitude (health + dodge) and Call of the Wild (AP + RAP) have an effective range of 20 yards from the pet but Roar of Recovery (+mana to the hunter only) is 30 yards.

Blizzard assuming hunters will want to be within 20 yards of their target (in order to receive the buff) doesn't mesh very well with things like the new Sniper Training talent in the Survival tree.

I hope that the talents are all changed to be 30 yards (or are simply applied party-wide like Ferocious Inspiration) so that we don't have to decide whether or not to pull our pet back or run in ourselves in order for everyone in the party to receive the buff.

I don't think we are supposed to blow the talent at the start of a boss fight before we move into position.

 

Gurth

You will probably want to stay closer to boss to benefit from enh shaman totem anyway. Also the fact that those abilities costs 100 focus means that you'll need to recall pet to use them anyway so the range is not really an issue.

 

• Intermission

Why would you recall them? Just turn autocast off bite/claw, use the ability, then turn autocast back on. All of which can be put into a single macro with shift/ctrl/alt modifiers.

 

Houjit

You don't need to recall your pet to get 100 focus. Assuming Auto-Cast works like it does now, it would be enough to put this talent first in your pet bar (Auto-Cast off) and enable Auto-Cast when you first want to use it in a boss fight. Your pet will save up the focus to use it.

Bringing a pet solely to buff a melee group with Roar of Fortitude (health + dodge) would be fine, but Call of the Wild (AP + RAP) seems like the real outlier here because it benefits melee and ranged equally.

 

Æthien

I can see me using roar of fortitude in arena but not in a raiding environment.
In wich case the 20 yards isnt such a big problem anymore, although it does make those abilities yet another dilemma instead of just good.

 

KraxisSingular

Have to agree on the 20 yard range.

It appears that Blizz wants encounters to be much closer in general. Not only are our pet abilities 20 yard, but the Shaman Flame Shock is 20 yards and quite important to their Lava Burst. I get the feeling we won't be the only ones standing at midrange. And with all the AoE skills and talents being thrown around it looks to be quite chaotic.

I hope they revert this. On bosses the size of Gruul or Supremus 20 yards is practially under their feet, and I really doubt that gigantic bosses won't make a reappearance.

Regarding BMT I think we can safely assume that the Exotics are going to be mainly flavour, perhaps a couple will have really good specials, but overall they are not going to be anything beyond normal pets. So it is down to the 5 points. And as it is I'm not certain they are worth it. With only 16 points you can easily get the most important talents and a top ability. What do you lose? A second top ability with a major cooldown or of limited value and some survival talents. Now that might very well be enough to make the point worth it, I don't know, but we still have to put points into Aspect Mastery that could be spent a lot better elsewhere. And since BMT doesn't appear to be a clearcut 'must-have' talent I am willing to say that it is one that we can safely drop.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Something like that could be a solid build for a raiding BM hunter that can't be certain other hunters will be along, something that often happens in guilds that are now moving ahead in BT/MH, meaning the more casual guilds.
Just like it is now for me, I would like Efficiency, but that would not be good for the raid on a whole as I'm often alone as a hunter, or the others don't have IHM. And of course, MM hunters while perhaps more viable this time might still not be very interesting to raidleaders, so someone has to take it and hopefully not sacrifice too much.

Regarding weaponspeed. As far as I have understood Steady Shot doesn't take weapon DPS into account (and currently not ammo either but that will change), but it does, and will, take weapon damagerange into account. Since Steady Shot will be spammed more than ever it seems, and Kill Shot is going to be based on weapon damage too, slow weapons should be better even for BM. I can only see Surv wanting faster weapons for their procs.

 

• Intermission

Steadyshot does (and will) take weapon DPS into account. As in, the dps value, not the damage range. However I agree that slow weapons will most likely be the most popular, for a variety of reasons. (PvP, multi/aimed, etc).

And I hope that 20 yard range is just an oversight... adding more micromanagement to those abilities would be a bit annoying.

 

Zurai

I really wish people would stop mindlessly following a wiki of all places.

It was not "removed in beta 8634". It was never trainable in the first place. Neither are any of the other new hunter abilities. We won't know if Camo is still in the game until we can train all our new abilities up to level 80.