Kaejin

Ideally speccing Survival should yield just as much DPS as Marks or BM.

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Ok GC, I will make it simple.
If Ghostcrawer's words can be taken at face value, there should be no penalties for providing any kind of buff. I'd rather people didn't get it into their heads that Survival can't have good DPS because it's a buff spec.


The difference between how we provide Replenishment and how Shadow Priests and Ret Paladins provide it is that we aren't limited by a cooldown of 8 to 10 seconds like they are. Hunter's can proc Replenishment on Arcane Shot, Explosive Shot, and Steady Shot crits. That means we have the potential to proc Replenishment many times over in the 8 seconds it takes a priest or paladin proc it once (how many times a specific hunter could proc it within 8 seconds would depend on their haste). This gives us more leeway in how many points we have to invest in Hunting Party in order to be competitive with either of those classes as a mana battery.

I don't know if 2 points into HP is the optimal number, but once the lowest ten in the raid have the buff, any extra procs are more or less wasted unless the Replenishment buff is running out. 5/5 points is almost certainly overkill because of things like that.

 

Smoggers

I suppose my replenishment confusion can be summed up in a fairly basic example.

Raid members 1-10 are the lowest mana raid members.
Raid members 11-20 are the next lowest mana raid members.

Replenishment procs, giving members 1-10 replenishment.

5 seconds later, you proc replenishment again, but members 1-10 are STILL the lowest mana raid members and obviously still have replenishment ticking on them.

what happens?

a) members 1-10 have their replenishment refreshed.
b) members 11-20 gain replenishment.
c) nothing.

 

TrevvyTrev

That's what I do now. In instances and most PvP situations I have my pet on passive, not because I don't want my pet attacking when I open fire (because it doesn't) but because I don't want it running off attacking whatever happened to hit it. Some minor AoE hits or a stray mob attacks it, and before I know it, my pet has run off and gotten itself killed, or worse, it has aggroed something it shouldn't have. My only point is that in situations where I'm prone to use defensive (and there aren't many of them) I would also want my pet attacking whatever aggros me, including what I'm attacking. I only use defensive when farming or grinding, and I have no reason not to have my pet attack things in those situations. Reasonable minds may differ, of course.

They aren't really saying that Survival shouldn't do good dps, but they *are* saying that it shouldn't be the highest dps spec if indeed it provides more utility than the others. They are putting it in the context of statements like this from Koraa:

(emphasis added.) The idea is that if Replenishment provides more utility than Ferocious Inspiration, for example, then BM probably should do more dps than Survival. How much more is debatable, as is whether Replenishment actually provides more utility than FI does. But assuming it does (or that traps actually end up useful during raids and SV trap talents provide significant utility), then people are suggesting that the spec with less utility should enjoy a dps edge, or else there's little reason to spec it.

 

Chul

I think we'll see how that train of thought pans out in how they handle ret pallies.

For example, using the utility=less DPS argument, ret paladins should be one of the lowest DPS specs as they bring the equivalent of FI and Hunting Party along with Judgement of Wisdom (and keeping it up), +crit debuff in Heart of the Crusader, +AP buff in Blessing of Might (or Kings which has no replacement), and Divine Storm heals 3 people every 10s.

I think they'll say that since there is now redundent buffs/debuffs in the game, and provided they spread them around, specs/classes wont be penalised too much for providing utility.

 

Iluminati

To really test pet dps you need to have raid debuffs up, and spirit beasts/wasps look like contenders for dps as well, based on their special abilities.

 

TrevvyTrev

Actually, with respect to ret pallies, they said this:

Source: It's Been Fun (A Hunter's Eulogy)

Beyond that, what you said isn't inconsistent with other goals they've set. You suspect that specs won't be penalized "too much" for utility, which doesn't say that there isn't a penalty at all, but instead that the penalty isn't onerous. That's okay. Most reasonable people aren't suggesting that a Ret paladin should never be at the top of a damage meter, nor are they saying that a Survival hunter should be. They are instead saying that those classes/specs shouldn't be surprised if others outdamage them from time to time, and they certainly shouldn't expect to blow other dps specs out of the water. What they've said they don't want to happen is that the "utility" specs do considerably less dps than the other specs all the time, because that "utility" often isn't all it's cracked up to be.

 

Puerile

With 3.0.2 pre-WOTLK raiding builds approaching very quickly, I've found myself stuck between having to pick between 3 major talent choice combinations.

1) 4/5 KS, 5/5 MS, 0/3 CA
2) 4/5 KS, 2/5 MS, 3/3 CA
3) 1/5 KS, 5/5 MS, 3/3 CA

At first, build #3 might seem to be the best bet, but I found that between #3 & #2, #2 seemed to edge out #3 quite consistently in terms of target dummy unbuffed DPS. I'm more up in the air between #1 and #2 at this point.

They all scale very well, but of course MS only affects steady shot. With Kings & AI, Careful Aim could provide quite a large AP buff. Kindred Spirits is nice, and since our pets seem to scale so well with raid-wide buffs, in my mind it only makes sense to spec into it.

I know the math on all these is tricky, and relying on the results of unbuffed target dummy spam isn't a great representation of how they will scale in a 25 man raid environment, but, has there been specific math done on these talents?

 

Chul

And that is exactly what I was saying. There will be a penalty but a minor one because otherwise, as my previous post showed, some classes who have more "utility" would end up with crappo DPS.

But what is this supposed utility that people think Surv has over the other two specs? All they have it Hunting Party; BM get FI and MM get TSA. I don't see one spec having more utility than others.

 

Chul

Have you tried using the WotLK DPS spreadsheet with your gear and lvl 70 buffs?

 

Infiniteone

They said they are trying to make all dps classes equal dps, but this doesnt mean ALL SPECS. Hunter, warlock, mages, and rogues are pure dps throughout all their trees, but only 1 tree per class is going to compete with all the other dps, the others will be for utility boosting and PvP. So dont hold your breath for all 3 hunter trees to produce the same dps.

 

Cranch

My PTR post was deleted, which asked if it was a bug or not that Rabid was not autocasting if the pet was not being attacked. Since Maaven appears to leave the actual bugs up, it seems safe to assume the nonautocasting is intentional (unless of course this was fixed in the Pet AI apparent revamp -- any news there?)

 

PSGarak

Wrong. You're splitting hairs on a semantic arguement, but don't have the details to back up the distinction you're making. They've said repeatedly that they don't want there to be PvE trees or PvP trees, and that all 3+ specs for all classes should be both raid- and PvP-viable. Given that Ret has been promised competitive DPS and a replenishment buff, they are not taking "raid viable" to mean "raid DPS" is exclusive with "raid utility." You can bet that SV's "punishment" for the utility won't be greater than maybe a hundred DPS (the quoted figure for retadins). Which is, in all honesty, a drop in the bucket for fifteen DPS characters cranking 3k each. Granted, one spec will always edge out the others by some value, and if it comes down to it SV should be the one that gets edged out because of replishment, but that value is intended to be ignorably small.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Spiry

a) members 1-10 have their replenishment refreshed.

 

Houze

This will benefit some classes more then others, I wonder if Blizzard have considered that?
Example, for warlocks it doesn't matter how much mana they have left, they can lifetap when needed, so they will simple dump mana in the beginning of a fight to get full benefit from replenishment during the whole fight, healers always want to save mana until it's realy needed so they wont get so much mana from replenishment, hunters wants to get full benefit of AotV and fill their mana-bar up to 100% as shifting between AotV and AotH costs GCD = dps-time so in a mana-heavy raid-setup it's possible that hunters replenishment uptime will be rather low (maybe 60-80% ?).

Have anybody done some calculations on mana pool for BM-hunters? It might be usefull to stack Int over other stats, for example Int gives the same attack power (with CA) as agility so getting 83 agi or 83 int is a diffrence of 1% crit or: 1245 mana + some 10-15 mp5 (from Invorgation) and another 15.56 mp5 from replenishment. It might be me thinking awkward but larger mana pool and more mana regen gives more time outside AotV and could result in higher dps?.

 

Smoggers

Thanks for clarifying, Spiry.

 

zoujin

Aotv scales incredibly well with buffs, eg it goes from 20 seconds in viper for one minute in hawk, to 15 seconds in viper for 3-4 minutes in hawk. By stacking intellect instead of agility you can reduce time in aotv with only fractions of seconds, and while it greatly increases time spent in aoth, your dps will be lower both in, out and overall.

But if you don't overdo it (several hundreds of agi to int) it shouldn't gimp your overall dps as it does now, just lower it a bit, so you could enchant weapons, or gem stuff with int instead of agi. That is, if they manage to keep viper useful.

 

sjogren

Wow, that sounds utterly broken. It'll make replenishment work drastically different in a 10man and a 25man.

If it works that way, what's the point of having 2-3 replenishers in a 25man raid (other than for redundancy if one happens to die)? Has there been any blue communication on this?

 

yllen

Efficiency doesn't scale particularly well though does it? No matter how you are geared, buffed or talented it just gives you a flat mana cost reduction.

Invigeration actually looks like it scales very nicely, particularly in a raid situation when you consider the changes to buff stacking.

If you can increase your agility, crit rating, pet crit rating, intellect or mana pool, then the amount of mana regenerated through Invigeration increases.

I had some back-of-an-envelope calculations making assumptions about gcd, mana pool, crit rates and shot rotation and even with conservative numbers, Invigeration returned more mana over time than was saved by Efficiency over the same time period.

 

lamrith

Yeah for true top level output I can't argue that. My concern is how can cat be taking raid buff higher when the tooltip for thier abilities lists a "flat" dmg component, while the Devilsaur ability is a % increase. Logic tells me that the % increase of the devilsaur can at least benefit from hunter/pet buffs, but the cat being a static number and not based off atk power etc should not scale? Or did they just leave that out of the tooltip?

 

Winged

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Ok GC, I will make it simple.

That's something very interessting about the Replenishbuff. It looks like that with 2 Classes able to buff the Replenish Buff more than 10 People are getting it.

 

Kajsa

I'd like to see hunting party take a cue from the druid ability mother bear (I know it's not called mother bear anymore but common, MOTHER BEAR)

"...for each friendly player in your party when you enter Bear Form or Dire Bear Form, damage you take is reduced while in Bear Form and Dire Bear Form by 3%."

Maybe giving us something like:

Replenishment effect + 1% damage increase for each player in party

This might be a little over budgeted for blizzards tastes, but then I don't know what the dps gain on the shadow priest's vampiric touch is.

 

KraxisSingular

Well it certainly aint perfect.

However, while I argued earlier that the people who are low on mana now are likely to be the ones low on mana mostly, it isn't going to be a set fact. Those who get low fast generally have means to get mana back relatively fast. Classes like Hunters, Warlocks, Enhancement Shamans and Mages. But their elevator style in mana means that the lowest 10 mana users will change a lot. Meaning new procs of Replenishment will often involve new people. As soon as one person is exchanged, a Replenishment proc is worth it (depending on how much HP costs the Surv Hunter). So I don't think it will be so that it can be ignored for 15 seconds etc.

However I can easily see Warlocks and Hunters stretching their last mana in an attempt to get Replenishment before they get their mana back. That in turn might lead to healers calling out that now DPS classes that can get mana back themselves shouldn't burn it all as several healers are low on mana.
It might end up being a coordinated effort through a raid.

Very much so. I just don't hold any faith on that given that it has been changed back and forth as to how it should work, but never once has any consideration ben given to "the selfless buffer" aspect.
Ret pallies for instance are just about the most 'selfish' buffers around. Every single buff they provide do something for them, directly (like Santified Retribution, Heart of the Crusader, Imp BoM, Swift Retribution) or indirectly through the talents that provide the buff (like Judgements of the Wise). Ret Pallies want to take these as they buff the paladin too in some very hands on way.

But a nice buffing to the Hunter in Hunting Party would be nice as the surrounding talents aren't exactly superb for raiding.

I don't think you should take that as Replenishment can stack in the sense that more than 10 people at a time can get the benefit.
I am quite certain she means that more than 10 people get the benefit because very seldomly does the same 10 people hold the lowest spot in mana. So over a fight it isn't all that unlikely that only a couple manausers won't have been blessed with Replenishment.

 

Osse

Am I missing something or is hunter's mark static 110 attack power increase and we have a three point tier two talent that increases attack power by 33?

 

KraxisSingular

Well it becomes free of mana too. But don't tell people, it might get nerfed from that OP state.
Yes, given the changes to Hunter's Mark it is a very inefficient way to spent three talents.

 

ElginRoko

There's a couple of other posts that have made me suspect (hope) that this is how it works, eg.
WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Did the 25-man Naxx as resto...

two seems kind of arbitrary if different peoples' replenishments just refresh each other, or if you can take a replenishment from more than one source. Possibly I'm massively over-analysing though

So modifying Smoggers' example, I'm wondering if this is what happens:

Raid members 1-10 are the lowest mana raid members.
Raid members 11-20 are the next lowest mana raid members.

Ret pala judges, giving members 1-10 replenishment.

5 seconds later, SV hunter procs replenishment again, members 1-10 are STILL the lowest mana raid members and obviously still have replenishment ticking on them.

members 11-20 gain replenishment. (members 1-10 are unaffected)

To put it another way, hunting party (or whatever) gives the replenishment buff to the 10 lowest mana raid members who do not have replenishment from a different source active.

Anyone care to verify/disprove?

Edit: Very significant yet easy-to-read-over words made bold :P