Disargeria

Beaten to it.

 

Griffen

I've seen the suggestion of having viper proc off melee before, and I think that might work alright. Even with pillar humping that works - just switch to viper and go on a wingclip spree.
Anyone seeing a problem with this?

If Haste is a b-stat, what else can be?
I hope int is, because I'd love to change it for more int. Int sucks a lot less now without being an optimal stat.

Numquam catapultas allice, iram omnium concitabis

 

Berfert

Your argument doesn't really work out very well in the long term...

Lets assume that hunters and all the other dps classes do 3000dps. Lets also assume that hunters gain no benefit from any stats or buffs, while other classes do. Over time, as we all get better gear, other classes will improve in dps at a much faster rate than us (us getting none for the sake of simplicity).

The problem isn't with our DPS as things stand now. It's how we scale as the bonuses on our gear goes up. If they have to lower our base dps so that we can:
a) get as much benefit from haste as everyone else
b) do the same dps as everyone else at "fresh 80" and "current 70" levels
Then I'm fine with that.

If we do the same damage as everyone else at current 70 and fresh 80, but then get surpassed at "geared 80" because everyone else gets more benefits from haste... then I'm not ok with that. We want to scale at the same rate as everyone else.

 

sjogren

Yeah, well, of course you run into stat inflation if you use fewer stats. But beyond the agi/sta/int/ap that all the items have, they have four stats to work with (hit, crit, haste, arp) and they're just putting two of them on each item. Why do all pieces of the T7 set have haste instead of 1-2 pieces? That's just dumb. Take the current T7 set and change all haste rating to crit rating and all crit rating to haste rating. Boom, you now have a set I wouldn't be ashamed to wear. Why is that a problem?

Of course haste isn't worthless, it's just very very bad. Of course an item with five gazillion haste rating would be better than an item with 12 AP, but I'd rather the item budget was decently well spent.

I hear higher tiers have higher ilevel too. Do you see any str on the rogue T7 set to make them want to upgrade to T8? IMO, that's how bad haste rating is for hunters.

In my opinion, this was one of the problems with the pvp gear in tbc. The stat allocation was so much better than on the pve items (at least early pve items) that the pvp items were competitive for pve despite spending budget points on extra sta and resilience.

You say that it's boring to have mindless upgrades from tier to tier. I agree. It's also boring to look at the loot of a whole tier and conclude "oh, wait, my current gear is better anyway." Sockets is another problem in the same category. Since sockets allows you to stack your best stat without penalty, the items without sockets have a very hard time to compete and in many cases are effectively useless unless they have a huge ilevel lead.

In conclusion: The sky isn't falling, I coped with crappy T4 itemization and I can cope with crappy T7 itemization, but that doesn't mean it's good design and it doesn't mean it's fun.

 

dssurge

I still think the devs are entirely missing the fact that 1 crit rating = 2 haste rating, at best, in damage difference. This is the problem. Even if they under-itemize the gear, giving us exclusively useful stats out weights losing itemization points on crap we don't really want.

As far as I'm concerned they could dump every single point of haste into INT and we would be at a net DPS gain, even after their stat inflation formula comes into play and significantly reduces the amount of INT we would ultimately get.

The simple fact of the matter is that only ~30 of Hunter damage is affected by Haste in any way. This number goes up marginally if you factor in Wild Quiver or GftT, but it's fairly safe to say a rather insignificant amount of our damage is being affected by a stat that is consuming a significant amount of itemization points.

Point and case, assuming 1 haste rating = 1 crit rating (which I assume it does), [Hyaline Helm of the Sniper] would be absurdly better by simply converting Haste to Crit. Even if haste and crit are not 1 for 1, so much itemization is consumed by Haste on this single drop that converting it to crit would be invariably better.

 

Squinky001

Well, I feel like a doofus for forgetting that. Proof that I shouldn't test when tired. ^^;

 

Teldra

Are these the currently made engineer ammo in BC, or are these better (higher dps) ammo?

 

Zurai

Not true. Warriors and DKs loathe Haste, and Retadins are somewhere in the middle. Only Rogues really like Haste among the physical damage classes. Haste is a drastically better caster stat than it is physical.

 

Ketari

Closer to 1:3, afaik.

And that's the problem - this drops the "effective" item level of anything with haste down and unless everything has a large amount of haste we end up with the few items without haste being "the" Hunter set, even if they're low probability drops.

 

Rivkah

Actually this has been worrying me. Right now there is no ammo that I've found that's better than the Hyjal rep ammo except for engineering ammo. I'm not sure what the cost of saronite is going to settle out to, but the idea that one stack of ammo requires 1.5 bars of saronite is not really that reassuring. Based on history, that means that on an average raid we're looking at a cost of 30-45 saronite bars a night in ammo if we want to use the best ammo available. I'm doubting that's going to be chump change. It's also going to put a strain on the ore supply which will likely drive up prices. Ammo is already expensive with the Hyjal stuff at about 50g for a night's raiding just for ammo, and now that more of our shots are dependent on ammo dps, we are going to feel more pressure to use the good stuff more of the time.

I'm also wondering about the hunters who never did Hyjal and won't have good quality ammo to fall back on when not using the engineering stuff. Are we going to see groups of hunters trying to farm Hyjal to get honored rep? What's the minimum size group for Hyjal farming at 80?

 

Sean

Do remember that this is "early" raid gear and none of it is intended to be "perfect" statwise. As we get up to higher tiers we'll see better allocations of stats and such.

 

beathoven

I find it especially sad if you compare it to the other class set items, e.g. rogues or dps warriors. There is no Strength anywhere on the rogue set gear. There is no Agility on the warrior gear. There is no haste on the warrior set gear. Yet on the hunter set gear we find haste rating on every single piece. Somehow this doesn't reflect the argument that was brought up here that T4 was really bad as well. Mind you, T4 was pretty bad in many respects, but not only for hunters but for a lot of other classes as well. Right now though, T7 is really only terrible for hunters. I've already compiled myself a list of gear from the 25 mans which doesn't contain a single piece of haste. I've compared them of course with our equivalent tier pieces, but for each and every of those pieces if you calculate 1 haste rating == 1 ap (which it very roughly is at the moment) you always come out way ahead with the the non-tier pieces as they have the same item level and the same number of stats on them, just differently and a lot more optimal distributed.

 

Steelfleece

Well, I should note that you can't fly more than 10 feet in Icecrown or Sholazar without multiple Saronite nodes popping up on the minimap. An hours worth of mining can net you something like 60-80 bars, more if you're lucky and get a lot of rich nodes. It's a lot more common than nodes in TBC, at any rate, and for a while I actually thought it might've simply been an increased spawn rate for testing on Beta (still can't rule that out really).

As for the earlier question, it's Saronite ammo from WotLK mats.

 

Khassandra

Beta has very limited population. When its on live and hundreds of others are mining, the nodes aren't going to be nearly that plentiful.

http://fdwde.wordpress.com/

"I've always wondered what it'd be like to have a prehensile penis, but you don't see me shitting up this thread with my idea." - Kaubel

 

Steelfleece

Oh, I realize that, but still, as things are on beta, the nodes are still far more common than anything in TBC. You can do reasonably well even if you only have a small area to yourself because the nodes are very densely packed and pretty much all over the map.

 

Rivkah

You also have to keep in mind that right now, people actively farming anything is a fairly small chunk of beta, since most people really do have better ways to spend their time than gather resources they can just buy (although the supply of said resources on the AH is pretty terrible too). On live farming is likely to be a far more common activity. I suspect jewelcrafting and blacksmithing are about to become a lot more popular as professions too since they seem to rank fairly highly on the stat gain from professions meter. I'm hoping it won't end up being a huge drain but I have a sneaking suspicion it will be.

Maybe they should give hunters daily quests for ammo

 

TrevvyTrev

You're neglecting the fact that we scale better than other classes with other stats. For example, we scale better with AGI than any other class besides rogues (and perhaps enhancement shamans with the changes). We cap hit faster than anyone except for 2h arms warriors, and therefore we need to spend less of our item budget on it. We have zero need for expertise (well, our pets need it, but they can't get it), which again, frees more points for stats we do care about.

So we are only guaranteed to scale worse than other classes if we don't get anything BUT haste on our gear. Once more, the point isn't that haste is great or efficient or whatever, but that a) it isn't entirely useless and b) it doesn't detract from the other stats that they put on the gear. At some points, haste is affirmatively better than other stats (i.e., hit when you're capped). Most importantly if the overall stats on a piece result in a comparable upgrade to whatever other classes are getting, then it doesn't matter. No one gets perfectly itemized gear, like our priest visitor said. Other classes wish that some item in their tier sets had hit instead of crit or spell power instead of spirit or int instead of stamina or str instead of expertise or ....

It's not a problem at all. You just proposed a set that still has haste -- you just reversed the amounts. Suggesting that the proportion of haste to crit should be different isn't the same as suggesting that haste has absolutely no value and the designers are crackheads for putting any on anything. I don't know why my points have somehow morphed into "haste should be on every piece of gear in copious amounts" or something like that. I only was answering the argument that there should be NO haste on anything and addressing someone's question whether people should always ditch gear that has any haste on it in favor of an item that doesn't have any. People have been distilling a nuanced point, which is that haste decreases in value substantially once your steady shot cast time dips below the GCD, into a simplistic and inaccurate statement of: "haste is the worst possible stat for hunters and if you see any on gear then that means it is poorly itemized and probably not an upgrade." I'm not a proponent of haste per se, rather I'm a proponent of not confusing people by misstating its relative value.

Yes, it's true that a lot of items would be more dps if the haste were replaced with crit or something. But it's also true that an item can be too good (from the designers' perspective, of course, it can never be too good as far as we're concerned), which is why some stats are spent on things that either don't increase dps (like sta) or increase your dps at a slower rate than other stats (like haste).

The simple answer is that you make more money at 80 doing level 80 type things than you did at 70, so you should be able to absorb the cost. Plus the white quality vendor ammo is 46.5 dps which is perfectly fine for when you aren't raiding, and it's pretty cheap -- same dps as the Violet Eye ammo at only 30% of the cost.

 

Rivkah

When everyone makes more money, everyone is willing to spend more on resources, this tends to drive up prices. A good example is what happened when the island dailies opened, many things on the AH went up in price (although to be honest, some of that was due to people doing dailies instead of farming so supply was more strained). I'm not convinced that saronite is really going to be cost effective. We'll see though. I just think it's a terrible idea to have the best ammo be completely reliant on crafting. The gap between 46.5 and 67.5 dps is not that small, any serious raiding guild will expect you to be using the good stuff at least on bosses and it's going to add up fast.

 

KraxisSingular

Indeed... T7 for a lot of classes is actually very very good. Even the Enhancers are looking at their set with wet eyes, thanking the lord to not have a repeat of TBC. And it is a very beautiful set indeed. There are even pieces that I, a Hunter, would like over my own set (legs and helmet beat ours hands, feet and head down). That can't be right can it?

I don't mind Haste if it was limited. But heck on the T7 set it is the third largest stat (no counting Stamina). And the sick thing is that that Stamina provides about the same value as all the Haste does for Survivalists (I think I saw people having calculated that Stamina is about 2/3 the value of Haste). How wrong isn't that?
Haste shouldn't be such a dominating stat when there are other options. Especially not when you could throw all the statpenalty out the window and just apply the converted Haste to any of the already given good stats and get a better result. In spite of that penalty.

But we are really skirting the issue here. Blizzard feels that they need to stack a lot of different stats on gear to avoid the stacking penalty on each item. Well, then the problem really is that we don't have enough stats to scale properly with. And worse yet, even within our class we scale differently with our own gear. Arguably BM scales worse with Haste than MM and Surv. Not a problem now, seeing that BM is likely best DPS. But as we have previously concluded the BM DPS has a lot to do with non-scaling buffs to the pet, so if the Hunter also scales badly compared to the other specs, then it might become an issue later. I don't think any Hunter, regardless of spec, actually want any of our specs to be similar to Spriests now in DPS scaling (starting out great but falling behind fast).

And btw, it isn't as if we can't use +Hit for all 9% until the cap. There are no Hit raidbuffs, and no debuffs either. They are all for casters. If we get above 6% hit from gear, then we drop a point in Focused Aim and so on until 9%. And it isn't exactly as if we are swimming in Hit on most gear, our setgear in particular. Getting more of it would not be bad.
Even Death Knights have way more Hit than us... And we need the same amount of Hit.

I simply can't see how we can't get 120 Haste rating from the T7 set changed to Hit or crit. It isn't as if either of those stats are highly priced at 40 and 77 ratings each. It really doesn't look like we will be capping out very easily in terms of Hit at T7.
That would bring Haste down to about ArP in spent itemvalue. Two stats we don't really need, but are fair with having in slight amounts.

And I most certainly don't buy the "well we do great DPS with this gear" line. Yes we do apparently. We seem to be 'balanced' around this kind of gear (I'm not certain that we won't get a whack just yet). But what happens when all of our esteemed theorycrafting Hunters out there swarm out and pick up every non-set item that are better itemized? Well, the result is that Hunters will be miles ahead on DPS. If that happens, then you can be sure something will happen to us, and my nagging feeling is that it won't be the longer approach of changing a lot of gear along with a nerf (which would obviously be required). And if we are balanced around all the non-setgear what do we have it for? Bad stand-ins for 'real' gear?

[EDIT]
Yup, too good gear does exist, and I have already argued why curbing our DPS on our setgear is a bad idea, since we can technically get superior gear from other sources. Might be slower, but if you are in a slow progressing guild it will pay off in a grand way. And that is the situation I'm in. I will likely do Naxx a whole lot, I won't have access to the next tier for some time.

 

Steelfleece

Well, I think if anything it'd be easier to find the materials on the AH on live than beta...I haven't had much luck with the beta AH myself when I actually NEEDED something. Usually it's either grabbing it myself or mooching it off someone else.

 

TrevvyTrev

If people are willing to spend more on resources, then they are willing to spend it on resources you provide as well. You will make money from selling things that you get from farming (actual items, boe greens that you send to be disenchanged, etc.) or from your professions like everyone else does.

What gear are you going to get from sources below Naxx that is actually better than Naxx gear? There is definitely better gear from instances that are equal to or above Naxx, but that's normal progression. Also I already answered why the existence of gear that is better than set gear isn't a problem.

EDIT: By the way, I totally get why people think the T7 set isn't itemized well. For the (hopefully) last time, I'm not trying to defend the T7 as being well itemized, even for its place in progression. I don't have an opinion on that. The issue I have is that people have been reading all the complaining about haste and are making incorrect conclusions about what haste generally does, and what they should do with haste gear. I mean, all the harping on the T7 set and its haste has people questioning whether they should throw away haste gear for questing or leveling. For pete's sake, you can level and quest half-naked. We can't let people continue to think that haste is as bad as THAT.

 

Ketari

TrevvyTrev - If the set gear isn't ideal for a class, then that class are going to be dead last for getting the tokens, and will be first up for the gear which is good for them in many loot systems. The snag being that the non-set gear will often be considerably rarer than the tokens.

If we're scaling to well? Then the class should be adjusted, or they have to make sure litterally all the gear we might reasonably use has haste.

 

Berfert

You make a lot of points, so I'll be brief:
1. Of course we scale better in agi than other classes, but they have other stats that scale for them in the same way. Warriors and such have Str to match our Agi, and those stats are priced the same across all of us. Haste doesn't have a parallel, it should scale around the same for every class.
2. The hit cap is a double edged sword. Sure, we cap faster than dual wielders. However, hit is the cheapest stat, ROI-wise. The fact that we cap quickly means we lose the ability to get that cheap bonus faster. That's a bad thing. That being said, the vast majority of other dps classes cap at the same number we do, 9%.
3. Expertise is a valid point, but that's a double edged sword, too. No dps needs it, its just another way to gain more dps.
4. Nobody with half a brain is saying haste is useless. We're saying it sucks compared to the other available stats, and it shouldn't be all over our gear in such large amount, or they should change things so we get as much benefit from it as other classes. It would be like them putting the 2.0 style +heal/dam stat all over the dps caster sets. Sure, they get the 1/3 +dam bonus from it... but it's certainly a stupid way to get it.

 

Aishen

Okies, stupid question time:

Chimera shot; is it actually worth it? I've been using it on the PTR and I'm not sure if it's doing any good; seems to be not working with my rotation; of course that could be just simply a sucky rotation.

In shot, I'm looking for advaice on a Wrath Marks build.

 

Garf

Wrong thread for this discussion, but there's a serious misconception here worth pointing out. I'll argue from the hunter perspective, since, well, this is the hunter thread and I can reasonably comment on that, but the principle applies to any class.

Haste applies to white damage (which is used synonymously to auto attack damage). This makes up 25ish percent of our total damage. Haste increases this by its percentage value. This already includes any stat benefits said auto attacks have at this point! Hence doubling this into the haste argument is not factually correct and has nothing to do with "mentality".