Yesterday I was trying out the Gorilla for grinding/dailies because of the improved thunderstomp, but what I noticed
is that Thunderstomp rarely was used. First I thought it was a focus problem so I disabled all abilities except for Growl and Thunderstomp (and checked it again to be sure it was turned off) but still thunderstomp was rarely used.
After that I added the /cast thunderstomp in my shot macro and it seemed to work much better.

So is there a common issue with autocasting pet abilities?

Gorilla Thunderstomp is only used on autocasting if your pet has more than one aggroed NPC in melee range. But you can use Thunderstomp manualy in an macro.

The bear Swipe skill is also used on single targets, so this may be an alternative pet.

Ah ok! That's actually good, growl is enough to keep one mob busy so I don't mind the gorilla only casts thunderstomp when facing multiple mobs. When I was testing I was indeed testing it on one mob at a time, never thinking it would cast only on a group of mobs.

Will try it out tonight.

RSkillz, if you have access to 2xT5 parts try equipping them while you testing. You will see you gorilla will be able to tank 10+ mobs at the same time and the healing from volley will keep him alive.

I just woke up so just to clarify; Are they on crack or does this mean that steady shot still benefits from WF totem?

No. It means that, just like before, Hunters receive no benefit from the totem.

The "nerf to white damage" bit refers more to the fact that Steady was already limited by the GCD when hasted out by WF and Serpent's Swiftness - at least for BM - whereas Auto Shot was not.

The part where it says "this is a nerf to hunter white damage" confuses me a lot. Do they expect every hunter to be BM or did they forget that steady shot is a 2.0 second cast?

PS. I think this sentence got epic signature potentional.

These changes indeed seem to make the balance between specs even worse then it already was.

On live realms i'm enjoying Marksman spec alot. Somewhat interesting rotations, good personal DPS and a nice new spell(chimera shot). Soloing i can keep going on because of the Rapid recuperation. Overal all neat. However when i did a heroic without a retri, spriest or a shaman i was nearly drinking/vipering more then dpsing if i had bad luck on the killing blows.

Just because we can now due to the nerfs, we had a sunwell alt raid(KJ down twice in 1 week...) filled with people who weren't saved yet on their mains and i brought my Orc hunter who is specced BM. Impossible to go OOM. In 5 mans you regain mana so fast in Viper.

This is all getting even worse in the next patches. Passive regen on viper, 3%(was it 3?)on shots returned and ranged attacks no longer being effected by windfury/improved icy talons will make BM so much better again due to Serpent's swiftness.

Not really looking forward to another expansion of mashing 1 button just to get the most out of the class.

edit: The dps nerf was to be expected after Ghostcrawler posted about us being kings of dps/dps to high etc. I was more aiming at the mana side of the story.

Most likely Blizz poster overlooked the fact that we do need haste for Steady Shot, proving once again the blizzard total cluelessness about hunter mechanics even when they simplified it.

I assume this will also means that hunters will be forced to spec BM once again in order to be competitive with other classes, unless haste gear will be enough to bring back MM/SV on par. I expect this be fixed *soon* with steady cast once again to 1,5 sec, or with serpent swiftness not affecting steady cast (now that would be fun to see lol).

Agreed, the wording is pretty weird on the WF change. Also with Mortal Shot's re-worded, we could assume that they;re going to change WF affecting autoshot (or rather remove it), while leave it for the steady. I don't really know how probable such option is, really, but mentioned nerf to white damage only would suggest it.

But in general BM hunters can pretty much walk over this change, even if it was all across the ranged abilities nerf - their haste talent makes up for it well enough. And with all the metric tonn of haste on our lvl 80 gear, steady shotting shouldn't be too damaged for all other specs even if WF won't affect it.

As MM, autoshot was only about 30% of our dps, while for BM it was around 40%, so 20% less autoshot for everyone hurts more for BM. Also Steadyshot was about 35% of MM's dps, and about 1.7 sec cast time, it means 9-10% less steady, which means 3% less dps, not that bad.
So i see it equal nerf for both spec.
Also the +10% armor on bosses hurts more to BM. Seeing hunters topping 6k dps on patchwerk, this "fix" would lower us to between 5000 and 5500 dps, so about equal to other classes. Not happy about the changes, but have to face it, it seems more balanced to me.

One thing although that was may left out of the calculation is the effect on AotV, so maybe the nerf was a bit overdone, but have to be tested.

So Steady Shot is less than 10% of a BM hunter's dps? These contradicting statements are making it really hard figuring out what information is reliable, and what is not.

Anyways, I'm interested to see how these changes will affect hunter dps in general. BM hunters, being passively haste capped, will probably suffer the least.

We're going to need to run some tests on Aspect of the Viper now. With the 50/50 nature of Viper, it seems we're regenerating mana slower than before. With the change to Windfury, it looks like it could drop down farther, leaving hunters spending more time at half damage.


I believe the second statement is with regards to personal damage. I do agree it's very confusing and inaccurate to directly compare hunter damage between specs, because we end up missing the pet scaling/dps.

Mmmm, not quite true, pets will still benefit from Windfury totem. Auto attack damage composes the majority of most pet's DPS, so it's still a good boost for the pet.

I'm pretty confident that this is going to get changed somehow. While nerfing hunter dps is all well and good, this screws with timing way too much. A ~1.7 second steady shot is incredibly awkward to use, especially now that so much of our shit is on stringent timers.

Anyways, has there been blue response to ammo? It seems to be the most obvious area that needs to be shored up still, with the whopping 2 new ammo types and one being worse than we already have. Beyond that, an ammo purchasable with honor like water is with concievably arena rating based upgrades seems like such an incredibly obvious idea it's painful.

A few pages back I was discussing the possibility of macro'ing in a Serpent Sting and while
"/cast serpent sting"

indeed doesn't work in the shot macro due to casting it everytime the gcd is done I did find this line:

"/castsequence reset=15/target Serpent Sting,null"

which will cast Serpent Sting on every new target and the "null" appearantly disables the function
for 15 seconds and then reactivates it.

I'm at work right now so I can't test it yet, but if this works, it could be pretty usefull.

Edit:

(I've read mixed comments saying the "null" will disable the FULL macro and not just that line, will have to test)

afaik, you can just leave it blank (Serpent Sting, )

I'm not sure I follow why steady shot's casting time would make things awkward since it is no longer tied to auto shot.

Thats one thing that has me worried about these nerfs. They are baseing the nerfs on our dps being much higher then everyone else yet forgot that currently we are not having to switch into Viper currently with the infinite mana bug happening with JoW. If we were switching like we should, then i bet the dps values would be a lot more inline with the other classes. But they havent fixed the bug yet and are baseing all of the nerfs on our bugged dps values. When JoW gets fixed, it's looking like we will take a huge hit in the DPS department. Few hunters on beta are speculating that we'll be on the lower half of the charts.

Vipers getting a double nerf in the next patch. First the 3% on Shots and 4%/3s is showing to be much lower then the current 6% for shots. To be equal, the passive needed to be raised to a combined 10%/3s. Not only that now, we get hit in the haste department where we lose 16% from WF therefor shooting slower and getting viper ticks evey more slowly. MM and SV are hit the hardest with the double nerf while BM can retain a little bit of speed from Serpent Swiftness.

I'm afraid its going to get real ugly here soon.

Because of the GCD. You want things to fit inside one GCD or you are going to waste time because Cooldowns no longer line up nicely.

The flaw with that argument is that you severely over-value the pushback aspect of focused aim. I can't think of one current fight where it'd be a significant increase.

On RoS, sure, it'll be marginally useful. A good hunter can already put out significant damage in P2 by using arcane/multi/serpent (or explosive/chimera if applicable) to avoid much of the pushback. Additionally a problem that arises by being able to hit more, faster, in this particular case is that you will be more prone to suicide.

On KJ, the reduction is only useful if you have fire bloom, and even then a quickshots/dst proc and/or intelligent cast timing allows you to virtually remove the "issue" with an insignificant loss in damage. And that's *only* if you get fire bloom. In all other cases it's not even beneficial to have.

At 80, the extra crit also allows more gftt procs, and if BM more cobra strikes procs as well. Comparing the trade-off is not as straightforward as it initially seems.

Ok I can understand that in a perfect scenario, but for quite a few people (like myself) where this is a small amount of lag and at times a poor framerate, that .2 second different really won't matter too much. I had more concerned with them not apparently realizing how much WF buffs pets, and their band-aid solution for hunter white damage signifigantly hurts survival and mm in comparison to BM's currently top raid scenario dps. Luckily they seemed to understand this as part of their 10% extra armor change, as this will lower BM far more than the other two specs. All in all I can't complain too much about these changes as they were certainly warranted.