If you look at the 51-point Combat Rogue, Arms Warrior and Ret Palading talents, you'll see they are getting some (mild) AOE abilities. Explosive Shot gives us the means to apply Expose Weakness to a group of mobs, which fits very well with the mentioned talents (yes, I know it doesn't proc EW atm, but that's most likely a bug).
And besides, it's damage is not just "so-so". It does 3x the dmg of Steady Shot (Rank 3) and only costs twice as much. It does very high damage, and it's more mana efficient than Steady Shot, oh, and it does AOE damage as well. Personally, I'm very pleased to have that as the 51-point talent (asuming they fix the EW/HP procs).
Edit: That was in reply to Gonkish btw.
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
You are aware that Hunting Party has a 8 second cooldown, are you? It wouldn´t match GftT or make it futile at all if it had the effect you describe. Moreover, you will take lethal shots and careful aim in every SV-specc so the question basically is whether to distribute the 2 remaining points to GftT or Focused Fire. I admit the latter surely has some power but unless Hunting Party is changed drastically (i.e. remove the CD, which would make it ridiculously powerful) I would favour GftT (focus dumps generally do more damage than KC) nonetheless.
Yeah, I thought about that after I posted it. Again, I'm just sort of dumping thoughts all over the place. (Also worth noting: Hunting Party on the beta servers is currently bugged and is ignoring the cooldown. Consequently it is INCREDIBLY AMAZING. I woe the inevitable fix. )
As for Scatter, Trevy... I would like to see either Deterrence or Scatter trainable. I suppose you're right in suggesting that Deterrence would make more sense. I still think Deterrence is the only effective method of utilizing Counterattack, however, and thus I still argue that Counterattack needs to be an active ability that would have to have a longer cooldown than its current one.
Redzin: I expected that a lot of people would disagree over Explosive. I'm still sort of on the fence myself, in fact. I just generally see it as being too situational to really justify its position. Sure, it's great for large packs of tightly-bunched mobs (I'm looking at you, Felmyst skeletons!), and, granted, it is an instant-cast shot like Arcane, thus allowing you to fire it on the move (which is probably my favorite aspect of it), but in most other respects it's very odd in my opinion. I'm not sure if it's really efficient to utilize on 2-3 mobs, myself. I feel as if I could just throw out a Multi and then follow that up with another Steady and achieve roughly the same effect, with the knowledge that the melee is going to be primarily focusing on one mob in most cases, anyway, even with their new AoE toys; plus, Expose still shines the brightest on the mob that is currently being assist-trained. I generally don't find myself worrying about Expose uptime on secondary targets; consequently, I don't really consider the prospect of multiple applications of Expose on different (and probably secondary) targets to be all that valueable, even when talking about Multi-Shot.
I do appreciate the thoughts, and I hope I don't sound evil or something. I'm just really tired.
(You would not believe how many times I had to edit this to make it readable...)
Last edited by Gonkish : 07/25/08 at 9:26 AM.
How can you help?
I can shoot things and then make my pet move toward them.
The first three tiers of Marksmanship are INCREDIBLY bloated. You can spend 55+ points in MM while skipping an ENTIRE TIER OF TALENTS and not even notice it. To me that means that MM needs some bloat reduction. You absolutely need to have at least 17 points in Marksmanship regardless of your spec anyway (Max Lethal Shots/Mortal Shots/Steady Aim/Careful Aim/Aimed Shot, to say nothing of Go For the Throat, Rapid Killing, or Imp. Hunter's Mark, the latter of which is pretty much required if you're a raiding Survival Hunter.)
The problem with MM's early tiers is that there's just TOO MUCH good stuff in it. It's got the exact opposite problem of almost every other talent tree I can think of: Instead of crap crap and maybe one decent 5 point talent that you take just to move deeper into the tree, early MM has a load of really good talents (with the possible exception of Imp. Concussive, though that is more of a PvP talent, again modified to provide consistency rather than the RNG stun, which is nice), some of which are absolutely essential unless you feel like being a huge ranged DPS gimp. The non-essentials are generally good enough that I hate playing without them (especially GftT when soloing, as it is just about the only way a Survival Hunter's pet ever has any Focus at all, without gimping its damage (and thus threat) output by turning off auto-cast Claw/Bite). Something needs to be done to better design the first three tiers of Marksmanship, they're just too FULL
<snip>
BM, on the other hand, has the same problem as MM, but inversely. Deep BM is crawling with a lot of great talents, but if you want both them and the requisite 17 in MM, you're basically out of luck. I'd suggest thinning out the crowd a bit. Either reduce the talent point investment, or combine one or two of them. The real problem lies behind the fact that Invigoration, Longetivity, and Beast Mastery are all generally essential in a raiding environment (or at least, the latter would seem to be, I reserve judgment until its implementation on the beta servers). There's not really any room for Cobra Strikes unless you skip Aspect Mastery in its entirety (which is thankfully possible as it is not the pre-req for Beast Mastery, which is a nice option), while still taking things from MM like Lethal/Mortal Shots, Steady/Careful Aim, Go for the Throat, and possibly Aimed Shot.
As it is, with Aspect Mastery being the clear lesser of all choices the BM tree is lean in extremity really. We don't really have to hunt for points as it is (when we consider level 80 builds).
As it is, you can just take every 'good' talent and still be able to get all the nice MM talents. Although I differ in opinion with you there; I don't really consider Aimed Shot or Focused Aim to be 'necessary'.. for current raids. It depends on raid design in the future whether we'll need both of course.
I full agree that higher-tier MM is too bloated and, worse, has talents which are completely superseded in usefulness by mechanics/other talents (hello Barrage) and talents which are dubious in discription (hello imp. Steady Shot not improving steady shot).
Mmm, Redzin, what AoE is both physical in nature and is likely to hit more than 4 targets at the same time?
While yes, Explosive Shot will help stack up the EW on multiple targets at the same time, there's very rarely the need to do so in groups larger than 4 which wouldn't be possible to do with the currently available tools.
Gonkish, I definitely agree with you that there is major talent bloat in the early tiers for MM and later tiers for BM. It seems to me that Blizzard is trying to shove all the 'utility' MM talents down into the early tiers and thus not letting that tree really shine. Concussive Barrage? Who the heck finds that remotely useful? I'm surprised it's still around in its current form. I would personally love to see that talent changed into a chance on shot % damage boost ala Reckoning but not based off crit but just shots fired which would help beef up the damage in the tree without increasing burst capabilities.
As for Potent Venom. Great idea to encourage the use of the stings, but really, bad implementation since the stings aren't generally worth it for the mana and gcd usage. I'm seriously thinking a 30-35% coefficient for stings and traps are sorely needed. 20% matches the normalised damage, the extra 10% would account for the DPS boost ~40% crit gives to crittable shots. 40% scalar would probably be a bit too much. The current 10% RAP scalar is like saying that a full length caster DoT only gets the same spell coefficient as an instant. And on the topic of RAP scalars, why on earth is arcane shot still only 15% RAP? The primary DPS shot for 55 levels and it scales the worst barring the stings which only just had scaling mechanics implemented.
As for MM being declared the 'pvp' tree, I find it rather unusual that the 'pvp tree' has no innate talents to increase durability. The HP talents are in BM and Survival, Survival has a -damage taken talent and it now has CloS lite plus enhanced crowd control capabilities (though the vast majority would use Frost traps and Wyvern is questionable). It seems that MM is becomming the (BC) Discipline tree of hunters with lots of funky stuff but incapable of standing on its own in a serious raiding mindset.
As it is, with Aspect Mastery being the clear lesser of all choices the BM tree is lean in extremity really. We don't really have to hunt for points as it is (when we consider level 80 builds).
As it is, you can just take every 'good' talent and still be able to get all the nice MM talents. Although I differ in opinion with you there; I don't really consider Aimed Shot or Focused Aim to be 'necessary'.. for current raids. It depends on raid design in the future whether we'll need both of course.
I full agree that higher-tier MM is too bloated and, worse, has talents which are completely superseded in usefulness by mechanics/other talents (hello Barrage) and talents which are dubious in discription (hello imp. Steady Shot not improving steady shot).
I certainly agree in the latter case. High-tier MM is bloated to hell. The whole tree is just too stuffed right now.
I suppose I'm a bit outdated in my mindset that having Aimed Shot is a nice fallback in the admittedly rare case of a raid lacking an Arms warrior. (I'm old fashioned, I guess.) I suspect Focused Aim can go one of two ways: 1.) Blizzard specifically designs encounters around the fact that Hunters can get pushback protection on Steady Shot, and thus consequently Focused Aim becomes essential. 2.) Blizzard ignores the fact that Focused Aim exists, and consequently doesn't design large M'uru 1.0-esque pushback spam raid boss fights. This effectively makes the talent terrible outside of solo play and maybe PvP. Maybe.
I'm not really sure which is preferable. If it's #1, every single raiding Hunter is required to max out Focused Aim, lest their DPS suffer. (Thus it ends up being equivalent to Lethal/Mortal Shots.) If it's #2, everyone bemoans the existence of the talent until it is either moved or removed. In both cases, you end up with sub-optimal results. If it ends up being a compromise, that is if Blizzard designs fights that have pushback elements, but they're not incredibly overwhelming (HELLO, OLD M'URU!), then you can justify either taking the talent or not. In short, its value hinges entirely on raid design, and I genuinely believe that Blizzard is going to throw out more, not less, raid-wide AoE damage (the justification for that theory being the endless ramping up of AoE damage through Sunwell, be it pushback-generating or not), which will potentially end up causing unavoidable or, at least, highly inconveniencing pushback generation.
That, however, remains to be seen. Maybe they've learned their lesson from Sunwell (or, more correctly, M'uru)?
EDIT:
Takel: Yeah, the real issue is that Potent Venom works off skills that are simply too weak to justify their cost. especially considering that Stings can't crit, and Survival's world revolves around crit. I agree that Stings need a much higher coefficient. 30-35% does sound more in line with what it should be, realistically.
I only call Marksmanship the "PvP" tree because that's what Blizzard seems to want it to be. If you look at the 21/31/41/51 point talents, you're staring, with the exception of TSA, at PvP tools. Scatter Shot, Silencing Shot, and, now, the dubious Chimera Shot (which is a good idea, especially in relation to Arenas, but it needs tweaking of some sort). I agree that it is strange for the official/unofficial PvP tree to be so sorely lacking in survivability talents, and I don't agree with the idea that you must go to the other two trees in order to not be a complete glass cannon.
Also, Concussive Barrage (and, by association, Blade Twisting) are sick jokes and failed mechanics (especially in terms of raiding). I bet all the other talents laugh at them at their office Christmas party, even before the booze starts flowing. I generally think Concussive Barrage is the obligatory fat chick with hygiene problems in the Talent world.
Last edited by Gonkish : 07/25/08 at 10:05 AM.
How can you help?
I can shoot things and then make my pet move toward them.
It seems like you still didn't get it: Even on _single_ target, ES does a lot more damage with just one GCD than Steady, to a point where it isn't only doing more DPS, but also is more mana efficient. In addition, it scales incredibly well (RAP * 0,6 + X). More targets in range of course push the damage even higher and I really don't see why you should choose 1 Multi + 1 Steady on a bunch of Mobs over 1 Multi + 1 Explosive.
Gonkish, yes you could fire a Multi and then a Steady for the same effect more or less, but in the same period of time you could fire Explosive and Steady too. And Explosive will overall have more damage than Multi for the much less mana. Explosive Shot looks to be godly damage and I will envy Survs for it, even on single targets... In fact it is the one talent that might make me try Surv out.
Thorongil, I'm happy to see more threat indeed, but three times as much? With the possiblity of 20% on top of that? Un-bloody-likely. The reason I want Longevity to affect Growl is that it is only fair, and logical that BM pets are the masters of threat, not just mildly better threat due to DPS. Currently every spec can get the 20% extra Growl threat, and only Intimidation provides more threat for BMs, which can't be used on bosses and such.
I don't like three times faster Growls because of the loss of specials, however three times faster Growls does mean less risk from resists. But in Tenacity the 4% hit will ensure 8% hit overall, which means no instanceboss will ever resist Growl (like our traps the pet specials also benefit from a combined hitbonus, and not rating in this case).
I'm not seeing the damage increase over Steady/Multi on the beta servers. This may be because something is not functioning properly, or I could just be braindead. One of those. But from what I've seen, the total damage done by every tick of Explosive/Steady on 2-3 targets (i.e., being relatively fair to Multi, because it is limited to 3 targets), even with crits, doesn't seem to be quite as good as a Multi/Steady (though, pbviously, the more targets there are in the 5 yard radius, the better Explosive becomes, but how often does that really happen?). This may be because Steady and Multi are taking advantage of my Armor Penetration (1064 passive on beta, 1364 with trinket), while Explosive is not (it's fire damage, however, and it thus ignores armor).
I wonder if the culprit for my (apparently mistaken?) belief that Explosive isn't really good DPS (outside of packs of mobs) is the fact that Armor Penetration is as retardedly good as we all know and love it for being.
I'll log back on the beta server and play with it some more. Thanks for the heads up.
ANOTHER EDIT (I'm so good at this):
Another random thought: Imp. AotH should be changed to allow Quick Shots to proc when the Hunter is using Aspect of hte Viper as well. (This would obviously require the talent to be renamed.) Sure, using Viper to aid in longetivity (which may or may not be as huge an issue, what with mana, especially for BM or Survival, possibly being less of a restriction) loses out on the AP bonus of Hawk, and it should, if you think about it, but the loss of Quick Shots hurts in two different ways: You're getting less shots out, and you're effectively wasting 5 talent points while Viper is up.
It'd be another simple change that would serve the class well.
EDITEDITEDIT (oh god someone kill me):
I just realized that Volley now scales with AP, can crit, AND has had its cooldown removed. Explosive + Volley seems like it'd be a nice addition to Mage/Lock/Boomkin AoE in Wrath.
Last edited by Gonkish : 07/25/08 at 10:20 AM.
How can you help?
I can shoot things and then make my pet move toward them.
It seems like you still didn't get it: Even on _single_ target, ES does a lot more damage with just one GCD than Steady, to a point where it isn't only doing more DPS, but also is more mana efficient. In addition, it scales incredibly well (RAP * 0,6 + X). More targets in range of course push the damage even higher and I really don't see why you should choose 1 Multi + 1 Steady on a bunch of Mobs over 1 Multi + 1 Explosive.
Exactly my point. Even on single targets it's very mana-effective. Even though it's mana-cost is relatively high, the damage it does outweighs it, meaning it's at least as efficient as Steady Shot, and could easily be more efficient (depending how many times it crits).
And the fact that the dmg is spread over 3 ticks vastly increases the chance of keeping up EW, both on single and multiple targets. With ES you could potentially keep up EW on 10+ targets indefinately (assuming a reasonably high crit rate). With Multi-Shot+Steady you might be able to keep it up on 4 targets for 7 seconds, if you're lucky that is.
I just got another thought about the mana efficiency btw... could it possibly proc Judgement of Wisdom 3 times? If it can then there's no doubt that it's awesome. ^^
Edit:
I'm not seeing the damage increase over Steady/Multi on the beta servers.
How? It does the aproximately same damage as Steady on each tick, ticking 3 times. And you could fire a Multi-shot right after as well, they don't share CD (afaik anyway).
I finished compiling most of the feedback listed in this thread and on TKASomething's hunter forums and posted it on the European beta forums as promised. I'll be checking this thread for updates and hopefully find the time to update mine on the official forums, but you're of course always welcome to PM me with things you'd like to see added or changed (just like the other beta hunters hanging around here). There's already been some terrific additions made by other hunters, it'd be great if we could keep it going. Also, I'd love it if someone could "advertise" or just link my post somewhere in the US beta forums, so it doesn't go to waste on the seemingly much smaller European forums.
I'm not seeing the damage increase over Steady/Multi on the beta servers. This may be because something is not functioning properly, or I could just be braindead.
Are you just looking at one tick of the damage? Yeah, one tick of Explosive is roughly the same damage as Steady. Thing is, even on single targets, Explosive ticks three times. At level 74 wearing t5 gear for ease of leveling, my explosive gets nearly 3k single target damage per cast even if none of the ticks crit. My steady crits are ~1.5 to ~1.8k for reference.
How? It does the same damage as Steady on each tick, ticking 3 times. And you could fire a Multi-shot right after as well, they don't share CD (afaik anyway).
I blame a lack of sleep for addling my mind. I think you're very correct. I also just made a realization: Each individual crit, like individual crits from the same Multi-Shot, from ES procs Thrill of the Hunt. (I'm not entirely sure if you can "cheat" extra procs out of an unbugged HP, as it is not behaving properly, as I mentioned earlier.) If you get 40% of ES's mana cost back on each individual crit from TotH (as you do with Multi), and then one proc of HP for 2% mana (which will only scale up, especially in a raid environment), that could be considerable mana regen (and, in fact, an outright mana profit).
For argument's sake:
At level 70 in my current gear I have 6868 mana unbuffed. 2% of that is 137.36. We'll round up to 138. Explosive Shot costs 540 mana (without Efficiency). 40% of 540 is 216.
If I fire off an Explosive Shot into a group of 3 mobs, and I get one crit across all the hits, I gain 216 mana from TotH, and then 138 mana from HP. That's 354 mana returned.
If I get TWO crits off any of the Explosive hits, I gain 432 mana from TotH, as well as the 138 mana from HP. That's 570 mana returned. So even with one crit, and the shitty low amount of mana I have unbuffed at level 70, I would gain 30 mana just from having two crits.
You guys were right, that seems really, really good.
How can you help?
I can shoot things and then make my pet move toward them.
I for one, would like to see some testing on Sporebats before we all jump on the Raptor bandwagon. While I agree Raptors appear to be the best DPS pet at the moment, we shouldn't rule out a pet with an ability that scales our damage on a short cooldown.
As I see it we need to know:
Does the armor pen stack with sunder and other debuffs?
Does the DoT scale with attack power?
I may be crazy but if armor penetration becomes as needed for end-game DPS, getting 700 from your pet along with a (hopefully) scaling DoT is going to outclass any other pet. Not to mention the built in "mini-innervate"
As for Scatter, Trevy... I would like to see either Deterrence or Scatter trainable. I suppose you're right in suggesting that Deterrence would make more sense. I still think Deterrence is the only effective method of utilizing Counterattack, however, and thus I still argue that Counterattack needs to be an active ability that would have to have a longer cooldown than its current one.
Oh, I agree with you re: Counterattack. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that Blizzard takes a hard look at the "reactive" abilities for hunters altogether. Hunters, by design, don't perform very well as hunters when they are in melee range. So in a large sense, having melee abilities that are only likely to be used when a significant amount of time is spent doing something we don't really want to do that much is counterproductive. In order to add a little sense to these abilities, they either need to be made non-reactive in some way, or they really need to do something when the reaction takes place.
Personally, I lean toward the latter. For example, consider the following: Deterrence is made trainable, counterattack takes its place in the tree. In addition to the current effect (minor damage + root that cannot be dodged/parried/blocked) it also reflects the parried attack's damage on the attacker. The chance to counterattack a "big hit" for a decent amount of damage thus makes up for the fact that you don't get to counterattack things very often. And it helps deterrence, well, DETER people. Instead of everyone just trying to power through deterrence, people might back off and regroup, like when a paladin bubbles or a mage ice blocks.
Or perhaps deterrence is made trainable, has all the current beta effects plus all parried attacks reflect x% of the damage back on the attacker. Deflection (SV talent) increases parry chance as it does now, plus increases the the amount reflected by deterrence by y% per rank.
Mongoose bite deserves similar treatment. As it stands now, who cares if I can hit someone for 350 damage after I dodge? You can't go around trying to mongoose bite people, so why not make it really do something? Maybe mongoose bite ignores armor. Maybe it places an armor reducing debuff on the target when used. Maybe it slows attack/casting speed on the target. Maybe it makes the target more vulnerable to snares (snares/roots have a longer duration when afflicted by mongoose bite, or they can't be removed for the duration). Maybe it puts a debuff that increases all physical damage taken. Maybe it lowers the targets chance to hit (melee/ranged/spell). There are a ton of possibilities.
The idea is that getting a hunter in melee range shouldn't be without some consequence to people, and there should be a greater reward for RNG-induced reactive abilities.
Apparently Hunting Party is being nerfed to 20/30/40/50/60 from 20/40/60/80/100 per MMO-Champion.
Originally Posted by Gleithan
And Potent Venom is nerfed to be only a 1% increase in damage no matter what rank. It really isn't worth the points now.
These changes leave me a bit puzzled. Why nerf 2 already marginal talents?
To edit: Yes, Hunting Party is nice, but how exactly can you quantify it's effect? The only non-mana class I have 'raiding' experience with is a warrior and 4 rage every 8 seconds isn't exactly .. massive.
That said, I've wondered at the 8 second cooldown, since Invigorate in BM doesn't have one (I'm assuming Hunting Party will get fixed so it actually has a CD of course). Why so long and why does the 2% mana returned sound so much better for mana classes than the 4 rage does for warriors/druids?
Those are actually some damn fine ideas. You should yell at someone to include those in their beta forum posts. Hell, I'm going to go submit feedback on those skills suggesting that stuff as soon as the beta login server comes back up.
EDIT:
Shandara: Hunting Party is hardly marginal. It's probably the second most powerful talent in the Survival tree, after Expose Weakness, when viewed in the proper context (i.e., when the SV Hunter is in a melee group in a raid, which is entirely feasible now thanks to the raidwide buff changes). Feeding Rogues/Warriors/DKs/Ret Pallies more power bar filling goodness is nice, even if it is only every 8 seconds.
On the other hand, Potent Venom just became an even bigger "Why would anyone want this?" talent.
Last edited by Gonkish : 07/25/08 at 11:30 AM.
How can you help?
I can shoot things and then make my pet move toward them.
These changes leave me a bit puzzled. Why nerf 2 already marginal talents?
I dunno. I think Hunting Party looks pretty good though. Maybe they're removing the cooldown on it. I've heard the 8 sec cooldown isn't working on test and its procing alot. Even with the cooldown, 15% mana, 30 rage, 75 energy/runic power per minute seems decent. Plus the fact that it will work in a mixed dps group. Gives a survival hunter more utility in a raid.
These changes leave me a bit puzzled. Why nerf 2 already marginal talents?
Indeed. Potent Venom was a bit doubtful, now it's utterly crap. And Hunting Party was in my opinion quite good, but it's becoming a bit doubtful now, unless the cooldown gets shortened (or removed like it is atm).
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
Master Tactician is still really strange. It scales inversely to your gear, which is odd. As you get better gear, MT becomes worse and worse. The best change to MT was unlinking it from Readiness, since the latter is actually useful at times.
Why do you say this? Regardless of your level of gear, MT provides the same benefit: approximately 1.2% crit (averaged over time) per talent point. Saying that this scales inversely with gear is like saying that crit chance scales inversely with gear, and none of us are complaining about seeing crit rating on gear because it scales inversely with itself. Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like MT shouldn't scale inversely with gear any more so than Lethal Shots would.
About the Hunting Party change/nerf, assuming that the 8 sec cooldown stays, what this change does is makes 1/5 hunting party an option to consider. Because the first point gives you 20% chance, and each point after only gives you 10% chance, combined with the diminishing returns inherent due to the cooldown, this may be a place to save some talent points while getting most of the benefit.
For a 40% crit chance, 8 sec cooldown, 1 shot/second, 15k mana pool, 20/30/40/50/60% to activate per talent point, rough math:
1/5 HP = 19.5s average between procs = 77 mp5
2/5 HP = 15.3s average between procs = 98 mp5
3/5 HP = 13.3s average between procs = 113 mp5
4/5 HP = 12.0s average between procs = 125 mp5
5/5 HP = 11.2s average between procs = 134 mp5
So for 1 talent point you get 77 mp5 (and your groups gets a proportional amount of mana/rage/energy/rune regen), but for each talent point afterwards, you get at most 21 mp5. That's pretty harsh diminishing returns.
Last edited by Gearknight : 07/25/08 at 12:01 PM.
Originally Posted by PSGarak
Personally I am not considering any spec without Corpse Explosion, because Corpse Explosion is the best spell in the game in any game that has a spell named Corpse Explosion.
Why do you say this? Regardless of your level of gear, MT provides the same benefit: approximately 1.2% crit (averaged over time) per talent point. Saying that this scales inversely with gear is like saying that crit chance scales inversely with gear, and none of us are complaining about seeing crit rating on gear because it scales inversely with itself. Maybe I'm missing something, but it sounds like MT shouldn't scale inversely with gear any more so than Lethal Shots would.
I phrased that poorly, and I apologize for that. What I meant to say was that as you get more and more agility/crit on your gear, MT becomes less and less valuable over time, relative to Expose Weakness uptime and the cooldown on Hunting Party (though don't hold me to anything on HP, as I obviously lack real world experience with it), at least from my perspective. I could very well be wrong here. Once you hit 50% crit, straight crit buffs in general (like crit rating and MT) start becoming less valuable (except for stuff like TotH), in my opinion, for a raiding Survival Hunter than haste rating or, to a very limited extent, AP. (Agility is naturally preferable above all DPS stats, but we're talking about talents here.)
My reasoning as far as this is concerned (and I know someone will disagree) is this: raiding as Survival on the live servers right now revolves entirely around ensuring as much Expose uptime as is possible. That's really what you're there for. Sure, your DPS isn't BAD, and it's definitely appreciated, but your primary justification for occupying a raid slot is that, with a good raid comp, you're effectively a walking 1000 RDPS.
Survival raiding is all about utility, and that utility, right now, is Expose Weakness (and soon to be Hunting Party, etc.). When I'm in Sunwell, I'm typically in a group with 2 other Hunters, a Shaman, and a feral druid. Raid buffed with consumables I'm running around 51% crit with that group setup. That means I have an Expose uptime of something in the upper 90s (last I checked I think it was 95% or so), naturally these figures are with 3 points in the talent.
Effectively what that means, in my opinion, is that more crit won't help me do my primary job in a raid: maintaining Expose Weakness reliably and consistently on a mob. It'll give me a nice tooltip to look at and get all giddy over, and it might push the Expose uptime up a bit (and it'll also naturally up my personal DPS by a certain amount), but point for point, I'd be better off focusing on agility (to increase the AP bonus of Expose) and haste rating (for more shot volume, which will consequently increase Expose uptime to a limited degree), rather than just piling more crit rating on top. The fact that MT is a 5 point talent, and that I could take those points and easily scatter them around elsewhere just makes it a simple choice for me. (Granted, there aren't any further agi boosting talents available to a Survival Hunter outside of LR, but in the case of haste talents, there is obviously IAotH, which is where I would immediately toss the 5 talent points that would have otherwise probably ended up in MT.)
I expressed that poorly. I just don't value Master Tactician that much at all, to be honest. By "scaling inversely" I meant to convey the idea that it becomes less and less valuable (again, in my own opinion) in terms of Survival's function as a reliable debuff bot, with the reasoning I explained above; not in the sense that the crit bonus itself becomes any less effective.
Sorry about that. This is what I get for posting on the internets with very little sleep.
Last edited by Gonkish : 07/25/08 at 12:24 PM.
How can you help?
I can shoot things and then make my pet move toward them.
Shandara: Hunting Party is hardly marginal. It's probably the second most powerful talent in the Survival tree, after Expose Weakness, when viewed in the proper context (i.e., when the SV Hunter is in a melee group in a raid, which is entirely feasible now thanks to the raidwide buff changes). Feeding Rogues/Warriors/DKs/Ret Pallies more power bar filling goodness is nice, even if it is only every 8 seconds.
Worked out with the talent as it's described now, you're looking at a 2.5% dps increase per rogue which means it's worse then FI. An ideal dps group, instead of being Sv/Bm/Feral/R/R would be BM/BM/F/R/R. Unless mana is extremely hard to come by, the talent is not worth the loss of personal dps gained by a 7/31/33 spec unless you are running only 1 or 2 hunters.
Originally Posted by missiletoad
I get enjoyment out of constructing buildings out of my fries and demolishing them with my chicken nugget army as I make monster noises. But you people. You people are FREAKS.
Worked out with the talent as it's described now, you're looking at a 2.5% dps increase per rogue which means it's worse then FI. An ideal dps group, instead of being Sv/Bm/Feral/R/R would be BM/BM/F/R/R. Unless mana is extremely hard to come by, the talent is not worth the loss of personal dps gained by a 7/31/33 spec unless you are running only 1 or 2 hunters.
Argh, really? That's somewhat disappointing, and they're apparently nerfing it to a 60% max chance to generate win in the next beta patch to boot.
How can you help?
I can shoot things and then make my pet move toward them.
Argh, really? That's somewhat disappointing, and they're apparently nerfing it to a 60% max chance to generate win in the next beta patch to boot.
I think it's a bit funny they are nerfing it before it even works properly. Currently there's no CD on it, which obviously makes it very nice. Perhaps they don't realize it's without a CD atm? :S
If they do realize it and still nerf it, then it's fail.
Edit: If, on the other hand, it stays without a CD but is nerfed to a 60% chance, then it's quite nice, although I doubt it.
Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
07/25/08, 9:20 AM
(Also worth noting: Hunting Party on the beta servers is currently bugged and is ignoring the cooldown. Consequently it is INCREDIBLY AMAZING. I woe the inevitable fix. 
)
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