Blizzard is also gaining the ability to crit in WotLK, and should have very high crit rates (thanks to the way Improved Blizzard, Frostbite and Shatter all work together). Seems like all of these channeled AOE's are getting significant improvement. Be interesting to see if Hellfire gets similar treatment.

That is VERY interesting to say the least... FYI currently on live; Rain of Fire and Hurricane both can not crit. If what you say is true I'd wouldn't be surprised if they both also gain the ability to crit. (hellfire might not just because it does damage to the lock and self critting seems like a very BAD idea).

Fair enough. I won't list it on the things that went from talented to trainable if that's not how it was meant to go down. I'm keeping it the list of "things Blizzard implemented to address concerns voiced by rogues" though.

That might be a better way of doing it for sure. Nothing left unturned.

Given how swiftly they're willing to take the nerf bat to HP, I'm worried about Explosive. I just realized (with the help of all of you) that it is pretty great, but if Blizzard decides, in its infinite Hunter wisdom (or lack thereof) that it's TOO good... well... I might just spec for EW and go for a WotLK variant of the current 7/20/33 spec.

That would make me very sad.

<speculation>I would bet that the tooltip damage, scaling with 0.2xAP, is meant to be total damage, not per tick. That'd bring its scaling much more in line with other scaling. The effective 0.6xAP scaling seems obscene.</speculation>

This I don't disagree with. It's a reason why I'm holding my breath, because if ES does damage x3 (impact + 2 dots) one would think the wording would be similar to "Deals X damage and then Y damage each second for 2 seconds". But with the way it's currently worded, I can almost expect it to act more like Serpent Sting (keywords "in/into the target" instead of "deals/causes"), ticking only twice. So ES, for the same mana cost as AS, would deal 2.2x more damage as fire instead of arcane, except it has AoE utility.

And that would be rather upsetting.

Even at two ticks it's not "bad" per-se.. but the decision to pick it up might be more dependent on if 5/5 HP is necessary.. or even 3/3 TotH. In between all that is MT, Readiness, and Sniper Training.. and one more point for AoE combo with Volley? *shrug*


And yeah, having it decoupled from Arc/Kill would give us more incentive to spend 8 points to get 5/5 HP to curb the mana drain.

Yeah, I think they need to tread a bit carefully in regards to Explosive. As it is right now, I think it's probably the first "bottom" talent (that is, it is in the same relative position as the old 31 and 41 point talents) in Survival that people might actually feasibly spec into without feeling gimped. If you look at Survival's history, it's ALWAYS had either simply bad talents (Lacerate!), lackluster talents (2 min. cooldown, 1.5 sec. cast Wyvern Sting that didn't scale with AP!), or ostensibly useful but unfortunately located talents (Readiness in its current location in the tree as of the live, 2.4.3, servers).

If they ensure that they keep Explosive's desirability up, they may actually succeed where they have failed since the inception of this class back at the end of retail beta: They may actually get someone to completely fill out the tree without feeling like a giant gimp/gimmick/laughing stock. (GASP! SHOCK! HORROR!)

The thing is, if they make it TOO good, then it becomes "required". If they make it "bad" then no one will bother to use it, just like no one used (or at least, no one will admit to using...) the ancient version of Wyvern Sting.

I think that right now Explosive is a little overboard. It's not ridiculously overpowered to the point of absurdity like some of the current DK talent combos, but it seems like they'll probably reduce it's effectiveness a (hopefully) small amount sometime before retail. (If they really wanted to be evil, they could pull a TBC-style Arcane Shot ninja nerf on it, and make me cry bitter tears.) Nothing too drastic, ideally, just possibly tweaking the formula or something.

Keep it viable, keep it desirable, keep it unique, but don't make it the "best" (and that term is relative in and of itself), or else you'll run into major issues with it causing spec shoehorning across the class.

I also enjoy its sound effect and graphic. So there. Go ahead and nerf that now, Blizzard! YOU WON'T TAKE MY EXPLOSIONS FROM ME!! ARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!!

(Ironically, I must now go pay my subscription fee. You win this day, Blizzard. THIS DAAAAAY!)

DISCLAIMER: If this has been covered already, please tell me and I'll delete this post. I read through everything, but I may have missed it.

HP got nerfed from a 100% chance on crit to proc (with a 8 sec internal cooldown) to a 60% chance on crit to proc (with a 8 sec internal cooldown). Wouldn't this mean that the ppm will remain roughly the same? It doesn't seem like a *major* nerf to me. At most we would miss out on one extra proc of HP it seems.

EDIT: Oh wow, am I reading the latest Beta patch notes correctly? Blizz is now saying that PV will only increase damage done to a target by ONE percent now, regardless of rank. Unless they are planning to scale Serpent Sting up to a larger AP bonus coefficient, this talent will be falling into the "if you have this you are a huntard" category.

as of right now it looks pretty good with the tier swaps and new talents, although... sadly... it seems BM will still be the king of DPS in WOTLK, but i could be wrong considering steady shot doesnt interrupt auto shot, we will just have to wait and see.

I came up with this as the maximum single dps spec:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Its basically aspect mastery vs improved tracking. Efficiency is easily skipped and it looks like you are probably going to be running a survival hunter and you might let him take imp mark(or take it instead of imp tracking).

Those aren't "patch notes" - they're a compiled list of changes to the Talent Trees on the official WoW site. Hopefully, it's just some error they made when updating them (they update the data on them a lot before a patch will even be anywhere close sometimes) and they didn't make PV even more pathetic. We'll have to wait and see when the new patch rolls out though (which hopefully puts Exotics and such in).

It sounds like the 2nd and 3rd point of Potent Venom do nothing right now, if it's 1% no matter how many points are invested. Obviously, it will get changed.

Hunting party (or its tooltip) is also obviously going to get changed, because it's missing the 8s cooldown.

Just give things some time, and if you're in the beta, submit intelligent feedback. There's no need to panic about what's over- and under-powered just yet.

I took some time last night to do some more tests with a new MM build generously provided here. I also took the advice given earlier to use WWS to measure performance, and perform three attempts per test.

Because I didnt want to leave it up to human error to cause variances in my results (e.g. slipping and hitting the wrong key, mistiming shots), i created a "spam" shot rotation macro to try to keep each test consistent. The macro I used is as follows (if anyone can recommend a better macro to use in WOTLK that would be better suited for testing purposes, please feel free to do so):

/castsequence reset=3 Auto Shot, Steady Shot
/castrandom Arcane Shot(Rank 9), Multi-Shot(Rank 6)
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Testing with Steady, Arcane and Multi-shot

#1

1214 dps, doing 95,960 dmg, OOM at 87.08 sec
Wow Web Stats

#2

1225 dps, doing 94,329 dmg, OOM at 85.19 secs
Wow Web Stats

#3

1346 dps, doing 99,673 dmg, OOM at 80.3 secs
Wow Web Stats

Testing with Steady, Arcane and down-ranked (rank 1) Multi-shot

#1

1218 dps, doing 112,116 damage, OOM at 101.66 seconds
WWS Loading...

#2

1223 dps, doing 116,247 dmg, OOM at104.23 secs
WWS Loading...

#3

1222 dps, doing 118,601 dmg, OOM at 111.71 sec
WWS Loading...


I hope some of you find this interesting. I think I will try this build next: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft
This next round Im taking care to avoid talents that are NYI. I think I neglected to look out for that last two times, woops!

EDIT: CHANGED TO REFLECT DR. BOOM DAMAGE ONLY, AND DISCOUNTED BOOM BOT DAMAGE

You need to look at the damage taken in by just Dr. Boom and totally discount the Boom Bot damage. For example, the DTPS by Dr. Boom in your first log is only 1142 - not 1384.

Just tested Explosive Shot with Byn - both of our effects were up on Boom at the same time, so yes multiple hunters will have their Explosive Shot do its full effects on a single mob.

orinaccio,
In case you needed some more MM specs to play with
#1 (Extreme mana dump)
#2 (Same as #1 with the exception of Imp. Arcane)
#3 (Mostly the same as the 7/50/4 one but with fewer unused talent points and no IT)

I'd like to see the affect Rapid Recuperation has on Time to OOM, hopefully they fix that soon. (If anyone can do some napkin math that would be nice too. Assuming that I didn't just glance over it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this be the best single-target build?
Hunter (51/15/5)

Aimed Shot is pretty much only useful in PvP, unless you use it for the odd MD pull. Master's Call, again, is pretty much only useful for PvP until we find an encounter that involves movement and a snare/stun mechanic (which would invariably hit the pet trying to cast it too, now that I think about it). Improved Mend Pet is almost a must-have in my opinion, as it saves your pet from a lot of really nasty debuffs.

I looked everywhere and I couldn't figure out a way how to filter out the Boom Bot damage. Im not very experienced with WWS so if someone can tell me how to do this or walk me through it I'll go back and correct it.

As it stands, I should have added a caveat to that post explaining that the damage takes into account all damage to Boom Bots and should be taken with a grain of salt (or as a "maximum possible damage output" test?)

You can also just edit the post to reflect damage to Dr Boom and damage total, or whatever you want.

Try this. That's your first WWS parse. All you need to do is click "Raids and Mobs," then select Dr Boom, and you'll get that screen. Make sense?

(Someone please feel free to yell at me if this isn't the desired results, I'm not really coherent right now.)

You're pretty much right. From the reports from people in the Beta, +50% AotH isn't exactly much compared to the ton of RAP we will have when ready to raid. Unless it does get a good buff, this will be the basic DPS spec.

( Oh and, I'm pretty sure 4/5 Frenzy and 1/5 Aspects would be better. Spreadsheets show that more than 4/5 Frenzy gives a really small dps boost, but this is just a small detail =p )

The talent calculator shows PV does give 1% damage increase regardless of rank 1, 2, or 3. The only difference is the mana discount to Serpent Sting. 10/20/30%.

I have a couple general questions though. Why are a few people hung up on MM being the PvP tree? I see quite a few talents in BM that would directly impact PvP such as Longevity and Master's Call. Would it be so bad if MM became the raiding tree again like it was pre-TBC?

I actually didn't even notice the original spec I clicked on (and subsequently swapped talents to "fix" it ) had 5/5 Frenzy. I'm so used to seeing 4/5 I didn't even look. So yes, 1/5 Aspect Mastery would be better.

The feedback on Aspect Mastery has been negative across the board, so I doubt it'll stay as-is.