Æthien

With cobra strikes feeding the pet an endless stream of crits even 3/5 could be enough I think.


If only there was another place to put those points to a use.
And for now, I'll leave BMtalent out of the build, because those 5 additional points serve little purpose and I want to see if any exotic pet is better than a raptor for dps first.
(knowing blizzard, I seriously doubt it)

48/18/5 would be my guess.
Possibly taking 1 point out of careful aim to fill up longevity, possibly taking all points out of it for something else.
Depends on what that talent affects.

 

Kelidor

It's probably because MM has silencing shot, scatter shot ( both on low cooldowns ) and the new chimera shot for good mana draining. I'm not saying MM is a better PvP tree than BM , no one is completly sure about that, but we know for a fact that MM in PvE lacks some things that BM has.

BM = PvP / PvE
MM = PvP

Sad truth

 

Catalept

Regardless of the damage it puts out, Explosive Shot is a very odd choice... its crits don't proc SV's 'on crit' procs, and at the moment at least, it's just a straight up nuke spell. I understand the need for a 'catch up' talent to boost SV's raid DPS to something respectable enough to make the whole SV package work, but ES is a pretty unimaginative option.

To me, the obvious fix seems to be:

Reduce the per-tick scaling to 0.1 DPS per AP.
Allow ES crits to proc HP, EW and TotH.
(Possibly) Unlink the cooldown from Arcane/Kill, and increase it to 12 seconds.

This keeps it effectiveness as a DPS boost to compensate for the lack of raw DPS talents near the bottom of the SV tree, while giving it a synergy with SV's main purpose, which is to keep the crit-procs rolling, as the triple-ticks from ES would serve to do admirably.

 

Bynn

Just realized that hunting party might be bad when pulling multiple mobs with several tanks as the mana can draw unwanted aggro to you or who your pulling to.

 

TrevvyTrev

It's not so much that people are saying that MM *should* be the PvP tree, they are saying that it *is* based on how the talents are distributed. BM has one of the best PvP talents in the game (The Beast Within addresses hunters' vulnerability to snares, which is extremely helpful for getting to range), but MM is the only tree that can pick up scatter shot, dispel protection for stings, pushback resistance and silencing shot, PLUS still have points left over for deterrence and improved wing clip in SV. And it does all this without having to give up its 51-point talent, which also has a significant PvP use (some might argue that it's only useful for PvP).

Now to answer your second question, yes it *would* be bad if MM became "the" raiding tree again. For dps classes (as opposed to hybrids, tanking/dps, or healing/dps classes) having one tree be "the" anything tree is bad design. MM absolutely should be "a" raiding tree again, though.

 

Varelse

Pull with shots that can't crit.

 

takel

Perfectly worded. It may be semantics by bloody heck I'm waiting for the day that all three trees are capable of contributing meaningfully to raid DPS.

In my honest opinion, MM and BM should be pushing out the same DPS pipping each other depending on the situation while Survival sacrifices personal DPS for raid support but pushes out steady amounts of damage.


As for a shot that cannot crit but generates a decent chunk of threat... that is a use for Distracting Shot ;P (Apart from Rank 1'ing warriors into combat so they can't charge or anyone else so they cannot stealth, drink etc...)

 

dssurge

I'm all in favor of seeing MM become a viable raid spec again, but until they change the Hunter class to be more than spaming Steady Shot, whoever can cram the most white damage into their uniform special shot rotation will always be the victor. This flaw is further amplified in Wrath where Steady simply doesn't clip. Chimera Shot is a great idea if stings scaled correctly but we've all seen how great Conflag worked out for Warlocks in relation to damage vs. global usage.

Breaking it down to basics, the core reason the MM and BM trees will never be 'equal' is because of variable gear levels. When is 20% more pet damage the same as xx% more weapon damage? Will all talents and abilities scale at the same rate based on AP, Crit, attack speed, damage ranges, etc.?

There's 101 reasons why DPS trees will never scale at the same rate and I think it's silly to even try and balance them in a lot of cases. No matter how close they make the trees in terms of damage out, any serious raiding Hunter will either be Survival or whatever happens to be the highest personal DPS spec, even if it's a difference of 2-3% damage. They may as well use this as an excuse to have properly implemented PvP, PvE and Support trees. Having the Marks tree become the equivalent to the Rogue Subtlety tree is fine with me as long as it's glaringly intended to be that way. Maybe it will make them dig some of the more useful talents out of the bottom of the tree and move them within striking distance on 51/x/x specs (assuming they are optimal).

 

Gonkish

I think they have to do this, to a certain extent. If they just sat down and arbitrarily decided which tree was going to be built from the top to the bottom with PvP, PvE, or Support/Utility, and then focused the deep talents of the tree specifically for that stated purpose, I think we'd all be happier. Instead they keep trying to haphazardly mix PvE/PvP talents in random trees, which typically ends in tears. (For example, the 983 billion trap talents in Survival, when the major reason for speccing Survival at all is 25 man raiding, as that's where the spec really shines. Sure, you can do 5 mans as Survival and be fine (hell, I do all the time), but you and your group would be better off if you were BM, if you ask me. (At this point in TBC, however, any group I'm running with probably outgears everything, so none of this Hunter talent spec min/max crap really matters. )

In my opinion, MM's biggest problem right now is Blizzard doesn't really seem to know what they want to do with it, and consequently we don't really know what we're meant to do with it. It's a big mess.

Why Hunters suffer...
Benefactor's Bar learns you some goodness quicklike...

 

takel

Mmmm, part of the problem is also the rather haphazard way Blizzard has scattered scaling stats across the class in general.

Pets only gain raw AP, armour, HP.
They really need to gain a potion of agi, hit and crit and remove the idiocy that is spell damage (why bother with Spell Damage if you nerf the coefficient with every ability that can meaningfully use it?) and just have all pet abilities scale with the pet's AP. Basically, turn the pet into a pocket rogue when you look at the scaling mechanics. As for hit and crit, while I loathe to water down the pet centric focus on the BM class afforded by the Ferocity and Pet Handling talents by modifying stats that are otherwise statics (especially in Animal Handler's case), I think that's what is really holding back some mechanics in equating the trees.

I don't envy the headaches attempting to create a balance between the pet and the hunter would be giving the class designers. For all intents and purposes, the hunter's pet is a virtual 'offhand' giving the hunters the same kind of scaling mechanics as a dual wielding DPS when it comes to AP scaling, but there is the lack of synchronisation with the other 'important' stats such as hit and crit which is further compounded by pets being able to double-dip on buffs. It's really because of this double dipping on buffs and the scaling afforded by Unleashed Fury, Frenzy and Serpent's Swiftness which pushes the scalability of the BM tree heads and shoulders above the other trees in personal DPS.

Simply put, though I really should had sat down with pen and paper for an hour or two to thrash out the feasibility, once we establish full attribute scaling on the pet we can then equate the DPS increase through pet talents as a rough increase in AP by equating the Unleashed Fury and Serpent's Swiftness talents. 30% of a hunter's AP is transferred to the pet. That is modified by 20% via Ferocity, another 20% due to SS then another 30% from Frenzy which is an assumed 100% uptime. This means the AP on the pet changes to ~56.16% or a 87.2% increase on effective AP. This means the BM hunter would be gaining another 26.16% AP because of their pet not counting blocks, misses and dodges since it's in melee range. Wow, now that's where the scaling is coming from! All hunters except for buff bitch Survival (agi stacking) would be carrying the same stats since there is not longer a distinction between raw AP and agi/hit/crit for the pet's scalability. That's just for the pet and we have another 20% auto-shot damage on the hunter via the SS talent plus BW for an added DPS cool down.

It's plainly not reasonable to incorporate that much additional scaling on the MM tree alone. It'll probably be possible if the tree was pruned to allow for MM hunters to hit the lower levels of pet scaling ala the old 20/31 build pre-BC, picking up Unleashed Fury at the very least which would reduce the pet advantage on BM vs MM to a manageable chunk.

I know this really shouldn't be a discussion on how to change the hunter class, but I personally feel this would be a golden opportunity for Blizzard to retune and tweak how the hunter class mechanics can unfold since they've already taken the time to rework the pet ability system and work over the shot mechanics by unlinking the specials from the autos and mechanics are getting reworked anyhow so there's the potential for a blank slate right there.



My selfish wish list to modify the mechanics and MM talents would be the following:

Increase the effect of Master Marksman. Perhaps to 15-20% additional RAP to set the stage.

Increase the default scaling on Arcane and Serpent to 20% and 40% respectively. That'll make those two shots more bang per cool down than Steady, thus diversifying the shot selections for all trees. Increasing the damage on Serpent could also mean interesting things with Survival talents. In any case, for sanity's sake there needs to be viable alternatives to Steady Shot. Changing Arcane Shot to use the same mechanics as Steady so it's effectively an armour piercing Steady Shot which can gain from caster debuffs but sacrifices mana efficiency would help when there are situations that mana is not a problem. Fall back is Steady Shot but if you have the mana to spare, subsitute one for an Arcane for more damage.

Piercing Shots apply to Auto, Kill Shot and Multi-Shot and in addition increases the damage cause by Arcane and Serpent by an additional 6-9-12%. Combined with the 'base' of an increase RAP, this would make the MM tree fully focus on using those two additional shots.

Wild Quiver proc chance buffed up and the damage penalty removed or conversely, keep the proc rate but increase the damage per shot. Net result would be an increase in 10-15% base auto shot damage. This is a direct counter to SS's effect on auto-shot damage, but takes it in a different approach. Instead of flat increase in attack speed, it's a bursty proc effect. While it's not 20%, the increase in RAP, RWS and Marked for Death will compensate.

Improved Steady Shot increases crit chance, or crit damage or reduces mana cost... this bit I'm weakest on and need to twiddle around with. Chance to proc the damage increase and the damage increase itself bumped up to 20% which means on a 6 sec cool down, those abilities will gain approx 10% more damage (3 steady shots in between cool downs = 0.8 to not proc. 0.8^3 = 0.512, 1-0.512 = 48.8% to proc at least once. Pushing the proc chance to 25% would increase the uptime to 57.81% for an average 11.56% increase in auto/kill shot damage)

Since we buffed up Serpent Sting's damage, have Chimera Shot deal 100% damage (use same damage mechanics as SS, which is our 'base' special attack) and have the Serpent Sting damage portion capable of critting. Now this shot is actually worth the GCD and tweak the mana cost so it's cost effective.
Probably OP in cases but oh well.

Then we have the problem of pruning the tree...


I wouldn't mind having a tree turned into a PvP tool set so long as all the tools are in the same tree. We have MM with the interrupting shots and dispel resistance, but we have the Survival Tree with the defensive cool downs, the enhanced traps, and durability increases. But yeah, the MM tree is a mess and the Survival tree is a mess because there isn't a clear consensus on what those trees are supposed to do exactly. It seems those two trees need to be merged then split off again to pile all the tricks in one tree and all the damage in the other.

 

Sean

Figured out the Wolverine Bite Formula - it's 5 damage per level +5. So the tooltip on wowhead makes sense now.

A level 70 Cunning pet has a 355 damage tooltip for Wolverine Bite. 72 is 365, 75 is 380, 76 is 385.

 

Feanoro

The problem that causes the confusion between MM and SV is simple, pvp. SV with its defenses and higher crit chance used to be the pvp tree. With the advent of resilience, SV got screwed over for pvp. MM, long the damage tree while BM was utility, suddenly had pvp tools crammed into it.

An easy solution would be to simply restore SV as the king pvp tree by swapping a few things with MM, and granting it armor pen talents to compensate for resilience. This is a rough idea, of course, but it seems off hand it'd go a long way to cleaning up the two trees.

 

Feanoro

Apparently, the PV change to 1% is a bug? Can anyone confirm or deny? Makes me wonder if the "nerfs" were on purpose, or bugs/mistakes.

 

Sean

No one can confirm or deny it - it's not actually on Beta yet. The PV thing and the Hunting Party change are ONLY on the updated Talent Calculator on the official site.

 

KraxisSingular

Depending on another Hunter having IHM you could go for Focused Aim, which would be a real DPS booster on certain fights. Hexlord anyone? He undoubtedly not the last boss with such a mechanic.

And I would actually drop a point in Cobra Strikes and put it in Longevity. A near 1.5 min CD on BW fits better than a 96 second CD does. And of course pet specials like Savage Rend and various others will benefit greatly with 10% extra reduction.
Besides, Cobra Strikes is up for 4.5 seconds at least. In that time I wonder if we won't be seeing at least 3 crits for most of the time at T7. That should be enough to have it refreshed for most of the time. The extra point just feels like a relative waste to me.

But where to put that possible Frenzy point... Was thinking Spirit Bond or Endurance Training. But Master's Call could be a possible choice depending on what we will face, and even how it works. Rooted in place by a boss? Masters Call might help in some cases.

 

rhodin

nice to have aimed shot when your bored etc, and 1% dmg is 1% dmg... and spirit bond > imp mend pet IMO, unless there will be encounters with alot of aoe debuffs or something.
Master's call could be nice if solo mobbs snare alot and maybe in 5-mans etc? but i dunno, we will have to wait and see.

Basically your spec is the same as mine with minor changes for personal liking.

 

TheWicked22

I suppose if you're only running with one paladin and a boss has a spammable snare, you could use Master's Call to break your tank out during the short Hand of Freedom cooldown. Maybe there will be a frost mage boss that does sick shatter combos, and the only way to save your tank will be to free him with Master's Call! BM Hunter utility!

 

Kelidor

According to the WoW WotLK official talent calculators, Potent Venom now gives 3% again. I guess it was bugged. Anyone else notice?

 

Tyranna

Just noticed the same. The talent is still crap though. It just went from crap to terrible and then back to crap.

 

KraxisSingular

That would be a cool application, hadn't thought of it that way. I was thinking more along the lines of a Rage fight where the root doesn't preclude the AoE (much like Aran and Blizzard). There getting out of it could save your behind pretty neatly, or if your main healer is stuck, save him and take a dive for the team.

 

takel

Yeah, the main problem still remains and that is the 3% increase in damage isn't worth the damage loss in using Serpent or Wyvern Sting.

 

Snipehunter

I'm drawn to Potent Venom for the following reason. I was comparing damage/mana for arcane shot, and serpent sting.

Assumptions: 5000 RAP, 35% crit

Arcane shot normal = 492 + .15*5000 = 1242
Arcane shot crit = 1242 * 2.3 = 2856.6
Arcane shot normal mana = 540
Arcane shot crit mana (with TotH) = 0.6*540 = 324
Arcane shot normal damage/mana = 1242/540 = 2.3
Arcane shot crit damage/mana = 2856.6/324 = 8.82
Weighted arcane shot damage/mana = 0.65*2.3 + 0.35*8.82 = 4.58

Serpent sting:
Assuming 5/5 imp stings and 3/3 Potent Venom

Serpent sting damage = 0.1*5000 + 1210 = 1710
Serpent sting mana = 680 * (1-0.3) = 476
Serpent sting damage/mana = 1710/476 = 3.59

So yes, serpent sting is less damage/mana than arcane shot, but now the next step is to compare the "lost" damage from a GCD used by serpent sting to the next 15s where your damage is increased by 3%.

So in 15s, lets say you just chain cast steady shots. With a 3.00 bow and 15% quiver, you have a autoshot timer of 2.61s and a steady shot cast time of 1.5s (with haste it would be faster, but let's establish a lower bound here)
In 15s you can fire off 15 / 2.61 = 5 autoshots
In 15s you can fire off 15 / 1.5 = 10 steady shots

So 15 shots have 3% increased damage. I'm getting lazy, but let's assume each steady shot and auto shot hits for 1200 damage. (all without critting) (This is a conservative estimate at lvl 80, esp. the no-crit part).
15 * 1200 * 0.03 = 540 more damage.

Adding this on to the damage of serpent sting, 1710 + 540 = 2250
Mana cost of serpent sting = 476
Damage/mana = 2250 / 476 = 4.73

This is now higher than the damage/mana of arcane shot, and this is assuming that the subsequent steady and autoshots don't crit. As a lower bound, it shows that the 3% damage over 15s can and does indeed outweigh the lost GCD which you could've used on an arcane shot.

 

Mancer

Masters Call is on a 1 min cooldown, if there was such a gimick in a fight (and it was a big issue to avoid snares on the MT) I think most guilds would just use a druid, who can break snares at will, as the MT. Two pallys can provide 20 sec every 25 sec (so 80%) snare avoidance which would probably be good enough, with a 1 minute CD I don't see Masters Call being all that useful even on a snare-gimick fight.

Of course this all depends on the fights in WotLK, it might be a great talent for 5mans, solo play or for getting us out of bad spots in 25 mans. As it is now I might drop a point from Imp. Mend Pet into Masters Call, or use it as the filler point that would otherwise go to making Frenzy 5/5 instead of 4/5 if Beast Mastery turns out to be a worthwhile talent, otherwise I think I'll be skipping it for more damage oriented talents in other trees. If Masters Call was a tier 1 talent I'd definitely take it over putting a filler point in Endurance Training.

 

Serf

I have just one thing to say re: master's Call; I hope they aren't telling us this is our only de-snare ability and is replacing Camouflage. Because if it is.... GG Blizzard.

 

KraxisSingular

That requires Imp Stings where the points could have been spent elsewhere. And to get PV you have to drop points in Master Tactician or Hunting Party, or ultimately also Explosive Shot (which looks to be the least effective choice to drop).

And you calculate against Arcane Shot which is already rather ineffective. Lets try to calculate against Steady Shot and Kill Shot since they will be the staple of any spec.


Normal Steady Shot of a 100 DPS weapon with 65 DPS ammo against a 30% armoured target: 280 (normalized average weapondamage for a 100 DPS weapon) + 182 (assuming the ammo will also be normalized to 2.8 speed) + (5000*.2+280) = 1742. 1742*0.7 = 1219
A crit = 1219*2.3 = 2805
Normal mana: 280
Manareturn with TotH: 0.6*280 = 168
Normal DPM: 4.35
Crit DPM: 25.04
Overall DPM: 4.35*0.65 + 25.04*0.35 = 11.59 DPM

Normal Kill Shot, same stats obviously, and assuming it is normalized to 2.8 speed too, and the target is below 20%: (280 + (5000*.15+325) + 785)*0.7 = 1498
A crit = 1498*2.3 = 3445
Normal mana: 475
Manareturn with Thrill: 0.6*475 = 285
Normal DPM: 3.15
Crit DPM: 18.13
Overall DPM: 3.15*0.65 + 18.13*0.35 = 8.39 DPM

So in the deparment of manaefficiency it isn't terribly great compared to what is to be expected to be used, and I think we can expect better weapons than 100 DPS, perhaps even greater ammo as well (and I don't know if ammo has an impact on Kill Shot either, I left it out at this time). However, if experience shows mana is a non-issue then it would actually be a boost to the DPS. Since talented up the sting isn't that far behind in DPG (Damage Per GCD), but the added 3% is going to help it along enough.
The losses in talents are going to hurt it though.

[EDIT] Damn, forgot to add Sniper Training for both shots. I think we can safely assume that it will be a great talent to use.