Doing this loses a lot of DPS. If you get unlucky with crits and aren't BM spec, it could take up to 25 seconds to refill to 100.

Allow me to comment briefly here: the hunter class has a bad reputation because of the insane popularity it has among the masses and the fact that the aforementioned masses are at the very least incompetent players on a basic level, let alone on a theorycrafting one.

Fact remains that the class used to have its moments of glory in pvp, in the time of FD + non trinketable trap, just to mention one and still today does very well in open spaces, such as battlegrounds or world pvp.

Arenas are a controversial topic: some would like them deleted from the game, some love them, hunters do not perform very well in such constrained environments due to LoS issues and lack of 1vs1 defensive abilities (compared to offensive threats at least). Exceptional players with exceptional teammates can obtain high ratings, but the curve is much steeper.

Maybe hunters didn't complain loud enough or not coordinately enough on the official boards, but assisting to rogues obtaining awesome buffs and changes (making them incredibly overpowered in confined PvP situations) and seeing hunters often if not always getting the short end of the stick, probably wasn't enough reason to have things changed.

To fall back a bit on the track: deterrence, counterattack and scattershot are nice abilities, none of them would be on CloS level of power (or shadowstep for that matter), but asking for all 3 being made trainable is a reasonable request (even if it would end up obtaining maybe one).
Then when remaking the talents, put in something that would inspire more sinergies as proposed above.

P.S.: thanks to all beta hunters for the work you're doing.

Being a hunter that appreciates the SV tree and the CC boosts I was wondering if there is any gear that will reduce trap cool downs or extend the effects coming in WotLK? Trap Mastery + Resourcefulness + Gear?? = Chain Trapping Happiness

Keeping 2 pieces of Beast Lord in my set is tough enough already, but getting to 80 and then keeping level 70 blues seems harsh.

Panda

On a side note, I would love to see Silencing Shot and Scatter Shot in the Survival tree.....after all they seem like CC abilities that would fit very well there

Isn't Clever Traps + Trap Mastery enough to allow chain trapping? +30% duration (+6 sec) with a -6 sec cooldown leaves you at 26 sec traps with 24 sec cooldowns.

No way a Serpent sting will do so little like 1700 damage in raid enviroments, I doubt that Serpent sting will go under 2000 damage, you will most likely see 2.2-2.3k damage from a single Serpent Sting.

- Stormstrike, Misery, Earth and Moon, Improved tracking and maybe something more will affect Serpent Sting, so the example with 1710 damage should be 1.20*1.05*1.06*1.05*1710 = 2398, 200 damage less or more, I will asume Enhancement Shamans will be a popular class in raids even in WotLK.
- 50% crit is rather high, I doubt that we will see anything like that before finishing at least the first 2-3 25-man instances.
- 100 DPS ranged and 60 DPS ammo are way to low, better up those with at least 50% in the calculations.

I say that if Serpent+PV has to be usefull, the difference between a Serpent and a SS have to be less then 15*DPS*0.03, the damage gained from PV during the PV-buff. Maybe I should use 13.5 as the uptime for PV as Serpent invokes a GCD, anyway, if Serpent does less then 405-450 damage then SS with 1000 dps, there is no gain for Serpent+PV. As we should be able to pass 3000 dps with a survival hunter we can say that SS must do at least 1200 damage more then Serpent to be taken over Serpent+PV.

I guess, the end result will still be the same, Serpent+PV arn't strong enough to use, well, maybe on entry level raiding, like Naxxramas and similar when you will have much less criticals and the weapon dps will be rather low, I would guess that a Survival hunter will have about 30% unbuffed crit when finished Naxx (like a T4 hunter today).

Maybe a better scaling of Serpent Sting would be enough to keep it viable, like 15-20% or so, guess 15% should keep it in the same range as Arcane shot that also isn't affected by damage reduction from armor. 15% from attack power scales about the same as SS that suffers a ~25% damage reduction from armor (with Sunder, FF, CoR on a 7700 AC raid-boss).

Any comment on the feasibility of doing a Chimera Shot/Scorpid sting rotation? Since the Chimera shot consumes the (single allowable) scorpid sting on the boss, and its effect goes away after 3 attacks by the boss, it would seem to be possible to set up a rotation with multiple MM hunters and reduce boss damage by an average of perhaps 20%-30%.

Actually, it might be better than that. If the scorpid is consumed immediately, the next hunter could then shoot scorpid and chimera (with 2 GCD's), and possibly stack chimera.

With two or three MM hunters, I think it's certainly possible to keep scorpid up 100% and chimera's scorpid debuff up for a high amount, but does that seem necessary?

I can say with a high degree of certainty, that there will be a maximum of one fight in WotLK that would have a significant benefit from such a strat (Think Patchwerk and Brutallus), however both fights mentioned also require(d) top DPS, meaning if MM remains a poor dps tree then it will not be viable.

In my experience on beta, I don't think rabid will autocast if the duration hasn't expired. I could be wrong, but I believe that is what I've witnessed so far. There seems to be some intelligence in the autocasting system, at least.

I should also note that savage rend only costs 25 focus, the same as any focus dump, so simply assigning savage rend to a macro (or using the hotkey) and spamming it when you see the cobra strikes proc go off seems to work (it has for me anyway). No need to take autocast off your focus dump.

To bring your attention to another point,which if discussed,skip this...

I noticed that with each level up we drastically loose on crit chance ? I checked talents,and none that affect crit or agility
are different between my live and copied character. Same for gear,as I have not changed a single piece.

Comparison :
Crit chance on paper doll : 37.41% (level 70)
Crit chance on paper doll : 31.86% (level 73)

Granted, I miss 5 skill points in Bows,but that accounts for a total of 0.2% crit, bringing it to 32.06% , which is still more
than 5% loss... and that only for 3 levels! With that tempo we will be diving on the crit percentage quite fast once at 80.

Any explanation ?

When you gain a level, the amount of critical strike rating you need for 1% crit goes up. Therefore, as you level your paper doll crit chance will go down.

Figured as much,but isn't the formula spiring up at a quite high curve ? I am already afraid to think how it will turn up at 80.

Roger that,thanks for the answers.

Forgive me if this has been answered already. Currently on live if you jump and land right before your autoshot is about to fire your character needs to complete its landing animation before it can fire the autoshot. Is this the case with the instant autoshots on beta aswell?

Well, only thing I'm against in the calculation is that calculation on a fully raid-buffed hunter (50% crit needs some heavy buffs and good gear) while not adding expected buffs for Serpent, Enhancement shamans will have 4 Stormstrike charges on 8 seconds refresh with talents, it will only be down if a elemental shaman spams nature bolts, so I would say it's fair to assume Stormstrike buff, so is Misery. That's 26% more damage for Serpent, you can't compare that damage modifier to some armor penetration, for a 7700 AC boss it would take some ~3700 armor penetration (you get the boss down to 0 AC here) to get the same effect and that's after normally debuffs are up (Sunder,FF,CoR).

It is however pretty clear that PV will not give anything near 3% dps increase (it will not even get as good as 2.7% dps increase, it doesn't buff the pet) as the damage that Serpent Sting does will be surpassed by all other shots pretty soon when gearing up and that makes it a bad investment of talent points.

PV might have some usage on entry level raiding, but after that it will loose it usage, it either needs to be buffed or Serpent Sting needs to be buffed.

Overall are the new talents not adding that much dps-increase, look on the BM-tree, Aspect Mastery gives very little, Cobra Strikes adds some crit's on pet specials but arn't those still static in damage and don't scale with attack power? Longevity or Beast Mastery maybe are the best new dps-talents for BM-hunters, but how good are they when talking dps-increase in percent?


MM-

Unless they are changing how stormstrike and serpent sting work, it's not gonna come out like that. I believe ssting behaves like deadly poisons, so no stormstrike effect for it (although likely for the chimera effect), also stormstrike charges will probably be eaten fast by rogue poisons, as they no longer need to ignore poisoning mainhands for windfury.
Eventually moonkin (using wrath in the rotation) and elemental shamans using lightning bolts will complain so poisons won't steal their charges

I don't understand how this even makes sense. An enhance shaman is going to earth shock, so that eats up a charge. Most SV hunters use a windserpent with lightning breath firing off as fast as GCD allows. Sometimes we also have an elemental shaman and/or a boomkin. So in an 8-second time period, we're supposed to consider a 20% damage boost on one, two ticks max, of serpent sting? I do think that an additional 68 damage per tick, or a grand total of 952 damage per minute (2 ticks of serpent at 20% more damage per tick per 8-seconds of stormstrike for an entire minute) is completely comparable to the damage modifier from armor penetration, since the armor penetration is going to effect every auto, steady, and kill shot.

With max buffs and GoA, I do hit 50% crit rate in a raid so it is completely feasible. Armor penetration in your gear gets better as the target has more armor debuffs applied too, easily increasing damage output by 3-6% depending.

The numbers in the calculations reflect damage by weapons available now. Any weapons available at level 80 are going to deal more auto, steady, and kill shot damage. This should have been easy to determine. The net increase of RAP from level 70 to level 80 is still not going to be enough to make Serpent Sting more useful than it is now. This is unless they make changes to it; Potent Venom isn't fixing it.

Last I checked stormstrike doesn't affect dots at all, it only boosts damage of the next few nature direct damage spells. Has this changed recently ?

Stormstrike charges work like Imp. Shadowbolt charges unless this is changed in WotLK. A charge is depleted only if the target is hit with a direct damage ability. DoT effects do not affect the number of charges remaining but are affected by its modifier so as long as Stormstrike was on the target when Serpent Sting is applied, it'll take full effect even if stormstrike drops off.


No, not taking quotes out of context. Just to give some background context
I would be extremely hesitant to declare a new play style because of a single pet's ability. Pets have essentially two active abilities. A low focus dump, and a pet family specific special. Unless all pets gain a 'high focus special' and a 'high focus dump which is less efficient than the low focus' and thus forcing the player to actively select the high focus dump to prevent wasted focus, declaring a play style based on managing focus to be extremely premature.

I somewhat agree with Ghostcrawler, as you don't want a fire and forget pet. But having abilities cost 100 focus isn't the way to go.

If we look at the new talents, the only two really high focus cost abilities is Roar of Recovery and Call of the Wild (which could be renamed Roar of <Something>).

Rather than the 100 focus cost, how about those abilities simply consumes all the focus the pet has, and reduces the focus regen for a small duration (a 'tiredness' debuff). You could use the auto-toggle featureif you liked, but you could end up having them cost a lot of focus if used at the wrong time (say after a crit + regen). If you manually cast it, you could time it for better results.

Reading the quoted posts Zurai put up, I have a rather... unusual idea.
Having three trees for a class that can be divided into two halves is always problematic IMHO... but anyhow...
MM and Survival: Focus on rotating shots based on procs, mana, cooldowns etc...

BM: Focus on the pet. Shot selection is essentially just Steady Shot since they have no talents to support other shots to be more effective. However, give them active pet abilities and they'll have to work from there >.>
Unfortunately, with current mechanics that is not feasible since as I posted previously, the pet by all intents and purpose is an offhand weapon in terms of damage scaling penalties. A unique offhand regardless, but it'll be like telling a rogue "You get to use 5 different types of Shiv but your Sinister Strike sucks bad!"

That and there isn't quite enough space in the talent tree to flesh out multiple hunter activated/mana costing pet abilities

I wonder - does that mean it'll be more efficient to focus on AP once the leveling frenzy starts? It looks like higher end raid gear will be up to par until the higher end 5-mans; if AP doesn't scale down as badly as crit rating/crit from AGI, it could make sense to regem for AP?

No changes for this build...?