Illy

While it's good to see they're improving our mana return abilities, my concern is how Blizzard views Viper. If they're looking to turn it into more of an evocation for hunters, great. If they're looking at making it so we'll need to use it instead of Hawk on boss fights, not so great. Outside of raiding it seems fine as is, which is why I'm hesitant to hear they're working on it.

 

Gurth

Serpent sting damage on live servers isn't too shabby if you got improved stings, approximately doing the same damage per GCD as steady shot (1100sh over time damage with steady doing 1100sh average between crits and hits). Of course having it over time rather than istant and the fact it cannot crit (no gftt or EW from it) and that cost so much mana, make it a poor choiche.

If they gonna buff it and give us an auto refresh tool is gonna be on target always. Naturally i'm a bit concerned about debuff slots on bosses atm, since everyone is getting something nice to put up the amount of slots available for dots is going down and down each build.

 

KergeKacsa

Soruce: WotLK Warlcok forums: WoW Forums -> @Destros With Imp Talents.

Maybe this will be implemeted for hunters too.

 

• Intermission

I'm not sure where you are getting your numbers from. Currently my Steady Shots average damage is 2078, according to my last Brut kill. Including crits/hits, and the time before sunders/debuffs were up. (slightly more than that actually, because to simplify the napkin maths I turned my 51% crit into 50% to use the wws default avg numbers:
Wow Web Stats )

Serpent needs a very large buff if they plan on putting it into our rotation, and I'm pretty sure they do.

 

Korlash

He doesn't specify warlock pets so it is encouraging. I'd like to see that for hunter pets since my pet seems to miss a lot on raid bosses. Is the hit cap for our pets also 9%? It's really nice if it is since if we're hit-capped our pet is too and we can put the 2 points in animal handler somewhere else.

 

KraxisSingular

Yes, pets are treated as attacking with one weapon.

I'm not certain that this applies to us. Firstly we have Animal Handler, secondly the Tenacity tree has a 4% hit talent. They would for the most part be redundant if our pets got our hitrating. Of course I would love it, but Blizz woul first have to remove these talents before I believe it will happen.
Ok, Animal Handler might have a use while leveling where we will likely lack hitrating.

Looking positive about Chimera Shot and stings. But the boost woul have to be considerable. Something on the order of 70-100% boost. And that is a lot... Still Serpent would be expensive to use. I don't know. And of course the massive amount of debuffs bosses can be expected to get in Wrath. If they don't increase the limit I see no future for stings in raids, save teh occational Scorpid.

 

Conscience

I think this is quite a good idea. Maybe it could even be extended to some further extend, like refreshing all poisons on the target, although the only poisons in a raid, the ones used by Rogues, don't really have an issue with uptime. On the other hand there are two pet families with a poison racial.

 

Kaejin

I don't see why they wouldn't apply it to all pets. When they put in pet scaling they did it for both Hunter and Warlock pets. While it's true both pet types needed scaling, no one can really say hunter pets were in need of spell power scaling at the time, which they got anyway. I assume it's easier to make the change across the board as far as pets go.

Either way, if it goes through for hunter pets as well, we free up two talent points in the BM tree, and as far as Grace of the Mantis goes, it also has a dodge component to it. So if for some reason Blizzard doesn't change those talents, it's not going to be the end of the world or anything. Of course, I'm not saying I'm opposed to replacing the hit% in those talents with something more useful.

 

Spiry

I will disagree that the freeing up of the two talent points in Animal Handler is that much of an amazing change, refer to these two builds of mine: Without AH and With AH. All I really gained from the dropping of AH were Master's Call and 100% Frenzy, as I was stuck without enough points to get from tier 7 to 8, whilst avoiding the shame of taking Spirit Bond.

 

Kaejin

I never said amazing, I just said they were freed up. Even if we "lose" those two talent points, I feel the pet gaining the hit% the hunter has is still likely and preferable.

 

Eurytos

I hope they look at the mana cost of Tranq shot. Right now it's 12% base... which is very high for a single dispel (Purge is 8% base).

 

Cheeky

The best solution to deal with AH and the Tenacity talent is to turn them into Expertise. Something they can never scale off us (any Hunter with significant Expertise is a moron) and is very useful in the World of Meleecraft.

Cheeky of Havoc

 

Ravenfire

@ Chimera Shot refreshing stings.... I like it... so far everyone seems stuck on the Serpent sting - Chimera shot relationship. I'd like to point out that Viper and Scorpid stings will also become more useful with this change (by varying amounts). I'd consider it a major boon to "refresh" scorpid sting, reduce the targets damage AND do a bit of damage with 1 GCD instead of consuming the sting and having to recast scorpid sting thus using another GCD and more mana. Sadly the length of viper sting is only 8 seconds while Chimera shot has a 10 second cool down so no perma viper sting-mana gains on bosses but it does mean you could easily get a viper sting to last 14 seconds thus insureing that we can again have 90+% uptime on our mana drain on any mana based class that can't dispell poisons (mage, locks, hunters, preist).

 

KraxisSingular

Agreed, that would be the most logical and most effective change. Especailly in the Tenacity tree, Expertice being a supreme tankingskill (obviously less for our pets since they don't generate extra threat off normal attacks). For Animal Handler 4% Expertice would perhaps be OP, but 1% per talent point would be nice.

 

Cheeky

I don't think 4% expertise would be game-breaking. For DPS pets it'll mean it's only as effective as +hit (only reduces Dodge since pets attack form behind) and for tanking pets it's not going to make much difference in either DPS or threat generation (as you state.)

Cheeky of Havoc

 

Arcazua

Just a note regarding the post I made on the last page regarding Hunting Party, with some maths and spreadsheets and stuffs:

I was using the wrong percentages for the ranks, 20/40/60/80/100 instead of 20/30/40/50/60. I redid the math, as well as worked out some follow-up questions the folks at TKA had. Rather than reposting everything here for the uninterested, I'll just give you the link to the thread where we explored a few other nuances, like looking at 60% vs 100% and what it would mean to remove or reduce the internal cooldown.

 

Kukulzaa

I don't think it's Bloodthirsty that's doing it. I was having the exact same problem last night on the beta. Check the pet tab in your spell book. Growl is autocasted by default. The bug however was that growl was being casted even when I toggled off autocast in my spell book. This was confirmed when the tank saw the growl animation and the mob would switch to my pet. To fix this, you have to add growl to your petbar and toggle off autocasting on your petbar instead of the spellbook. I had no problems after I did that. I was able to go through the Nexus without a single pet death.

 

Sin86

According to wowwebstats reports, our pet hit cap is not 9%, with 2/2 AH we still have like ~12%+ miss on swing attacks. It will be an huge dps increase, if our pets can get our 9% hit, less swing, kill command, special abilities misses. It sounds awesome.

Concerning tranq shot changes, would be nice if it would not be affected by the global cooldown and mana cost reduced.

 

Keltan

I believe WowWebStats groups miss/dodge/parry all together as "misses".

What you are likely seeing is the -9% miss chance + -5% dodge chance +4% hit you get from Animal Handler, which gets you to ~11% miss.

 

Catalept

Well, we don't want to have to rely on the presence of an MM hunter to make Serpent Sting useful, so Serpent scaling will still need to be increased to make it worth burning a GCD for... and in that case, using another player to keep our own dots rolling seems a little OP. Imagine if Shadow Word: Death refreshed Corruption

The analogy with judgements isn't quite apples-to-apples, as they are target debuffs, not dots.

IMO, boosting Serpent to 0.2 scaling and making Chimera Shot refresh rather than consume would fix a number of issues with both trees. +1 Make It So.

 

Arcazua

.25 scaling imo. Our other shots do .2, and they can crit.

 

Denvald

nyone knows if Tranq shot will remove Beastial Wrath?

 

Kelidor

Only if it also removes other big Zerker abilities such as

-Feral 51th
-Demo 51th
-Anything else?

 

MetallicaRulez0

It definitely wasn't Growl, as it's on my pet bar and toggled off. Another hint that it's not Growl.... he was drawing AoE aggro, not single target aggro. I had to rez him no less than 15 times during that run because any mob the tank wasn't actively building threat on would run over and start punching my dino.

 

Catalept

Well, I always figured that the rationale for Arcane and Serpent's low scaling was that they're non-physical, and therefore ignore armor. However, given that we tend to live at 30%+ crit, and armor pentration will continue to be stackable in WLK, the tradeoff between non-crittable nature damage and crittable physical damage would indeed require at least 0.2 scaling, and some napkin-maths I just did points to 0.25 as being a good target.

Note that, the +30% damage boost from Improved Stings needs to be factored in. Crittable shots effectively get a boosted scaling rougly equivalent to your crit rate. Imp.Stings boosts the scaling of stings, effectively folding in a boosted scaling for stings that is competitive with that from crits... for some calculations, 5/5 Imp.Stings can be regarded as equivalent to assuming that Serpent Sting can crit.

Interestingly, if we do get 0.2 (or better... fingers crossed) scaling on Serpent Sting, Hunting Party's horrible returns means that removing 4 points from HP and getting 3/3 PV in SV, and taking 5/5 ImpStings could be a very workable build.