Catalept

MT is about an extra +5% crit. With no cooldown on Hunting Party, if you're at, say 25% crit, MT is an extra 20% more procs. Even at 50% crit, MT increases HP's output by 10%... nothing to sneeze at.

 

Zerlu

Played around and came up with WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Hunter -> Talent Calculator.

Its an odd build, but has merit so bear with me. Right now I am operating under the assumption that the damage portion of Bear trap will work on bosses. I picked up PoNE to help with raid DPS, and picked up Noxious Stings(as well as Imp Stings) instead of Master Tact. The line of thought being that with the increase in Sting damage, this talent will be at least as good as MT, and will be up whether or not we are on the move.

 

Catalept

TBH, I'd be suprised if the Bear Trap debuff applied to bosses. A flat 4(ish) percent increase to all incoming damage seems unprecedented (probably violating Blizzard's "no 'must have specs' allowed" policy. Although it wouldn't be too odious standing at 6 yards out and ducking into the boss' hitbox every 36(?) seconds, it doesn't sound fun... and would be flat-out impossible for some bosses.

OTOH, if trap mastery increases the trap trigger-radius to a point where the average boss trigger from 6 yards (or more), we'd have a highly desirable PvP talent and PvE-viable PONE... watch that space, I guess

 

Kaejin

Why wouldn't Bear Trap's bleed apply to bosses? Is the bleed linked to the root like Frost Bolt's snare was linked to the damage in regards to resists?

If you mean PoNE, Frost Trap doesn't affect most bosses, much less raid bosses. Freezing Trap is obviously out of the question, and Bear Trap doesn't last long enough to make it gamebreaking or anything. Unless PoNE applies a debuff that lasts a set amount of time rather than just the length of the trap effect itself.

Maybe I'm just confused because I've never worked with these abilities/talents.

 

Kom

Hi, I am having some trouble with the math presented here. A lot of the time I don't keep 100% up to date with changes but these seem a lot different to what I have seen, chances are I am off the ball though.

Firstly, you've got "Normalized attacks are: weapon damage + 20% * AP.". I have always been of the impression that when something has normalized weapon damage factored in it merely means (ignoring min/max and just taking average) WeaponDPS*2.8.
Which would mean that your already 2.8 speed bow in the second quote would rather give the formula:
Steady Shot damage: 280 + 260 WpnDmg + 140 AmmoDmg + 20% * AP = 680 + 20% * AP
Which gives a difference of 20% AP. Also if I am right about that statement, then is there any 100% confirmation on which of the 3 possible formula's is used by the new SS:
1) WeaponDPS*2.8 + AmmoDPS*2.8 + 280 + 0.2*AP
2) WeaponDPS*2.8 + AmmoDPS + 280 + 0.2*AP
3) WeaponDPS + AmmoDPS8 + 280 + 0.2*AP

Secondly, with Arcane Shot you've presented that it is now affected by Armor, I believe this isn't in Live (I just double checked 5 minutes ago), I was just wondering where you got this information as I have not seen any major changes to this ability. Also is there confirmation about spell damage debuffs affecting it? That I have not tested.

EDIT:After re-reading I think you may be refering to the fact that other abilities encounter roughly 20% mitigation, I'm not sure if it wise to factor this in by adding 20% damage to Arcane Shot however.

Thirdly, if there is some comparison to be made very roughly like this on which shot to put in your GCD, then isn't a bit unfair that Arcane Shot gets modified by target debuffs and yet SS isn't? I would have thought if anything it would be very much the other way round, that SS would be affected by a lot more debuffs, so if a rough calculation is to be made like this then it should gain a decent sized * X% compared to Arcane Shot.

 

Terp

You are telling me. It's ridiculously hard to pick from all the toys in the tree now. That I can honestly feel Entrapment is one of the weaker talents in the tree is just confusing. It's been a mainstay since the damn game launched. The tree obviously needs more help though, as the large pre-reqs for HvW, Counterattack, and Hunting Party more or less kill PoNE and ST. Surefooted and TNT seem flat out required now too. TNT to the point that I think I'm reading it wrong. Does that come out to a 40% chance to stun on each Explosive Shot? In an aoe? That's so out of line with other aoe stun procs I'm sure I missed something.

Also regarding HvW and ET synergy, Survivalist was just changed to Sta instead of Health with this build. I would fully expect ET to simply have been an oversight.

Ideally you would want Frost Trap to affect bosses over Bear for PoNE, it's triple the length at the expense of sub-2k damage. The Bleed is tied to the root, you can see the buff here. I don't recall whatever happened to letting Frozen status apply to bosses without actually freezing them, but PoNE could work similarly with Frost.

 

Kaejin

Survival Tactics is especially tempting now because of the change to Disengage. I even grabbed Resourcefulness when I was climbing the tree to get Explosive Shot before I trimmed things down to the talents I thought were the most important. Reducing trap cooldown and mana cost produces some good bonuses (hesitent to call it synergy for some reason) in conjunction with ST, PoNE, Explosive Shot, and L&L. The more often I get to screw some melee over by using Bear Trap + Disengage (for range if needed) + Explosive Shot*3 the better. I get giddy thinking about it.

Root & Bleed from Bear Trap + (6% crit from PoNE + 15% crit from TNT [21% crit boost total]) + (15% chance to stun for 2 seconds *3 [for every ES tick]) * (Explosive Shot *3)

Every 24 seconds.

That probably looks messy. But I think the burst potential is apparent, especially when it's punishment for approaching a Survival hunter in melee.

This is the first time since it's conception that I've ever appreciated Readiness. And let's not forget the fact that EW is likely to proc and boost your RAP somewhere in there.

I just sent shivers down my spine. I hope this doesn't get nerfed. I hope beyond hope that what amounts to a 45% chance to stun per ES isn't nerfed either. Excuse me while I laugh like an idiot for the next five minutes.

 

Zerlu

Are there any thoughts regarding Lock and Load? It states that you have a x% chance when you trap a target to get the "three free shots" effect. Now, are they only regarding our Ice traps as a trapped target, or will ALL traps be considered when calculating the Lock and Load effect? Just wondering if anyone had heard anything, or can cite a precedent.

 

Kaejin

I would assume it means when a player triggers the trap they are then "trapped" by it. It would be a shame if it only worked on Freeze and Bear Trap purely because of faulty semantics, especially when they call things like Snake Trap, Immolation Trap, and Explosive Trap... well, traps.

In other words, if only Freeze trap's effect was considered "trapping" a target for L&L, then why call any of the other traps traps?

I don't think we really need to go any further with that until we see how it works next push.

 

Kom

For someone without a beta key (me) these changes raise a lot of questions:
1) Does Explosive shot still tick 3 times? Seems more like 2 times if theres initial damage also
2) Does the Explosive shot dot still tick on initial target?
3) Does T.N.T have an internal cooldown?
4) Can the dot ticks still crit? Based on what %?
5) Is the initial damage on a crit based on our crit modifier? or 150% spells one still?
6) What will happen when using LnL to the Explosive Shot ticks? Do they stack or could it potentially skip the final tick if re-applied fast enough?

As for burst potential, I guess it remains to be seen, I'm assuming that LnL doesn't affect GCD, meaning that unless Explosive Shot is pulling some big numbers, or the enemies are all grouped up then it may not do anymore burst than using alternatives, although I guess that depends on if theres a crit modifier change. Obviously the stun proc is a reason to repeat it though in PvP situations.

 

Terp

The biggest problem with Resourcefulness currently is how dependent on scattershot Freeze Trap is. 24 second frost and snake traps are incredible, but worthless when you need to spam freeze someone. Through the simple act of providing an interesting alternative to Scatter (making Freeze trap far less powerful), Resourcefulness becomes a lot more attractive.

 

Kaejin

I'm not in beta either, unfortunately. But...

1 & 2) This is the only one (two?) I can really say for sure.

Explosive Shot's tootip: You fire an explosive charge into the target, dealing 416-486 Fire damage to the enemy target and an additional 104-121 to all enemies withing 5 yards of the target every second for 2 sec.

So in other words, it deals damage three times. The intial shot, plus two tics every second.


3) No idea. Even if it doesn't, there's still diminishing returns to take into account for the stuns. I don't see why the crit boost would have a cooldown, though.


5) I haven't played in a while, but I think they fixed this for Arcane, didn't they? I could easily be wrong.

6) Something I'd love to know as well, but I think we'll have to wait until someone can actually test it. It may very well be something similar to Explosive Trap's aura, but who knows.

 

Arcazua

Potentially long post considering all the new changes, and it's late here so I may post some incoherent babble. Bear with me.


Aspect Mastery as a 1-point talent is actually right on par with what it could or maybe should be. Using current game numbers, 1 point of AM is 55 RAP from Hawk. 1 point of Master Marksman is the same amount if you have (without MM) 2750 RAP. A well-geared MM hunter can maybe pull that off, but AM starts off being much better until gear improves. It doesn't scale at all, however. At least, not for the Hawk bonus. I do however like that it is not accessible for 1 point to all specs...I'm surprised how much some people here overvalue it though. If you've got 7 into BM (IAotH and FF,) is it really worth sinking 3 random other points just to unlock this? I'm inclined to think not.

Separation Anxiety first looks silly, and then it looks good, and then it actually looks pretty bad when you think about it. It's literally half the effect of a tier 3 talent, and conditional to boot. Couldn't we just get an identical clone of Unleashed Fury instead? Still, the proximity bonus to runspeed may have some interesting uses.

+10% healing on Spirit Bond is neat. I'm not sure just how useful it is, but it's still nice. Here's to hoping tenacity pets can tank 5-mans...(yeah, right)


I know not every talent has to have a home in raiding and/or pvp, but Rapid Recuperation sure looks like an estranged orphan, leaning so heavily on Rapid Killing (the buff) to be useful. Unless there are a lot of encounters that have random weenie targets for us to kill, RK is not going to be active for anything besides solo grinding.

Was Marked for Death always 2% per point? I noticed someone point this out earlier in the thread. I thought it was only 5% total before.

Chimera Shot actually represents a net gain of mana. With Improved Stings and Efficiency, a Viper-Chimera cycle nets something like 600 mana every 15 seconds. 200 MP5 is pretty good, I imagine, even if it costs you 2 out of every 10 GCDs. (You certainly have flexibility to pop Serpent instead if you don't need the mana.) No idea if the effect functions on manaless targets, however.


Surv is changed all which ways, so it's hard to know where to start.

Deflection is bumped back a tier (and is finally the 2%-per 3-point talent many have asked for.) Survival Instincts is now tier TWO. Improved FD is renamed and put in tier three. Some interesting rearrangement that only makes survival a desireable dump tree finally. Previously BM loved marks and marks split their points or just went surv strictly for Surefooted. (I think BM still loves marks, though.)

TNT is interesting, if you're going for an Explosive Shot build. Of course, Lock and Load is even more poignant for this. It almost makes Explosive Shot look like the new Mind Flay. (To that effect, exactly how much has ES been tinkered with in terms of strictly the main target? All we have is a flat value on the talent calc, and I seriously hope they didn't remove all scaling from the skill.)

Hunter Vs. Wild is an interesting talent, and I support what it's trying to do...a lot to bite off for 8 points, but PvP'ers will have Survivalist anyway and find it a nice 3-point drop. However, Survivalist was nerfed. No two ways about it. If you count the Hunter Vs. Wild bonus first as already having 30% off your pre-existing stamina, and then look at Survivalist buffing stamina rather than health, the only reason you can use to explain this change is synergy with HvW. However, you get what is effectively 3% of your (pre-existing) stamina as attack power from that synergy, and in exchange, you lose 10% of your base health. I honestly do not think that is a good trade. For my character at 70, that's like 17 attack power for about 350 health. No thanks. I'd like the old Survivalist back.

Noxious Stings is bizarre and clearly PvP-based, so I won't say anything more about it than that.

Hunting Party was radically altered. It's now (a) back to 20-40-60-80-100, (b) has no internal cooldown, and (c) only triggers off select specials. However, let's make a temporary assumption that we only fire those shots, and don't mix in stings or other random junk. We should fire 40 special attacks per minute. If our average crit rate is C, we should get 40*C crits during that minute, or 2*40*C percent mana returned to us during the minute. In other words, effectively we get 80% of our crit rate as mana pool every minute if we can maintain a constant cycle. If you want to convert that into MP5, by today's standards of (say) 7k mana and 40% crit, that's like 186 MP5. Inferior to Invigoration, but it's going to the whole group. I'd call that pretty damn good. More importantly, the talent now (a) scales perfectly per point, and (b) is weapon speed-independent. I call this a very nice reworking of the ability on Blizzard's part, as it fixes the two major concerns I had with any version that merely tweaked the numbers of the old.

Only final talent to talk about is the NYI -- Trap Mastery is supposedly 1 point now, and we've seen nothing from Clever Traps to speak of. I really like my extra Freezing Trap duration, so I hope this hasn't been done away with (unless it's in favor of a rank 4 freezing trap with 25 sec duration, of course.)


I think, for the time being, my surv build of choice is a basic 5/15/51 non-sting spec. We'll see how things pan out.

 

Kom

My questions probably don't make any sense at all with that tooltip. The one I've been looking at reads:
"You fire an explosive charge into the target, dealing 416-486 Fire damage the enemy target, and an additional 104-121 Fire damage to all enemies within 5 yards of the target every second for 2 sec."

Thats taken off the official calc's, I believe thats the new one. I'd assume (with much assumption) that it equates to:
"You fire an explosive charge into the target, dealing [RAP * 0.2 + 416]-[RAP * 0.2 + 486] Fire damage the enemy target, and an additional [(RAP * 0.2 + 416)/4]-[(RAP * 0.2 + 486)/4] Fire damage to all enemies within 5 yards of the target every second for 2 sec."

 

Kaejin

You're right, my mistake. I didn't read the tooltip I got from Wowhead carefully enough and used the old one. All that I said applied to the new one, however. It's a direct chunk of damage intially (400ish) followed by two tics (100ish each) every second for two seconds.

That's effectively three times that it does damage. I edited my post so that it makes sense now.

 

Orezbes

Lock and load : 15% when you sting... and if this sting is scorpid (current SW job on bosses)? No need to search imp sting and anything about serpent or wyvern...

No more cooldown on hunting party so the more AS is available the better it is... no?

What do you think about that?

0/20/51 .

Trap Mastery is my Mac Gyver's choice!

 

Kaejin

You bring up a good point about Lock and Load's synergy with Hunting Party. That's something I hadn't thought of before, in addition to TNT's 15% crit boost.

That reminds me of another question I was thinking of. Will Imp Arcane Shot reduce the cooldown of Chimera Shot and Explosive Shot?

 

WarTotem

Lactose's work is what seem pretty accurate in current game mechanics. Another explenation is from WoWwiki. Both show that normalization works only for the AP part in this case with a 2.8 speed or 14/2.8 = 20% scaling. As you can see, a normalized attack keeps the variable weapon damage range (woot, more RNG), rather then being a fixed damage. I merely took the average for easy math ofcourse.

I took 20% damage increase on Arcane Shot because the mitigation is actually closer to 17-18% (after generic raid debuffs), so adding 20% to the current damage buffs it to 100%. I am working on more accurate formula's, but I was waiting for the hunter polish to come out first to refine my spreadsheet. I was actually rather generous in my armor values though, giving lvl 80 mobs no more then ~9000 armor. Atleast the 17+% is on par with the current boss armor being 7700 + Sunder/FF applications.

Steady Shot does not gain a lot of bonuses specificly for itself. I can only think of 1 debuff, being Blood Frenzy, which boosts physical damage taken, but I checked the stats of some end-game raiding guilds on my server and I came to the conclusion that a very large part of Blood Frenzy is pure compensation of the lost DPS from respeccing. Either those guys all plain sucked, or they purely specced Arms for less personal threat. For the rest, most buffs either boost all damage or AP, which scales with both attacks here.


I did the math and at 1 damaging ability per second, MT is 6,4% crit, more efficient then Lethal Shots (nice to know if you need the points from MM)


<Edit>
Can any beta tester let us know if Lock & Load also includes no GCD? I would assume not, but it would mean a nice DPS boost (and easier cycles) if it was

 

• Playered

You cannot really give up Lethal Shots as there is nothing else at T1 MM worth replacing it (do you really intend to ignore all the goodies in early MM for some reason?).

L&L isn't implemented yet so no one can test it, wait for the build after 8778 for when those new/changed talents 'should' be added.

 

Kom

I don't believe this is the case as the tooltip says:
"A steady shot that causes unmodified weapon damage, plus ammo, plus [RAP * 0.2 + 120]. Causes an additional 175 against Dazed targets."
This is different to Aimed Shot and Multi-shot which both use modified weapon damage, i.e. weapon damage + normalized attack power. Thats what I make of it anyway.

Lets try something, just imagine a hunter with 5000 effective AP. With lets say a 100 DPS bow, 50 DPS ammo and 2.8 speed.
Aimed Shot: (From Cheeky's Spreadsheet)
Ranged Weapon Damage: 280
Ammo Damage: 140
Aimed Shot Damage: 1570
Damage From AP: (5000/14)*2.8 = 1000
Total Base Damage: 2990

Steady Shot: (Your calculation)
Ranged Weapon Damage: 280
Ammo Damage: 140
Steady Shot Damage: 280
Damage From AP: 5000*0.4 = 2000
Total Base Damage: 2650

Steady Shot: (My calculation)
Ranged Weapon Damage: 280
Ammo Damage: 140
Steady Shot Damage: 280
Damage From AP: 5000*0.2 = 1000
Total Base Damage: 1700

I know the cast time has increased but with your calculation that puts its damage pretty dam close to that of Aimed Shot. Do you have any links or anything where some of this has been tested?

As for Arcane Shot, again as far as I know it isn't affected by armor. I'm not really sure what your trying to say with that paragraph. As a result all armor penetration debuffs like FF/CoR/EA etc affect Steady Shot but not Arcane Shot, hence why if your are stating Arcane Shot will do X amount with spell debuffs, then the same must be done to say Steady SHot will do X amount with armor and physical debuffs.

 

Nakari

That would be a good idea, because at the moment Imp. Arcane Shot is probably the worst talent point for point in the whole Marksman tree (even worse than Concussive Barrage). It's rather suprising the talent survived several talent reviews without any changes... it could really use a reduction in points from 5 to 3 and / or a more interesting effect than a mere cooldown reduction, especially considering how lackluster Arcane Shot is for all builds. Perhaps something like "Reduces the cooldown of your Arcane Shot, Kill Shot, Chimera Shot and Explosive Shot by 0,3 / 0,6 / 1 Sec. and gives your Arcane Shot a 5 / 10 / 15% chance to cause your next 3 physical attacks to deal arcane instaed of physical damage."

 

KraxisSingular

I can't imagine LnL being no GCD. Depending on the power of Explosive Shot, I think the no-CD shots would get the most effect out of Explosive-Arcane-Explosive. That way all the DoT components gets off. If it was just three Explosives the last DoT tick on the first and second Explosive would get wasted (unless they stack of course, making LnL a fun AoE talent).

Orezbes, if Improved Arcane Shot lowers the Explosive Shot CD, then it might be worth it, if not then it is a waste, or at least there are other places where you could spend 5 points more efficently.

No Careful Aim?
Hawk Eye and Savage Strikes?
Sniper Training?

 

KraxisSingular

Just remembered a comment by a Blue recently.

They want all specs to use a sting and a shot different from Steady Shot. Specifically mentioned was BM -> Arcane, MM -> Chimera and Surv -> Explosive.
With the recent 'nerf' to Arcane, I fail to see any reason to use it as BM. There are no talents that buff it (unlike various Surv talents buff Explosive), there is no internal synergy (like for Chimera) and it is pretty expensive still.

Is this an indication that Arcane might recieve a significant buff? Either through damage from itself, or through BM talents perhaps? And if Kill Shot is on the same CD (we don't know yet, but a 6 sec CD indicates as much) wouldn't that just ruin Kill Shot or sort of make the Arcane buffs somewhat worthless?

The same with stings. BM has no synergy with stings, while the other two trees do. Yet Blizzard want all trees to use stings. Sounds like Scorpid then, unless Serpent is buffed mightily. But in either case that should only deepen the gap that MM and Surv is currently carving to BM.

Blizzard might not want any spec to be required, but at this time they don't appear to be very phased about specs not being wanted. Hopefully some more far reaching changes are in the cooker.

@Trev, it isn't that I don't understand you. I'm there with you in fact. I would like to know when what is activated. Doesn't seem fair that we have to assume things. However, I don't think Blizzard is really thinking those talents through. In case of Seperation Anxiety the PvP aspect just overpowers the other considerations. If you are too close you get speed, if you are maxing range yo get damage from pet. Raiding is not considered there. And if it is then it is likely thought of "well the Hunter should stay at max range anyway, that is why we gave them the longest range and now Kill Shot (45 yards)" and so get the 10% petdamage bonus. For Sniper Training I'm pretty certain the same thought applies, Hunter = max range. And I must admit that I agree, that is how it should be. However they designed us to take advantage of melee buffs, and in the process forgot to grant them range for us. Perhaps two teams are working on Hunters and melee, and as such they end up working in each their direction. Leading to us getting stuck betweentwo chairs so to speak.

 

WarTotem

WotLK Talents & Abilities Discussion
Definately modified. Seems that I used a bad weapon to do my first math with, as I forgot to do add weapon damage modification as well. It's not normalized as other attacks, it's even extra-normalized, even though the tooltip states the other way around. Don't trust tooltips, the WF tooltip has been implying it's a single hit for about a year now.

And I already counted armor debuffs for Steady. The formula for reduciton through armor is With a lvl 83 target with 9000 armor that is 35%. With 4k armor that is 18,4%, which requires a 22,7% damage increase to go back to the pre-armor values [or in math: (100%-18,4%) * 122,7% = 100%]. To go below this 20% damage bonus, you'ld have to go below 3.3k effective armor.

@Kraxis:
No GCD wouldn't be THAT bad really. Arcane is currently not doing much damage, thus wasting proc charges, and Explosive has the 2 second delay. Adding Kill Shot on this talent would be an interesting choice though.

 

Orezbes

Careful Aim like Hunter vs Wild requires other stat than agility... 100% intel is it significant? Maybe... that is a first try of template without stuff knowledge.

Hawk eye to maximize the chance to use the first part of Sniper training talent.

Ok for Savage strikes but what else? With the new mangoose free from dodge requirement... and some synergie between traps and shots...

Sniper training maximizes explosive shot... and gives points to take the end talent... which is 'explosive shot'! Increase Kill Shot crit is not so bad...

Why imp. arcane? Because the SV chooses to nerf himself with the purpose of buff others... and hunting party works only with three shots. Arcane is one of them. I could take imp Aspect of the Hawk but it means that the SV is not mobile to works... and whe have synergies between traps and shots...

Yes it's normal to chose dps but is an other world impossible?

Sorry for my english .

I will be happy to hear your opinion on this draft vision of the future tree and my English: p.