Chul

If pets got a percentage of our haste from gear/item procs, then it wouldn't be so bad.

 

takel

If pets got a percentage of all our stats, then we wouldn't be stuck in this dilemma of pet friendly buffs and stats.

Let's be honest. Part of the reason why Haste is a less desirable stat for hunters is because it affects one of three parts of the hunter's DPS sources. The auto-attack, which is 35-40% of our DPS. It naturally leaves the special damage segment unaffected, as it does for all other physical DPS classes. However, it leaves out our melee component (pet), which is anywhere from 20 to 35% of our DPS.

Let the pets take our haste rating, and we now have the stat affecting 60-70%+ of our DPS. There you go, you have a stat that is useful for all three hunter specs, and the enh shammies who are in melee anyway. Itemisation just became a lot easier for Blizzard.

Then we have armour penetration. The more reliant on pet DPS you are, the less valuable armour pen is because it doesn't apply to the pet. Fix that omission and armour pen becomes a more valuable stat all round and becomes a very viable stat to stick on physical DPS mail instead of having to consider if the person who's taking it is 40% pet based.

I'm sounding like a broken record and I'm probably going to get an infraction for this, but honestly, the most elegant method to fix the majority of our itemisation woes is to simply rework how pets scale from our stats, and probably rework the whole pet damage model at the same time.

 

Berfert

You get 100% more haste, you get 100% more burst damage. Honestly, I'm just not seeing the issue there. It's also worth noting that they could just as easily say "haste reduces cooldown for any ability that isn't an instant" (on next attacks not counting as instants, I assume)...


But it does effect everything a caster can do that doesn't have a specific cooldown (much as it wouldn't help with our own specific cooldowns). And we all pay the exact same code for haste rating. I just feel that everyone should get "around" the same benefit from the haste (varying by spec in certain cases)... or it should cost less for the classes that don't get as much out of it. This is especially true for stats that Blizzard has decided are the new "in thing", like haste and ArP.

 

Chul

Swapping Pets:

If our pets are going to have abilities that are a backup to other class abilities (like Sunder Armour/FF etc), then it would be handy if there was some way to swap pets in the middle of an instance besides hearthing and whispering a lock for a summons.

I propose that we are giving an ability on a long-ish cooldown (say 1 hour, remembering that Longevity could reduce it to 42 minutes) that brings up the stable screen; if we swap a pet, the cooldown is started. It could be disabled in combat in case Blizzard is worried about us hot swapping our pets when they die.

Server Cast Queue:

One big thing I would like to also see (and perhaps this could be raised again on the Beta forums), is for the cast queue to be used for abilities under the GCD. Currently (based at least on healing tests on my alt), the cast queue at the server only gets the message when the GCD is gone. All classes really should have the ability to chain cast spells/abilities using the cast queue at the server regardless of their cast time. In fact, the shorter the cast, the bigger effect latency has so it makes more sense for short cast time spells (like Steady Shot) to utilise it over longer cast spells.

If Blizzard is worried about spam, the client could protect the server by only sending one message per GCD.

 

Quilde

On a different topic, with the announcement of wrath talents coming sometime in the next few weeks, any ideas on talent specs for those of us still raiding? From a BM perspective should we start ditching points in marks and going further down the BM tree? Surely we could replace rapid killing and efficiency for invigoration and longevity (obviously its still beta and things will change). Any thoughts?

 

Prinsesa

If you have three Paladins in a raid, everyone is going to have Kings, Might and Wisdom.

There's a Blessing of Might Glyph that lets it provide 10% of the AP buff as Spell Power, making it applicable to casters.

There's also a Blessing of Wisdom Glyph that lets it provide 100% of the mana return as health gain, making it applicable to tanks (and everyone else), which is a far sight better than Sanctuary.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

cutfang

I would have thought that warriors would prefer the reduction in damage + return damage aggro from Sanctuary compared to a somewhat negligible hp5 gain, but thats going off topic.

I guess if we get the new talents before Wotlk is released then an exotic pet would have to be pretty damn powerful to make up for losing mortal shots.

 

Killua

except you'll be able to skill 51/10/0 and have an exotic pet + mortal shots..

 

Spiry

How focus starved would an exotic pet be without gftt and only bd?

I'm thinking to stick with my boar until 72 then respeccing to 51/12 and ofc getting me a devilsaur (I don't care if everyone else is too :P)

edit:rage -> focus

 

mako

Pets don't have rage... so not starved at all. The pet overhaul means you'll probably have extra focus lying around with bd and gftt anyway.

As for the haste thing. What I'm saying is that 1% haste is the same 1% white damage increase across all specs.

Non-BM gets the added benefit of bringing their steady closer to 1.5, but that's still going to be slower than, or equal to, BM. The result of that would be BM can spend it's item budget on better stats, like armor pen and agility, instead of haste, so it's not as though haste is suddenly going to make MM the top dps spec.

<Bad> Dragonmaw US
www.damnwesuck.com

 

Akston

With instants not being affected by haste at all and MM/SV using more instants that BM wouldn't the overall benefit from haste for your personal damage be about the same? MM/SV would take longer to soft cap but at the same time they wouldn't ever get as much out of haste as BM does. Of course BM pets will probably be a larger part of a BM hunter's dps than pets for MM/SV but as far as haste effecting the actual hunter's output it seems like haste is about equal for all 3 specs without including the pet's contribution.

 

Spiry

my bad, meant focus >_<

I'll edit it now :P

btw I meant with BD and without GftT.

 

mako

As far as I know, a hunters haste does not affect their pet, so it should be the same, roughly.

edit: I imagine it'd be feasible to try a build without gftt with the new talents at 70, although I'm not sure if skipping careful aim and gftt is worth it in order to get an exotic pet.

<Bad> Dragonmaw US
www.damnwesuck.com

 

Shandara

On average, 1 point in GftT will give your pet enough focus for everything, but that's just on average.

WotLK Hunter DPS Spreadsheet

 

mako

You have bite/claw at 25 focus with no cooldown, and then most of the normal specials at 25 focus, 10 second cooldowns.

So your pet only needs ~25 focus/1.5 sec to keep spamming away in a raid/party where it's just dpsing. I'm not fully aware of focus mechanics (regen rate with and without bd, estimating gftt value) so if anyone has some info please enlighten me.

<Bad> Dragonmaw US
www.damnwesuck.com

 

Conscience

It has been layed out in detail that you won't want haste in wotlk over most other stats like agi, crit, hit etc. So IAotH won't be very good anymore, too. How valuable compared to the other talents you mentioned can hardly be determined at the moment. In every case it won't affect your rotation anymore.

As for the "haste scaling with pets" point: Pets scale with your haste, although very very slightly. More Autoshots means more crits, which is more focus through gftt.

 

Shenlong

Hah, Blizz's itemisation crew really are a perverse lot. I reckon they look at what's been said in here and on the General forums, smirk wryly to themselves and do the exact opposite of what we want. Here's all the level 80 blue mail with haste rating so far, 7/17 hunterish items.

Boots
Shoulders
Neck
2H Axe
Cloak
Ring
Dagger

Only two new items with Armor Pen as of yet, this bow and this sword. Still, early days yet.

 

Runningelk

In light of Bliz's announcement that they are going to release the talent trees and pets before the official release of WotLK, how are you going to use your 61 talent points? What pets will you use for raiding before the release of the expansion? I'm specifically interested in BM/MM builds to pets to maximize DPS. I currently raid with a Cat and the typical 41/20 build and would like to stay BM spec'd.

Also, what professions are you looking at for the expansion? I'm keeping JC and currently have LW for the drums but with the nerf to drums I'm considering other options. Inscription? Alchemy? Keep LW?

Thanks in advance.

 

Bovii

Of course, you're not getting the problem. You don't want to see the problem. And you aren't alone. You're looking at this from the sole stand point of the Hunter which is why you aren't understanding why Blizz only allowed haste to affect spell cool downs. Can you imagine how much more burst DPS that a Warrior or Rogue would put out if haste affected their cool downs? Rogues can self haste anyway so you'd be seeing sub 1s styles. And Warriors, who can also self haste to a point, would be even worse. Both of those classes scale much better with gear and AP than we do. Plus, the bulk of all DPS abilities for non-casters are instants. Haste reducing the GCDs was necessary for casters, mostly healers, to handle to stress of the new content for SWP.

By allowing Hunters to continue to fire off Auto Shots while Steady Shot (and even Multi-Shot if your timing is off) is casting along with the changes to Wind Fury Totem, they've essentially allowed us to change our approach to DPSing without having to spam Steady Shot like a bunch of retards. No class should limit itself to one of a multitude of abilities in order to maximize DPS.

 

mako

Rogues have never had issues with the GCD. They simply are not limited by it, with auto-attacks going off constantly, the only things that limit rogues are environmental factors and energy regen. Unless energy regen outpaces the gcd through a pleasant accident rogues will never see a benefit from haste to lowering their gcd (the only exception being a mild increase in burst damage if energy is pooled to near max, but the overall damage doesn't change).

All the hunter auto-shot change did was bring us in line with all physical dps by giving us true "white damage". With the changes to raid buffs and the massive push of haste as a stat, it was necessary as Hunters in TBC gain minimal benefits from the stat. Hunters also don't scale any less than a warrior or rogue does when you account for wrath changes.

Casters simply have too many 1.5s spells, so haste was hardly useful for half the spells healers and dps casters used, so the GCD reduction was added in order to bring them closer in line with physical dpsers.

<Bad> Dragonmaw US
www.damnwesuck.com

 

Korlash

With autoshot unlinked from the rest of our shots weapon speed is obviously not as important to us as it was in TBC. Im trying to decide what would be better for us in wotlk. A slow hard hitting weapon or a fast softer hitting one. My guess is BM would want the faster one since that should translate into more crits and more focus for our pets and so on. I'm not sure about the other specs but generally when i think about it, would faster not be better since it means more crits, albeit smaller crits? (With regard to PvE dps, PvP is a different story)

 

Rustik

Even normalized weapon damage skills gain a slight boost to damage from a slower weapon because the formula is Weapon damage + (Normalized Weapon Speed * AP/14).

Also, Steady shot is not normalized. A slower weapon is better.

 

Korlash

Ahh cool thanks, forgot about that. So it's really a balance between a slower weapon and enough crit chance to ensure our pets have enough focus.

 

dssurge

If steady shot isn't normalized, which is suggested by the tooltip ("A steady shot that causes unmodified weapon damage, plus ammo..."), having a slow weapon will result in vastly higher damage since the cast speed is static. At the same time this seems really fucking silly and everyone will be using the Crossbow of Smiting 2.0 with little to no deviation since the slowest weapon will always be the best (even moreso with the ammo damage being added.)

With the changes to focus consumption, having a slow weapon seems as if it won't drastically affect pet damage potential. I don't think a pet can dump focus fast enough for it to matter, really...

 

Rustik

Ret pallies and Slam warriors already go for slower weapons, and even rogues, because of the extra benefit to instants. (And especially slam, and now, judgements).

Honestly, if they're going to normalize damage, they ought to take NWS(Weapon DPS + AP/14), but it's not how it works, so we'll gear for the best. :P