Aym

I truly suck. I was under the impression that dots was affected aswell, back from when channeled spells got changed to be affected. They are affected, right? Am i making a fool out of myself here? Should i stop talking?

Well, then on the other side, the 3% extra damage adds to casters aswell. Thats probably going to be the argument for BM hunters - even though all reports point to survival being dominant (until the inevitable nerf) we will see a *lot* of big red dinos, i think :P

 

Aym

Back to spec talk - sorry:

This topic was made on MMO-Champions hunter forum, asking what spec people would go for in WOTLK.

I made a simple reply, linking to this survival spec, to which one person replied:
This was my response - the two quotes signifies the break between my first post at 05:36:42 PM and the second last night:
Am i wrong in my assumptions?

 

Gonkish

Aside from the Rapid Killing adherence, I agree. Sniper Training is incredibly underwhelming right now.

As for RK, if you're going Survival, you're getting Readiness for Explosive Shot. Readiness is a 3 minute cooldown, and Rapid Fire is a 3 minute cooldown with RK. I doubt you'll be caring too much about the bonus damage modifier on RK, so you'd logically focus on it more for the cooldown reduction. That said, Readiness technically gives you a 3 minute cooldown RF anyway. So I'd argue that you don't even really need to take RK, and can instead put those points somewhere in Survival or Marks or something.

Am I completely off my rocker here?

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

 

Tyranna

Does anyone else feel MM needs a little pruning? I was playing with the latest talent calculator over at MMOChampion and I couldn't make a satisfactory build without dumping 53+ points into MM.
http://tinyurl.com/5ajr9r

I still have 4 points left over, but I don't see me putting them anywhere else but MM. Mind you, I had to ditch Aimed, Silencing, RR, and both Multi talents to get this far. I'd ditch scattershot too except for that pesky link to TSA.

*****

Second topic so I don't have to double post.

What's the deal with +hit to spells? I was reminded of this looking at a blue post about poisons being affected by +hit as it's the same for physical as it is for magical. If that's the case, why does Survival Tactics have an extra 4% from traps? I'm not sure what the hit cap for spells is at 80, but I'd think we'd have more than enough +hit for ourselves that our traps would be nigh unresistable even without ST.

 

François

Unless cpecifically changed, Hit caps for +3 (mob) targets are
9% for specials and non Dual Wield melee white attaks
17% for spells
28% for Dual wield white attacks

There are rumors about a change for spell hit cap. As far as I know, it's only rumors.

 

Steelfleece

I believe the trap-arming thing is old news. I remember seeing it before. Don't remember the aspects part though. In either case however, they're not highlighted as "new" changes.

affect –verb (used with object) 1. to act on; produce an effect or change in
effect –noun 1. something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence
Know the difference.

 

Aym

Well, readiness might give you a rapid fire every three minutes - but with RK and readiness, you'll have 2x rapid fire each 3 minutes. I mean, what else are you going to use readiness for in PvE? (which is my focus, obviously)

Rapid fire then immediately readiness, pew pew for 14 seconds, then rapid fire again. I quite like that..

 

Feanoro

Misdirection on obnoxious pulls like Twins.

 

sjogren

Regarding haste, I saw an interesting quote from GC:
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't far, far more than 40% of a (combat) rogue's damage from white damage? For hunters, everything we've seen so far point to having far less than 40% of our damage coming from auto, doesn't it?

I really wonder, if they want 40% of damage to be "white", why doesn't haste rating give significantly more per rating point than eg hit rating or crit rating? It just doesn't make any sense...

 

Aym

True, but its not critical. You can do twins without two misdirections. My point was really that the majority of time someone uses readiness, its for rapid fire.

 

Byuu

soo.. do you actually need Hunting party in wotlk raids? The replenish mana buff won't stack.. 10 raidmembers with the lowest mana will get it... you will have one ret pally and 1 (or 2?) shadows for ~20 mana using classes...

correct me if i'm wrong, but would be a spec like: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunt...00000000000000 be that bad?

 

Aym

Yes, i would. Theres no requirement to bring any, and a shadowpriest currently doesnt hold any benefit except that they can ress people. We can get stamina buff from a warlock or such.

If you have several mana batteries, you'll make sure that it never runs out, and always is refreshed. That is the raid utility you get in survival tree these days. Sniper training is very lackluster, as i argued in my long post above, and it hardly adds anything signifigant overall, compared to what you could bring to your raid with Hunting Party.

About your spec, why wouldnt you want rapid killing? 3 minute rapid fire CD, 3 minute readiness CD - see where this is going? You can either have 1 rapid fire each 3 minute, as you do now, or two rapid fire each 3 minute if you have rapid killing.

I will give you points for imp. stings - didnt think about that. However, my spec might instead look like this: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunt...00000000000000 - until i have enough crit to move one point from hunting party over to stings, and then just forget all about GFTT.

But i really wouldnt want to be without hunting party, i think. Its great utility (heck, im even planning on running 10 mans)

 

Sartuk

Obviously, a lot of this is going to depend on encounters in WotLK and how much focus regen pets really need. I could argue that 1/2 in Go for the Throat is all you need, and you could also dump the 2 in RK, thus still getting 3/3 Sniper Training. As underwhelming as Sniper Training may be right now (I think it could use a slight buff, nothing drastic...maybe a small crit bonus to Explosive/Steady, or a lowering of the required range to ~20 yards, who knows), if that 1 extra point in gftt is not needed, it frees up a bit of room.

I'm still not bought on Rapid Killing being that valuable. Two rapid fires every 3 minutes is very sexy sounding(and is certainly a lot nicer than 1 every 3 minutes...without RK, you're essentially wasting 2 minutes of Rapid Fire's cooldown), I admit, but how much of a DPS boost is that really going to be, considering it's essentially only affecting our white damage and not helping with steady shot at all?

Edit: I certainly wouldn't even argue about dropping anything else for Sniper Training, though. Careful Aim, Hunting Party, etc. are all much more valuable from a PvE standpoint (arguably even a PvP one.)

 

Bovii

You're not completely off your rocker there. The big choice is really going to come down to who else you have in your raid. Right now, my guild raids with a Ret Pally and two Shadow Priests. If that carries over to WotLK, I'm not going to really need to spec for Hunting Party as the overlap is largely redundant. In that case, even having a few points in Hunting Party is a waste so you're better off putting them somewhere else (depending on the encounters, you could go with Sniper Training or Survival Tactics - God knows I've died enough or had to slow my DPS due to FD resists). As a Survival Hunter and the way that they've designed the higher portion of the tree (something that I'm still not happy with but that is a different topic for a different day), you're going to have to use Serpent Sting. So if that is the case, why would you not put 3 easy points in Improved Stings to increase your DPS? And, while we have Readiness every 3 minutes, meaning that we have Rapid Fire every three minutes, wouldn't it be more beneficial to your DPS and your raid's DPS to have an additional 12s of haste? It won't boost your yellow damage any but it will impact your white damage. With the lack of clipping, now, that is a pretty hefty increase in damage.

Again, it is really a choice based on what you want to bring to the table and how your raid is grouping. Furthermore, a lot of it will depend on how your gear looks at lvl 80. Are we going to be at vanilla T2 with a 28-30% crit or TBC in T6.5 of 40% crit base? Are there going to be fights where we're constantly getting interrupted and will the new code for handling interrupts affect us as well? So much is unknown that it is all conjecture. But we've got to work on the best knowledge that we can. I would figure that the following would be optimized with what we know right now:

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft (points in SV tactics can be moved, obviously).

 

Tyne2

Tyranna, I think all the trees need a little “pruning,” but in your build I think you could omit some of your current choices.

For instance, piercing shots is underwhelming right now. It only works on Steady and Aimed, and 6% really isn’t that much:

5000 armor = 32.14% DR (Level 70 values)
Knock off 6% of that which is 300 armor and you get 4700 = 30.8% DR

So if your Steady Shot does 1000 damage before DR, without piercing shots it does 678.6 damage, with piercing shots it does 692.0 damage, which is an increase of 1.97% damage. Increasing just Steady Shot by ~2% for three talent points is a pretty bad return. This number increases to 3.01% against a target with 10k armor, which is still bad. It should be closer to 3% armor penetration or more per point and work on all attacks, at least then it would be 2.98% increase against 5k armor, 4.58% against 10k.

Improved Steady also doesn’t do it for me. Chimera will probably be doing around 20% of a Hunter’s ranged damage, so even if you had it proc for every Chimera Shot it would only be a 3% increase to your ranged damage. Granted that isn’t including the mana savings. For three points that deep in the tree, I expect a little more.

 

Tyranna

Well, I was thinking more of the mana conservation than the actual damage increase. RR is pretty underwhelming in it's current state and Efficiency isn't enough by itself so I figured I'd tack on ISS as on average, it'd be every other chimera at -40% mana. Which is decent considering Chimera is 16% base mana. Also, by your figures, 3% damage increase for 3 points is around where the devs want it to be IIRC so 3% damage + mana conservation makes it a decent talent.

As far as Piercing Shot goes, yeah. according to your numbers, it's a pretty lackluster return, but I was under the impression that the more arp you stacked, the better it got. So Piercing Shot would be better if you take into account arp from your gear?

 

Bovii

Remember though, you're looking at talents on a stand alone basis and in a vacuum. If you take Piercing Shots 3/3 and try to analyze it, it is going to come off extremely undervalued. But look at the fact that in full SWP gear (mail or leather), you're sitting at about -1100 armor at minimum. Given that current bosses range between 6500 and 7200 armor, give or take, Piercing Shots stacks extremely well. Let's assume your target has 9000 armor at lvl 80 and your gear gives you -1500 armor. With Piercing Shots, you've dropped that down to 8490 armor. Adding in your gear, you're not hitting a target with 7000 armor. Put Sunder Armor 5/5 on top of that and you're now attacking a target with 5500 armor. That is a drop in armor of 40% without factoring in Curse of Recklessness or special pet abilities.

The point isn't for it to be a massive DPS upgrade on its own. Rather, it is intended to increase damage slightly while further enhancing damage in conjunction with other abilities.

You have to realize that the Marskman tree has quite a few DPS boosting talents, from the start. That entire tree, with the exception of Scatter Shot, is 100% damage boosting talents or talents designed to increase the duration in which you can DPS (Efficiency, Rapid Recuperation, etc). In contrast, the Rogue Subtelty tree is built around survivability and damage mitigation. So while Serrated Blades and Piercing Shots does the same thing, the increase in damage gained by each talent is different because of the rest of the talents in that tree.

I will agree, though, that adding in Auto Shot would have been nice. But hey, better to have some rather than none, right?

 

Tyne2

Hmm, I hadn’t thought of the stacking implications, but it actually doesn’t make much difference.

If a mob had 10000 armor, and by whatever means you somehow managed to drop it all the way down to only 600 armor left (6% of total armor, 5.38% DR) and then that last 600 was taken off by Piercing Shots, Piercing Shots only increased your Steady Shot damage by 5.68%. Even if Steady does 50% of our damage, that’s less than 1% per point return. Against Mobs with 7200 armor, reduced to 432, then reduced to 0 thanks to Piercing Shots would only be a 4.09% increase to Steady Shot.

Those numbers are unrealistic. More common would be if a Mob had 7200 armor, and you reduced it by 4100 thanks to gear and sunder, piercing shots only increases your Steady Shot damage by 3.27%.

So in a sense you are right, it doesn’t suck as much as I thought, but does still suck. More importantly, is this how % armor reductions work? I would be interested to know whether the reduction is based on the total armor of the mob before debuffs, or whether it would be 6% off of whatever’s left after sunder.

 

bigjonno

Am I right in thinking that Survival is currently looking like the best tree for DPS in Wrath? I've been trying to digest as much of this thread as possible and I'd appreciate someone confirming this for me. I'm in a 10-man guild, so kicking out the most damage I can is my main priority. If it looks like something other than BM is going to be best for that role, I'm going to need to get over not having a new exotic pet.

 

ZulazeeluIcecrown

Eh, I'd hold off worrying about it until more testing after release. Remember at BC release, page after page of theorycraft said nothing had changed and MM was still the raid DPS spec. I remember getting into massive arguments about it, where I was mocked for specing BM. Even at BC release, BM was the higher DPS spec if you could keep your pet alive (a big "if" back then before 2.1), but it wasn't until 2.1 that anyone really admitted it. Nothing changed except the ease of keeping your pet alive, but suddenly people were looking at the real numbers instead of what they had wanted to be true. Before 2.1, people said that "even if you kept your pet alive, there's no way BM would be competitive with MM," had numbers they thought backed it up, and proclaimed that Hunters sucked in raids.

After 2.1, everyone changed their tune, I guess because it was becoming like the elephant in the room. I'm not saying things are going to go the same way this time around; after all, there was definitely a change in the high-DPS spec from 1.x to 2.x. MM gave way to BM. It is certainly possible that I am being guilty of the exact same thing I am complaining about, and that BM will have to give way to Survival. But I'd say any point in beta is too early to conclude one way or the other.

 

Shandara

We can only make conjecture at this point, mostly because we don't have enough information yet.

- Abilities are bugged or work in strange ways (opposite to tooltips)
- Armor values are largely unknown so far
- They'll probably revise mana regeneration again
- Explosive Shot and Chimera Shot have been changing over the patches

Judging purely by the intent of the trees though, we can come to some conclusions:
a) BM is going to be dependant on the pet more than ever and, most of all, low armour bosses. Lacking a 51-pt talent finisher shot like the other 2 trees, the spec is purely dependant on pet dps. Only low enough armour bosses can help the pet scale far enough beyond MM/SV pets to make up the hunter's personal DPS gap.
On the other hand, BM is going to be very very mana efficient, with very few shots (probably just Serpent Sting and Steady Shot) to use. With the talents and buffs it'll be hard to run out of mana. It'll be TBC Steady-spam all over though.
b) MM is dependant on one ability. Chimera Shot. It'll probably make or break the spec. The synergy with Serpent sting for extra damage and mana-efficiency, the talents in the tree that boost both abilities enormously and high AP help push it forward as probably the highest DPS spec.
On the other side, the spec has TSA, which has gone from a puny ability to a cd-less, 100% uptime, long-range 12% (with Glyph) AP boost. It beats enhancement shamans and DKs easily. Plus Chimera Shot has (probably) decent application in Gimmick fights (the scorpid sting effect) a the cost of personal DPS
Biggest drawback is the complete lack of decent mana regeneration talents. Without a shadow priest or retribution paladin or a SV hunter giving the spec refreshment constantly, it's nigh impossible to keep up any DPS
c) SV is the most evenly paced spec, in my opinion. Good talents, good abilities, good mana regeneration. Explosive Shot. Despite spending (probably) even more mana than MM, you know at least you'll have Refreshment most of the time (since you supply it yourself). Plus, most of your damage ignores armour already.

From the constant tweaking on the spreadsheet, the trees have been growing closer to each other DPS-wise though. Much depends on the final armour levels of the mobs. I had taken a random figure of 12k armour but it doesn't have any basis in testing, since there has been NO testing of that so far as I know.

The lower final figure of boss armour, the closer BM spec will be to MM and SV.

Maybe we will finally have the choice of 3 competitive specs?

WotLK Hunter DPS Spreadsheet

 

Chul

So where are we with regards to raid buffs affecting hunters?

We know Rampage now affects ranged crit and had its range extended to 45yards so it's now hunter friendly.

What about AP % modifiers, Abomination's Might and Unleashed Rage ? AB looks like it increases ranged AP (and the WotLK DPS spreadsheet assumes it), but it only has a 20yard range. Unleashed Rage looks like its only melee AP and it too is only 20yards.

And Battle Shout? Seems to be in the same boat as UR; only melee AP and 20 yards.

Is this correct? If so, can someone bring this up again on the beta boards to get the range of AB/UR/BS extended to at least 45yards and UR/BS to effect range AP?

 

Tyranna

Also, it's been stated a few times already by the devs that they haven't done a numbers tuning pass for any of the classes or specs yet. That's part of the reason for the recent massive nerf to DK damage. Right now, they're working on the mechanics of new components rather than the numbers they produce. Basically, all or most of the current values for damage are placeholders.

 

Steelfleece

I remember something similar being said about pet specials as well, that all the damage values were placeholders and would change (and some/most of the abilities would scale with AP). If that happens, it could be a big boost to BM damage (and a decent boost to all other specs).

affect –verb (used with object) 1. to act on; produce an effect or change in
effect –noun 1. something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence
Know the difference.

 

Kaejin

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - [Feedback] Pet Specials Generally

That would be correct.