What's really perplexing me is how so many people are considering the aimed shot glyph viable.

I understand it has been changed to reduce the cooldown by 2 seconds instead of some trivial mana cost reduction, but it simply doesn't provide an increase in damage over the steady shot glyph.

My claims are based using the following assumptions:

• The priority queue used is Explosive > Aimed > Serpent > Steady.
• For simplicity, I have ignored special, long cooldown buffs and kill shot (since kill shot has no bearing on our 'rotation').
• You will not wait even .5 seconds for an ability to come up. Instead, you will be firing the next highest priority shot immediately, and then use the higher priority shot on the next gcd. (This primarily affects aimed/serpent)

The two rotations come out as shown below, over 26 GCDs (this is when the aimed shot cast lines up again, and thus, could be considered a full cycle)


What I am finding is that lowering the cooldown on aimed shot by 2 seconds effectively allows one steady shot to be replaced with one aimed shot every 39 seconds (every 26 gcds), resulting in 5 Aimed shots instead of the non-glyphed 4.

In order for glyph of aimed shot to surpass glyph of steady shot, you would need for aimed shot to deal more damage than a steady shot plus the bonus glyph damage of 13 other steadies i.e. Aimed shot must deal 2.3 times more damage than steady shot in order for the aimed shot and steady shots glyphs to be equal in power.

Side note: Because of the interaction of a 1.5 second GCD with odd cooldown numbers (non-multiples of 1.5, such as the 8 with a glyphed aimed shot) glyph of multishot ends up being equally effective if you choose to use multi over aimed because 1/2 of the lower duration is wasted in a tight cycle (i.e. casting steady instead of waiting an extra .5-1 second for aimed to be ready.).

This is precisely my concern. With the GCD resource needing to be distributed amongst a lot of abilities with non-compatible cooldowns (either with each other, or with the GCD), it seems that SV is becoming needlessly complex, both in terms of theorycrafting and actual play.

With the Sniper Trainer change combined with moving Trap Mastery to the 2nd Tier, there is no need for Hawk Eye anymore. It used to be only a filler talent since there was nothing else to put those 3 points into, then Sniper Training made it actually usefull. Now it seems Trap Mastery is the better choice for those 3 points.

It looks like we will also be keeping SerpSting up so I would think that Noxious Stings would still be getting 3 points into it (plus the 1 for Wyvern).

Unless they go back to the immolation trap refresh and trap launcher thing that was on MMO Champion initially, I'm not sure I see trap mastery being very compelling. The lock and load proc chance on immolation trap isn't that high and with the changes to sniper training, I don't see trap dancing for a chance of an immolation proc to be really worthwhile. Am I missing something?

Looks to me on fights with adds that can be affected we can still try to use slow traps for that 100% proc chance, but on more straightforward fights LnL is going to be a cross your fingers and hope sort of talent unless they buff up black arrow, reduce the cooldown, or improve the proc rate. I'm actually wondering if LnL is even worth the point investment if the proc rate ends up being super low- 2 points is kind of a no brainer since there's really nothing else PvE useful to put them in, but a 3rd point in its current state looks questionable to me.

Why would SerpSting be useless?

Steady Shot (Rank 4)
A steady shot that causes unmodified weapon damage, plus ammo, plus [RAP * 0.1 + 252]. Causes an additional 175 against Dazed targets.

Serpent Sting (Rank 11)
Stings the target, causing [RAP * 0.2 + 1210] Nature damage over 15 sec. Only one Sting per Hunter can be active on any one target.

At 6000AP raid buffed Serpent Sting is out damaging Steady even with Crits factored in. Not to mention it's another instant cast.

As for the Glyph of Explosive Shot increasing the critical strike chance of our #1 damage dealer seems like a clear winner. I don't understand why people are downrating this Glyph regardless of your Crit rate. Diminishing returns on crit related buffs are moreso related to uptime, i.e. Hunting Party, Gfft, Expose Weakness, Frenzy. I don't see diminishing returns on this Glyph, 4% is 4%. If you take 10,000 Explosive Shot Ticks, that means you would have 40 more that crit regardless of your current crit rating. On a average boss with 100 Explosive ticks, 4 extra that critted would be what, 15k extra damage done?

Actually most people don't take Aimed, it seems like it is currently more half and half with 2/18/51 and 6/14/51 from what I can tell. Although I agree with you, I like Aimed personally, but I don't see the Glyph to reduce the CD by 2 seconds being a better choice over other Glyphs. Often times Aimed Shot gets pushed back a CD anyways because it comes up at the same time as Explosive.

Ok, with bosses that have adds using a Frost trap would be the way to go. But with bosses being immune to it and 3.1 making that immunity not trigger the frost effect, the bosses that don't have adds will have to rely on Immolation and Black Arrow. Now my point is what do you think will give you a bigger DPS boost, 3/3 in Hawk Eye or 3/3 in Trap Mastery? Without the need to stand 30 yards out for Sniper Training, Hawk Eye is almost useless but Trap Mastery will at least yield an increase in damage on the times that a Immolation Trap is used.

I expect that with the changes to survival, we'll see more people speccing more than 51 points into the tree, which is going to make focused fire unreachable, in which case aimed becomes a lot more attractive since the extra points in imp hawk are less compelling without it, although I suppose maybe people will want more points in imp hawk than they have now if they don't have room for it with the new glyphs.

I haven't done the math on the new LnL, but I'm just not seeing manually running in and dropping an immolation trap to be a very good idea with the changes. You'll basically be giving up the benefit of sniper training for 6 seconds plus whatever time it takes to do the movement to drop the trap. Then you won't have any control over the LnL proc. I think immolation trap ticks every 3 seconds which would mean you have what a 50% chance of an LnL proc sometime in the next 15 seconds if you dropped one? If the 30 second cooldown on LnL is still there and you already have black arrow up, you already have a chance to proc it from that (I don't know what the black arrow tick rate is). So basically you're talking about investing 3 talent points to gain a small damage boost to immolation trap which you won't be using in the first place unless somehow the trap dancing and chance mechanics involved outweigh the negatives. Anyone who sucks less than me at napkin math want to work out some rough idea on the damage tradeoffs?

Just a note on hawk eye btw, I wouldn't go way out of my way to get it, but there are definitely occasions where it has improved my damage slightly by allowing me to start attacking again faster in situations where I got out of range. Sapphiron is a good example- sometimes you have to hide behind the ice blocks pretty far in the back- the sooner you can get back into shooting range the more damage you'll do. It's situational, but it's not completely without its damage benefits.

Good points, a lot will be determined when things actually go live and we see what was kept and what gets changed. However at it's current state Immolation Trap could be Trap Launched (new ability) every minute, however sharing a CD with Black Arrow would definetely change things. I didn't see any notes about them sharing a CD however, is this coming from people who are on PTR at the moment? I'm at work so cna't hop on until tonight. However, if that is the case I wonder if it is intentional. It seems that Blizz wants us to use traps, they have stated the Survival Tree is trap-centric and introducing a Trap Launcher seems to back that up. Black Arrow sharing a CD would seem to nullify using traps in many cases.

However, the amount of extra damage from Hawk Eye is extremely situational and miniscule at best, so I guess it comes down to how they treat traps/black arrow CDs. But I would gather that only one or the either is chosen, not like a couple of the posted builds I have seen so far where both talents had 3/3 in.

I think that's the point. With LnL proccing off BA, and BA itself doing far more damage than even a talented Immolation Trap, assuming Blizzard gets the per-tick proc rate right, traps are completely off the menu for SV PvE. The only downside for me is that making BA and traps share a cooldown feels like nothing less than an ugly hack, even when I know why they did it

I think I see why you're so confused Perzyx. You're basing your spec on the info that was on MMO Champion last night. They changed that information and currently the trap launching is not in, nor is the immolation trap refresh on TnT. So right now, immolation trap is a substandard option for keeping LnL procs flowing. That may change but it's the current state of what we're being given.

If things go forward similar to what is laid out now, not much will change other than the death of trap dancing for the most part and the addition of yet another cooldown to monitor for everyone.

Well, it could have been worse I guess. As long as DPS doesn't fall behind our top mages even farther I guess I can live with it.