From this post onwards:

If you are not directly discussing changes, impact that changes have on hunters/hunter mechanics (with either numbers to back it or similar theorycrafting), or innovations related to 3.0.8 changes, expect a week off. This thread has gone to complete shit since I took some time off for the holidays.

tl;dr - you whine at all, you lose posting for a week

Be careful, I ran a wasp when I was raiding in Naxx and OS and melee were complaning that they couldn't see mobs or effects on the floor because of it. I was asked by an officer to switch out my pet back to my cat, which didn't sit well with me. I mainly ran the wasp because I was tired of cats in general, we do have a fair amount of feral druids who do amazing DPS which would have benefited my cat more, but I ran the wasp to save a GCD for them and to satisfy my tastes.

With the nerfs to both Scorpids and Cats and the fact that for a SV Hunter the difference between say a Raptor and a Wind Serpent would be about 10% dps max (even less according to the spreadsheet) Im switching to a Wind Serpent allready. Im in a 10 men raiding guild with friends (no 25mens for me) and Im forced to use Viper during Bosstries. My guess is that a 10% loss out of ~400-700 Petdps is worth less than reducing or even removing having to Viper during a Boss. I think that for a nonBM Hunter - especially one with some manaproblems - a Cunning Pet may well become viable.

There are a lot of posts about which pet to use once 3.08 launches, just for clarification are we saying:

If BM --> Spirit Beast > Devilsaur
If MM/SV --> Wasp > Cat

And why?

As a BM, I'm seeing Devilsaur > Wasp > Core Hound > Raptor > Spirit Beast > Cat currently (using 81c), but they're all quite close to one another, a 91 DPS difference (with my character, Glyphs of Bestial Wrath, Steady Shot, and Serpent Sting, and Skinning profession using Shandara's 10-Man Team buffset) between Devilsaur and Cat. I'm not sure I completely trust these numbers yet, though, since it still seems up in the air whether Spirit Beast is using Spell Power or Attack Power. GC didn't seem to know himself in his latest post on the subject, but perhaps he'll look into it and clarify.

For MM/SV a Wasp is a better pet (then a full-DPS pet like cat) if you haven't got a minor armor debuff on your raid.
And why?
You do bigger % of your total dmg (while at BM you do lower%, since your pet do you dmg's 35-40%), and you won more personal DPS then losing pet-dps.

If you got minor armor debuff in raid (CoR, Faerie fire, another Wasp), then of course you worth more if you go with a cat (or other full-dps pet.)

That has to be a bug. Not that 5/10 man emblems are a valuable commodity, but I'd assume 99% of hunters have blown emblems on it. They simply cannot have made that useless for us on a whim.

Lock and Load now has a 30 second internal cooldown. This probably warrants the need for an addon to keep track of the ICD, lest you waste time going in for immolation traps when it's already procced off of Serpent Sting. Also removes the need to take Resourcefulness. Frees up 3 more points to put into master tact/whatever.

Ferocious Inspiration now increases damage from Arcane Shot by 3/6/9%. Since the Explosive Shot nerf only lowers base damage (a minor nerf), it doesn't seem to up BM on the scales, provided everyone in your raid is switching to Survival.

... They also buffed cat and scorpid damage. What?

Also on MMOChampion:

Is that going to kill trap dancing? I'm guessing no unless LnL procs from Serpent Sting are atleast every 30s. Has anyone ever modeled how often LnL procs?

GC on the Mirror of Truth "change":

This is a tooltip error. The item has not changed. It will still work off of ranged attacks.

We changed the tooltip to be clear that it does not proc off of magic spells. It does proc off of bows, guns and thrown items.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> @GC, Mirror of Truth change

Thank god.

The added 9% increase to Arcane shot will be a nice addition. I'll have to jump over to the PTR this weekend and start testing and playing around with all these AS changes.

They bumped up the base damage a bit, but the scaling is way down.

This was a very nice little tidbit I came across in a mage post. Confirmation of an overhaul of the pet stat and buff inheritance system, for patch 3.1 or beyond, which seems to include stats pets don't currently recieve (spell penetration is mentioned specifically). I could definitely see it helping any scaling issues we may end up with in 3.0.8 being alleviated if pets get our crit, haste, and armor penetration rating, especially since those stats are rather lacklustre for us currently.

Actually, I believe that adding a 30-second cooldown to LnL will make trap dancing much more desirable.

A 6% chance every 3 seconds means that the average time it takes for a Serpent proc is 50 seconds. However, they are not buffered in any way. As far as LnL procs are concerned, Serpent sting may as well not be up at all during that 30 second downtime. That means that we have to add 30 seconds to the average time between serpent procs... increasing the time between procs to 80 seconds. Relying on Serpent alone for our LnL procs will make them happen almost three times slower than forcing procs with traps.

Unless Blizzard significantly buffs the proc rate, traps will be by far the best way to keep LnL rolling.

Edit: Actually, with a 30-second cooldown for LnL, anything less than a 100% proc chance from Serpent will result in a lower LnL uptime than trap dancing. Of course, trap dancing incurs its own DPS loss, and may not always be a no-brainer... but with an 80-second average time, Serpent procs are certainly relegated to background noise.

In the latest build, speccing into Ferocious Inspiration increases the damage done by arcane shot by 9%. This is independent of whether FI is actually up. The bonus is additive with Improved arcane shot -- i.e., if both are fully maxxed then Arcane Shot damage is increased by 9% + 15% = 24%. Hard numbers from the PTR, BM specced (incl. Focused Fire) with 3768 RAP:

Arcane shot with no pet out, 3/3 FI and 3/3 Imp. Arcane: 1311 (corresponds to (15% RAP (565.2) + 492) * 1.24)

Same as above but with pet out: 1337 (corresponds to 1311 * 1.02).

This is pretty much exactly the opposite of what they seem to be heading towards, and I agree with you completely. I hope these numbers become more well known.

I can't say I'm too pleased with the thought of trap dancing. 3-Drake is already challenging and hectic enough without worrying about trying to maximize DPS with this silly gimmick. I'm really hoping they up the proc rate on SS to something that puts it at a comparable level to trap dancing.

MetallicaRulez0 does have a point, trap dancing when doing something like Sarth-3D would be fairly annoying; but it wouldn't be immensely hard nor impossible, and it does add something interesting to the game. Personally, I'm not too concerned with this patch; it's been stated over and over that more changes will be coming in the patch after; meaning we'll have to wait for that to see how we do in Ulduar anyway. I highly doubt any of us will be put aside by our guilds, just because we lose a little DPS depending on spec and situation. I do hope however, that we get some more depth in our rotation, I think we all agree on the fact that the current state of BM makes every hunter look good.

I haven't decided whether I'm going SV for 3.0.8 yet, I want to run some numbers first.

Has anyone done the numbers for SV with the new ES and ICD on LnL? If not, I'll do them later today when I get back home and have some spare time. I don't think the difference is that massive, but I still wanna verify my feelings first.

Forgive me, but when it comes to trap dancing especially at Sarthation +drakes we talk about dancing in order to use an Immolation Trap upon one of the drakes to proc the Lock and Load effect. Wouldn't it be slightly more beneficial to ignore the already in my opinion pathetic excuse for damage that is Immolation Trap and rather lay down perhaps, especially while Tenebron is still up a frost, or explosive trap to proc the buff.

I haven't played with Survival at all during WotLK as I've been a solid BM fan, however Lock and Load - Spell - World of Warcraft suggests that the buff can be from anywhere, and not just the target we're firing against. Taking into consideration my own fully buffed RAP of ~6600, Immolation Trap - Spell - World of Warcraft
would only be causing ~2200 (6600/0.1 =660+ 1540) damage to the target. Only another autoshots worth of damage? So is the dancing aspect really worth it? Especially during Tenebron the Explosive trap effect would cause more damage on the initial blast, and a neglegable ammount over time.

So, thats that covered, but what about in the future, and any static fights? I imagine in Ulduar we will reach upto 7000 buffed RAP, which will bring Immolation Trap to ~2240 (7000/0.1 =700+1540=2240) damage, which really is quite poor in terms of scaling. We also presume with Ulduar being the "tier 2 of learning" that each fight will have a static phase, so would incorporating a Freezing Trap into our rotations be beneficial over the movement issue for the sake of 2240 damage extra. Yes, a boss mob will be immune no doubt, but we don't lose the downtime from movement. The upside to movement into melee range is the melee hits and then to disengage, maybe incorporate a Raptor>Mongoose>Disengage rotation into play, but as a ranged class I'm fairly confident in saying this would also drop our overall numbers.

Going to stop there as I'm starting to encroach on Survival play styles and not on the 3.0.8 changes to Lock and Load.

Actually Sartharion 3D is fairly easy to trap dance. Just put a trap near adds and let them trigger it.

I agree that Trap Dancing feels bit odd because of it's gimmicky nature and additional difficulity brought in to trigger it. There most likely will be encounters that will keep us too busy to use it. Blizzard doesn't seem to be balancing Survival around it, which is a good thing.

Has anyone done solid math on Trap Dancing vs. Sniper Training? Most of the bosses you can manage this, at least in 25 man raids where you don't need any buffs from the melee that are 30yards or less.

So let's see how the LnL change affects a perfect proc situation from how it would work pre-change to now post.

In 5 minutes (300 seconds), Serpent would have procced 6 times (average of 50 seconds per proc, bear with me), and with Resourcefulness we would hav trapped every 24 seconds, leading to a max procrate of 18.5 (6 + 12.5).
Now we can hope to get 10 at most by forcing a proc every 30 seconds. That's a considerable reduction. Coupled with the Explosive tweak (won't call it a nerf per se) we should see Surv getting toned down a fair bit.

The sad part is that Serpent Sting is hardly worth it for LnL procs, with 30 seconds where it can't proc and an average of 50 seconds per proc we are looking at 1:20 per serpent proc. That's close enough to... well not at all.

Someone knows if with the new numbers and the new formula of the explosive shot that now deal {RAP*0.16+428}-{RAP*0.16+428} Fire damage, the armor penetration could influences its damage? Or if it will draw benefit from effects like the coe?

i would test it on ptr but now i'm unable to login..

ES raw numbers for the new PTR build

From version 1 to version 2, it's about 10.7% less damage... it's still about twice the live ES, but maybe a wee bit short of that. Overall still a huge buff. Basically if ES accounts for 40% of your overall damage (and it probably will), it means it's about a 4.3% DPS nerf. Probably appropriate, considering where MM and BM were.

I made some changes to the format of my average ES damage tables. It now has your base crit rate (non ES crit rate) across the top to show you your average damage before any other scaling. The formula I used was:

((base crit+0.13)*2.3*(0.48*AP+1284))+((1-base crit-0.13)*(0.48*AP+1284))

Note this is the AVERAGE damage all your ES shots will do over time. If you get 3 crits, it will be significantly higher. If you get no crits, it will be lower. This doesn't take into any account damage modifiers (sniper training, FI, etc), but....just multiply it by 1.09 if you want to know those.

3.0.8 version 2 ES

AP 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5 0.55
2000 3207 3353 3498 3644 3790 3936 4082 4228
2100 3275 3424 3573 3722 3871 4020 4169 4318
2200 3344 3496 3648 3800 3952 4104 4256 4409
2300 3412 3568 3723 3878 4033 4189 4344 4499
2400 3481 3639 3798 3956 4114 4273 4431 4589
2500 3550 3711 3873 4034 4195 4357 4518 4680
2600 3618 3783 3947 4112 4277 4441 4606 4770
2700 3687 3855 4022 4190 4358 4525 4693 4861
2800 3755 3926 4097 4268 4439 4610 4780 4951
2900 3824 3998 4172 4346 4520 4694 4868 5042
3000 3893 4070 4247 4424 4601 4778 4955 5132
3100 3961 4141 4322 4502 4682 4862 5042 5222
3200 4030 4213 4396 4580 4763 4946 5130 5313
3300 4098 4285 4471 4658 4844 5030 5217 5403
3400 4167 4357 4546 4736 4925 5115 5304 5494
3500 4236 4428 4621 4814 5006 5199 5392 5584
3600 4304 4500 4696 4891 5087 5283 5479 5675
3700 4373 4572 4771 4969 5168 5367 5566 5765
3800 4441 4643 4845 5047 5249 5451 5653 5855
3900 4510 4715 4920 5125 5330 5536 5741 5946
4000 4579 4787 4995 5203 5412 5620 5828 6036
4100 4647 4858 5070 5281 5493 5704 5915 6127
4200 4716 4930 5145 5359 5574 5788 6003 6217
4300 4784 5002 5220 5437 5655 5872 6090 6308
4400 4853 5074 5294 5515 5736 5957 6177 6398
4500 4921 5145 5369 5593 5817 6041 6265 6488
4600 4990 5217 5444 5671 5898 6125 6352 6579
4700 5059 5289 5519 5749 5979 6209 6439 6669
4800 5127 5360 5594 5827 6060 6293 6527 6760
4900 5196 5432 5669 5905 6141 6378 6614 6850
5000 5264 5504 5743 5983 6222 6462 6701 6941
7000 6636 6938 7240 7542 7844 8146 8447 8749