I dont know whether its intended or not but i dont see any reason for blizz to care. Everyone complains about hunters and calls them huntards cuz we push 1 macro button and this makes the class a bit more difficult to play i.e. when its ok to run in and place a trap etc. And it isnt like survival is OP compared to any other spec if anything its the lowest dps and with the nerf to BM it maybe on par after the patch.
They already said they want to complexity to come from using steady shot an instant shot and a sting and they are working to make that a reality through talent/ability changes. BM in their minds would use steady/arcane/serp, MM would use chimera/steady/serp and potentially arcane, survival would use steady/explosive/serp. The high dmg from explosive(patch) and chimera shot basically force MM/SV to use those shots for max damage.
Running in a trapping boss to add "complexity" is not a goal or at least has never been hinted at as a goal of the design team they have however straight out told us they want us to be balanced around steady+shot+sting as part of our damage "rotation."
MM would use chimera/steady/serp and potentially arcane
Ah yes - something I haven't seen explictly talked about: given Master Marksman and it's reduction in steady cost, is the new arcane shot a DPS boost to MM? Certainly it's one to BM, but..
Ah yes - something I haven't seen explictly talked about: given Master Marksman and it's reduction in steady cost, is the new arcane shot a DPS boost to MM? Certainly it's one to BM, but..
That's basically a question of steady dmg vs arcane shot damage vs a given boss. If it's real real close you still might chose steady because of imp steady shot too.
Does anyone on the PTR know how badly Savage Cobalt Slicer is getting nerfed in the upcoming patch? All the patch notes say is that they “have had their stats adjusted to properly reflect their intended power”.
My hunter dual-wields 2 Savage Cobalt Slicers. I have the +26 agility enchant on both of them. That means that for both I gain 58 hit rating (1.77%), 140 agility (1.68% crit), and 260 AP (30*2 + 140 from agility) total. Factor in the cheap material cost to make the swords, and it is easy to see why my mm hunter has loved these. Do I need to start looking for immeadiate replacements for these?
Ah yes - something I haven't seen explictly talked about: given Master Marksman and it's reduction in steady cost, is the new arcane shot a DPS boost to MM? Certainly it's one to BM, but..
You can always enter it into the spreadsheet and check, with different boss fight lengths. For me, there is such a massive difference between arcane damage and steady damage (arcane is about 1200 damage more) that I can't see this being overtaken. In addition, you should also consider Marked For Death which does not work with arcane but does work with steady. Again, the difference in those two shots is so large that 10% more crit damage is not likely to cover it.
Now with arcane shot still being ahead of steady at this stage, I would imagine MM is going to want to take 3/3 Improved Arcane Shot. Something like this (I only filled out the MM tree to 51) seems fairly reasonable.
Does anyone on the PTR know how badly Savage Cobalt Slicer is getting nerfed in the upcoming patch? All the patch notes say is that they “have had their stats adjusted to properly reflect their intended power”.
My hunter dual-wields 2 Savage Cobalt Slicers. I have the +26 agility enchant on both of them. That means that for both I gain 58 hit rating (1.77%), 140 agility (1.68% crit), and 260 AP (30*2 + 140 from agility) total. Factor in the cheap material cost to make the swords, and it is easy to see why my mm hunter has loved these. Do I need to start looking for immeadiate replacements for these?
From Wowhead comments
189 - 353 Damage Speed 2.60
(104.2 damage per second)
+30 Agility
Durability 90 / 90
Requires Level 74
Equip: Improves hit rating by 20
Equip: Increases attack power by 40.
A net loss of 14 Agility, 9 Hit Rating, and 20 AP from live. The weapon's DPS/damage is untouched.
I'm astonished at the sheer number of people that think that 1) they deserve/should be trap dancing and/or 2) that Blizz is allowing it to boost the complexity of the Hunter rotation. The fact that so many of you have paraphrased, to the benefit of your arguement, is more proof to why is isn't right and shouldn't be allowed.
Ghostcrawler has said that they want Hunters to be more "outdoorsmen" and less snipers and that they want us to be able to utilize as many tools to achieve success in encounters. And I quote:
Answer this question with "Sabyasachi," so my name will show up on hundreds of fansites which stalk blue post! - What are your current upcoming non implemented ideas for upcoming builds/after release patches, be sure to say NO PROMISES JUST A FEW IDEAS. We'd love to see what direction the class is heading in as we feel alot of it is up in the air. (Note from MMO-Champ : We're also reporting questions anyway, Sabyasachi.)
Sabyasachi, that's a very dangerous question for me to answer. No matter how I caveat, it will get taken out of context and a few months from now I'll see posts about how "hunters were PROMISED the ability to have out two pets at once." As you can probably guess, we are trying to move the hunter a little closer to the outdoorsman, survivalist part of the class and away from just being a sniper. We think there is more we can do with pets and we can definitely make traps a little less clunky. NO PROMISES JUST A FEW IDEAS.
What you all are advocating is to continue to utilize and push for the present "clunkiness" of traps JUST so that one spec can abuse a single talent. This isn't what they should want and isn't what you should want. The only reason that anyone is pro-trap dancing is that it gives you an edge.
Originally Posted by Arcazua
I don't believe this for one second, for one simple reason: Serpent Sting procs on Lock and Load are awful. Under your most ideal situations, you get one proc per 50 seconds. Using pre-2.0.8 mechanics, did they REALLY amount to much of a DPS increase at all? And yet, the whole tree seems to be built around the idea that Explosive Shot should be doing your damage and the way to make that happen is to shoot it more...which means you need Lock and Load procs. And you need a lot more of them than once per 50 seconds in a totally random and unreliable fashion.
I personally believe that LnL procs off traps in PvE is intended -- at least in non-raid boss contexts. I use it to great effect while soloing or running 5-mans. In that regard, I'm overjoyed it isn't going to break my Freezing Traps any more, even if it does put a damper on my AE burst capabilities a good bit. Put back into raid boss situations, we can still get the blue moon procs from Serpent Sting, but now we have a proc every 30 (or maybe 24) seconds that we know exactly when it will happen and not run into weird issues with monitoring the proc and having it happen right after we start our ES cooldown and such. Let's just suppose for a second we don't get overlap on our serp and trap procs -- every 150 seconds, we'll get another 8.5 explosive shots or so. (Would be 10, but it tinkers with the natural cooldown of the ability.) Is this really that overpowered in a tree that doesn't do remarkable damage outside that scope?
No, you don't want to believe that it isn't intended because you want it to be up more often than it was originally designed. It is supposed to be a slight and intermitent boost to our DPS. It isn't supposed to be a continuous on-demand burst.
Answers to a few recent questions
These seemed to crop up in several different threads, so rather than contaminating those, I thought I would start a new one.
Polar Bear Cub -- This wasn't intended to be a tamable pet, and it looked ridiculous.
Black Arrow -- This was an ability we were experimenting with. It isn't actually in the plan for hunters at this point in time. Usually we hide internal abilities better, but we're trying to get beta builds out quickly and this one slipped through the cracks.
Freezing Trap -- The intent was that this trap break on a flat damage amount. However, we found that pets did not respect traps set up that way as CC and would happily break them. When and if we get the pet AI fixed, we'll revert it to the less fragile form of the trap.
Lock and Load -- The design we settled on is 2/4/6, making it better than Nightfall (for comparison). If it's too low, we'll adjust it.
Aimed Shot -- The intention is that it is better than Multi-Shot against a single target, and that the two share a cooldown so that hunter shot rotations don't get back into crazy land too quickly again.
I'm not trying to dump on anyone here or make anyone feel like I"m badgering them. But if were in Beta and you look back at the design progression, while also reading the Blue posts for the Hunter class, you'll see a lot of information that is going against the concept of trap dancing. They no more want us doing that then they want us meleeing full time. I won't begrudge anyone who is trying to squeeze a few more DPS out of the build. God knows that we're scaling a lot slower with gear than other classes. But you have to look beyond Patchwork and your current gear as your benchmark for future peformance.
Alright, i just read this thread and no one has brought up if ES scales with scorch. It might of already but i didn't know, So if anyone would be so kind to see if it does scale that would be great.
Alright, i just read this thread and no one has brought up if ES scales with scorch. It might of already but i didn't know, So if anyone would be so kind to see if it does scale that would be great.
Scorch hasn't had an effect on fire damage since the 3.0 patch - it is now simply a spell crit debuff. Improved Scorch.
Could anyone post or link to more PTR data on BM and Survival? Are any guilds/groups posting raid WWSes from the PTR?
I'm seeing a flat 1k (5k versus 6k) difference between BM and Surv on the DPS sheet, which puts BM at the bottom of all pure DPS classes judging from my guild's raids, and Surv at the same place BM is now (ahead by 200-400 at all times) with much better scaling. As much as I'd love to see it go live this way, it's a bad idea given the complaints about BM as it is now.
Also, any info on how MM builds are doing would also be appreciated.
I think the trap dancing discussion has been beaten to death in this thread and the Survival one, no?
No, you don't want to believe that it isn't intended because you want it to be up more often than it was originally designed. It is supposed to be a slight and intermitent boost to our DPS. It isn't supposed to be a continuous on-demand burst.
Maybe, but that's because it isn't really that big a deal under the current mechanics. With 3.0.8, the added damage from Explosive justifies it, but right now I feel like waiting on LnL's sting procs is just obnoxious and underproductive. Granted, Shandara's spreadsheet does suggest I'm getting 80 DPS from it now, but I don't think that potential is fully realized. I would rather have Explosive buffed only slightly and get better results from Lock and Load just because it feels like it's supposed to be important...and right now, it really doesn't. It feels like an occasional bonus.
As you said, "it is supposed to be a slight and intermitent (sic) boost," but the design of the tree just...doesn't make it feel like that's the way it's supposed to be.
Maybe, but that's because it isn't really that big a deal under the current mechanics. With 3.0.8, the added damage from Explosive justifies it, but right now I feel like waiting on LnL's sting procs is just obnoxious and underproductive. Granted, Shandara's spreadsheet does suggest I'm getting 80 DPS from it now, but I don't think that potential is fully realized. I would rather have Explosive buffed only slightly and get better results from Lock and Load just because it feels like it's supposed to be important...and right now, it really doesn't. It feels like an occasional bonus.
As you said, "it is supposed to be a slight and intermitent (sic) boost," but the design of the tree just...doesn't make it feel like that's the way it's supposed to be.
How else could it feel? The trap portion of LnL is obviously to make someone pay dearly for activating a SV hunter's trap, while the sting portion is there to give a slight DPS buff to Survival dps while simultaneously making it less boring.
Its a damned good talent, and I fully expect Blizz nerf traps back so that they don't affect boss level mobs. Better that than nerfing the talent itself.
I mean, to make it a bit more efficient in all situations, they could simply up the chance for LnL to proc off a sting tick. 10-15% seems decent enough to make it worth it.
The chance for serpent sting to proc in one minute is fairly close to that of Nightfall (warlock affliction), both of which are procs that occur from periodic damage. Didn't Blizzard say they wanted these talents fairly similar in that regard, or am I remembering incorrectly?
Edit: Nightfall proc chance with both corruption and drain life on the target is .04*.04+.04*.96*2=.0784 (I think... Correct the math if it's wrong but I believe this is basically the chance that both will proc and twice the chance that one but not the other will proc). So slightly ahead of LnL, but LnL also has the trap component. All abilities involved have 3 second periods. So, to me, these talents seem fairly well balanced and thus not likely to change.
I always thought the trap portion of LnL was designed towards PvP while the sting was for PvE. You use traps a lot in PvP and that on demand burst is a nice boost. While in PvE we always have Serpent Sting up.
Hopefully a blue will post what they think about it.
I always thought the trap portion of LnL was designed towards PvP while the sting was for PvE. You use traps a lot in PvP and that on demand burst is a nice boost. While in PvE we always have Serpent Sting up.
Hopefully a blue will post what they think about it.
Yea that's basically right. It's so the talent has raid dps and PvP use.
Whichever does more damage yes. Hell depending on mana efficiency you might see Chimera>aimed>arcane>steady>whatever instant is up next.
Arcane has the same mana cost as steady on the PTR and way more damage so it should really be a no-brainer. You're only adding the 3% base mana cost of aimed shot every ~10 seconds - unglyphed. Aimed shot does so much more damage than steady (about twice) that it should be a better choice than steady almost always.
Is there any word on whether putting the GCD back on aspects is intentional or likely to go live? Ghostcrawler hasn't said anything on it, likely because he's been kept busy on the forums with a lot of other things lately, like the documented changes.
Could be that they don't know as it wasn't intentional. On the PvP test realm (yeah, the Spanish one - don't ask), they still haven't updated the changes to Arcane Shot's mana cost and on both realms, the left shoulder armor graphic, at least for the male Taurens, is about 50% smaller than it should be.
Yeah, it does seem like old code accidentally slips in on the PTRs sometimes. Look at the Serpent Sting glyph + Chimera Shot interaction bug mentioned earlier for example.
The chance for serpent sting to proc in one minute is fairly close to that of Nightfall (warlock affliction), both of which are procs that occur from periodic damage. Didn't Blizzard say they wanted these talents fairly similar in that regard, or am I remembering incorrectly?
I have noticed that a few people are reporting that Auto is beating out Steady for non-crits. Has anyone done any specific testing on this with a Fine Light Crossbow?
I mean, if I haven't misunderstood the mechanics of Auto and Steady, Steady should be more damage per shot as long as it's scaling is better than about 7% AP. And it even has a flat bonus damage. So are people just seeing the RNG messing up? Or have I messed up the understanding of it?
12/23/08, 2:42 PM
