Dunno if anyone noticed but Black Arrow and traps share CD, which will change any rotations mentioned above.

If I'm understanding Rokh correctly, any increase in damage per tick from Chimera Shot will simply get over written in the next GCD when a less hard-hitting shot is fired.

That sucks, and it's pretty stupid. But it means that you have to wait 30 seconds at the beginning of a fight until you can fire the first BA.

We'll have to test it more, but yeah it's certainly not the deep wounds we were expecting anyway. I imagine (just by random chance) those were from a steady shot crit, I mean you can do the math, but the higher your crit the less that talent is going to be worth actually since it doesn't stack, after a point. You want just enough crit so your "Chimera bleed" ticks for as long as possible, but not to much so you're overwriting it on the next shot.

Also, the new pet talent that increases AP given to the pet by the Hunter has to be bugged; It's taking my pets from around 1650ap to 3400ap. This is putting BM around 4k self-buffed DPS and Survival around 3.2k self-buffed DPS with Survival gems and Glyphs. Expect a nerf soon. Also, the Lock and Load nerf really hurts quite a bit, if you don't get a lucky proc from Black Arrow you're pretty well screwed for that 30 second window.

I did see a self-buffed crit of Explosive Shot for 3.8k with Black Arrow and everything running. Sniper Training would push that up over 4k, heh.

Anyway, tldr: Survival = Slightly nerfed, Marks = Same, BM = Buffed (but possibly bugged).

Anyone know how the Immo Trap refreshing will work exactly ? Will your ES refresh it with your current AP ?

Blizz has shown a consistent pattern regarding abilities such as this in which the refresh recalculates the dmg based on current attack power. For example, rolling the Serpent Sting with Chim Shot and the druid rolling Lifebloom nerf.

Sigh. The TnT changes regarding Immolation Trap and Trap Launcher didn't make it to the PTR. If they were intended or not, who knows, but I'd say for now it's pretty safe to assume that they've removed those changes for good, and gave us Black Arrow instead.


Edit: Piercing Shots is bugged, I'm seeing 15 damage ticks from a Steady Shot and 1 damage ticks from Chimera Shot everytime. That can't be right.

I've read this before in AJ's forum cause pvp, and seems BA share CD only with fire traps. This really hurts, I'm hope in some change during PTR times.

The chance to proc Lock and Load from one Black Arrow is about 41% over all 5 ticks. That means about 0.8 ppm or on average 73s between each proc. If the hidden cooldown on the proc is still there, it is worse.

Using frost or freezing traps on adds still gives you far more Lock and Load procs, but you don't get the averaged out 3% damage from Black Arrow (and the bit of damage it does).
I don't see any use for Immolation Trap.

Does Resourcefulness decrease the Black Arrow cooldown?

EDIT: If Black Arrow only shares cooldown with the fire traps, can you still use the frost traps on adds while keeping Black Arrow on the boss? And do frost traps still share cooldown with fire traps?

Isn't it the case that a hunter can only have one trap effect in place at a time (I may be thinking old skool)? If you have the Immolation effect being refreshed via Explosive Shot and TNT, then won't that effect be lifted if an add triggers your frost trap?

If they've removed the internal cooldown on LnL, triggering it from black arrow will have about the same frequency as triggering it from serpent sting today, right?

Live: In a 60s window from your last LnL proc you'll have 10 sting ticks (the first 10 will be eaten by the internal cooldown) that can proc LnL
PTR: In a 60s window you'll have two black arrow durations, ie 10 ticks that can proc LnL.

Edit: More formally with some probability theory (feel free to correct me since it's been a while since I did these kind of things): If X is the number of ticks (after any internal cooldown expires) needed to trigger LnL, then E(X) = 10. This means the expected number of procs per minute is 1 in both cases.

Less QQ, More PewPew has some screenshots of the new ferocity pet talents available (I assume) only to BM 51pt hunters.

Shark Attack - Your pet does 4/8% more damage with all attacks.
Wild Hunt - Increase the contribution your pets get from your Stamina by 20%/40% and attack power by 20%/40%.

Especially the last one is interesting. Current AP scaling from hunter -> pet is 22%. Would this be 40% of 22% or a flat 40% on top of 22% (i.e. 62%). The latter seems unbelievable.

From that screenshot it seems like you need 15 pet talent points to take either of them. So with the normal 16 talent points you can get 1 point in one of them but you need the extra 4 talent points to get all of them.

Firstly I believe that just like every other DoT in game the bleed effect will only be overwritten/refreshed by somehting equal or stronger than it so a steady bleed will never overwrite a chimera. This may end up with a small portion of downtime but with better damage overall.

As for survival rotation:

Immolation trap (Glyphed) 1.5s Hopefully be able to prepare beforehand for bosses that are moved.
ES(Glyphed)(immo refresh) 3.0s
AimS 4.5s
Serpent 6.0s
Steady(Glyphed) 7.5s
ES (Immo refresh 9.0s
Steady 10.5s
Steady 12.0s
Steady 13.5s
ES (Immo refresh) 15.0s
AimS 16.5s
Serpent 18.0s
Steady 19.5s
ES (Immo refresh) 21.0s
Steady 22.5s
Steady 24.0s
Steady 25.5s
ES (Immo refresh) 27.0s
AimS 28.5s
Serpent 30.0s
BA 31.5s
ES (Immo refresh) 33.0s

I believe with this rotaion you will get the best flow of shots and most damage due to having the immolation trap effect up for 100% of the fight then using BA whenever your trap CD is up for the rest of the fight for the extra 6% damage and extra ticks for LnL procs. This rotation does not include any LnL procs.

I use Immo trap first because as I understand it does about 300 dps which is better than 6% damage until you hit 5k DPS after that the BA buff will do more damage but I still think having Immo effect up will increase DPS for longer fights.

EDIT: typo

Since it says increases contribution and your contribution is currently 22% that it would increase the 22% by 20%/40% to put it at 26.4%/30.8%

Yeah well, but Blizz's maths regarding percantages has been pretty awkward in the past.

From looking at Rohks post # 254 I would speculate that Blizz currently has the Wild Hunt talent set to increase your contribution to a total of 62% but I would also say this is most likely a mistake and will probably be fixed down to the 30.8%.

Kill Shot seems to generate a GCD now.

I'm having trouble seeing how all specs were not slightly buffed by these changes. It appears that Survival has a sustainable increase in dps of ~400 from the immolation ticks with glyph and Black Arrow and the refresh makes it permanent throughout the fight once launched. Further, as noted above, it may be possible to construct builds with both noxious sting and black arrow, allowing for 1.03 coefficient on dmg from noxious with another normalized 1.03 coefficient on dmg from Black arrow. This will allow for less need of people to go into the BM tree past the 1st tier to get a total of 2% total dmg with pet for 7 points, when 2-4 in IAotH is all that is required.

The Marks tree has another slight buff from the Glyph of Chimera Shot, which will reduce the cooldown and allow more Chimera Shots (not quite the 6 second cooldown of Explosive, but it's still an improvement). If you're focusing on the bleed only, you might miss the other major buff (since Chimera is the bread and butter of MM).

BM, even if capped at the 30% ap figure noted above from the 22% it was. If it is currently doing 60%, that is overly buffed, but even at 30%, this should make it very competitive again.

My question is...

Is this an indication that MM was not the good baseline GC and the devs previously thought it was, that it would need to be buffed? I think this is a good thing, and I would rather see more class buffs than nerfs for ANY class.

Well Wild Hunt certainly is a good decision for the simple reason the poor pet scaling with gear gets alleviated somewhat. We want to get away from buffs being such a huge portion of BM damage, and more from gear.

I must say that overall I'm somewhat confused. Especially the Trap Throw, BA, ES and Immo thing. That and the shared cd between fire traps and BA. And then there is the Piercing Shots results... Some clarification on these matter would be nice. I really can't grasp why BA and fire traps need to share cd, especially if BA is a talent, and we don't have the option of keeping Immo up with ES. It's just clunky and quite counterintuitive.

If I'm understanding the changes right, since BA has 15 sec duration, and a 30 sec CD, and because it procs LnL - will it be better to delay BA until the internal CD of LnL is up to fire the next one, or is the 6% damage buff it gives worth maximizing its uptime?

I guess to try to be more clear

0:00 - fire BA
0:15 - Last tick of BA procs LnL
0:30 - BA off CD - LnL still on internal CD
0:45 - LnL off of internal CD

If we fire BA again at 0:30, we maximize its uptime, but essentially reduce the probability that LnL will proc.
If we fire BA at 0:45, we give it the best chance of proccing LnL, but lose 6% damage modifier and the BA DOT for 15 seconds.

Also we have to take in to account that immo can proc LnL, so while firing it at 0:30 doesn't make it impossible for LnL to proc, it does reduce the raw number of chances that LnL can proc.

While this looks good on paper for single target stand and shoot fights, this will put us at a distinct disadvantage on fights with multiple targets (i.e. Sarth + drakes, Anub {cryptguards}, Faerlina {when killing adds for enrage}, Grobbulus {slimes}, Gluth {decimate AoE spamming}, 4H) AND fights which involve damage interruption (i.e. Maexxna {wrap & spray}, Grobulus {running away for injection}, KT {MC}, Malygos {ww}.

The common problem with every single one of those fights is that maintaining the perfect rotation might never be possible due to random damage interruptions or needing to switch targets. Yea, we might be able to continue rolling explosive shots on the main target via a focus macro while dpsing down an add, but try and explain to your raid leader why you're only putting less than half of your total damage on the current focus target.

The penalty for dropping your immolation debuff seems far too severe, possibly requiring up to a whole minute to lay a new trap + fire the next black arrow. We've never been a class that requires a lot of time to "ramp up" our damage after an interruption, and I hope we don't end up heading in that direction in 3.1.