Well then nothing is changed now... bye bye BM hunters again welcome back to SV...

I just had an epiphany while playing with dual speccing.

When you switch specs, the talents of your pet are wiped. There is a 30min CD on changing pets remotely, but NO CD on swapping specs so before and after every boss fight we can choose the talents most optimum for that encounter vs just a average efficiency for the entire raid.

Looking at the pet talents this is a huge buff.

This is clunky wording, but it looks like instead of the normal 22% scaling, it was currently doing 22%/42% on the PTR. The change is that it increases the scaling by 10%/20% (the way he worded it, it still sounds like it's additive so I'm glad he provided an example), so (.22*1.1)/(.22*1.2)=24.2%/26.4%. That's going to be somewhere around a 1k AP decrease for the hunter pet, at max rank, which has SV and BM looking really close on the spreadsheet.

I think we were all expecting Wild Hunt to be toned down, but I hardly think this counts BM out. Given that BM had such a huge lead in theoretical testing earlier, this should probably knock them down to about even.

It is difficult indeed to interpret GC's words.

The talent was increasing AP contribution from a base 22% to 42%/62% and not just doubling it as he claims. Either that or there were some serious display issues going on at the same time.

This change however makes the talent a bit lackluster and rather underpowered compared to Shark Attack.

The thing that really kills me about the 3.1 changes is that Blizz has still not done anything about addessing the overall issues with the Survival tree. In fact, they've done nothing but add in additional issues making the play style that much more difficult. Instead of managing trinket cool downs, Rapid Fire, and the general Explosive Shot, Steady Shot, Multi-Shot/Aimed Shot, Serpent Sting, and whatever else, we now have to drop in Black Arrow into the mix all while timing it with whatever cool downs/trinkets that you were going to use anyway.

- Traps are still clunky, visible, easily avoided, and offer no benefit to a raid due to the before mentioned clunkiness
- They've added in too many must haves for a rotation (we're pushing Warlock madness here)
- Counterattack has been neutered beyond belief since 3.09 went live (no more using Deterrence to setup CA)
- Current traps are out dated and have to be glyphed to get around their pitfalls

Quite... Not only does it appear they have 'fixed' the additive scaling (his example shows that it is based of our scaling now), but they have halved the value as well? Seems to be quite a bit too much. I'm certain that a lot of BM Hunters are going to feel a little let down.

And as noted, no comments or changes regarding the highly haphazard structure of early Survival. It just doesn't make sense the way it is now (especially the Trap Mastery change is 'interesting' when there is no need for traps and already as a 1 pointer it was weak).

Probably a little premature for that. Blizzard is obviously happy to twiddle the numbers, and I'd expect Wild Hunt and Shark Attack to be the primary target for BM DPS fine-tuning. Having said that, hunters disappointed that the Wild Hunt change shunts BM back down the DPS food-chain probably need to re-adjust their expectations

My personal theory is that somewhere, a conversation went something like this:

"We finally decided on a 41-point talent for survival! Trap Launching! It'll simplify some of survival's rotation issues, and be really cool!"

"Great! Can you get into 3.1?"

"... err... no."

"Do we have a plan B?"

"Not as such... no. But plan Q will let us use the Black Arrow icon!"

"Plan Q it is!"

Yes, the tree is awesome with a Trap Launcher and the rolling Immo trap, but now... not so much. So the big question becomes: Do they intend to keep it the way it is now, since it 'clearly' works, or do they intend to change either BA to Trap Launcher or the tree itself? The first would be painful to accept.

Can anyone confirm that Sniper Training is or isnt working on test right now?

I cant figure out how to test it with all of my trinkets proccing AP and Expose weakness etc. And theres no icon for it when its active so I cant figure out if we are getting that 6% or not on the current test build.

Edit: Found this by AA a couple of pages back
Went to test it and yeah, hes definitely right. ST on Test at the moment has its tooltip updated to the 6s functionality but it is actually still using the old 30+ yard range functionality thats on live currently.

Hi Perforate,

When u scroll onto the Talent you can see a "NYI" which stands for not yet implemented.

regards

Castrandom is no solution to shot complexity if you're trying to maximise dps.

With this "fix" to Wild Hunt I can see BM dropping below MM and SV by some margin. In general bonus dmg we get from shark attack is slightly higher than the nerf caused by normalization of all 3 trees (1% bonus dmg difference). Wild Hunt now is mediocre boost, and pretty much all eyes of potential BM hunters are at changes of hit transfer (affecting mainly Spirit Beast) and change of Wolf and Raptor specials. And since BM will most likely continue to scale worst of all 3 specs I find it unlikely to be contender for top spot, unless changes to Raptors/Spirit Beasts/Wolves can make that change.

I know this is a minor change but I still think BM and MM hunters should be allowed to trigger LnL with SS. Removing it reduces our Pvp playstyle options and I think MM and BM hunters need all the pvp help they can get.

Of course trapping is the best way to trigger LnL but you can't always rely on a trap: cooldowns; easy to see; Freezing Arrow aim time. I liked knowing that I had a chance of additional burst whilst on the move, kiting or strafing.

Seems like an unnecessary change to me but perhaps it is to enhance the uniqueness of Survival playstyle.

My concern over the current changes with Black Arrow, and rumoured changes with Trap Launcher, is to what it does/will do to SV Hunter cc capability.

On live atm, the maximum possible SV raid dps may well be by trap dancing, but it is marginal increase over Sniper Training, and would be even smaller if the hidden 30 second cooldown affected Frost Trap too, which we suspect to be a bug anyway. If fixed, any extra dps through trap procced LnL (over straight Sniper) would be fairly minor and pretty situational, depending upon Boss encounter.

On Test atm you have BA, itself a DoT, not only proccing extra LnLs but also providing a boost to the rest of your damage. As BA shares a cooldown with our traps you immediately have the issue of Max Damage = No traps.

If the proposed Trap Launcher changes go ahead as well, assuming that a refreshed Immolation Trap also resets the cooldown on traps, you are pretty much locked out of trap based cc if you want to maximise your dps, and let's face it, SV Hunters will be dps balanced by Blizzard based upon use of those two Talents. Mages don't have to give up Polymorph to maximise their damage, Priests don't have to lose the ability to Shackle Undead etc, why should Hunters lose the ability to cc with traps, to be able to maximise theirs? It just seems wrong to me.

I guess my point is that I believe this is just poor, clunky/lazy design, and brings up concerns about just what we will see in Ulduar and beyond. I was hoping that the AoE-fest that WotLK has been so far would be moderated somewhat with more reliance on cc in the future, especially as more classes have some cc now. The current Blizzard mantra of "bring the player, not the class" can still apply, even if the amount of cc needed is ramped up.

I find it ironic that if all the changes and proposed changes go through, MM and BM Hunters will be the ones able to trap an add whilst still pumping out max dps and SV won't.

I might see a valid concern about PvP, but I dont really understand what leads people to think that the refresh of the trap by ES will reset its cooldown. Is there something similar going on with skills from other classes? If not, I dont see a reason, why a duration refresh every 6 seconds should reset a much longer trap cd, because it would definetly make one of both worthless, so why implement it in the same tree? (Unless the whole trap launching thing was not meant to be for PvE)

Right now I would think it could work quite well for single target bosses, launching the trap at the beginnig of the fight, and using all subsequent cd's for BA and refreshing the trap "duration" with ES. I dont see a reason to interpret too much into it until its implemented. Who can say how trap launcher will work? It might just as well have its own "launcher" cd, independently overwriting or not using the regular trap cd, which is only used for direct placement of the trap.

removed

Another minor change I had seen on PTR is in shot macro'ing kill shot into somthing like steady or whatever.

#showtooltip Steady Shot
/cast Kill Shot
/cast Steady Shot

.. now this will break your shots on PTR. Not sure if it's intended (probably), but just something to note.

It's annoying because I could simply ignore KS and let the macro do the work, add in BA and KS as manual casts now. Just seems Blizz is trying to complicate our SV rots more and more. More fun yes, more of a pita, yes.

Kill Shot is back on the GCD which breaks the macros, and it was announced that it was an intended change. With the long cooldown, I don't think it's that much of a complicator, though there's currently no advantage to placing it anywhere in the rotation as opposed to just firing it as a high priority when it comes off CD, since it's high damage for the cost, in terms of mana, and the opportunity cost of now having to use a GCD.

"Letting the macro do the work" is generally something Blizzard doesn't want to allow. I don't mind having to choose when to use KS manually; the downside of the change is just that it adds another GCD to juggle in an already messy attack queue. As it stands on live, if KS had a GCD attached it would still be second priority to ES since ES does equal or more damage, procs more things, and has a shorter cooldown so a delay in casting it hurts its DPS more.

When you say it breaks your shots, do you mean, even if Kill Shot is on cooldown or the mob is above 20%, it will not fire the second shot in the macro? Or do you mean that the GCD from Kill Shot prevents the second shot firing at the same time, but pressing the button again once the GCD is over will fire it?

In 3.0.3 and before (when Kill Shot was on the GCD), a macro that looked like this:

/cast Kill Shot
/cast Arcane Shot

would cast Arcane Shot normally but Kill Shot instead if if was available. In 3.0.8, when they took Kill Shot off the GCD, it would fire Arcane Shot, and additionally Kill Shot if it was available.

I'm wondering if they've changed the unique nature of Kill Shot that allowed it to come first in a macro and 'fall through' if it is on cooldown or not available yet, or merely changed the GCD back to 3.0.3 behavior.

Pez, yes I am aware, maybe I should have elaborated as to why it's broken. Never-the-less, it does not work any more - i posted this because a hunter on my server asked me about this the other day.

I'm aware. :-)