Well, solidly staying BM for PTR raids at least, and looks like live too if the haste really only applies to autoshot. That batch of changes do not appear to be up on the PTR yet though, quiver is reducing my swing timer, and ES is still critting as hard as on live.

As far as current PTR specs, sniper training appears to be doing exactly what it is on live, my ES damage went up by ~6.5% when at 40 yard range from what it was at 6 yard range, no difference from standing still for 6 seconds, no difference to attacks not mentioned in the tooltip. So it's still possibly worth speccing into for PTR content, regardless of actual tooltip effect being untrue.

edit: also pets still seem to be horribly bugged with regard to spec swaps, they lose their talents (and you see your unspent talents), but the talent pane still has talents listed for the talents your pet had as your last spec, and you can't take them out, until you go back to a pet trainer, reset your pet talents, and then try to spend them: http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c5...709_103603.jpg

I guess I'm reading in to the notes a little differently, but I read it as a flat 10% base damage nerf, and then 12.5% nerf to the AP bonus damage.

I guess we won't know for sure until these changes make it on to the next PTR build (unless they already are and you're getting your info from that)

World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> [Updated] 3.1.0 PTR Patch Notes

Was about to say that too. This is merely an official statement of the stealth nerf we got a little while ago.
Also the 15% Haste... hard to determine, but if it really is only Auto, which I will assume it isn't, then... back to BM for sure. I mean can Steady Shot get any worse?

The LnL part... I don't know about that either. The official notes mentioned this last time too, but apparently ingame it was 10%. Maybe it is merely a changeconsolidation since 3.0.9? Everything since then has been added along with the new PTR changes.

The Viper thing... I don't PvP much, but Priests were crying rivers that they had no chance of defending themselves against Hunters, and Blizzard responded that it was something they were looking at already. Or something along those lines. This might be the 'solution', though I must say it only makes draining rather worthless, and changes into a regeneration. Can anyone see the impact in PvE? One Viper Sting for one duration = 8*300% = 24% of our total mana, and with MM you could grab a single Chimera for almost 40% (assuming the very next shot is Serpent sting, otherwise the regeneration will jump further. No more Aspect of the Viper for MM? And it certainly makes sense to pop Viper Sting in any spec if you have to go into Aspect of the Viper. Out of it faster.

I remember Blizzard saying they wanted to raise the usefulness of Haste for Melee classes, so in the event the modify haste, specs other than BM may still be viable after next patch.

As it stands, it's impossible to Haste cap for Survival and MM unless they lower SS back down to a 1.5 second cast. So much for getting excited about the Chimera Shot glyph :\

This makes sense from the design PoV. Obviously Blizzard didn't want to give all ranged weapon users 15% ranged Haste (not that it would really matter that much). But by tying the Haste to Autoshot they made sure only Hunters would get it. Since we are the only class with Autoshot. It's actually quite elegant.

I just hopped on the PTR to see if these changes were in yet, and the so far I can say that the ammo/quiver change isn't in the current live build and since we have Iron Council testing tonight, I doubt we'll see a patch today. That being said, I would find it EXTREMELY damaging to SV if this quiver nerf went in as it makes the SV rotation even more nasty. A nerf to explosive shot damage also seems a bit strange but with the additional dps the spec is getting (hopefully immo trap refresh on ES will be in soon) it seems like that was probably a safe thing to do.

As for BM, the spec right now is completely broken with the pet ap scaling, so don't really worry about the numbers BM hunters are showing, they won't stay like they are right now.

I'll try and get some numbers together for you guys showing both SV and BM tonight on Iron Council just so you guys have some stuff to pick at from Ulduar, along with some impressions on how easily the specs fit with the fight.

Another thing I guess I should add, from what we saw of the fight last night, if they manage to balance out trees in terms of dps, BM may end up being the winner for that fight. Depending on how you use the fires you may have quite a bit more consistent dps with BM seeing as how a much larger portion of your damage is not being affected very much by having to move. Being able to pop BM while standing next to the fire or having a buff from one of the other NPCs should prove to be a nice way to pull some big dps. TBW gets rid of any stacks of the cold debuff that you get so you are free to stand around and wreck face while TBW is up. Now this could all change depending on what blizz does with SV considering all the instants and dot damage that spec could potentially have available to it, but anything that is going to do well on the move is going to preform well in that fight.

Another update, it seems that shark attack was changed recently, its showing as 6% for 2 points as opposed to 8%. I'm trying to figure out if this means the scaling of wild hunt has been fixed but I don't seem to know how to do the math correctly, so I'll give you what I'm seeing on my character sheet. My melee ap is 3920, my RAP is 4660, my pets AP unspecced is 1750 (raptor lvl 80) and fully dps specced pet AP is at 3707 so a difference of 1957 from talents. My spec looks like this. So if anyone wants to poke around with those numbers thats what the PTR looks like right now.

Re-read GC's note to be sure, and he does say that "Black Arrow is currently on the trap cooldown," which implies that they know resourcefullness might affect it, but who knows if it will stay there.

If Bestial Wrath itself negates that, then I could see it being useful enough to provide a rather large increase. Heck, beyond even the actual freeze, just the stacking debuff being negated by Bestial Wrath could prove rather effective. But I'm not sure if it would make up for all the instants a survival build (particularly one with aimed shot) has at its arsenal. I think a lot is definitely going to depend on how much the pet AP scaling gets nerfed before 3.1 goes live. There's still a lot of questions that need to be answered.

Yes the pet was getting frozen, but it seemed like less of a dps nerf to recall my pet for a few sec and have my pet doing a larger portion of my dps, than having my pet not do that much damage, but having to consistently run around while trying to dps.

Before I go into a rant about this, could we possibly get a validation of Reach's test on there being no cooldown with BA LnL?

Better yet, could someone do a test over 24-30 minutes of BA usage and detail the following (with no trap usage whatsoever):

How many LnL procs happened in that span? If it's 24-30 (respectively), then you guys are right and there is not cooldown. If it's closer to 18-26 (respectively), then there is still a 30s cooldown, and I detail that reason below.

The rest of this assumes a cooldown, and if you don't want to go there, then stop reading.

I really didn't mean to imply that our proc rate should trend towards 2 ppm. I really meant to state that the proc rate would trend towards that without the cooldown in place since at the time we seemed to be using P (A U B) probabilities where each event was mutually exclusive. That is entirely my fault, and I probably got my sentences twisted in that because I was on two trains of thought. My apologies.


Now, what should worry you about the BA mechanic (with a cooldown) is the fact that you might get 1 proc per minute, but only about 2/3 of the time. BA at 10% (assuming cooldown) will be much more susceptible to RNG problems than the current SS LnL, and I outlined part of the reason earlier when I mapped out the tables. Let's assume that the rate is 10% proc chance per damage application. For BA, you have the following probability that no proc will happen at all in any given minute of a fight.

.9 .9 .9 .9 .9 .9 .9 .9 .9 .9 = .9 ^ 10 = 0.3486784401 = 35%

One out of every 3 minutes of a boss fight, you should expect no LnL procs whatsoever, if there's still a cooldown. Again, if you guys verify that the cooldown is definitely gone without using traps, then I think everyone will breathe a sigh of relief.


With the SS LnL system currently in place (assuming 10% proc chance), the worst case will only happen:

.9 ^ 20 = 0.12157665459056928801 = 12% of the time.

and as noted before, even with a 30s cooldown, you have a decent chance of proccing 2 LnLs with the SS system (because if every tick is 10% chance with SS), you still have a decent probability of proccing in the last half of the minute. In fact, here are the probabilities for that (with time set to the proc slice out of each minute).

.1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 = 90% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 1
.1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 = 80% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 2
.1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 = 70% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 3
.1 .1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 = 60% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 4
.1 .1 .1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 = 50% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 5
.1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 .1 .1 = 40% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 6
.1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 .1 = 30% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 7
.1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 = 20% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 8
.1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 = 10% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 9

These probabilities will require chaining the probability of the specific event sequence occurring before the proc and result in the following probabilities (please correct me if I'm wrong here):

.1 * .9 = .09
.9 * .1 * .8 = 0.072
.9^2 * .1 * .7 = 0.0567
.9^3 * .1 * .6 = 0.04374
.9^4 * .1 * .5 = 0.032805
.9^5 * .1 * .4 = 0.0236196
.9^6 * .1 * .3 = 0.01594323
.9^7 * .1 * .2 = 0.009565938
.9^8 * .1 * .1 = 0.0043046721
total = 9 + 7.2 + 5.67 + 4.374 + 3.2805 + 2.36196 + 1.594323 + .9565938 + .43046721
total = 34.86784401% chance to proc 2 LnLs per minute to correct the 12% chance you won't get any LnL procs in a minute.

Consequently, SS LnL should produce a tendency to have more than 1 ppm, even with the cooldown.


Now, looking at the probabilities that are possible to "catch up" for BA and still get an average of one proc per minute, you have the following possibilities in a BA (cooldown) scenario.

Base (just for my own reference):
.1 .1 .1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 .1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0


.1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 = 40% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 1
.1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 = 30% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 2
.1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 = 20% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 3
.1 .1 .1 .1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .1 0 0 0 0 0 = 10% chance of proccing 2 LnLs, given proc at time = 4

Unless someone can point out a math error here, these probabilities are all linked together and should have the following chances, respectively:

.1 * .4 = .04
.9 * .1 * .3 = 0.027
.9^2 * .1 * .2 = 0.0162
.9^3 * .1 * .1 = 0.00729
total = 4 + 2.7 +1.62 + .729 = 9.049 chance to proc 2 LnLs per minute to correct the 34.9% chance you won't get any LnL procs in a minute.

Consequently, if we still have a LnL cooldown that is specific to BA, then we will see a trend of less than 1 ppm, trending towards one proc every 1.2 minutes (unless my math is incorrect)

BA's proc rate per the patch notes is 6% per tick, not 10%.

Quick - yes, it's...not very helpful in actually draining mana. This is a bit of a problem for Hunters as I see it: AV's burst is getting stepped on hard, we won't have a deacent drain and..er..what *are* we supposed to do in arena again?