Well Blizzard has put out some updated changes for Hunters that I figured was worth discussing. Check out the full patch notes right here. And here are the newest additions. So let’s just jump into it shall we? First off:
Ferocious Inspiration now also increase the damage of Arcane Shot by 3/6/9%
Blizzard really wants us to use Arcane Shot. Besides just making the mana cost match Steady Shot exactly, the way I am reading this change is that on top of the 3% damage buff from FI, you will also get another 9% on top of Arcane Shot. This is like a desperate attempt to say “Hey, PvE BM Hunters, please use something other than Serpent Sting and Steady Shot in your rotations. I won’t deny, 9% more damage seems like a fairly decent bonus, especially if you end up taking the Arcane Shot talent.
Lock and Load now has a 30 seconds cooldown.
Ouch. That is a major hit to Survival DPS. You might say “Well, it matches the trap cooldown now.” And sure, people were experimenting with the trap dancing concept to guarantee Lock and Load procs, but that was in conjunction with that you were getting from serpent Sting ticks. Now I think it’s pretty safe to guarantee that Serpent Sting will at least proc it once every half minute. That clever playstyle seems like it might have died before it had a chance.
Explosive shot damage has been slightly decreased and now deal {RAP*0.16+428}-{RAP*0.16+428} Fire damage at level 80. (Down from {RAP*0.18+476}-{RAP*0.18+476})
They also decided to take down Explosive Shot again. But how much exactly? Let’s take a quick look just for information purposes. Using my current stats, I have 4147 Attack Power unbuffed other than Aspect of the Dragonhawk.
So on the PTR, my current Explosive Shot damage would be: 1222.46 {RAP*0.18+476}
The new formula has it doing: 1091.52 {RAP*0.16+428}
So that would be about a 11% nerf of Steady Shot given my current stats. Obviously my Attack Power would be higher specced into Survival with things like Lightning Reflexes and what not. I know Blizzard stated they thought Survival was showing to be slightly higher than BM and MM but that hit to damage and the cooldown on Lock and Load I wonder if they didn’t over-do it. It’s hard to say. I am not yet sure what the tick damage was changed to as I haven’t seen that posted yet.
Improved Stings now reduces the chance your Sting damage over time effects will be dispelled by 10/20/30%. (Old – Affected all stings)
This type of change is universal across all classes it seems. A number of talents no longer provide dispel resistance to non-damaging effects. Things like Frost Nova, Fears, Hammers of Justice, etc. It seems the ability to defensively dispel was buffed. No clarification if offensive dispels as well. For example, I am unsure if a Paladin’s bubble will retain it’s resistance or not.
I think the cooldown on Viper Sting needs to be adjusted to match the current state of drain mechanics. Since all mana drain effects will have certain percentages they can drain, keeping them all standardized, reducing the cooldown of Viper Sting to something like 8-10 seconds would be a reasonable request. It can still be dispelled and there would still be a window where Viper Sting could not be applied, but just not as long, since it is no longer as powerful.
In addition to these changes, it appears some pet modifications might have snuck in as well. And at face value they look like they are buffs, which technically they are, Blizzard still has the intent of nerfing a couple of these to bring them more in-line with other animals.
- Spirit Strike (Spirit Beast) damage has been decreased and now Burns the enemy for 49 to 65 Arcane damage and an additional 49 to 65 damage over 6 sec at max rank. (Down from 85 to 115)
- Rake (Cat) damage has been increased, now deals 47-67 (Up from 24-34) bleed damage and an additional 19-25 (up from 10-24) damage over 9 seconds at max rank.
- Scorpid Poison damage has been increased. (From 45 to 100 Nature damage over 10 sec for the last rank)
There is no indication that their coefficients are being re-modified, just the base value so I am still expecting an overall decrease in the cat and scorpid DPS as Blizzard was intending to do. The Spirit Beast change seems to be in correlation with the modification needed to make the ability work with Longevity. Without testing though it seems like this would make the pet worse (obviously) unless you took Longevity under the assumption it was going to have a 7 second cooldown instead of 10.
While there is no reason not to take Longevity as a full BM Hunter because the talent is amazing, the change is still being made under the pretense that your pet will use it every 7 seconds. I am sure this will end up being hardly a big deal. Just interesting it was changed that way.
There was also a small panic when these changes got posted, as someone reported that the Mirror of Truth was only proccing of melee attacks, but Ghostcrawler has clarified that this is indeed false. So no panic there.
Well that’s all for now. I figure some of this stuff was worth a late night post on the weekend. We’ll see what other changes are pushed in before the patch really goes live.
Thoughts, comments, etc. Post ‘em!
Drotara (or BehemothDan) considers himself a geek on many levels. A web developer and programmer by trade, he has no shortage of geeky hobbies. Whether it's trying to stay current in World of Warcraft raiding, playing competitively in the WoW TCG, Magic: The Gathering with friends, or a night at the local shop playing DnD, it's all good to him!
Is it bad that I have level 71 hunter and I didn’t understand half of that? I really need to learn more about my classes, don’t I.
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YAY more cat DMG :D Sucks with the steady shot nerf though -_-
I did copy myself to the PTR lats night. No mods installed quickly ran to test dummies and tried the 3 specs. Just gut reaction BM seems to have been hit the hardest. I am gonna spend this weekend runny numbers at timed runs at the dummy.
Looks like this Tuesday is it do you think it will be this next week?
I will be back to post my results over timed 5 min runs. I even played with my old 31/30 MM/SV spec, but mana whore spec as well.
To be honest, I’m a bit bummed about the Survival changes. Since I started speccing Surv for 10 mans, I’ve been having fun trap dancing with bosses and trash. I am going to miss the fireworks. :(
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As a PvP survival hunter, the useful thing to me about Lock and Load is that you _know_ you will have it available after a trap, just when you need it to either burst down the trapped player, or get rid of the other guy before you deal with him.
Now, I don’t care about L&L proccing from Serpent Sting. What will happen now is that it’ll proc from Serpent Sting and then debuff me for 30 seconds. What am I supposed to do? I don’t _want_ a random debuff from one of my major damage dealing stings.
I want reliable play based on skill, not random die-rolls. Please, do what you can to lobby against this.
@rptb1 You make an excellent point I didn’t consider before. Not being able to trigger the effect at will due to Serpent sting proccing it is a very valid point. It would force you not to use Serpent Sting if you wanted guaranteed control over LnL procs.
The Internal CD is really sort of unnecessary, at least to that extent, 8-12 seconds sounds fair enough with current damage that it does.
The thing is though, you can’t take Readiness and Explosive Shot for massive burst, nor does LnL proc Chimera Shot for a build like that. In fact once Explosive Shot is toned down a little I think the change all together will be completely unnecessary.
On another note, I wish they would reinstate a tiny chunk of AOE to explosive shot, they’ve made it to much like the MM tree IMO.
No QQ here I am now and will be after the patch an sv Hunter. With the lock and load change honestly it will I think just make me pick up sniper again and stay at far range. Lock and load was a lot of fun but really our biggest dps advantage is we, minus a few weak encounters can stay at range. As a fun factor change however wow boy does it suck the fun out of SV. I cannot use traps really in raids save for adds and I cannot really do anything that’s not a button press or staying at range to help my DPS….My damage is all RNG with RNG crits etc… I want to be in control over my DPS and how I do it. At least MM has a variety of sting effects to choose from. If Bliz thinks adding shots to my dps rotation makes things interesting by it self I really don’t know what to say. Hunters have tons of abilities…..that go away when raiding and don’t help dps. It’s sort of sad really.
I hadn’t really considered the added control idea on LnL procs. I’m anxious for the patch to come out simply to get out of our current limbo.
I haven’t gone the SV route yet, but it’s a possibility for sure.
@ Freecloud – there was that *highly* speculative post on MMO champ last week concerning the new icons and perhaps the introduction of shootable traps. It’d definitely be interesting.
a little bit miffed about this latest round of changes.
on one hand blizz wants us to use arcane shot in pvp, yet on the other hand they took a dispell off of it a few patches ago that was exceptionally usefull in pvp. (i use AS pretty much all the time anyway, so it bothers me not if they up the damage or not, just i think blizz needs to realise that there’s a lot that could be done to make hunters and their pets less squishy in pvp)
secondly, in patch 3.x blizz went to great lengths to put in uniqie pet skills across all families to try to stop everyone using either boars or cats, and for the most part that worked. Or at least people went with cats, gorillas, and one or two other families. Yet now they’re planning on nerfing gorillas, and buffing cat damage..
go figure.
I like that arcane shot change, i ll gonna stay bm and adding as to the rotation is plain simple, just hoping it doesnt suck to much dps wise so that i am still competitive with other specs
As a SV hunter, I feel that Blizz will always buff and then backhand debuff us somwhere else as soon as we get our hopes up. Now, instead of looking at the random chance to proc L&L off of SS as a bonus, it feels more like an unfortunate accident, and if you bother to take points in Resourcefulness, then you just messed yourself up even more, making the talent useless yet again.
IMHO, trap dancing was allowing people who were willing to fight for it, the opportunity to surpass other specs in damage by doing absolutely crazy shit and doing something that hunters haven’t had to do in a long time; work for it. For the first time, I didn’t just sit back and smack a macro until the fight was over, i moved around, used instants to close gaps, got into melee range… MELEE RANGE… and maybe even used a raptor strike as I laid a trap, AND IT WAS FUN. I looked for the Explosive Shot dmg buff as a godsend, a way to make what I was already doing better…
But Blizz decided that all that was too much work I guess, and I need to get back in the line with the casters and smack a macro until I fall asleep on my keyboard. zzzzzzzz….
Well, by one school of thought, this change makes trap dancing just about mandatory.
if you trap dance, you’re guaranteed to have LnL every time it can possibly go off- ie, once every 30 seconds.
If you wait for stings, then let’s say it’s 20 seconds before a sting procs it. THEN it’s another 30 before it has a chance to proc it again. Then it might be another 20 seconds… and then a 30 second cd…
In other words, if you wait for the uncontrolled proc, the new internal CD will space out the LnL procs by a LOT. You pretty much have to trap dance now if you want to get LnL’s at anything like the old rate, if I understand this correctly.
(Btw, Dro, I think the math says serpent sting alone will proc LnL on an average of once every 50 seconds? So adding a 30 second ICD *after* that is really a kick in the ‘nads for non-trapdance LnL procs.)
@ Zeuxis,
Well, that actually might be the case to try and make sure that LnL happens that you have to trap dance, but my miff is that talents such as Resourcefulness, unless the talent decreases the LnL cooldown, and the random sting proc gives SV a lot less control of when and how we use our best shot. I almost want Blizz to take the sting aspect off completely in order to allow us to control our shots.
Unfortunately, I’m stuck in the European forum ghetto, which does not appear to be read by Blizzard development, and very very rarely gets any feedback from Blizzard. I’ve checked the US forums and I can’t see that the issue with Lock and Load and reliable bursts in PvP has been raised in the US forums. Ghostcrawler has said that they’re still thinking about Lock and Load. Please, if you are a US account holder, could you raise this on the US Damage Dealing or PvP forums? There is plenty of material in this post http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=7575988518&sid=1
I’ve been looking at what GC has been saying about the LnL change, and I can kinda understand their dilemma. Apparently, SV dps is blowing the other specs out of the water in PTR, and the LnL change was an attempt to remedy that. Maybe they buffed the shot too much, but I can imagine that if GC is saying that they are still messing with the mechanics of the shot, it won’t take long for them to, hopefully, come up with a better idea then a 30sec LnL cooldown.
How are you guys stacking up dps wise in raids currently ? Are u out damaging the other classes by a wide margin still ? There are so many posts that points to the contrary i really wonder what to believe and what not to believe.
If what i read on the wow forums and others are true, do u think we will indeed end up in the bottom portion of damage ?
I also find it interesting that the pure vs hybrid theory of x% in favor of pures has flown out the window and not discussed anymore.
I’m not QQing just perplexed by the whole thought pattern being seemingly developed.