A couple weeks ago, Celestalon tweeted that survival hunters were getting a new ability called Bear Trap. I speculated it might be a DPS cooldown since survival was sorely lacking in that department, and it looks like it will be. Beast mastery has Bestial Wrath, marksmanship has Rapid Fire, and now survival will have Bear Trap.
@Amulrei Very large bleed + Root.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 13, 2014
This is the same sort of thing it was in the Wrath beta (obviously it never made it to live servers), but now it seems sort of redundant when you consider Entrapment. However, Celestalon says it’ll be a longer root than that.
@Amulrei It’s longer than Entrapment. — Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 13, 2014
In terms of damage, Celestalon compared it to a cooldown like Stampede.
@Nogz__ “Rotational” usually refers to something that’s part of your rotation; this is more of a DPS cooldown. Like Stampede or Shadowfiend.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 13, 2014
OK, so this sounds a bit promising. Maybe it will give survival a little bit of on-demand burst DPS. The only weird thing for me is why is this a physical bleed and not fire or poison damage so as to benefit from survival’s mastery? Celestalon thinks there are upsides to this in regards to gearing. I’m not 100% sure what he means by this, but it’s possible they are concerned about making mastery too valuable as a stat. Mastery may seem kind of weak right now for survival, but remember it will be competing against two new DPS stats (Readiness and Multistrike) in Warlords. It’s too early to even speculate on the values of the various DPS secondary stats.
And does dropping a trap feel a bit clunky for a DPS cooldown? Maybe. But maybe not when you only have to use it every couple of minutes. Trap travel time is still an issue, but at least traps will activate instantly in Warlords. Celestalon seems to think the trap improvements will help.
@JVel2 @tanjon Traps and how they trigger are done with newer technology now; works *much* more consistently.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) May 7, 2014
Sorry to you hunters out there who were hoping Bear Trap would summon an army of bears.
They can do almost whatever they want as long as they don’t attempt to re release the horror that was mists beta black arrow….oh lord it was bad. And their attempted removal of serpent spread. That being said… one can hope that since it is a “dps cooldown” that they’ll make it no aiming necessary. Click/hit your hotkey and it flies to your target. Because having it muck around with the trap launcher…. well, anyone who has launched a trap to see it land 1/2 inch away from their intended target and it merrily ignore the mobs… or if a boss gets moved as you launch it….it would be much easier to waste than rapid fire or bestial wrath.
It looks like a clunky and weird dps cooldown. I understand they want something with traps for survival but in terms of reducing button bloat it doesn’t make much sense since the ability seems to be very similar to existing traps+entrapment.
At least we won’t have to consider standing in melee all the time since it’s not a rotation ability.
If it’s really going to act like a normal trap, I can see it being pretty clunky indeed. It’s presumably going to be a longer cooldown… so what if your trap misses? Hey tank… mind moving the boss over to the right a couple yards so my main DPS cooldown can activate?