Beta build 18537 went up and with it comes the third round of changes to hunter tier 17 set bonuses. There’s some real cool stuff here, but knowing how often these have changed so far, don’t get too attached. Although I’m sort of already attached to this new BM one…
Beast Mastery
- 2-piece bonus: Kill Command has a 25% chance to reset the cooldown of Bestial Wrath.
- 4-piece bonus: While Bestial Wrath is active, one additional pet is summoned to fight with you.
The 4p bonus was unchanged from before, only the 2p bonus is new. Yeah, so, this is pretty awesome. The best pet is a big red pet. These are the types of set bonuses I’d come up with on a wish list. Stuff that is sitting right on the line dividing realistic and too good to be true. I know some people dislike RNG bonuses like this, but I’ve always liked them.
I still wonder if the 4p bonus is just going to summon a Dire Beast or if it’ll be an actual pet from your current active pets with full abilities and all (or at least basic attacks).
What I would change: Nothing, except maybe a guarantee that the second pet it pulls out will be the first available one in your list. Say you have pet 3 summoned, it will summon pet 1. If you have pet 1 summoned, it would summon pet 2.
Survival
- 2-piece bonus: Black Arrow deals damage 33% more often.
- 4-piece bonus: When you hit a target with Explosive Shot, your multistrike damage is increased by 25% for 3 sec.
Even more multistrike emphasis for survival. Keep in mind that Black Arrow now procs Lock and Load solely from multistrikes. It also now ticks every 3 seconds (it ticks every 2 sec on live servers). This bonus is just going to give you more chances at LnL procs with 2 second ticks.
The 4p is just another reminder to favor multistrike. The uptime on this will be extremely high… well over 50%. These two bonuses aren’t nearly as fun as the BM ones (in my opinion).
What I would change: Have the 4p bonus be something else for Explosive Shot. I don’t think we need even more multistrike incentive here. Something like:
- Explosive Shot now consumes your next Lock and Load charge if available, causing it to deal twice the damage. Cost remains 15 focus. (In other words, you can bleed off stacks twice as fast, save some focus, and have more burst in the process).
Marksmanship
- 2-piece bonus: Aimed Shot critical strikes restore 10 additional focus.
- 4-piece bonus: While Rapid Fire is active, your critical strike damage is increased by 5% per second.
Let me translate the 2p bonus for you: Aimed Shot crits are free to cast (most of the time). The perk already refunds 20 focus, this brings it up to 30 (or the cost of an Aimed Shot under the effects of Thrill of the Hunt). Fervor? Dire Beast? What are those?
The 4p bonus is kind of fun. If you manage to crit with a shot during the last second of Rapid Fire, it’ll have 270% crit damage. Stack that with, say, another 20% from Sniper Training, and damn! Close to 300% crit damage. I can see myself delaying Chimera Shot until the very end of Rapid Fire to try to snag that massive crit. I would wager that Careful Aim’s benefit during Rapid Fire won’t make it much of a loss to delay. I’ll leave it up to the math experts to figure that one out.
What I would change: I would change the 2-piece so Thrill of the Hunt doesn’t seem like the only option in that talent tier. Here’s what I would change it to:
- Sniper Training’s duration is increased by 100%.
If you want to see what the old bonuses were, you can see them here. I prefer the new ones overall, and I’m definitely most excited about the BM ones.
The thing I am not a fan of with their plan for lock and load is that it is dependent on multi strike, which unless they change some things won’t be available until 90. Imagine leveling as survival with no access to multi strike besides maybe a pet till you get to draenor. It’d be like making bestial wrath need mastery to work. Sorry bm hunter no bestial wrath till 80. There would be riots.
There are a couple potential fixes for the leveling issue:
1) Give Black Arrow (and only Black Arrow, no other spell in the entire game, for any class) an innate 10% multistrike chance, and tune the dot damage 8-10% lower to compensate.
2) Change Trueshot Aura to provide 10% AP and 5% Mastery (BM), 5% Crit (MM), or 5% Multistrike (SV). This would let hunters bring 3 raid buffs, more for BM with exotics, which is in line with all other dps specs (excepting Retribution, which only has 2.)
1. This might make LnL chance too high in later tiers. Already with just the first tier of PvP gear at lvl 100, you can get your Multistrike chance up to 26%. PvE gear will probably be higher, then there’s potential for gem slots, etc. Second tier of PvE gear will be even higher. I still think it sucks to have this awkward period where black arrow will hardly proc any multistrikes. Not just at level 90 when 6.0 goes live, but Black Arrow unlocks at something like level 50 for a new hunter…
2. I like this idea
It would be nice. It is tempting to get the twitter just to be able to pose possible solutions to the devs
That BM bonus….
/dance 😀
Don’t forget that you also regens about 10 focus while casting Aimed Shot. It looks to me that using Thrill of the Hunt + Rapid Fire MM could get focus capped while casting Aimed Shots.
Focusing Shot originally looked like an MM talent but with enough crit MM will be the spec least casting it.
BM 2p bonus probably needs some tuning, 25% seems OP, but I like the overall design of the bonuses.
Btw, if the MM 2p bonus increased Sniper Training duration by 100% it could become mandatory for PvP 😉
PVE set bonuses are disabled in rated PVP. In world PVP I’d argue the extra ilvl on PVP gear against players outweighs that anyway (not that it matters being a fictional set bonus and all 😉 ).
Focusing shot still has some value for MM if for no other reason that you need to be standing still that long anyway to activate sniper training. I agree there will be a lot of focus capping going on though. Dumping excess focus quickly is a big problem for MM right now.
My issue with Focusing Shot is that I can just cast 2 Steady in the same timeframe, and still be able to move out of fire/kite mobs/etc. Unless it provides a significantly greater dps gain than the other two talents (unlikely, as it requires careful management to avoid focus capping and it stops casting on movement (and so is just wasted dps time if you need to move mid cast)) I can’t see myself using it over Exotic Ammo or Lone Wolf, even as MM.