WoD Beta: Exotic Munitions preview

Today we’re taking a closer look at the newest of the level 100 hunter talents in Warlords of Draenor, Exotic Munitions. This is a passive talent that modifies your Auto Shots in 3 different ways. Only one of these munition types can be active at a time.

• Incendiary Ammo – Arms your ranged weapon with exotic ammunition that lasts for 1 hour. Each autoshot deals 20% additional weapon damage as Fire to all enemies within 8 yards of the initial target.
  • To be used primarily in AoE raid encounters, dungeons, or just farming large numbers of mobs out in the world.
• Poisoned Ammo – Arms your ranged weapon with exotic ammunition that lasts for 1 hour. Each autoshot deals (200% of Attack power) additional Nature damage over 16 sec. When this effect is refreshed, the remaining damage will be added to the new effect.
  • To be used primarily for extended single-target fights.
• Frozen Ammo – Arms your ranged weapon with exotic ammunition that lasts for 1 hour. Each autoshot deals 40% additional weapon damage as Frost and reduces the target’s movement speed by 50% for 8 sec.
  • To be used primarily for PvP, or for when you’re fighting one target at a time that won’t live long enough to fully benefit from Poisoned Ammo. If we had this talent today, I’d probably be using it to aid in my 2 or 3-shotting of Gulp Frogs.

The video below gives you a little preview of what these ammo types look like. They have some minor visual effects, but nothing too substantial to avoid cluttering up the screen for an effect that’ll be happening every couple of seconds.

The only thing missing in the effects department is visuals on the projectiles. I hope they’re changed so your auto shot arrows and bullets will glow the appropriate color. Back when we still had ammo, we were able to get the frozen arrow effect from Ice-Threaded Arrows (see below screenshot of what they looked like).

I must say that Exotic Munitions is a lot more fun than the initial talent that took its place. For those that don’t remember, it was “Flaming Arrows” and all it did was turn your auto shots into fire damage.

This isn’t the first time Blizzard has tried adding ammo types to the game. Back in the earliest iterations of the Mists of Pandaria beta, the level 15 talent tier was dedicated to ammo types.

More Details and Observations

• You can switch ammo types at any time, including in combat, with a couple of caveats:
  • It’s a 3 second cast and cannot be cast while moving.
  • It interrupts all of your attacks, including auto shot.
  • Effects from each ammo type will persist if you switch, e.g. you apply the Poisoned Ammo DoT to your target and switch to Incendiary Ammo and the poison DoT will remain.
• Incendiary Ammo also deals the extra fire damage to the primary target.
• How the Poisoned Ammo DoT works is still shrouded in a bit of mystery. The tooltip seems to imply that the damage will increase with each successive Auto Shot, but right now on beta all it is doing is refreshing the DoT. The tick damage never increases. I hope this is a bug.
• Frozen Ammo won’t apply the slow effect to boss targets or other elites which are immune to that kind of crowd control. Currently, this prevents Frozen Ammo from doing any damage at all to boss targets. I’m pretty confident this is a bug and all they need to do is split up the damage and slow components.
• The percent of auto shot damage given to Incendiary/Frozen is pre-armor mitigation.

• As you can see from the above image, all of these secondary damage effects (from all 3) can independently crit, multistrike, and crit multistrike.
• However, Auto Shot multistrikes do not trigger additional Exotic Munitions effects.
• Your chosen ammo type will persist through death like a flask.
• I’m not sure why it needs to last for an hour instead of just being permanent like an aspect. Inevitably you’re going to need some kind of addon that flashes something in your face when the buff falls off in the middle of a boss fight.
• All the ammo types scale with survival’s elemental damage mastery.
• It’s way too early to talk numbers, but I imagine this will be a talent mostly favored by survival hunters. BM would have to give up their super pet (from Versatility), and MM seems like it was made for Focusing Shot with Sniper Training. There’s also Lone Wolf to contend with. I suppose it’s the only choice for any MM or SV hunter who wants to keep their pet and their freedom of movement.
• Everything is subject to change. Hell, this talent could even be removed completely.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this little preview of Exotic Munitions. I’ll eventually do similar posts for Focusing Shot and Lone Wolf/Versatility, so stay tuned. 🙂