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).

icethreadedarrow

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.

mopbetatalents

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.

multistrikebooyah

  • 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. šŸ™‚

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

8 thoughts on “WoD Beta: Exotic Munitions preview”

  1. Frozen ammo seems good for pvp, yet it seems directed at fighting against mele classes, while a raw damage choice would benifit against every class.

  2. I honestly can’t see myself using Focusing Shot, even as MM. Instead, I will gear myself to have enough haste to reduce Steady to a 1.5s cast with raid buffs, and just cast 2 of them instead.

    This way if I NEED to move (fire under me or w/e) during the 3 seconds I’m waiting for Sniper Training, I don’t lose any dps (only potential dps from not having the buff up, as opposed to losiing out on the shot damage AND the focus gain if I cancel the shot by moving, on top of not having the buff).

    1. Steady Focus is gone so there is no need to cast 2 steady shots in a row anymore which also reduces the benefit you may have from focusing shot.

  3. Exotic Ammunitions is interesting although the 3 second cast time does limit it’s use a bit in boss fights but I can understand Blizzards desire to prevent continuous ammo switching.

    I’ve only tested Focusing Shot as MM so far and based on shooting at test-dummies I have to say that I don’t like Focusing Shot. It’s long cast time plus the long cast time of Aimed Shot means that from the moment that you start casting Focusing Shot till the moment that Aimed Shot is released you gain over 70 focus (50 from focusing shot and over 20 passive regen at level 100 in iLvL 660 PvP gear). That is a lot and means that you really have to be careful not to use Focusing Shot until you are below 45 focus or you risk getting focus capped.

    If you happen to have a Direbeast out you even have more “passive regen” which means you could very well get focus capped. The same with the passive regen from fervor. With Thrill of the Hunt I found that I didn’t even need to use Focusing Shot a lot. I personally found the combination of stead shot + thrill of the hunt to feel much smoother since it means I don’t have to watch my focus bar all the time.

    Since all level 60 talents either increase your risk of focus capping or reduce the number of times focusing shot is actually used I’m wondering how many Focusing Shot’s per minute you would have to fire in order for it to be competitive with Poisoned Ammo/Lone Wolf.

  4. Couple other notes:
    *The percent of auto shot damage given to Incendiary/Frozen is pre-armor, so once armor mitigation is factored in, incendiary actually does more than 20% of an auto shot
    *Quite possibly the best talent for all specs for heavy aoe. PG tuning is broken at 100 currently, but this talent was huge on aoe waves
    *Poisoned Ammo stacking is indeed broken. The way I read it, if corrected to match the tooltip, it should basically just be the equivalent of 2*AP damage with every auto shot. Really strong stuff.

    1. Good point about the pre-mitigation stuff. Adding that to the post. It seems like Incendiary is more like ~35% of an auto shot’s actual damage then.

Leave a Reply to ringoflinthammerCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.