Hunter scopes in Warlords of Draenor

It looks like hunters will finally have more than one weapon enchant to choose from, for the first time since vanilla that I can recall (back then it was 3% hit or +9 weapon damage I believe). Unfortunately they still don’t make your weapon glow or shoot out flaming arrows or anything fancy like that. Visual effects are still the territory of melee enchants it seems.

The new scopes proc one of three secondary stats. Like everything else in Warlords, the procs are moving away from primary stats entirely. It’s a good move in my book. I spoke here about how this new system is almost like a replacement for reforging, allowing you to customize your secondary stats to a reasonably large degree. These scopes further emphasize this new method of secondary stat stacking. (Update: You can’t stack secondary stats quite as much as you used to with the reversal to agility flasks, but it’s still there to some degree).

Scopes

“USP” stands for Unlucky Streak Prevention and works the same as RPPM trinkets work today. If you go too long without a proc, the chance of proccing increases until you do. You can see this system in action with an addon like ExtraCD.

The crit scope is intended for marksmanship, multistrike for survival, and mastery for beast mastery. Of course, it may end up where other stats are better at certain levels. It’s too early to tell at this point.

How much is 750 of each stat at level 100?
  • Crit scope: 7.15% crit for MM, 6.8% crit for SV/BM
  • Multistrike scope: 11.93% multistrike for SV, 11.36% multistrike for MM/BM
  • Mastery scope: 14.3% pet damage for BM, 6.8% elemental damage for SV, 3.4% damage & 3.4% crit damage for MM Sniper Training

I’m pleased to have more than one scope to choose from in Warlords. My gut tells me that each spec’s secondary stat attunement will be the way to go, but we won’t know for sure until the numbers have been tuned. When you combine this with the 1219 secondary stats you can get from enchants and consumables, you can start to see how much you’ll be able to focus your stats in one direction, almost as if reforging was still there. (Blizzard nerfed this considerably. Secondary stat customized is still there, but to a much lesser degree. Scopes seem to remain un-nerfed).

Updated on Aug 6: Scopes were buffed from 750 to 938 stats.
Updated on Aug 13: Removed note about the previously-awesome stat stacking methods. Blizzard has decided against it.
Updated on Nov 17: Scopes are back to 750 stats

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13 thoughts on “Hunter scopes in Warlords of Draenor”

  1. At 90. With a wind serpent pet. Multistrike trinket, flask, food, enchants… I got my multi up to like 76%. I am not sure if the ring an neck enchants will be permanent or not though

    1. The enchants you get from Flaskataur aren’t scaling correctly from 90-99 right now. Also they won’t be available in 6.0 before WoD since they use WoD mats. Tell me about it though, I got my BM mastery up to about 130% pet damage at 90. This is a bug though, just to be clear.

      1. Pretty sure before the WoD release blizz will make some, enchants, flask, ect not “stackeable” when they see that you can gain a lot of damage…

      2. It is pretty funny though. Since they did away with the profession perks, do you think those neck and ring enchants will be sticking around?

        1. They have stated they wanted fewer, but more powerful enchants. Now that you can only enchant rings, neck, and cloak it makes sense in that case. These are definitely powerful enchants. But no more shoulder, bracer, legs, chest, boots, etc.

          1. Although I loathe to give up enchantment slots, just the horrible pain it was getting an alts gear done up… I don’t think I will miss that, hopping from enchanter to jewelcrafter to leather worker to scribe, forgetting that I needed a slot and hopping back to my enchanter…. it was pretty exhausting for an altoholic such as myself.

  2. It’s interesting that Blizz seems to be seriously pushing for multiple gear sets for hunters (and other pure DPSers), who wish to always be optimal, now. “Wait, lemme swap over to my SV stuff.” A nice way to keep tier tokens, weapons, and jewelry/trinkets being used after everybody has one. I’m imagining my Druid sister laughing though “Now you know our bag pain!”

  3. Didn’t Flintlocke’s Woodchucker have a visual effect ?

    As a lazy (and Dutch) hunter I would have prefered a single scope for all specs since it’s cheaper;)
    but as an engineer I can see some good business potential 🙂

    I think that towards the end of WoD all specs will be using Mastery Scopes. Both Crit and Multi-Strike are subject to diminishing returns.

  4. Cross posting this from the “reforging 2.0 post, as this post sent me over there, and got me thinking about it in the first place.

    I have two issues with this method of stat customization. First, the auction house will control how much it costs me to customize my gear the way I want, provided it has the scrolls I want in the first place.

    Second, there is no way to salvage a bad drop for your character, like a Versa/Mastery piece for MM or anything without Multistrike for SV. Since you can only control the additional stats, rather than the base stats, those 1105 points are the only points you will be able to customize the entire expansion.

    When we get to Tier 19 or 20 those 1105 points will matter a lot less than they do in questing blues.

    1. The 1105 points will be less comparatively in later tiers, but it’ll still be significant IMO. That’s still 10% crit! There will also be gems on some of your better loot for more secondary stats.

      It’s true that you may be spending more on enchants to always be optimal, but you’ll be spending nothing on reforging. It will probably balance out. I know a full reforge can cost as much as 250-300g. They could also make the enchants cheaper to produce if it became an issue.

      As for salvaging a bad drop, I know their goal is to make all the stats as equal in value as possible. One will always be the “right” choice, but my hope is all the specs will be like BM is right now on live. Basically all the stats are good because of how they interact with each other. Whether or not this actually happens is another thing…. 😉

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