The first round of beta number tuning is in. Beast mastery is nerfed, survival is buffed, and marksmanship is sort of buffed. There’s very little else going on hunter-wise. No new abilities, mechanics, glyphs, pet changes, or anything else I can see. 😕 I was kind of hoping for more. I really don’t like the prospect of SV and MM going live as-is (mechanically).
Beast Mastery
- Kill Command now deals 240% of attack power damage (down from 283%)
- Cobra Shot now deals 60% weapon damage(up from 42%)
Survival
- Black Arrow now deals 510% attack power over 18 sec (up from 169% attack power) This is not a typo
- Cobra Shot now deals 60% weapon damage (up from 42%)
- Explosive Shot now deals 46% of attack power weapon damage per tick (up from 40%)
- Serpent Sting now deals 225% of attack power over 15 sec (up from 150%)
Marksmanship
- Aimed Shot now deals 385% weapon damage (up from 306%)
- Careful Aim now increases the critical strike chance of Focusing Shot in addition to Steady Shot and Aimed Shot
- Steady Shot now deals 60% weapon damage (up from 42%)
Talents
- Exotic Munitions: Frozen Ammo now reduces movement speed for 4 sec (down from 8 sec)
- Thrill of the Hunt now has a 20% chance to proc (down from 30%)
About what I expected. The beast mastery nerf isn’t a big one in the grand scheme of things. Though if you ask me, I’d rather see Arcane Shot nerfed instead. Signature abilities should always deal high damage to reward you for using them in cooldown.
Survival’s DoTs both got a sizable buff, especially Black Arrow. It now deals 3 times more damage than the previous build. Serpent Sting’s buff is decent, but Explosive Shot buff isn’t as extreme. There was a bug on the old builds where Explosive Shot damage was getting clipped, and that is supposed to be fixed now. I’m hoping that 5-stack LnL ticks will be suitably large.
Marksmanship’s buffs are somewhat countered with the Thrill of the Hunt nerf. Less uptime on Thrill = less Aimed Shots. The end result is the MM buffs aren’t as substantial as survival’s (though survival needed it more). I would have expected a Chimaera Shot buff.
That’s it?
Uhh, yep. These buffs should make survival playable in dungeon and raid testing anyway. Marksmanship? I don’t know.
Survival’s cooldown is a lost cause I’m afraid, but I hope they’ll reconsider. Marksmanship still needs something to fill in the gap left by Steady Focus. Some kind of stack or debuff or something to manage beyond slowly casting Aimed Shots.
I’m not freaking out yet, but it’s going to be time for another round of feedback to the devs. After I play the specs some more, of course.
Despite any complaints, you can’t argue that they didn’t succeeded in making the 3 specs feel different.
Pet changes? Not this round
The “taming pass” hasn’t been done yet. Some of the most basic beasts, like the black wolves in Shadowmoon, are still untameable. Rylaks are still Chimaeras, and Gara hasn’t had any updates.
I’m going to go poke around more on the beta and see if I find anything else. If I do, I’ll update the post.
Update: Dismiss Pet is back in the hunter spellbook after a brief hiatus (while it was gone, you had to either make a macro or right click->dismiss on the pet).
not entirely sure if breaking 2 specs to make it different is that good of an option, even if everything doing “balanced” dmg and being viable at some sort both survival and mm seems really simplistic in what they ever were. at least BM still have its soul intact, wish they had at least tried to emulate cataclysm MM and did something different with survival >.<
Well, maybe by 6.1 they’ll say.. survival having a cooldown wasn’t so bad..
only to add… “but we don’t like making ‘big’ changes during an expansion so we’ll buff cobra shot by 5%” 😛
I hope Explosive Shot would be the new tuning knob in such cases. It already doesn’t hit very hard.
Yeah, but you can not-hit-very-hard up to 5 times!!! Thats something, isnt it?
“Despite any complaints, you can’t argue that they didn’t succeeded in making the 3 specs feel different.”
Agreed, Sv and MM are both boring, but in different ways…
I wonder what the impact of Cobra Shot’s damage increase is on Focusing Shot. Especially for SV.
The specs are certainly feeling different….to bad they are not feeling better.
I wonder if Bliz will “force” a spec up on us like they did in the past with the big BM nerf.
I dont feel bad for the Thrill of the Hunt talent nerf, personaly i dont like it and i prefer choose Dire Beast for fast Focus regen plus some damage.
Bendak mention something about “the gap left by Steady Focus”, sorry my ignorance but which is that “gap left”?
The “gap” is that MM has no proc or interacting mechanic to make its rotation interesting. Basicaly, right now you just need to cast Aimed Shot all the time and reload with Steady Shot when needed.
In live you have both Steady Focus and Master Marksman to modify your rotation. Master Marksman Procs? Instant Aimed Shot becomes priority. Steady Focus was not the best mechanic, but it forced you to activate you every few seconds to maintain a attack speed buff. Without any such reactive/proactive mechanics, the rotation feels really basic and boring.
I didn’t even like Steady Focus that much, but it was better than nothing. Also that extra haste was really nice for Aimed Shot.
I talked to Celestalon a while ago when he announced the 20% chance to TotH. I said that I always thought the percentage should be equal to the Focus cost. So, casting an Aimed Shot should have 50% chance. But casting an Aimed Shot modified by TotH would only have a 30% chance.
He seemed to agree and said that is a solution they are considering. I hope it ends up being implemented.
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As for changes in design for Surv and MM, I’m not in the “wait and see” mood. I still didn’t get a key, but I’ve been posting suggestions everywhere I could. Not only me, but a lot of people in beta agree that Surv and MM need something more to feel complete. So, I’m now just hoping the devs know what they are doing.
I like that Thrill of the Hunt idea, but it seems like they’re going in a different direction. Perhaps worried that it was too good for MM. I was still preferring Fervor for SV on the beta anyway because of all the times I needed a large boost of focus to get rid of LnL. Focusing Shot was also surprisingly useful for that, but the problem was it seemed like Exotic Munitions was still giving the same or even more overall damage depending how well you play.
Also, hope you get a beta key soon. Good luck on that.
Steady Focyus was an MM ability: “When you Steady Shot twice in a row, your ranged attack speed will be increased by 15% and your Steady Shot will generate 3 additional Focus for 20 sec.”
It added some depth to the MM rotation and a much needed 15% attack speed., especially since MM no longer has Arcane to dump focus.
There are two new things over at mmo-champion: Heavy Artillery and Stopping Power with the captions “Choose a level 90/30 talent”, any word on what this might be?
That serves 2 purposes:
1. It’s what they call these talent tiers when they are unlocked in the Tanaan intro for boosted characters.
2. It makes these talent tiers into a single button. Say you have glaive toss on your bar. When you switch to Barrage it will automatically switch on your bar since they’re part of the “Heavy Artillery.”
Are you able to call the Talent row in a macro? eg:
#showtooltip Heavy Artillery
/use [@focus.help,nodead][@pet]Misdirection
/use Heavy Artillery
Yes. Just tried /cast heavy artilery – it works.
Good, that means I can ditch another auto macro maker add on.
Always amusing to see when some add on gets adapted into the actual game.