It’s nice to have a beta build that isn’t all nerfs!
WoD Beta build 18967 went up last night and had a few hunter number changes. Both BM and SV got a little bump, which was sorely needed. In Survival’s case, it was more of an un-nerfing.
- Arcane Shot now deals 110% Arcane damage (up from 100%)
- Multi-Shot now deals 40% Physical damage (up from 30%)
- Cobra Shot now deals 66% Nature damage (up from 60%)
- Kill Shot now deals 759% Physical damage (up from 660%)
- Black Arrow now deals (440% Attack Power) damage over 20 sec (up from 400%)
- Explosive Shot now deals (42.9% Attack Power) Fire damage per tick (up from 39%)
- Serpent Sting now deals (176% Attack Power) Nature damage over 15 sec (up from 160%)
And now the one nerf of this build…
- Exotic Munitions – Poisoned Ammo: Each Auto Shot deals (32% Attack Power) additional Nature damage over 16 sec (down from 48%)
Despite the buffs, BM and SV hunters are still simming in last place among all other DPS specs. These sims do not account for any movement, or situations which may be detrimental to the potential DPS of other classes. This is to be expected, but a lot of us feel like the penalty we’re getting for our freedom of movement may be a bit too severe. There definitely needs to be one, but 20-30% DPS penalty, as the sims are showing now, seems a little too steep. Maybe I’m wrong, but Marksmanship is sitting much higher on the charts, even if you have crummy uptime on Sniper Training.
The Exotic Munitions nerf is puzzling. Lone Wolf was already ahead of it in single target damage before this nerf (or maybe on par for Survival), this just takes it another step further. I don’t like the idea of forcing MM and SV hunters to get rid of their pet if they want to do the most damage.
It just doesn’t seem very huntery to me. I’m glad the petless option is there for those who desire it, but let’s not forget that hunters are THE pet class. Let’s not punish them for keeping their pet around, eh?
I put up my 2 cents on the ptr about BM. While we seems to have a decent rotation, there just isn’t the damage output that MM has. My suggestion was to lower the focus cost of kill command by 10 so we suffer from less focus starvation, up the damage on kill command by 25% (it’s that bad), and just boost cobra shot to 70% nature damage.
The main issue with BM is that Kill Shot is an ending shot and really doesn’t do anything with sustained dps on boss encounters. The spec is really designed so that our pets are the main dps boost but without a big increase on kill command and focus cost reduction, we just are sitting here without any way to generate enough damage to be viable,
The good thing is they really don’t need to move around the functionality, just boost one , maybe two existing abilities and we should be off and running. I feel these changes would do great with the level scaling and abilities all the way through level 100 raiding.
Things are looking really biased in the beta atm >.> Blizzard has long way to go before they even get the ptr on live T_T
They should atleast revert the dps cooldown loss, and give back kill shot for survival
Afaik allmost all classes and specs got a little boost. Not sure if these balancing boosts make a huge difference in that case… And i’ll be playing my hunter in my preferred spec and talents regardless of how it sims. I have faith in that if damage turns out to be unbalanced Blizzard would fix it.
The only think I’m personally bothered by is the big difference in pet performance between the various species that they introduced. It was already there for a bit (wolf, devilsaur, spirit beast for solo, missing-buff pet for groups) but now 90% of pet models are not interesting because of lacking buffs (like 5% crit + 5% stats + defensive cooldown vs mortal wounds). RIP riverbeast / raptorbird / turtle / crab…..
Turtle is still a superior soloing pet, since Shell Shield works [strike]differently[/strike]better than the other defensive CDs.
The shale spider one is identical to the turtle version: http://beta.wowhead.com/spell=160063 Quilen and Clefthoof have the inferior version you’re thinking of.
True, but Turtles are non-exotic, making it my preferred tank pet for MM soloing (which is highly effective when specced/glyphed for max self healing).
It’s going to be a messy tier in my opinion. Just hope we don’t have as many hotfixes/patch adjustments as monks had.
Though it is good to see that they did unnerfed Survival, the whole hunter situation still worries me. It just feels like we’re being forced into too many things. I don’t want to lose my pet…yet it seems they are adamant on making us send our fluffy/scaly/feathery companions into our stable.
And while I am not a member of some high end raiding guild, with our casual raiding guild I do like to not suck. Previously I could explain to myself that survival was an acceptable choice over BM due to just being so used to survival.
If the numbers don’t change, it’s going to be hard to validate (with myself) picking anything but mm when the fight is not movement based.
Of course, if it is movement based then the considerations can start. But to make up for 20-30% you’d have to have fights like Thok movement/standing still wise. Or there will be Special Jobs for us again like conveyor belts. I doubt they could balance fights with too much movement for ranged dps now. Any fight with too much of it would entice guilds to just stack hunters as ranged. And special jobs always gave me mixed feeling, I like the fact that we might be the class for the job. But at the same time I at times prefer to just stand still and shoot the heck out of Blackfuse, cuddling one of the top spots on the dps list and not worry one bit about any belts and the added pressure of wiping the raid if I stumble and screw up.
But still in the end, numbers are prone to change if we lag too much behind yet it is cool (even though as we see now it has balancing drawbacks) to have our niche. To (even more) be the movement ranged dps.