Tag Archives: Black Arrow

Hunter Patch Notes Update: Black Arrow dispel protection, talent changes

The official patch notes just received an update. Lots of hunter changes to report. Some of it we already know from the previous build, but there’s a few new bits in here.  If the tooltips don’t make sense, it’s because some of these changes are not in the build yet.

Survival Changes
  • Black Arrow‘s cooldown is reset if it’s dispelled.  🙂
  • Lock and Load has been reverted to the previous version. It’s similar to the live version, but you will get at least one proc per Black Arrow, with chances for additional procs on each tick. It also no longer has a 10 second internal cooldown.
  • Survivalist now increases multistrike damage by 20%. (Old: increases multistrike chance by 10%)

Yay! Black Arrow dispelling was something i was really concerned about, so I’m glad they added something.

While I was originally pretty excited for the Lock and Load multistrike proccing version, it ended up having several problems. When multistrike was low, it was extremely underwhelming (that is why they added the 10% baseline chance in the first place) and it was common to have Black Arrows with zero or just one proc.  When multistrike was high, the rotation devolved into nothing by Explosive Shot with hardly any focus available for Arcane Shot. Lastly, Lock and Load just didn’t feel as fun when it was no longer free or didn’t reset the cooldown. So, I’m on board with this.

Survivalist’s 20% multistrike damage is just there so survival will favor multistrike and benefit from its multistrike attunement.

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WoD Beta: Survival PvP concerns

Survival isn’t in the best shape for PvP as it stands. Its damage is based around sustained DPS — which is already a downside for PvP — and its only source of burst damage (Lock and Load) can be negated entirely with a simple dispel of Black Arrow. No Black Arrow = no Lock and Load procs. This would be remedied somewhat if Ice Trap was still able to proc Lock and Load as a fallback, but it doesn’t anymore.

It seems like at one point in time they were aware of the problem because the original WoD 4pc survival PvP bonus used to give Black Arrow the ability to trigger Lock and Load instantly (and presumably removed the subsequent proc chances as a tradeoff). This was later changed once they added the Multistrike behavior to LnL.

Here are some potential solutions I hope the devs will take into consideration. Consider all these numbers as just examples to illustrate a point. I don’t presume to know how to balance them.

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More details on Black Arrow and Lock and Load in Warlords

Updated: The below post is now irrelevant as Celestalon tweeted there’s going to be another change to Lock and Load. Every time one of Black Arrow’s ticks multistrikes, it adds a stack of Lock and Load.

One of the changes coming in Warlords of Draenor for survival hunters is that every Black Arrow will guarantee at least one Lock and Load proc. Traps can no longer proc Lock and Load, which is why LnL itself has been removed and it’s now just a built-in component of Black Arrow.

Some hunters were wondering exactly how this guaranteed proc was going to work. Did it just mean that the final tick was always guaranteed to be a proc, or what? Turns out, that the guaranteed proc is randomly placed on one of the ticks, and it does this by determining how many procs you get on cast and then randomly placing them among the ticks.

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