Tag Archives: Marksmanship

Hunter News, Opinion

WoD Beta: Improvements to Lock and Load and Chimera Shot on the way

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Celestalon has been tweeting more about hunters, and we have some good news for both survival and marksmanship to talk about. None of these changes are in the build (or patch notes) yet, but they should hopefully make it in soon so we can test them.

Lock and Load

We’ll start with the survival changes. One is a nice quality of life change (and opens up some new gameplay avenues), and the other will help survival at lower multistrike levels. In case you haven’t been keeping up with the news, Black Arrow now procs 1 charge of Lock and Load every time it multistrikes.

Patch 6.0 at level 90 would have been really awkward without this baseline chance. If you have Haromm’s Talisman, you should be able to get around ~20% total multistrike with the appropriate raid buff (more if they add level 90 versions of the multistrike flasks and food) when patch 6.0 launches.

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Opinion

WoD Beta: Missing the Mark

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Editor’s Note: If there’s one thing most hunters will agree with on the Warlords beta, it’s that marksmanship and survival are simply missing “something” in their current state. I thought Jademcian articulated the reason for this better than I ever could, so I asked him to do a guest post for the site. Hopefully this will spark some more discussion and help improve these specs before release. -Bendak

A few days ago I made a four part post on the beta class forums for a discussion regarding Marksmanship. Many of the posters seemed to  enjoy Beast Mastery while feeling Marks and Survival were hollow by comparison. In my post I made a few remarks on Marksmanship based on the discussion then went into a comparison between it and Beast Mastery, why I thought one felt more complete than the other and an example of what could be done to make Marksmanship feel the same ‘completeness.’

Bendak asked if I would write about that post here, on his site, and I happily obliged because I think it’s something the hunter community may be able to use to fuel player/developer conversation. The first step is identifying that something feels missing, the second step is figuring out what that thing is, and the third step is in Blizzard’s hands. So, whether you like Beast Mastery or not, or what was axed from Marksmanship, I hope you find my thoughts a useful tool for communicating your own.

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News

WoD Beta: Lone Wolf and Adaptation talent previews

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This is second in a series of posts about the new level 100 hunter talents as they currently exist on beta. The first post was all about Exotic Munitions. Today, it’s about Lone Wolf and Adaptation. This talent changes based on your current spec: Lone Wolf for marksmanship and survival, Adaptation for beast mastery.

These talents couldn’t be more opposite if they tried. One removes your pet, the other turns your pet into a superhero pet. If you’ve read my posts before, you’ll know I am not really down with the whole Lone Wolf thing. I play hunters because of the pets. I still think it’s cool they’re giving the option to those who want to play a pure archer, but the BM version of this talent appeals to me more.

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Hunter News, Opinion

Hunter Beta Feedback: Round 1

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What follows isn’t going to written like one of my normal blog posts. It’s a copy/paste of a feedback post I made in the Warlords beta forums intended for the developers. I thought some of you may be interested in reading it anyway. I’ve added a few pictures to help with the “wall of text crits you for 9000” factor.

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Hunter News

Marksmanship mastery and Lock and Load changes, T17 Mythic armor

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WoD beta build 18505 just hit the servers and with it comes some pretty substantial changes for marksmanship and survival hunters.

Marksmanship Mastery

  • Marksmanship’s mastery is no longer Wild Quiver, and is now Sniper Training.
    • When you stand still for 3 seconds, you gain Sniper Training for 6 sec, which increases your damage, shot range, and critical strike damage by 4%.

It seems like Blizzard is really pushing for marksmanship to be the turret spec. The synergy here with Focusing Shot has enormous potential if this style of play is something you’re interested in. The 4% value is the base mastery, it will be higher with mastery gear. On the beta I got it up to 10% with gear and buffs. Some of you may remember the old Sniper Training talent from back in the day, but that one was just increased damage. This new version adds critical hit damage and shot range. The shot range bit is pretty interesting. 50 yard shots? Very, very cool. I’ve done a quick bit of testing on the beta and it appears that it takes 3 seconds to activate. It doesn’t start counting down from 6 seconds until you begin moving.

aimedshotrange

The real question is if we’ll be able to give up our bunny-hopping, DPS-on-the-move freedom and revert back to turret style. What do you think?

After testing this for a bit on the beta, one thing it REALLY needs is some kind of visual to let you know you have it. Otherwise, it’s basically a “WeakAuras required” thing to get the most out of it.

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Hunter News

WoD Alpha build 18443: Hunter tier 17 armor revealed, new set bonuses

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The vast majority of hunter changes in this build are tooltip changes for clearer wording, or to merge two abilities into one to reduce spellbook clutter. Piercing Shots is still listed in this build even though it’s supposedly getting removed, but I would wager that it’s just an oversight. The Enhanced Piercing Shots perk for marksmanship, which would have added Piercing Shots to Multi-Shot, has been changed to Improved Chimera Shot. Before we get started, keep in mind that some of these set bonuses could still change.

Beast Mastery T17 Set Bonuses
  • 2-piece: Kill Command has a 25% chance to increase the size and damage of your pet by 10% for 8 seconds.
  • 4-piece: While Bestial Wrath is active, one additional pet is summoned to fight with you.

These are much nicer than the old temporary ones. The 2-piece bonus lasts just long enough so you can apply its bonus to your next Kill Command.

The 4-piece sounds like it might just be an extra Dire Beast summon that pops during Bestial Wrath, which means probably only melee attacks and no specials. I hope I’m wrong and it pulls another one of your active pets with all its abilities intact (or at least claw/bite/smack). That would be very nice.

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Hunter News

WoD Alpha: Quick first impressions of the 3 hunter specs

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I’ve spent some time with all 3 specs recently. Ran the dungeon at least twice with each, and did a little bit of testing (what little I could without a damage meter). Yesterday, I shared some more general impressions of the alpha as a whole.  Today, I’m keeping it short and to the point.  I’m sure opinions will change as I play it more, but for now this is what stood out to me after my extremely limited experience in a single zone and a single dungeon over the course of a couple of days.

Beast Mastery

I had Improved Arcane Shot and Enhanced Basic Attacks for perks.

  • Hardly anything has changed vs. BM on live servers apart from the lack of Serpent Sting. I don’t miss Serpent Sting for BM at all.
  • Kill Shot is nice. It hits harder and the cooldown reset when it doesn’t kill the target is much faster.  Oh, and the 15% heal ain’t bad either.
  • Pet damage is a little low at the moment, but a numbers tuning pass hasn’t been done yet.
  • Blink Strikes is too mandatory to give up. Seems weird I’ll seemingly never have a desire to use Stampede as a beast mastery hunter.
  • This applies to all specs, but I like that pet buffs are permanent auras now.

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Hunter News

Latest alpha patch notes clean up the Hunter spellbook [Updated]

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Updated: If you read this post earlier, there were some more hunter changes added to the notes. Updates are in red.

Blizzard just updated the alpha patch notes with a handful of hunter changes and an explanation of their philosophy on adding the new secondary stat attunements which were discovered in the previous build.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Official Forums)
A new concept that we’re introducing is each specialization having an attunement to a particular secondary stat. These take the form of a passive ability that grants a 5% increase to the amount of a specific secondary stat gained. This provides a good starting point for where to focus your secondary stats. Usually, it will be your highest throughput stat (not counting Spirit for Healers, and Bonus Armor for Tanks, which is an optimal secondary stat in most cases). There are exceptions, and raw throughput may not even be the biggest concern in some situations. Treat this as a guideline, not a rule, about which secondary stat to favor.

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Hunter News, Opinion

Lone Wolf: How to play a pet class without a pet

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Lone Wolf is a new level 100 talent for survival and marksmanship hunters. It’s kind of a big deal. It lets you play a pet class without a pet. Whoa. It’s pretty simple: Dismiss your pet and get a 30% damage buff. Lone Wolf is undoubtedly the result of player demand. Demand from all of the players who want to play an archer class without having to maintain a roster of pets. Even more demand from raiders who were sick of their pet doing silly things like getting stuck in random places and not doing any DPS.

I’m not currently in the alpha, so most of what follows is just speculation. I’m just going by what I can see on paper and the limited amount of info I’ve been able to gleam from the handful of hunter streamers in alpha.

The following talents and abilities will simply not function if you spec into Lone Wolf:

Spirit Bond is something I’d have trouble living without, though the new self-heals from Kill Shot and Survivalist will help somewhat. The loss of Master’s Call is probably a deal breaker for a lot of PvP hunters.

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News

Ricket’s 5.4 marksmanship guide

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Tired of beast mastery and survival? Ricket has posted a great video guide to marksmanship DPS in 5.4 on her YouTube channel. She discusses stat priorities, arcane vs. aimed shot focus dumps, the opener, and more. She’s currently ranked #1 for marksmanship on Malkorok 25H on worldoflogs, so it’s a safe bet you can take these tips to the bank.

With the possibility of marksmanship being a stronger spec in Warlords, you may want to get a head start and try it out now if you haven’t yet. Just remember that Aimed Shot will be the exclusive focus dump in the future, so don’t get too attached to Arcane Shot while playing MM! You can see a summary of marksmanship changes in Warlords revealed thus far here on Eyes of the Beast.

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