Thoughts about Hunter changes in 3.0.8

I was bored this afternoon, so I thought I'd copy myself to the PTR and give it a whirl, maybe look at how much of a dps reduction I can expect after the next patch goes live.

(Note - Toshimitsu was flagged for a namechange, so for all intents and purposes in this post, Toraneko = Toshi)

Since I was pretty much free to do anything there (multiple respecs kgo), I tried out all three specs to see how the dps difference between them would be. And to my surprise, Survival is currently coming in with top dps.


Surv was the first spec I tried, and it was simply the same spec I'm playing with on live at the moment. The recount above is myself self buffed, no raid consumables. I did another pass a little later on with consumables (agi and int pots, and agi food) and surprisingly the difference in dps was negligible, only about 50-80dps difference from burst.

Suffice to say, the new cooldown on Lock and Load will be annoying to work with. For one, it completely eliminates the rotation of trap dancing, because if you are specced into Resourcefulness, you will be either waiting 14 seconds to get a L&L proc, or wasting 8 seconds waiting for the LnL cooldown to go off.


Next we have the Marks tree. I haven't been MM in over 3 months, so I might have been a bit rusty with the rotations. It seems to be holding mid ground in terms of dps on the PTR, which you will understand once I show you the BM charts. Overall though, the Marks spec is still probably very solid and has nothing unexpected. Aside from the change of mana to Arcane Shot of course, which is nice for this spec.

And here are the charts for BM. Hold on to your seats people...


That's right, BM is currently a whopping 200dps below Marks, even with a Cat. It seems the Cat is still by far the best pet, though the Devilsaur is coming in close. One way or another, I'd say you can take either one and put out the same numbers.

The numbers I got with the Spirit Beast however, were a bit disappointing. It was below both Cat and Devilsaur dps by about 50. It seems the Spirit Beast will simply remain a trophy, and nothing more.

Now, these numbers are not set in stone - I might be doing something wrong, I may be biased towards Surv at the moment, or maybe there's something up with the PTR. However, all accounts I've read are pointing towards Survival doing the most damage on the test realms.

All in all, I'm not sure how to react. I'm honestly not too fussed with the Steady Shot nerf, but this sudden upheaval in the hierarchy of the specs has me reeling a little bit.