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.

More experimenting with Surv

As mentioned in a previous post, I thought I'd save 10mans for Survival testing. Well, tonight was the guild's weekly 10man Naxx, and I thought I'd try out a different spec from last week.

This week, I put in that one point in Go for the Throat (which in my haste last week I forgot to do) which was suggested on the EJ Surv hunter thread.

Instead of putting full points into Sniper Training and 1 in Imp. Feign Death, I decided to go Trap Mastery and Resourcefulness this time. Because this was a clean run of Naxx (as opposed to just two bosses like last week), I had more opportunities to use Explosive Shot's AoE capability.

My main rotation on trash would be to wait for tank to pick up and establish aggro, run in and drop an Explosive Trap, wait for Lock and Load to proc, use up L&L's charges, and then Volley until Explosive Shot is off cooldown.

Usually, after proccing L&L, you can just sit back and literally listen to the fireworks. It's like music.

What surprised me though, is that I topped dps for most bosses. (Of course discounting the fact that we'd taken a few undergeared people in to get some loots for them...) There were a few fights were our Fury TG Warrior out dpsed me, but that was by a rather small margin and so I don't really mind.

Since there is no WWS report tonight, I can't really tell how well Replenishment went for the raid.

See that Explosive Shot three in a row crit? Oh yeah baby...

Thoughts on Survival

Against my better judgement, I respecced Survival for our guild's 10man Sapphiron and Kel'Thuzad kills tonight. One of the new healers who'd just dinged - a CoH priest - was complaining of going oom halfway through the fight because we didn't have a Replenishment class. So I decided to take a dive into the deep end and throw dps out the window while I did so.

So I dragged my ass down to IF, respecced, and banged on the Heroic Training Dummy for a while, figuring out a good rotation. Right after that, I got asked on a heroic Halls of Lightning run, where I was mildly surprised by the dps output it was doing, especially on boss fights. (Hello, 10k Kill Shot crit!) Funny story... we actually killed Loken 5 minutes before the instance reset and I didn't manage to loot my badges, Stone Keeper's Shards or the quest item... boo!

Anyway, I rock up to Sapph, and we down him on the first try. I'd read some surv hunter reports that they'd run up to the boss and drop an Explosive Trap on their heads to proc Lock and Load. While it's not one of the most dignified things to be seen doing, especially on Sapph, it does result in a chain of Explosive Shots, and hey, more crits mean more uptime on Replenishment, right? Absolutely!

I even have a WWS report! It's my first time actually seeing one of these things in action, so bear with me if I'm a bit excited. According to WWS, my Replenishment buff caused our healers to gain an average of 14k mana. It's not stellar as far as mana replenishment goes, but I guess it's not bad? Forgive me if I have no clue how this works for healers...

I came 4th on damage, and 6th on dps for that fight. Not too shabby for damage, but a little lackluster for dps... but I was expecting that.

On to Kel'Thuzad. We wiped the first time due to an unlucky number of mana explosions on one of our druid healers, and an unlucky ice block on the add tank right before the adds came up, but we did get him down to 10%.

Anyways, second attempt went better. Here's the report for those interested. On this fight, Replenishment restored about 15k of healers' mana. I also switched aspects 5 times on the fight, something which is also interesting. As with Sapph, I was periodically running up to KT and dropping a trap. It was actually pretty amusing to hear our DK tank - who is formerly a hunter - ask if he should be doing anything, because he thought it was something the boss did.

Came 3rd on damage and 4th on dps, slightly better than Sapphiron. (It's the not having to move out of blizzards... I swear)

I wasn't feeling on top at the end of the raid, but after our resto druid posted the WWS reports and told me that Replenishment was actually helpful to him on those fights, I kinda feel better now. It is nice to actually have some utility other than just bring the huge numbers in, and I think I will be respeccing for guild 10s to Survival from now on. :)

Special thanks to the guild's resident grumpy resto druid for posting that WWS report!

Marksman 101*

With the Steady Shot nerf looming in the next patch, I thought it might be wise to put out something about expanding into the other two Hunter trees.

Although Beast Mastery has been by and large the highest dps output so far, that can potentially change. The main thing of note is that the BM/Readiness spec that is the most popular right now is getting nerfed to the ground.

And with that in mind, I'd like to talk about a heavy Marks spec for raiding.

Take this build for example.

On the first tier, we have Improved Aspect of the Hawk. Since the change to Viper in patch 3.0, any hunter worth their bow would have been switching to having Hawk all the time instead of Viper as was the norm in BC. This talent is now pretty much a prerequisite for any raiding spec now. While you don't necessarily spam Steady Shot as Marks, the haste bonus is still pretty nice and is worth spending the 5 points in.

Over in the MM tree, the top three tiers pretty much fill themselves in. Lethal Shots, Careful Aim and Mortal Shots are all extremely good talents to have for any spec. Full points in Go for the Throat and Rapid Killing are also not to be overlooked.

If you're not hitcapped, you can see about switching the 3 points from either Improved Hunter's Mark or Improved Stings into Focused Aim instead. Depending on what your hit is like, you might want to see how many points you need to spend in that talent. If you're unsure about what the hitcap is, especially in relation to this talent, here is a great guide by Drotora about it.

The rest of the tree is pretty self-explanatory, but I also took full points in Barrage due to Aimed Shot being a staple in my Marks rotation.

Over in the Surv tree, I've popped full points into Improved Tracking and Hawk Eye. Especially with the patch, they're improving the mechanics of Imp Tracking to make it better, which makes it pretty much an essential now. As for Hawk Eye, it is always nice to be out of bosses' AoEs. :D One of the comments in Wowhead noted that it is hard to go back to playing without it... and I agree. I levelled up with that talent, and I really miss having to run further toward my target just to reach it to tap it. This can be especially annoying when doing Sons of Hodir dailies... but I digress.

And finally I've also put in full points in Survival Instincts, for the same reasoning I put points into Barrage. Not only that, it also affects Steady Shot! Win-win situation.

I'd been using this spec to raid since patch 3.0 came out (with less points, of course), and have since topped or came in second for dps where before I was usually about 3rd to 5th on the charts. This was also the spec I used to level up. Before I read about how powerful BM/Readiness was, this was my raiding spec for a good two or three weeks after I hit 80. Compared with the BM hunter in the same raid with a Devilsaur, I was outputting equivalent dps with a cat. This tree is no longer to be underestimated!

My basic rotation was mainly Serpent Sting > Aimed > Arcane > Chimera and then Steady spam till the other abilities were off cooldown. Switch to Viper and pop Rapid Fire when you're oom (since Viper regens mana based on your ranged attack speed - the faster you shoot, the faster you regain mana), rinse and repeat. I usually pop Readiness after Rapid Fire so the cooldown can start counting down, but other than that, there aren't many "big" cooldowns it's useful for in the Marks tree.

Of course, this isn't the only option for MM specs. For example, instead of going down Surv to take the increased Arcane/Steady talent, one could opt going into the BM tree for Aspect Mastery, as illustrated here.

If I ever get the chance to try out a Surv spec - and I probably will after the nerf patch - I will post something about it. :D Was thinking about something like this...

*The following is based on personal experience... I don't claim to be an expert on this sort of thing. :P