Huge Hunter changes incoming

[Devboy]

Changes for hunters on the next PTR Build


Hunter (Forums, Talent Calculator)
Arcane Shot An instant shot that causes 165% weapon damage plus 4,184 125% weapon damage plus 2,378 as Arcane damage. Requires Ranged Weapon. 30 Focus. 40 yd range.

Beast Mastery
Kill Command (Beast Mastery) Give the command to kill, causing your pet to instantly inflict [ 1,215 + 121.8% 140.1% of RAP ] damage to its target and apply the Hunter's Mark effect.
Kill Command (Marksmanship, Survival) Give the command to kill, causing your pet to instantly inflict [ 1,047 + 105% 120.8% of RAP ] damage to its target and apply the Hunter's Mark effect.

Marksmanship
Aimed Shot A powerful aimed shot that deals 350% ranged weapon damage plus 9,597 400% ranged weapon damage plus 12,612. Requires Ranged Weapon. Hunter - Marksmanship Spec. 50 Focus. 40 yd range. 2.5 sec cast.

Survival
Explosive Shot You fire an explosive charge into the enemy target, dealing [ 384 + 30.8% [ 453 + 36.3% of RAP ] Fire damage initially and every second for 2 sec and applying the Hunter's Mark effect. Requires Ranged Weapon. Hunter - Survival Spec. 25 Focus. 40 yd range. 6 sec cooldown.

[Kaeth]

Went Mastrey > Haste > Crit tonight, went surprisingly well. Conclusion, it doesn't matter what secondary you stack, as long as haste isn't last it doesn't even matter. :HUNTERS:

Your logic is frightening. "Surprisingly well" is not the same thing as "optimal." Sure, if you just throw on any set of same-ilvl agility mail and don't reforge anything other than hit/expertise, you'll be able to do "okay." The point of theorycrafting and number crunching, however, is not to do simply ... "okay."

Mastery lags far behind the other two stats. Enough that prioritizing it will cost you a kill on a farm boss? No. But you'll still do more damage prioritizing haste or crit. And that might make the difference on a progression fight (do people still bring hunters to those?).

[aarjun]

Yee.. So a nerf to AS and buff to signature shots just happened...

And we still have 30 focus cost for Arcane Shot. I tweeted this exact thing to GC the day they announced 50% damage 50% focus increase that they're not fooling anyone and they'll end up decreasing damage and keeping focus nerf in place because of devaluation of signature shots. If you have done any PTR raid testing, you'd have noticed how bad this change feels until you get t16 and even then, the set bonus nerfed from 12 sec to 6 sec makes it terrible when RF/lust/BW is not up.

[Devboy]

Beast Mastery
Kill Command (Beast Mastery) Give the command to kill, causing your pet to instantly inflict [ 1,215 + 121.8% 140.1% of RAP ] damage to its target and apply the Hunter's Mark effect.
Kill Command (Marksmanship, Survival) Give the command to kill, causing your pet to instantly inflict [ 1,047 + 105% 120.8% of RAP ] damage to its target and apply the Hunter's Mark effect.

I Find this part a little confusing... Why does BM have two kill command tooltips.. one for BM, and one for MM and SV?

Surely they are not thinking of making KC across the board for all specs..?

[Deleted]

I Find this part a little confusing... Why does BM have two kill command tooltips.. one for BM, and one for MM and SV?

Surely they are not thinking of making KC across the board for all specs..?

It will be a datamine issue. Same thing with warrior notes.

[Effinhunter]

Wow. That's a major nerf to AS. And for what? A very small buff to KC? Could we at least get an appropriate reduction in focus cost of arcane shot? It's not like we have a focus dump option for BM.

[Kaeth]

And we still have 30 focus cost for Arcane Shot. I tweeted this exact thing to GC the day they announced 50% damage 50% focus increase that they're not fooling anyone and they'll end up decreasing damage and keeping focus nerf in place because of devaluation of signature shots.

It's more than a 27% DPF nerf from the live version. If somehow you're absolutely drowning in focus, it's only an 8-9% damage increase (Arcane Shot damage, not overall dps) for that 27% drop in efficiency.

So the first numbers pass is here, and ... and ... an Arcane Shot nerf?

At least the 14-18% buffs to signature shots are fairly significant. Going to be tricky to determine the overall change alongside the huge Arcane Shot nerf, though. My gut says that even if they're just trying to make 5.4 Arcane Shot less of a nuke and more of a focus dump, there still needs to be some middle ground on the cost, perhaps ... 25 focus?

[Beoren]

LOL wtf??? 15% buff to KC/ES/AiS and 25% nerf to Arcane Shot while Rogues got 40% buff to Dispatch and Mutilate fcking amazing Rogues need MORE buffs

[Terahertz]

Is blizzard stupid or something? Last time I checked chimera shot was the signature shot for MM. Aimed Shot is barely being used anyways as it's shit. This is like a big "fuck you" in the face by blizzard, especially towards PvP. The Arcane Shot nerf alone will make MM bottom spec for basically everything.

[Orcindauh]

I'm not happy about the Arcane shot nerf. 165% weapon damage plus 4,184 to 125% weapon damage plus 2,378 but we still have the 30 focus cost. Not cool Blizzard, at least lower the focus to around 25.

[Tehstool]

Is blizzard stupid or something? Last time I checked chimera shot was the signature shot for MM. Aimed Shot is barely being used anyways as it's shit. This is like a big "fuck you" in the face by blizzard, especially towards PvP. The Arcane Shot nerf alone will make MM bottom spec for basically everything.

MM is still going to use chimera shot. I does 112% more damage arcane than shot does for 50% more focus (30 vs 45).

[Dracodraco]

*is patiently waiting for Zeherah to update femaledwarf so we can see what kind of difference this has on our damage* <_<.

[Deleted]

*is patiently waiting for Zeherah to update femaledwarf so we can see what kind of difference this has on our damage* <_<.

Come on Draco, join the rest of us who are running around in total panic and threatening to unsubscribe.

[Dracodraco]

Come on Draco, join the rest of us who are running around in total panic and threatening to unsubscribe.

God damn chicken little...
Well, I already have my disc priest ready anyway, soooo... I'm covered either way <.<.

[Ayazaki1218]

Wait what? Isn't the nerf to Arcane Shot damaging Survival? I mean is the shot the spec most uses while on CD's and it hits pretty hard since it benefits fro mastery. The buff to Explosive seems great but still not too strong.

[Noctifer616]

Wait what? Isn't the nerf to Arcane Shot damaging Survival? I mean is the shot the spec most uses while on CD's and it hits pretty hard since it benefits fro mastery. The buff to Explosive seems great but still not too strong.

Doesn't BM have a higher number of AS in a fight compared to SV? It should hurt BM more than SV then.

[Tehstool]

Doesn't BM have a higher number of AS in a fight compared to SV? It should hurt BM more than SV then.

Depending on the talents, they are quite similar. It hurts them both equally. SV slightly more than BM though.

[subrosian]

Don't worry too much yet about the nerf, there's another balancing patch coming next week so, which will contain a lot more balancing than this patch (including the fat nerfs to demonology locks).

Cool, so they go Affliction and still dominate on every fight next tier. GG. The one fight Hunters are competitive on... because constant interrupts wreck casters... we still lose to Locks. Dots go tick tick tick tick tick. Hunters go QQQQ all the way to the bench.

[Deleted]

This isn't final though, this is just buffing them to see how they'll do in the 25m testing. (Classes never get scaled of anything but 25man testing).

There's 2 weeks to go, plenty of time to get everything sorted, and there's always hotfixes. I'm certain they'll get us at a good spot.

So, they need to buff classes like rogues and warlocks that are already doing awesome dps (and warlocks have the best utility in the game that causes most raids to stack them anyway) for 25 man testing yet they didn't want to buff hunters that were already bad at everything, instead all they done was moved damage from arcane shot to signatures.

In what universe does that make sense to you? Because it doesn't make sense in ours.... must be the dev coffee room universe filled with waccy baccy smoke.

[subrosian]

There's 2 weeks to go, plenty of time to get everything sorted, and there's always hotfixes. I'm certain they'll get us at a good spot.

MoP Beta T14 25-man testing lead Blizzard to falsely believe that Survival was doing "unintended DPS". They completely ignored that Hunters were stacking old set bonuses (scaled up by testing), trinkets and weapons to abuse SV AoE in a way that would be impossible on Live. The result was a 50% nerf to SV that wasn't reverted until 5.1. Hunters spent the actual progression portion of most of T14 as the least-desired, most underpowered class due to a complete lack of cleave.

T15 went Live with LoS and pathing bugs that were reported numerous times, by many top Hunters, bugs which still exist on Live for many fights. The first week of Heroic progression on Meg, Durumu and Primordius... Hunters were completely useless (hence why you see Warlocks and Ele Shaman and only the token gear-soak Hunters in the World race kills from that time period).

This notion that we're going to wind up in a good spot because Blizzard vaguely hinted at the idea that we'd be fine? It's compliance by complacency. They label anyone who speaks out against them as "crazy", an "outlier", a "rager", and they get people to follow along like sheep with the idea that everything will be okay. No need to put in effort, make a phone call, get upset, or do anything other than sit there and suck at the subscription teat of mommy Blizzard.

Too bad it HASN'T been okay, and they've been completely wrong for over a year. We have Bestial Wrath application bugs (0.3s delay on the execution of the actual effect versus when the buff is applied) for a year. We have pet AI and pathing issues that have existed for over a year. We have dots that aren't scaling properly with Haste, scaling issues with our abilities not being affected by our stats properly... and that has existed for over a year. There are issues reported on MoP Beta, that were promised to be looked at, that exist on Live as-is.

The current Blizzard propaganda is that we'll be fixed in 6.0. If you believe that, I have some great real estate that I promise will be worth billions someday that I'm willing to sell cheap. Nothing is going to change until the Hunter community starts demanding Blizzard "show us the money" now. Not 2 weeks, 2 months or 2 years from now... and this line that they're building our future... they build Mage's future on PTR with new animations and extensive testing immediately. Until you see artists, animators and a team of coders responding *instantly* to our issues, they haven't decided to fix them.

Talk is cheap for Blizzard... that's why they give it to us.