I despise sniper training.

[Garkanh]

my only advice, (and it may be a horrible one), is to try and avoid mastery as much as possible, and just stack crit and haste. that way you reduce the effect of sniper training, making it less important, but still it will always be a dps loss to not have it.

[Deleted]

Doesnt matter how much you avoid mastery.
It'll still be around 10% and 10% is pretty significant.

[Echocho]

It doesn't promote bad gameplay. Bad gameplay would be not moving out of things that could kill you.

[Deleted]

I love sniper training and the flavor of MM in general. The only thing that imo doesn't fit is chimaera shot, which I'd replace with a different mechanic.

But if you stand still the entire fight you have 100% uptime right? That's what ppl do. Moving risks losing the buff, so why bother. That's the logic it promotes. Do less, do more dmg.

Can be said other way too. Don't think about movement and you risk losing the buff. Plan your movement and abilities accordingly and you can maintain the buff even if semi-mobile. The offset to movement is a fair trade between increased dps and mobility. SV is meant to do less dps and be unrestrictive in movement.

To think about it, how that doesn't promote bad gameplay? As a SV hunter, you can move every time you want, with no punishment, no loss and the only trade-off is blizzard's tuning. So you pick a spec that does less damage because you can move all the time.

And it's not even that bad. You can move for 4 seconds, have the buff another 2, and then small 1 sec window where you simply use your wet noodle. You can only regen focus on the move anyway (if you don't pick FS over LW), and the occasional ST damage loss of steady shot is too small to not move from fire during progress, especially on mythic where you die if you don't overgear the content. MM is still not movement-restrictive compared to other casters and can attack from greater distance than any other class in the game.

So all in all, you get flavor, you get decision-making, you get pros and cons, you have to play better. That promotes good gameplay imo.

[Dasani]

Be glad you didn't play a hunter back when you had to hold still to cast steady shot, as well as having to time your steady shots to line up with auto attacks to maximize your DPS.

I always find it amusing when blizzard shifts things into easy mode for a while then shift it to make it slightly harder than it currently is, but still much easier than it used to be, people rant and rave about it.

Marks is the highest DPS because it will take the most skill to play thanks in large part to sniper training. All the casters are having to remain stationary to cast, makes sense the best hunter spec would be treated in kind, but at least you have the option to play a less optimal spec to maximize mobility. It's called a tradeoff. It's the same reason you'd swap between BM and survival during SOO progression depending on the fight and circumstances.

[Deleted]

I think it promotes good gameplay. Hunters are super super easy; join Russian server, face away from enemy, press autorun, slide fingers up keyboard. Having to think and look for opportunities to stop kiting, and deciding if they're worth the damage increase, or weighing the damage vs mobility tradeoff, then considering the range gaps for enemy gapclosers, and your own cooldowns.. Oh man, it's good gameplay. Actually requires thought, unlike most of this class. Sorry you don't like it though; keep practising though and you'll get better with it, and then you might see the beauty.

[gnathic]

I'm going to try MM with a weak aura to help with the sniper training timing and see how it goes. sounds like a fun challenge to stay out of fire and keep sniper training uptime high!