Thoughts on the Redditt AMA with GC from today

[jax]

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Survival Hunter
We wanted to make Explosive Shot more powerful than other shots, such as Arcane. To do so, we shifted some damage from their DoTs:

Increased the damage of Explosive Shot by 20%.
Reduced the damage of Black Arrow by 25%.
Improved Serpent Sting now increases the damage of Serpent Sting by 50%, down from 100%.

Surely this wasn't the sole reason for deciding to nerf Serpent Sting? Personally, I was quite enjoying hunters having something that actually resembled a dot, rather than what serpent sting was and now continues to be: something you only use once per fight (except when target switching). I'm just curious if that's your design intent, and whether having some form of multidotting utility was seen as overpowered.

No, we actually like Survival getting a bit of the multi-dot style. This change shouldn’t invalidate that.

Was it also intended that this change bring down SV's AoE damage? I'm not sure how we were doing at 90 AoEwise, but this definitely has a significant impact.

There was also a recent bugfix which significantly increased Survival’s AoE damage. The instant damage from Improved Serpent Sting would not be dealt if there was already a Serpent Sting on the target that was greater than 15 sec long. This meant that during AoE, when casting Multishot repeatedly, only some of them would trigger the Improved Serpent Sting damage. We fixed that, which also of course increased their AoE damage significantly. The nerf to Improved Serpent Sting and this bugfix offset each other.

Thoughts?

[Kisho]

Sounds good to me. Currently on live my arcane shot can sometimes do the majority of my damage (I use Thrill of the Hunt because I hate Dire Beast) on single target fights, which doesn't seem right to me. Putting more damage into Explosive seems like a good idea.

And well, if he's right in that AoE will be unaffected, then there are no issues here.

[Deleted]

It would be awesome if they made explosive trade to spread explosive shot from the main target up to 10 targets. That would be multidotting.

Serpent sting imo isn't multidotting, every class got more dots than that (maybe just not ele shaman). lol

[aarjun]

The nerf to iSrS isn't that big a deal, because maintaining SrS on more than 1 targets is not really feasible in MoP due to focus overflaw. At 85 before 5.0.4, keeping SrS up on 2-3 targets would've been a dps increase, but that's not the case in MoP.

The fact remains: hunters have no way to compete with other classes on cleave fight and that won't change in MoP. SV will also remain the worst spec for multi-target fights that require target swaps, because of the 30 sec cd on BA. I really wish they'd make ExS the way it was in wrath beta that did splash damage and provide a minor glyph similar to Lava Lash to remove splash for PVP purposes.

[Kimbald]

The nerf to iSrS isn't that big a deal, because maintaining SrS on more than 1 targets is not really feasible in MoP due to focus overflaw. At 85 before 5.0.4, keeping SrS up on 2-3 targets would've been a dps increase, but that's not the case in MoP.

The fact remains: hunters have no way to compete with other classes on cleave fight and that won't change in MoP. SV will also remain the worst spec for multi-target fights that require target swaps, because of the 30 sec cd on BA. I really wish they'd make ExS the way it was in wrath beta that did splash damage and provide a minor glyph similar to Lava Lash to remove splash for PVP purposes.

standard solution for everything this Xpac: make a glyph for it...

In pve you have glyphs to spare, 2 to be exact, especially as a SV raider (different as a BM solo'er for example).
So the logic would be: make a major glyph that gives your Explosive shot splash damage, not a glyph to remove such splash damage!

In pve you come glyphs short.
There is already too much 'common sense' utility reduced to glyphs:

Camo glyph to some extend: that ability has been weak all Cata, and now we need a glyph for MoP to make it what it was supposed to be all along?

Snake trap glyph: those snakes should get that avoidance by default, no excuses there.

Disengage: if disengage proved too short in pvp mostly: increase it... don't take the easy glyph route.

A SV hunter is built around dots, but he needs a glyph to make his cc remove dots?

I realise this is not the main point of your post, and I'm not really attacking you on it as such.
I'm mostly venting about the ease at wich glyphs were added to solve weaknesses that shouldn't be there in the first place.