Huge Hunter changes incoming

[Ninjeff]

How does Arcane shot cost more focus than the Survival signature shot? This seems like such bad design.. IMO Arcane shot should cost about 25 focus and Explosive shot should cost 30 focus and have their damage tuned accordingly.

[Kaeth]

Affliction is receiving minor buffs due to the fact that they can't use Malefic Grasp on the move anymore, which is a big portion of their damage.

Malefic Grasp has been back on the Kil'Jaeden's Cunning talent again for over a month now. Affliction only has to stop to cast Haunt or reapply Unstable Affliction.

[Deleted]

2P setbonus is down to 4seconds for BM now.

My avarage arcane shot crits on the raid target dummy is 115K. 60K avarage hit for 30 focus, blizzard are frikking retaded.

Even with the changes to KC my bite does WAY more damage then kill command, while having 20-25% higher crit chance.

What a complete joke of a patch atm.

[Effinhunter]

2P setbonus is down to 4seconds for BM now.

My avarage arcane shot crits on the raid target dummy is 115K. 60K avarage hit for 30 focus, blizzard are frikking retaded.

Even with the changes to KC my bite does WAY more damage then kill command, while having 20-25% higher crit chance.

What a complete joke of a patch atm.

If that's true for the 2 piece, then that should bring it down to roughly 4.5k dps, which is where the 4 piece is also at. That's also roughly 2k worse than set bonuses from live t15. If that does go through, all warforged offset pieces should be at least as good as having set bonuses. That would be a new low for this expansion.

[Deleted]

well maybe for BM or SV thats true, but in a hypothetical case where they buff MM enough to bring it in par with SV or even BM on ST, both bonus are really strong for MM compared to SV or BM, as both synergize really well. But then the spec would be totally dependant on having the 4 pieces

[Megabloks]

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?).

Funnily enough I only lost 3k dps according to sims going that reforge. Then I ranked 16th on Lei Shen.

[Dracodraco]

Funnily enough I only lost 3k dps according to sims going that reforge. Then I ranked 16th on Lei Shen.

Lei Shen is one of the fights where Mastery is more acceptable, though. It's not a pure singletarget "tank and spank" - to get a rank on Lei Shen, you have to AOE like crazy - and if you time your beast cleaving of the balls with 5x stacks of Frenzy, it devalues haste a fair bit (due to already being at an insanely high level), possibly pushing mastery ahead.
Looking at your log, you only had 2x warlocks and a shadow priest going "full out" on the AOE of the balls, apart from yourself - everyone else is mostly just leaving them be, or passively cleaving them - not really trying to obliterate them. That's a sure way to get ranked, and not something alot of people can "afford" to do, either because their guild can't, or because it's unwilling to "boost" a person to ranks.

With that said, it's been known for a long time that the difference between the secondary stats is extremely small. Both haste and Crit are "RNG"-stats, relying on (for haste) proc'ing more bonuses, or (for crit) RNG favoring your crits.
Mastery is the only "passive" stat that has a linear scale, and it scales with both haste and crit :3.

[Deleted]

But why are they nerfing arcane shot while they are buffing all other primary shots to compensate Readiness...I don't get this tbh

[Kaeth]

Sorry, Mega. I probably shouldn't post from work when I'm feeling argumentative.

[Deleted]

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

General
Corruption damage has been increased by 10%.
Immolate damage has been increased by 10%.
Affliction
Agony damage has been increased by 16%.
Drain Soul no longer energizes Soul Shards from the pets and guardians of players, and now deals 34% less damage. If other periodic Affliction damage effects are triggered by Drain Soul, they now deal 60% of their normal damage (down from 100%).
Malefic Grasp now deals 34% less damage, and causes all of the Warlock's other periodic Affliction damage effects to instantly deal 30% of their normal periodic damage (down from 50%).
Unstable Affliction damage has been increased by 21%.
It annoys me when i see warlocks getting buffed , they are already doing well , there is a huge difference between our dps and what warlocks/mage/chamans do , we don`t bring anything special to the raid and we are still getting nerfed , most of the guildes don`t want to have more than 1 or 2 hunters in their raids , we became useless , look at the streams of the best guildes , they keep relying on warlocks , mages and chamans sometimes they don`t have a single hunter in their raids .
It makes laugh when i see blizzard nerfing the AS shot back again et increasing the cost of it (OMG it`s our focus dump ) .
I checked on femaledwarf yesterday after the last update of the website and i don`t see any gain of dps with the nerf of the RPPM trinkets we lost lot of dps and even with the buff of KC/AI and ES we didn`t gain lot , our dps is the same, we would like blizzard to review the increase of the cost of focus of AS and buff all our signature shots not just Aimed shot or at least giving the MM back their readiness , they have promised they would do huge changes and improve our dps , so would like to see improvement ^^ .

[Kaeth]

Curious ... after the RPPM nerf, how much of a dps gain is the legendary meta over the crafted agi/critdmg gem?

[Deleted]

the meta is not affected. tho they lowered its base ppm a bit.
the 2 piece for MM is also 4 sec, like BM. really underwhelming. After switching from 4pct15 to 4pc16 (trying to keep agi the same and secondary stats the same, to compare bonuses) it is a DPS loss, for all 3 specs, maybe the 4 set for SV is better. I couldn't see at any moment the 4 piece in my buffs for BM, not with elvui or default ui. RPPM trinkets with a 10 sec duration sucks, even with double ppm. But that is for all classes.

[Deleted]

Hunters spent the actual progression portion of most of T14 as the least-desired, most underpowered class due to a complete lack of cleave.

Yet there were only 3 aoe fights (out of 16) and even there hunters were viable (yes i play hunter). Plus i don't recall not seing hunters in CM's at start of MOP.

With the rest of your post i agree.

[Dracodraco]

Yet there were only 3 aoe fights (out of 16) and even there hunters were viable (yes i play hunter). Plus i don't recall not seing hunters in CM's at start of MOP.

With the rest of your post i agree.

You've got to be kidding, right? Being "viable" weeks after the top end has done the progress means nothing. The only fights in the entire tier that hunters were sort of good for, was:

WOTE (1 min CD on spark soaking).
Vizier (heavy movement).
Blade Lord (Heavy movement).
Lei Shi (Heavy movement).

That's it. FOr every other fight, hunters were absolute shit? Protectors? NVM; pet not affected by the dmg% buff. Tsulong? All other casters did far more dmg as they didn't have to rely on focus upkeep to burst down adds. Sha? Multidotters/AOE dream. Hunters were used as ball-bitches because of how Deterrence could block the emerge and did decent AOE to the adds, but lots of classes did far better.

I could go on, but not really in the mood. Suffice to say, Hunters, before the buff they got in 5.1 (look it up - 100% serpent sting dmg etc) were utter shit.

[Saoron]

it's ok guys.. hunters are always taken to challenge modes.. we are more than viable.

[Dysheki]

They've unbanned my account both times (waiting on the 24 hours to fall off on B.NET). The only change they made out of my list was to remove the focus cost of Dash. And yes, that change was because of me... it took two voicemails to Greg Street, a voicemail to Rob Pardo, several emails, two perma-bans and dozens of hours of emails and letter writing, but by god I got the focus cost removed from Dash (hold your applause, I was trying for actual fixes... I obviously failed).

You think very highly of yourself.

I made a post about how the PTR DoC change nerfed cleaving, AoE, multi-dotting, and made it useless during BitW range for ferals. Other people pointed it out too but it was clearly my post that was the sole reason the devs reverted the change. Clearly.

How do you hunters stand by and let this hooligan post here? All he does is post hyperbole and nonsense with a little substance thrown in at times for good measure.

[Deleted]

How do you hunters stand by and let this hooligan post here? All he does is post hyperbole and nonsense with a little substance thrown in at times for good measure.

I think most are just ignoring him. If he thinks he is the one and only savior of the Hunter class, so be it. It's not really hurting me in any way.
Besides it's amusing to read from time to time.

[Dysheki]

I think most are just ignoring him.

That's good to hear. Just wanted to double check.

[Rtslbd]

No changes latest ptr update.

Blizzard logic: Buff warlocks (the most overpowered class all expansion), continue to provide 'buffs' which are a slap in the face to certain classes as you have removed/nerfed them greatly in other areas.

I can't believe this is even happening lol, obviously i play a hunter and we have just been shat on. Now our rotation includes a lot more cobra shots because we are focus starved due to them starting off by buffing the arcane shot damage and doubling the focus cost, then removing the damage portion and leaving the high focus cost. Readiness gone due to pvpers crying, slight buffs to our signature shots that are nowhere near enough to bring us to a competitive amount. The only 'good' buffs are stampede back to 100% damage (which we had prior, plus the pets abilities) and the amoc 40% buff (which is worse then live anyway because we cant double up at the start with readiness. I seriously hope they do a PROPER buff before this goes live and not a mid tier (after we have already cleared content) +5% aspect buff again.

[Windthorn]

Don't worry guys we'll get buffed once the progression race is over and there's no point to the buffs with a promise to fix us in 6.0. I mean that's what they said when mop was announced and now look at us!