Chimera Shot Clarification

There was a bunch of discussion in the comments yesterday about Chimera Shot, and the poorly worded tooltip lead to some misunderstanding of how it works. Just like the Aimed Shot debuff doesn’t increase the damage of any other shots, Chimera shot does in fact do damage based on the entire duration of Serpent Sting.

Because the tooltip says that on serpent sting it “deals 40% of the damage done by your Serpent Sting” many people read this as it only did damage based on how much your serpent sting had already done. This lead them to believe the serpent sting glyph was worthless, and further that you should wait until the end of your serpent sting to hit Chimera Shot.

Fortunately, this is easy to verify, since you combat text reports the damage done from the serpent sting aspect of Chimera separately from the main Chimera Shot damage.

So I popped over to the target dummy and did a series of tests firing serpent sting, then immediately firing Chimera. After getting about 20 results, I repeated but fired serpent sting, then waited until it was almost up to fire Chimera. Absolutely zero difference.

Then I put on the Serpent Sting glyph and repeated the test, and indeed I was doing something like 400 more damage per shot (had no buffs, no hunter’s mark, and removed proccing trinket). Again, the results were consistent regardless of how long serpent sting was on the target.

So Is the Glyph Worth It?

Dunno yet. I hope to find some time this weekend to theorycraft out all of the glyphs for Marksman. It is, however, easy enough to take a quick peek at how the Serpent Sting glyph works. Here is the equation for Serpent Sting base damage:

RAP * 0.2 + 1210

Lets say in a raid and with Hunter’s Mark we’re hanging out at around 7,000 RAP. Obviously this will vary a lot by your raid composition, but it seems like a fair benchmark. Thus we’re looking at 2,610 damage from Serpent Sting. However, we do have improved stings, giving us and extra 30% damage, or 3,393 damage.

Now, this damage ticks every 3 seconds for 15 seconds (5 times), or it does 678.6 damage every tick. The serpent sting glyph adds 6 seconds, or two more ticks, which adds 1,357.2 damage over the life of the shot.

So, base serpent does 3,393 damage, and glyphed serpent does 4,750.2.

Chimera adds 40% of that as damage, meaning 1,357 damage from base serpent, or 1,900 damage from glyphed serpent — or the glyph adds 543 damage every time you hit Chimera Shot. Assuming you hit it every 10 seconds, you’re looking at a gain of 54.3 dps for using the glyph.

However, it’s not quite that simple. Because the serpent portion of Chimera Shot can also crit! If we assume a 40% buffed crit chance we’re looking at an average damage of the chimera portion (average of crits and hits combined, at 40% crit rate) as follows:

Base serpent: 1,923.8
Glyphed serpent: 2,660

Glyphed now is doing 736.2 damage more. Again, if you fire chimera every 10 seconds, that’s a 73.6 dps gain. (In actuality, the theoretical gain is actually a bit higher since I didn’t take Mortal Shots into account.)

At any rate, on the surface Serpent Sting looks like a killer glyph for MM hunters. I’ll try to go through the rest of the glyphs this weekend and put a glyph guide together for MM hunters!