This video gives you a good look at exactly what the MM shot rotation is looking like right now in the Cataclysm beta. For whatever reason there are still persistent rumors that the standard hunter rotation is focus-starved and worse off than in Wrath.
This is not true.
We hunters are getting off a better special shot to steady shot ratio than in Wrath. I also take a look at Volley toward the end to give an idea of how many you can fire before running out of focus. The hunter rotations are not yet automatic for me, and I noticed some delays here and there as I was trying to talk about something completely different while maintaining the rotation, so please forgive me 
Note: our ability to shoot on the move is a problem right now — those rumors are right — but it’s so clearly bad that I trust that Blizzard will address it. I’m not going to waste a ton of time on it until they actually get a fix in place.
Just wondering, with the new changes to aimed shot should we use it as our big opener and THEN apply scorpid and serpent, (with a steady or two in between) or just ignore our regular aimed shot and use it only with the free proc? (if so, whats the reason? Just too big of a focus sink?)
I know this is all subject to change as the beta continues, but watching your video had me interested in this.
Please tell me that cat skin is not easy to get now.
Aimed Shot would have to be delicately timed to be worth it as an opener. The problem with aimed is that your auto-shot will not fire during the aimed shot cast, and aimed shot resets the auto-shot timer. So you effectively lose at least 2 auto-shots by casting aimed shot.
I have no idea if that skin is easy to get nowadays or not — I got it back in vanilla
Does this hold true for BM rotation as well? My experiences with that (aside from trying to track frenzy stacks to no avail) seem that BM tends to focus starve quicker than MM and SV.
This is just MM. I’ll get to BM eventually, but I kinda want to wait for them to do the pet design pass first, ’cause I think that might affect pet stats.
When I go over the spec at the dummy I also spend a lot of time determining overall dps, measuring the effects of haste on various shots, etc. I’d like to avoid doing all that knowing that a major change is on its way
Pretty nice job there.
The rotation looks really good and with the aimed proc it might not be that boring as today on live.
however i was wondering if it is possible to roll the venom forever, or do you have to reapply it at some point.
also when you might be doing some testing with sv in the near future, could you try to figure out what expose weakness actually does ?!
That makes sense- do you have an idea if they’re adding something to augment the interface to track Frenzy stacks? At the moment it feels like a game of cat and mouse trying to track how many my pet has so I can activate Focus Fire.
Kasila i think that is only viable in a BM spec and not MM like frost was previewing.
Also did anyone notice the FLYING MOUNTS!!! YES!!!!
back to the subject that rotation for MM seems a lot more interesting then our current wrath one ie: spam steady till a shot is off CD. I like it, thanks for the update Frost
is camo working yet? i haven’t seen any coverage of what it looks like or its effect on aimed. in my head I had worked out that I wanted my opener to be a md’d and camo’d aimed shot.
@Kerba: Scorpid Venom does roll forever — casting steady shot resets it to its full 30 sec duration. That works for scorpid venom only, not the others.
@Hua: Camo is a level 85 ability. The current beta level cap is level 83. So will be a while before we can see it.
Yes, you can fly in Ironforge — you can fly in almost all of the old world, except some of the new starting zones.
Awesome stuffs! I about crapped my pants when I saw the drake fly in! SO cannot wait for flying in Azeroth.
I notice that, unlike rogue and kitty it seems like we want to keep our focus well over empty, so also unlike rogue or kitty, the talent to increase your total focus isn’t going to be wasted methinks. It definitely looks like “ranged rogue” is nowhere near accurate as a description of the “focus hunter”
Great job as usual, thank you.
With aimed shot interrupting auto shots, if this makes it into live servers in cataclysm… do you think we will see a larger variety of ranged weapon speeds and maybe want to gear for ranged weapons with a longer speed time to not clip it as an opener?
Also I think I heard you mention or saw at some point a steady-arcane-steady-arcane in there, does this mean that the 6 second cooldown on arcane shot has changed?
The way it works now, you just won’t want to use Aimed in your rotation. As an opener it could be good as long as you know exactly when your tank is entering combat so you can start pre-casting.
Technically a *shorter* cast ranged weapon would be better — it doesn’t just clip the auto-shots, it *resets* the timer. So when your aimed fires off, you then have to wait the full duration of your auto timer before your first auto-shot fires.
Arcane shot has no cooldown. Cooldown status of all shots is listed here; http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2010/07/cataclysm-beta-hunter-focus-costs-for-shots/
Ah ok thank you for the information… hopefully i’ll get my beta invite on the 3rd round.
Interesting rotation. I was wondering if you could also use a base rotation instead. I mean, since we are now ranged rogues, why not use the rogue rotation principle?
They usually have a base rotation of “shots” that have no cooldown, and prioritise the better/special/incidental abilities on that. At that moment they interrupt this base rotation to do the other ability and then continue.
Now the analogy isn’t the same, as their usage on ‘prime shots’ isn’t for the most part based on cooldown as we hunters, but on stacks based on procs, but I wonder if that would nevertheless work.
So treat e.g. CS as an interuption that moves through the rotation to the Arcane+4xSteady instead of a drifting fixed rotation.
But perhaps that won’t work. Just a quess.
We are, of course, nothing at all like ranged rogues. At all. Nothing.
Rogues are defined by their stuns and combo points, not their energy. It’s like saying when we had mana we were just physical mages.
You seem to be having no problem keeping your focus up. Atleast while standing still. If they do up the focus regen, they’ll probably increase the focus cost of arcane so we don’t just Chimera-Arcane-Steady-Arcane, etc. I wonder how important Haste will be to Hunters. Level faster, Frost! See if anything changes at 83.
Completely off-topic to the beta, but I noticed a lot of clicking in the first half.
If that clicking is the keyboard when you are firing off a shot, do you just click once for a shot, or do you click the shot multiple times until it goes off?
Interesting video – I look forward to seeing you do the other rotations.
The rotation certainly looks more interesting. I’m still wondering why they decided to make Arcane Shot such a staple in the MM rotation when the whole point of marks is to be the physical damage class? It would make more sense to have an aimed shot talent that (with full points in the talent) would allow for you to use aimed shot the same way you are shooting arcane shot now. I think the only spec that should need to fire arcane shot should be BM, since SV has Exp Shot. That’s just my $0.02 though.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
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Based on your testing, do you have a sense that they actually mean for us to regain 3 focus/sec as your testing has shown, or is that a mistake that will be adjusted back to the 6 focus/sec as they had stated earlier?
The 3.125 base focus regen is not a typo on Blizzard’s end. That is where they want our base focus regen to be.
Now the question is will they do something to improve our aspect of the fox regen, which currently boosts our focus regen by less than 1 focus/sec.
I noticed you had big clear text indicators for when you fired a certain shot, is that an addon or did you put those in to the video manually for illustrative purposes?
I put that in manually in post. No addons work in beta atm.
Frost, thanks for rotation show, this was really what I was looking forward from all those beta lucky hunters out there.
I have question about debuffs on target. I cant recognize all of them because of resolution of the video. I can obviously identify Hunter´s Mark, Scorpid Venom and Serpent Sting. The fourth one which is there for most of time reminds me of Piercing Shots talent – but it has gone away from the talent tree (my favourite talent out there…). Is it REMOTELY possible that we will still have it? And last debuff looks be pet´s Rake but i am not 100% about that – but it stays on target 9 seconds so it shoud be Rake.
Thanks for answer
Buffs question:
while we are at it, there is another question, this time regarding Buffs:
1) what is the buff that looks like like Master Tactician? I have searched cata.wowhead.com and didnt find any other spell using this icon apart for MT (that was SV talent and is gone anyway) and Martyr (spell you get on Red dragon in Oculus) – Appears at 0:51
2) the one that appears at 1:04 and is fourth from right – looks like Sic´Em proc?
3) at 2:03 the fourth icon from right – looks like Stinger – 4pc T10 proc. You normally dont wear 4T10 but I suppose you do in beta because SS now can crit without 2T9, correct?
Thanks
So did I! It was possibly the toughest Alliance tame in vanilla I think. Sian-Rotam. I worked hard for him!
Hey Frosty, Great vid mate, makes feel alot more comfortable with whats to come!
Also, are you looking to do a similar vid for SV? I’d love to see how the dots & trap launcher is going to play out.
Thanks for the vid. You mention that we are still getting the same ratio of “special” to steady shots, i.e. 1 chimera, 1 aimed (except now it’s arcane), and 4 steady shots. But to compare the dps potential with wrath, isn’t it more important to look at the timing? If all damage remained equal, shouldn’t we be concerned with the interval between chimera shots – whether it is greater than 10s (nerf) or less than 10s (buff)?
Chimera is still on a 10 second cooldown, so it’s fired just as often. Arcane does way more damage, so it’s pretty equivalent to the old aimed shot. But — we also get the occasional free instant aimed shot in there, for big damage.
Right now the dps looks to be about in the same range — probably a bit higher — in the beta, and that’s without the mastery system working.
Oh wow, I was under the impression that they had removed the cooldowns on everything, so we’d be like rogues and purely limited by focus. Thanks for the clarification.
What I’m seeing here makes it seem like MM will not be a good pvp spec anymore. With some of the biggest shots having cast times I feel like pvp hunters are being designed out of MM completely. Any sense of this?
You think it’s worth to start equipping haste gems for faster regen or will that never be a serious option ?
@burntpepperoni: No sense, no. Not sure how you got there, but the only shots with cast time are steady and aimed shot (and aimed is sometimes instant). Chimera does more damage than before, arcane does around twice the damage as before and of course has no cooldown.
Hey I’m a lvl 80 hunter and am just getting to learn about shot rotation. Can you give me a good tree spec for mm and bm and a good shot rotation so i can bring my dps up. I cant do ICC cause my dps sucks . tyvm
Are you using the improved steadyshot talent? With the proc on that, it seemed like i could fire 2-3 arcane shots without needing to build up focus again. With the increased damage on arcane, that might be a viable option as it seemed to proc pretty regularly.
Also, I noticed from messing around with this rotation that the cd on chimera shot cuts it pretty close to the duration on Serpent sting, I had to fire it immediately after it came available or my sting would fall off. Just something people need to be aware of.