Beast Mastery
- Ferocious Inspiration is now a 1 Rank talent, down from 3 Ranks.
- Improved Kill Command now Reduces the cooldown of your Kill Command by 3/6 sec instead of reducing its focus cost.
Marksmanship
- Arcane Shot now causes [ 17% of Ranged AP + 603 ] damage. Down from [ 33% of RAP + 603 ]
- Termination no longer requires Aspect of the Hawk to grant additional focus.
Survival
- Misdirection no longer has a focus cost.
- Resourcefulness is now a Tier 3 talent. Down from Tier 4.
- T.N.T. is now a 2 Ranks talent. Down from 3 Ranks.
- Point of No Escape is now a Tier 4 talent. Up from Tier 3.
- Lock and Load is now a 2 Ranks talent. Down from 3 Ranks.
- Survival Tactics is now a Tier 2 talent. Down from Tier 3.
- Hunter vs. Wild now is a Tier 1 talent. Down from Tier 2. Now increases your total Stamina by 3/7/10%.
- Entrapment now is a 2 Ranks talent. Down from 3 Ranks.
The actual listed changes here aren’t generally huge things — very nice to see Ferocious Inspiration down to one talent point now, and the change to Hunter vs Wild in SV certainly will changeup people’s off-tree builds, now that it no longer offers an AP boost.
But the bigger change is that all the previous focus cost changes now work! Arcane is 25 focus, concussive is free, serpent is 25, yay! While the coefficient of arcane has been lowered, it’s still critting for on average 8.25k (MM, 83, in 80 gear), well over steady shot hits or crits.
On another note, it looks as though they’ve changed the base focus regen rate again. My measurements are showing base focus regen to be around 4.166 focus/sec.
I’ve only messed around with MM so far (since that’s the spec I had on me) and the standstill rotation didn’t change a whole lot, just an extra arcane in each rotation. The extra arcanes are actually a tad tricky to weave in, because you need to double up on your steady shots at very specific times to reapply your Improved Steady Shot haste buff, but you have to do so without delaying Chimera at all, or risk losing your serpent sting.
With Aspect of the Fox and non-stop movement MM can pretty much get 1 chimera and 1 arcane shot every 10 seconds (every now and then I had to leave the arcane shot out), plus all the auto-shots and keeping serpent sting refreshed. You can also fire off concussive shot all you want, of course.
In a series of 5 min target dummy tests with all self buffs and in MM, my dps in Aspect of the Fox was about 37% of my full dps.
Wow, that’s quite a bit of Fox DPS. Looks like we’ll be able to not suck on movement phase fights.
37% while in fox, is that a good or bad thing? I havent really done so much moving tests in live to see how much dmg i do when moving, but 37% sounds a bit low?
I am NOT loving the change to hunter vs. wild, at all.
37% sounds extremely low. Thats gotta mean huge changes incomming to fox or it wont be used at all. Considering how often you can also find points to stand still in pvp for a steady i’d almost think about fox needing to go from 20% extra focus to doubling focus generation.
37% sounds extremely low. I would guess right now (3.3.5) that it is around 60% DPS while on the move (with a little bit of stutter-steppeing). Obviously AotF was intended for kiting, roaming and PvP, and DPS should be nerfed while on the move. The implementation of AotF should not have a higher DPS than AotH while standing still, yet it should have a higher DPS on the move (relative, but still nerfed DPS).
This next paragraph is a complete estimation on Blizzard’s thoughts. Note that I am NOT in the beta.
The way they are currently trying to have AotF increase DPS on the move is by a slight increase to focus regen, and auto-shots on the move. By having auto-shots be part of the damage while on the roam the availibilty of special shots had to be nerfed to lower our DPS. This creates a boring situation where we can only fire a special shot every 5 or so seconds. I think that they should remove the Auto-shot bonus of AotF, and increase the focus regen bonus. This way they are nerfing our damage while roaming by taking away our auto-shots, not our availability of special shots (the fun part). The availability of shots in AotF would also be slightly less than stationary (firing cobra/steady with AotH), to have a more significant damage reduction (more than just auto-shot DPS loss). However, there is a fine line here. AotF cannot have such a high focus regen rate that it overtakes AotH in DPS while stationary.
Basically, while on the move DPS should lack, but fun should not.
Actually with the latest changes I have a hard time picturing when we’d use aspect of the hawk. Now that we’re regenning focus from steady and cobra in any aspect, the only thing hawk gives us is the extra AP, versus the extra focus regen from fox. Unless we’re in a situation where we have focus coming in faster than we can use it (which most likely will happen with MM during rapid fire with rapid recup), the extra focus regen is probably more attractive.
According to my math, the difference between hawk and fox is 64.5 focus a minute. So that’s about 2 extra cooldown specials or 3 extra arcane shots versus the focus shot they’d replace. Given that the shot damage balancing is still not very far along it’s hard to say how that compares to the extra AP on every shot.
The change to hunter vs wild is an odd one indeed. With the push to cause dps classes/specs to take more survival talents to make things easier on healers it is interesting to me that they would remove what would (currently in live) be the only reason to take the talent.
What I fear in this has nothing to do with being a hunter, but as a healer. Unless the trees are built in such a way (I have not looked at the actual tree yet) that taking Hunter vs Wild is required to get to the next tier of talents, I feel early cata will have a LOT of healers getting shafted by hunters who think that survival talents are a waste of points…
What is worse is that even if it is required for surv hunters to talent into HvW to get to the next tier, that means nothing for the MM or BM hunters out there, as I imagine most will look for other talents to put points into.
I really hope that Blizz doesn’t balance healing around expecting DPS to spec into these talents, as the only time I would ever expect that is end game, progression minded players.
I agree with you pretty much exactly Gamma — well, except that Blizzard has stated that they want hunter movement dps to be lower than it is now on live.
But I think it’s a game design error to supply such a percentage of the movement dps with auto-shot rather than removing that and replacing it with enough focus for more specials. The end result is the same dps, but pushing buttons to cause our dps is more fun than just running around and watching it happen.
I’m sad about the hunter vs wild talent change. I always thought it was cool in SV to have a talent that actually rewarded gearing for survivability a bit.
Correction on my last post btw, it’s only 1.5 extra cooldown specials, I forgot the focus cost is 44, not 34, now that they’ve finally fixed the legacy talents on beta.
Quoting Frostheim, “But I think it’s a game design error to supply such a percentage of the movement dps with auto-shot rather than removing that and replacing it with enough focus for more specials. The end result is the same dps, but pushing buttons to cause our dps is more fun than just running around and watching it happen.”
YES!
Ohh, and femaldwarf. While AotH is enabled steady/cobra shot regen focus (9 i think).
Gamma, you may have missed that in the last beta patch it was changed so you do also gain that 9 focus from steady/cobra in any aspect, even fox. I’ve tested and it does currently work that way on beta. So you no longer need to use AotH to get the extra focus from steady/cobra.
@Femaledwarf
Wow… Sweet. Yeah I missed that bit. I was camping for three weeks and just speed read through a couple blogs. ): not in beta
So Arcane shot is pretty much down to what it is now. From 15% AP to 17%. Now that our special to auto is also back to what it was (unless you insist in taking the MM ArP rotation), this should take away the last of any worries that our dps is nerfed.
For me, I’m happy Blizzard really came back on their PvP stuff. Dual arcane shots per focus is much better even if it almost half the damage.