Frostheim Beta Report 3: Deeper Testing

Beta build 12694
Focus regen at 4.16/sec
Level cap: 83
Still no masteries implemented for hunters.

Strangely, all of the in-game ways to report bugs seem to have been removed, which is disconcerting.

I spent a good chunk of time this weekend at the target dummies doing a bunch of testing with all three specs, including doing rotation tests, shot comparisons, recording parses, and recording video to determine how haste stuff is now affecting our cast times and auto-shots. Here’s the breakdown:

Marksman

I kind of feel that MM is the most polished of the hunter specs in beta at the moment. More than any other spec, their talents just seem to work.

One of the main abilities of MM is the Improved Steady Shot, and I suspect this is going to end up being one of those abilities that people continually misunderstand, because it does not work terribly intuitively.

When you cast 2 steady shots in a row, you get the buff. You cannot get the buff again, until it has completely worn off. So if it has 4 seconds left and you cast 2 steady shots — nothing. Not only that, but both steady shots must be cast after the buff has worn off, including the first one. Further, it only counts when a steady shot lands on the target — not when it’s cast. This also means that a missed shot does not count as a shot fired for purposes of Imp Steady Shot (meaning you can steady-hit, steady-miss, steady-hit and get the buff).

Also, imp steady is now affecting cast times as it should, which is nice to see.

I have not yet done any testing on Resitance is Futile or Termination. Some people are pointing out that Kill Command does more damage than arcane shot. This is true. Some are saying it’s more damage per focus, and this is not true. Kill Command uses your pet’s crit chance, which after a bunch of testing is only half my crit chance. So even if they get KC working better (more on that in BM) it’s still less damage per focus than arcane. So no reason to use it except in LoS situations.

If you missed it, the new MM rotation video can be seen Here.

Survival

On live survival is the most reactionary spec. Personally this makes me not a huge fan of it (though it also make it a bit easier to play in some ways, with the right addons). Well, in beta survival is more reactionary than ever, so I’m guessing people that like survival will like it even more.

One thing that really stands out about SV is how important crit is now. The Thrill of the Hunt talent refunds 40% of the focus of explosive and arcane shots that crit. Now sure, it does that with mana now, but who cares? We don’t run out of mana. But for focus, this is huge.

I did various tests of SV at level 80 (when my crit was 64%) and through to 83 (when with the same gear my crit is 24%). That crit difference makes a massive difference in focus. With the higher crit I was constantly using arcane shot to bleed off extra focus, and I capped on focus during every Lock & Load, requiring me to use Kill Command. At level 83, I pretty much only have enough focus to get my explosive shots off, and I usually have to wait a bit if Black Arrow becomes available.

Speaking of which, I suspect the low crit rotation will require prioritizing black arrow over explosive shot — otherwise you could wait a long, long time before you ever have enough focus for black arrow. That said, even with my super low crit, I always had enough focus for explosive when it was available, every now and then I needed an arcane, and sometimes during L&L I capped out and had to use Kill Command.

SV Scaling Issue?

The difference in 5-10% crit seems to make such a big difference in focus regen — and thus dps — that I’m concerned this might give SV a bit of a scaling problem, because SV’s dps will not scale linearly with gear (while other specs do, at least much more so). So at starting 85 gear levels SV dps will be quite low, but then as gear improves and crit improves, that dps will leap upward.

This means that if SV is balanced for mid-level gear it will be behind at lower gear levels, and ahead at high gear levels. If it’s balanced for high levels, it will be too low for the majority of hunters. This isn’t something that can be easily tweaked with master — since that will scale the SV dps evenly across all gear levels.

It’s possible that I’m over-estimating the difference, because I started with the insane crit rates that we have at level 80, and I’m pretty confidant that we will never again see crit percentages that high again. Possibly the difference between starting gear and endgame gear will only be 20% crit to 30% crit — and perhaps the difference of only, say, 5% isn’t *that* huge of a difference. We’ll have to wait and see when we do more thorough testing at level 85.

Arcane vs. Explosive

Another interesting thing with SV is right now arcane shot is doing more damage per focus than explosive shot (explosive does more damage overall). So technically right now you’d be better off only using arcane shot and save explosive solely for L&L procs. However, as explosive is the signature shot of the spec, I’m sure they’ll work the numbers so explosive is the way to go when they get around to that stuff.

Keeping in mind, we are not yet nearly to the point where they’re working on balancing numbers — they’re still working on over-arcing issues, getting talents to actually work correctly, squashing bugs, and, clearly, spending a lot of time working on the focus regen balance for hunter.

You can see the SV Shot Rotation video Here.

Beast Mastery

First off, I am very, very sad to report that tons of BM stuff is still not working. I fully intended to do a BM rotation video over the weekend, but too many things were still not working right to get a really good look at it. So no BM video for this build. I’m sorry guys : ( The non-functioning list looks something like this:

• Kill Command is wonky in several ways — more on that below
• Focus Fire is working, but only if you have a pet with the “claw” basic attack. Only the claw basic attack is granting the pet frenzy atm.
• Kindred Spirits is not giving the extra focus that it should
• Fervor restores focus to you, but not your pet
• Cobra Strikes is not working at all — the effect triggers (you see the buff) but it has no effect on your pet’s attacks (though I should really go back and see if it works for the claw attack like frenzy – Update: verified, cobra strikes only works with the claw special attack.)
• Sic ‘Em is not working (Update: Sic ‘Em also works with the claw attack only)
• Rhumba, of course, is still not yet implemented

So with a cat pet I could get the rotation mostly down, but without Cobra Strikes, Sic ‘Em, or Kill Command working, that’s not a great test of the spec.

I feel like Kill Command has two main problems right now. The first is that when you fire KC (and it’s off the gcd, which is nice) you spend the focus, make the big pointing gesture (as if to say “KILL THAT NOW, PET!”) but… your pet may or may not actually launch a Kill Command attack. Current theory on the beta forums is that you pet can only use Kill Command when the pet has a gcd free. If you trigger it while your pet is on gcd, then nothing happens (though you still use the focus).

In one test I fired off exactly 100 Kill Commands, and only 41 KC attacks were actually launched by the pet. I’m confidant that this is not what is intended, and that it will be fixed.

The second problem with KC is that the attack is based on your pet’s crit chance, not your own crit chance. At the time my paper doll crit chance was 24.37% and my level 83 pet’s actual crit chance was only 11.64%. So even if KC actually worked every time I pressed the button, it still would suffer a huge loss in liklihood of critting — in fact, arcane shot was still better damage per focus, and it has the chance (or better chance) to proc all kinds of useful things, like sic ‘em and cobra strikes.

We’re pretty sure that Blizzard wants BM to use Kill Command. Once they get it working when you push the button, I figure they’ll either make it work off of your crit chance, or when they do the pet design pass maybe we’ll see that BM pets have a much closer crit chance to our own crit chances.

With talents, KC currently has no cooldown. I can very easily see a rotation where we want to use Kill Command as a superior damaging attack, but also want to weave in arcane shots to maintain our Sic ‘Em bonus attacks.

Big Red Pet is AWESOMESAUCE

Okay, so you know how big red pet discounts the mana cost of your shots? Who cares, right? Well… reducing focus cost by 50% is huge. When I pop big red I can spam arcane shots (11 focus each!) for almost the entire time, non-stop (or considerably fewer Kill Commands — but still a lot).

An interesting side effect of this is you absolutely want to be all the way up at full focus before hitting big red pet — that way you don’t have to waste any time on cobra shots (other than one to refresh serpent sting) while you’re big and red. You just spam the specials away, and when you finally use all that focus up, you hit Fervor for another 50 focus for you and the pet and go crazy again!

This, by the way, is another advantage of the Kindred Spirits talent, which increases your maximum focus. For BM, it’s not just about the burst dps out of the gate, but building up to full focus to have that burst all over again ever 1.17 minutes for big red pet.

The BM rotation is still by far the easiest hunter rotation there is. Sure, it’s got more going on now, but all the other specs have more more going on. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what the BM rotation is though, until we see Kill Command working as it should be. With KC having no cooldown, will we end up using only KC? Only arcane? Some mixture of both? I hope it’s a mixture, but until things are a bit more refined, we can’t know what that mixture might be.

With the big pain happening with hunter movement dps however, I can definitely see BM as a crazy strong pvp spec at the moment. Battles go like this:

OMG! I’m stunned.

Rogues! I hate rogues.

BIG RED F’ING PET BIATCH!

Arcane arcane arcane I dance in circles with aspect of the fox still firing auto shots arcane arcane arcane…. oh you dead now?

FERVOR BIATCH! target someone else arcane arcane arcane YEEEEHAAAAAWW!!!

oop. Small again. Time to hide.  brb 1 minute guys.

General Hunter Stuff

Currently you no longer have to be in aspect of the hawk to get your full 9 focus regen from steady or cobra shot. Since AotH provides relatively little attack power, it’s probably better to just stay in fox all the time right now.

However, I’m confidant that will not be the optimal route by the time beta’s done. Blizzard does not want people just sitting in fox the entire time. Possibly they’ll make the steady/cobra regen no longer work while in fox, or possibly they’ll just have hawk provide so much attack power that it’ll hurt too much to be out of it.

Sure, hawk might only be providing me with 320 attack power right now. But maybe they haven’t fixed it yet, or maybe the big scaling comes at level 84 or 85. Heck, my Hunter’s Mark now boosts ranged AP by 1,500. Why not hawk too?

Skill matters more

Certainly one thing that I’m seeing in all of the hunter rotations is that skill will matter more. Talent specs will matter less, only because it will be much harder to make a truly horrible talent spec (which currently on live is shockingly doable). But with so much more involved in our rotations right now we’re going to see the ability of very skilled hunters to pull far ahead of average skilled hunters even if they’re far better geared.

I suspect that the average-skilled hunters will do just fine, but now we won’t be stutter stepping to eek out that tiny bit of extra dps — instead we’ll be micro-managing our imp steady stacks or filling focus for big red pet or perfectly planning for black arrow and L&Ls to get not a tiny dps increase, but very significant ones indeed.

Note that overall hunter stuff, a lot more skill involved, and skill will make a bigger difference than ever with dps.

overall note on steady/cobra working in aspect of the fox. Sure that’ll be changed.