Frostheim Beta Report #4

Build: 12803
Focus regen: about 4.15/sec
Level cap: 83

We’ve had new builds just about every week for the last month or so, all of them bringing various hunter changes. Despite all this constant change, the details of hunter rotations are holding pretty steady… for the most part.

Arcane shot has been repeatedly tweaked time and again — and every time made weaker. Currently arcane shot actually hits for less damage than either cobra shot or steady shot (a lot less damage – nearly half the damage). So if you’re at full focus, you’re actually better off using another steady rather than an arcane. The result is that currently MM and SV will use Kill Command to dump excess focus.

However, I’m sure their goal isn’t to effectively remove arcane shot from the game, and I’m guessing they’ll tweak that damage back up so that it becomes a valid focus dump — which seems like the correct role for the shot… though I am a little baffled as to what they were thinking when they made it do less damage than our free focus-generating shots. Do they want to remove arcane from rotations?

Multi-shot is now down to only 20 focus, and I think that change came in a wee hot-fix patch that came after the latest beta build. The damage still sucks, and it’s still just 3 targets, but we probably have to wait for another actual build or two to see what their plans for multi-shot are. However, with Serpent Spread SV is probably better off applying Serpent Sting via multi-shot rather than pushing the serpent sting button. The shorter duration doesn’t matter, ’cause cobra shots will take care of that.

The MM rotation now looks more like it did earlier in the beta when arcane shot was expensive — since it’s now using Kill Command instead of arcane shot, but again, I’m assuming this is temporary and arcane shot will go back to being the dump. BM is still a decision-free spec, but it’ll probably take a build or two before that gets fixed (and to those who disagree, I can only assure you that Blizz does not want a spec to be devoid of decision-making or to be playable at near-optimum levels with a one-button macro).

Kill Command has an annoying bug, that I’m assuming will get fixed: when you’re fighting bosses with large hit boxes, your pet is considered too far away to actually use Kill Command. So currently tough to get actual KC data in actual 5-mans, and when I’m MM I end up capping on focus since I’m better off using steady shot rather than dumping focus with arcane shot, which is a sad failure of the focus mechanic.

I am, however, kicking ass on the dps charts in 5-mans. Whether this is because I’m a bit more familiar with the instances, or just the fact that dps balance hasn’t been done yet, it’s still nice to see. I’m doing either about the same or slightly more dps on average than I do now in heroics (usually a chunk over 7k). And that’s without volley.

Admittedly I’m level 83; however, my dps has actually gone down every level from 80 simply because I was super geared for level 80, and as those rating changes hit (losing 40% crit, 16% haste, etc) the dps plummets despite the increase in shot power.

Misdirection

As I’ve mentioned before, our new Misdirection has the added text at the end:

Transferred threat is not permanent, and will fade after 30 seconds.

This left us with the question of what “fade” means. Does it mean the transferred threat just vanishes, disappears into the ether? Or does the threat move back to us after 30 seconds, making the transfer temporary?

Happily, I did some testing and it seems we got the best deal, and the transferred threat just disappears — it does not go back to the hunter. So we can still use MD to get a few threat-free shots off, even if we don’t permanently boost the tank’s threat in the process. I am finding that I’m having far more aggro problems in dungeons now than in Wrath, even with tanks pulling over 4k dps.

Also, when I asked a guild tank who’s in the beta to help me test this to see how it worked, he had some questions:

Og: What exactly do you want me to do?

Frost: I just need you to stand there while a mob beats on you for a while.

Og: And that’s it?

Frost: Yes, you need to generate zero threat. My pet will attack a mob a couple times, generating a few hundred threat. Then I’ll MD to you and shoot the mob a couple times, generating several thousand threat and sending the mob to attack you. Then after 30 seconds when MD fades we’ll see if the mob comes to me, or goes to the pet.

Og: So am I going to end up naked in front of a target dummy? Because that’s what testing always seems to be to you.

Frost: Not this time, no. And that’s not me! That’s just the way science works!

Mastery

Obviously the mastery bonus for each spec are not balanced against each other. Radically not balanced. I mean, you get a few pieces of gear with mastery, and suddenly your SV spec is getting an extra 5% damage to everything except auto-shot and your pet. That’s f’ing awesome! You’re MM and the same gear gets you an extra 4% chance to proc a half auto-shot damage shot. That is much, much less of a boost.

Of course, I figured, MM does more damage naturally, so they need a weaker mastery so that in the end the specs can dps about the same. Only as I’ve been thinking about it more, I’m not sure this is such a good thing. Certainly you can’t expect them to be perfectly balanced — they’ll always be off a bit and will move around and blizz starts to tweak those numbers to balance the spec.

The unfortunate result of the benefit of mastery being so varied is that the specs are going to value the mastery stat wildly differently. So differently, in fact, that you could end up needing a different gear set for SV than you do for MM. This is a bit disappointing to me, because I was looking forward to an era in which the specs were dps balanced and we’d use our dual-speccing to swap from spec to spec mid-raid to use the spec that compliments the fight mechanics of a particular boss the most.

But if we need different gear to play a different spec… yikes!

Population Explosion

Back in the first days of the beta, it was kind of like being in an awesome club of like-minded folk. People were helpful and worked together and chatted together. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there were asshats then, but I never really encountered them. When people disagreed, they talked about why they disagreed. If it was a technical disagreement someone would produce data. If it was opinion they’d disagree respectfully and go on their way. It was like a guild.

Now with the population explosion of the beta in the last three weeks or so, it’s a far less nice place to be. The beta forums have gone way, way down hill. When people disagree they start getting into name-calling and personal attacks rather than discussing what they actually disagree on. You also see more and more people posting flat contradictions (rather than making an argument) and then treating people who contradict them as morons.

There’s also a whole lot more wrongness going on in the forum. This was always there, but the percentage seems to be higher now. People who claim patently silly things about rotations — a favorite of mine was that MM doesn’t need to save up focus for Chimera, instead that focus will somehow just always magically be there when you need to fire the shot. And these people, of course, post them just like the contradiction — no reasoning to support their weird thinking.

The larger chunk of the beta invitees — as I understand it — is effectively a random sampling. The people brought in specifically for their expertise or experience are a sufficient minority that they shouldn’t skew the sampling in any statistically significant way.

Whether there are a thousand or fifty thousand people, the percentage of asshats and trolls and scum who exist just to pollute the internet should be the same. So why does it seem like as any given population increases, the percentage of the loud-mouthed worthless increases?

Is it that they are dragging other people down to their level, the gravitational pull of the lowest common denominator? Or is it just that the loud-mouthed ranting of these rage-filled asstrolls has caused the non-rage-filled asstrolls to step out of the conversation. I have to admit to struggling with that impulse myself.

For the time being I’m sticking it out — despite that there are other channels available for sending feedback, including the in-game bug & suggestion reporting — I feel like presenting the feedback within the beta community is more important, and is a responsibility of the beta tester. You never know when someone is going to have a perfect answer to why your thought is wrong, or when your thought sparks an even better thought in someone else. Just submitting suggestions via the reporting tool is working in a vacuum, giving a thought without a bunch of people to chew that thought over and offer insight, support, or disagreement to supplement your voice to the developers.

But I tell ya, if things keep up like this, I’m tempted to subscribe to the work in a vacuum theory, no matter how much nature abhors those people.