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| Reviewed 5/10/2011 Patch 4.1 |
View other WHU WoW Cataclysm hunter guides here.
The Cataclysm changes to the MM talent Careful Aim and the way this interacts with Piercing Shots has brought up some questions about exactly how the MM hunter bleed effect of Piercing Shots works.
Specifically if you’re just watching the debuff on the target, it looks like every new piercing shots proc overwrites the debuff with the new one — making it look like you’re actually losing part of your previous piercing shots bleed. This is not the case.
The short version is this:
Every Piercing Shots proc from Aimed Shot, Chimera Shot, or Steady Shot crits gives you a bleed effect that does 30% of that crit damage. You get this effect for every single crit from those shots. It does not overwrite the existing buff. It does not refresh the existing buff — so you aren’t actually able to get more than the 30%, or less. You just get the full 30% extra bleed damage from every aimed, chimera, or steady crit, just like the tooltip says.
When you see the piercing shots debuff refresh, here’s what the game is actually doing:
The game looks at how much damage is left to be done on the existing piercing shots, then adds that to the total damage of the new piercing shots — it then takes that new total and divides it by 8 seconds, doing that damage each second.
Piercing Shots Example
So if your steady shot crits for 10,000 damage (for the sake of round numbers) it then gets a piercing shots proc that will do 3,000 damage over 8 seconds — or 375 damage per second for 8 seconds.
Now lets say three second later you get another steady shot crit for 10,000 damage, which will also get a piercing shots proc for 3,000 damage over 8 seconds. That first proc has ticked for 3 seconds at 375 per second, and has done 1,125 damage — but has 1,875 damage left to do over the next 5 seconds. We add that 1,875 to the 3,000 damage of our new proc, to get 4,875 damage that will be done over the next 8 seconds — so piercing shots now has a full 8-second duration, but will do 609 damage per second.
This is why if you look at combat logs, the average tick of the piercing shots bleed is so much higher than it should be based on your average crits.
The 30% Bleed Buff
It’s worth noting that Piercing Shots is a bleed effect, and its damage is increased by the 30% bleed debuff, which can be provided by the hunter pets hyena, boar, and rhino (exotic). The buff is also provided by arms warriors, subtlety rogues, and feral druids.
thanks for that tidbit of info frost! ive always been confused as to how exactly the refresh on the dot actually worked. its good to know you arent losing any damage by say having a steadyshot crit after a chimera and the lower damage crit start the duration over again.
Okay, so the bleed effect works as intended, very nice math there!
However, is the bleed effect still worth the talent points? If it gets the increased damage from a pet/group member, or even on its own? Crits do sort of happen pretty often so that bleed effect could be active for a looooong time and actually build up to be pretty nifty occasionally. I guess it all depends on your crit chance, eh?
Piercing Shots is absolutely worth the talent points! It’s huge for MM!
I was playing a bit with pet buff combination and had saw weird numbers when playing with Ed (my hyena).
With the +30% blood buff, I was sure I will see an increase of 30% of the damage that is done with Piercing Shots when attacking the dummies.
However when turning Ed’s Tendon Rip on & off I was able only to see a change of up to 12% in the damage that is done by my Piercing Shots
any chance this will interact in some way with the Gore ability (bleed effect) from the boar?
Re-read the last part of the article: “The 30% Bleed Buff”
ok.. I was a bit eager to post (considering it was my first post).. so let me try again.
How does our piercing shot the Bleed effect for our rhino/boar/hyena (or arms warrior/ feral druid/subtlety rogue) into account? Is it as Wilegenius suggest an increase of 30% bleed damage, or does it interact in another way.
Also your post seems to suggest that with a new piercing shot the timer starts over (thus a new 8 seconds with improved damage) instead of ticking seperately.
With the starting over of the timer we lose dps, compared with each piercing shot ticking seperately.
Assuming the bleed effect is 3,000 damage per second, with a new bleed effect every 2 seconds:
- with resetting of the timer it gives after 9 seconds (5 shots) it gives 55933,6 damage
- without resetting of the timer (ticking seperatly), after 9 seconds (5 shots): 72000 damage
this gives a difference of 16066,4
- with resetting of the timer it gives after 20 seconds (10 shots) it gives 172054,6 damage
- without resetting of the timer (ticking seperatly), after 20 seconds (10 shots): 180000 damage
this gives a difference of 7945,4
so 3 conclusions can be drawn:
- when the piercing shots can fully end, there is no difference in total damage (which usually doesn’t happen);
- damage based on not resetting the timer will give more damage, then damage based on resetting the timer;
- the longer the fight takes, the more the damage scales towards each other. So short fights will give relative less damage then longer fights.
PS: I’ve got a spreadsheet with my calculations, but I have no clue how to upload it
Your numbers are correct — piercing shots is really an effect for boss fights, not for short trash fights. However, in practice you will see the bleed effect fall off (well, after the boss is below 80% health) — keep in mind that a Cataclysm hunter geared in the first raid tier might have about 20% crit, unlike today’s crazy numbers
And of course once the bleed falls off, the numbers should match up perfectly. I suspect the reason piercing shots (and other bleeds, I believe) work this way is so that it only has to use one debuff slot, rather than a slot for every single application, which is how it’d have to work if they each ticked separately.
The pierceing shots does not work this way. It is well known that pierceing shots is a deep wounds/ flashburn(old from earlier in the beta) style effect. The bleed damage left over from the first SS crit in your example does NOT get broken up over the course of 8 seconds due to the fact that the new duration time is now 8 seconds. The first bleed will continue to tick at the normal amount over the next 5 seconds, on-top of the damage of the other, whereupon the first bleed will be done and your ticks will diminish in power because of the first bleed terminateing and haveing 3 seconds left on the second bleed. Pierceing shots does 30% of the damage of the crit over 8 seconds as bleed damage. Any ADDITIONAL pierceing shots effects does not affect the rate of any previous pierceing shots on the target. each crit will be its own bleed and run untill termination 8 seconds later. all bleeds on the target will tick together every second.
sorry dont mean to seem nit picky but the way you explained it is that i could have a pierceing shot last through the entire course of a boss fight if i just kept the pierceing shots rolling, which is DEFINATLY not the case.
Would make a lot of sense to me, logicly and considering the numbers is my previous post.
Incorrect — in fact, Piercing Shots has always worked as an add and redivide throughout Wrath, and it appears unchanged now.
This is very easy to test too — just fire steady shot at the target dummy — with careful aim you’ll crit every time. Let piercing shots tick a couple of times, then fire steady shot again and stop shooting.
If you were right you’d see a higher piercing shots tick at first that would suddenly become lower once the first piercing shots fell off. This is not the case — instead you’ll see a consistent tick for all 8 seconds, and the amount works out perfectly to the system described here (and, incidentally, many other places where people have tested piercing shots.
Keep in mind I’m not saying that piercing shots *stacks* — it does not — it’s only the unused damage that gets added onto the new piercing shots bleed.
Sorry, old flashburn, now reverted back to the ignite. ignite used to be a talent that buffed flashburn back when flashburn(the fire mage mastery) was dot on crits, now its the other way around and the ignite talent is the dot on crits and flashburn(if its even called the same thing still im not going to look it up, im going solely from memory) is just buffing your ignite damage.
Hey I was just thinking about ways to maximize your damage on certain fights. Is there a forum for this?
For example I was thinking that on Val ther in BoT you could switch targets back and forth to put bleeds on them and keep them up as much as you can.. Maybe even put SrS on both of them (especially if you’re SV)
??