September News/Discussion

[Kevin]

New beta patch being loaded right now.

Tigole listed some tidbits on it here, but mostly vague.

The awesomeness of his tidbits was this one:
What a great patch note =)

I do love that note.

I have a few comments on the hunter changes.

Mostly good, though explosive shot was a bit over nerfed. It's close to what I think they want but I think they toned it down too much.

Right now for survial the shot rotation that gets me the most DPS seems to be the following. Each dash represents .5s. So the 15s duration of serpent sting gets you 30 dashes. The | indicates the start of casting

Code:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5
|--E--A--E--S..SM--S..SE--S..S|

| = Fire Serpent Sting, which procs Lock N Load, giving 2 Arcane or Explosive that don't trigger the 6s shared cooldown or cost mana, this means you get 3 shots. The 2 free and then a 3rd that starts the 6s cooldown.
E = Fire Explosive
A = Fire Arcane shot
S = Start/Finish the channel of steady shot. It's a 2 s cast.
M = Fire Multi shot.

You can't actually reapply the serpent sting until there is less than 1s left on it's time if you try you get a "A more powerful effect is active"

Now, yesterday before the patch, explosive shot was way more powerful than Arcane and you would use it for all 3 of the shots. But now on a single target explosive has to have the 2s to deliver it's charge to keep up. If there are 2 targets to get hit by the damage from explosive you would want to fire it for all 3 shots.
You could also refresh the sting earlier and you would actually want to do instead of that last steady shot. Now you can't. So your timings are right on the wall and any lag or latency is going to cost you a steady shot. I often end up not getting it off, or getting it off and losing a second or so of sting time.

You do always want some sting up not just because it will give you a lock and load proc now but because you'll likely have the talent that gives you 3% damage boost to all damage you do.

You don't really have to worry about autshot. It's unlinked and it will fire off as it should if a bit syncopated. It won't fire when casting but it seems to store the shot and keep the timer going as normal so that if you have a 3s auto shot speed you'll have a hit and say you do an instant shot followed by a steady shot. The instant starts that 1.5s GCD and steady takes 2s to cast so you would be 4.5s after the first auto before steady fires. Well an auto will come out with that steady, and then you'll get another 1.5s later, right at 6s from starting the first auto shot.

Now I still need to do more testing on that, but I'm quite happy about that change.

It also seems that haste now does lower hunter GCD times (like it does with casters down to a minimum of 1s) and it shortens the steady shot casting time as well. This is good. This means that while it looks like you may end up with a haste cap eventually that it won't be nearly the issue it can be in TBC. I don't have much haste gear on my hunter to test with and haven't grabbed a friendly shaman to check either but it's looking very good overall.

I just wish that explosive was clearly better than arcane all the time unless you had to worry about CC.

And yes I realize some of the stuff I'm mentioning has likely been detailed elsewhere already (the autoshot stuff) but as I've mentioned I haven't really dug around too much on EJ or other sources to really get into the mechanics.

Besides with a patch like every week I'm always having to respec and things change enough that it would invalidate some of my knowledge anyway. :)