Hard casting aimed shot sucks balls. The spec is designed such that you have to get EVERY aimed shot you can possibly get off, or your DPS is in the dumpster. The problem with that is that the cast time is so long, that even if you’re midway through the cast, if a mechanic spawns under you, you need to move and stop the cast.
Look at the dragon soul MM spec. You cast Chimera shot on CD, and then you did two rotations of a focus cost shot and two steady shots for focus gen in between the cooldowns. If you could stand still, you cast Aimed shot to spend. if you had to move you cast arcane. Aimed WAS better, but not so much better that your DPS suffered really hard when you had to cast arcane. Chimera was your big deal. add to that your free cast Aimed shots from LnL and you had a rewarding experience.
Now, every missed aimed shot is crippling, and the devs are trying to balance the DPS around “how hard does this shot have to hit, given they have to cancel its cast one in four attempts”. It’s awful.
To the people that weren’t around back then, just think back to legion, especially antorus. Once you got the right legendaries and the right amount of gear, MM with marked shot felt great. You weren’t so reliant on Aimed shot for your damage, you could cast it when you had a second to stand still for boosts, or you got a free cast now and then.
The Devs need to give up on this “Build the spec around aimed shot” thing. It feels terrible, and it’s harder to balance.
20 Likes
Aimed shot is a big reason I don’t like MM the cast time is to long and to punishing for movement fights. The only time it feels good is when you have true shot. Wish they would do something to improve it.
8 Likes
Legion isn’t a good example to use. You were heavily punished for not getting off each Aimed Shot for each vulnerability window.
TBH it’s mostly fine as it is. Aimed Shot has 2 charges so as long as you keep it from reaching 2 charges it will be fine. The decision to add charges to Aimed Shot was controversial but this is why they did it. You really don’t have to cancel so many casts.
6 Likes
I would agree with you if everthing didn’t come together perfectly in Antorus. I feel like the vulnerabiity window/aimed shot dynamic was super smooth with the tier bonus/legendary combo during that tier.
Wasn’t that mostly because you were pretty much always in a vulnerability window? That would just go back to MM being punished due to movement at all times.
With the current version of MM you’re not losing DPS to moving unless Aimed Shot is going to spend some time at 2 charges. It’s actually a lot more generous to movement than most caster specs.
They could go with a WoD style setup where Aimed Shot was movable while casting but you had to maintain Sniper Training, but I think the reason they didn’t continue that was because the DPS loss to constant movement was a lot less obvious. I knew people who played MM and didn’t bother at all with Sniper Training because it wasn’t apparent just how large a DPS loss it was to not maintain it. When you can’t cast your signature ability the downside is unmissable.
4 Likes
This is SPECIALLY true in PVP.
You almost never get a cast off. It is truly awful, it makes me wanna puke sometimes…
Totally breaks the game dynamics and doesn’t make you wanna play MM.
They should make Chimera an ability that does not replace Arcane so we can have an instant shot to fill up the gap we are having right now.
They could even make aimed shot hit less to make up for adding Chimera to the talents.
But I truly swear this is ridiculous beyond understanding and buffing and buffing Aimed aint gonna do nothing.
We basically have no decent abilities to pick and choose from its not even funny.
But the big problem is not even this, the big problem is the fact we get nothing from the team that they are seeing the problem and are working on it.
They just wanna buff the damage to bring us from the 30th in place to 25th on the ladder so we stop complaining that we no longer lose to Blood DKs in damage. ROFL
I laugh hard at this so I do go depressed.
9 Likes
I play MM in pvp from time to time.
Sometimes when I’m overextended and not paying attention i cant cast aimed shot because i am trying to escape all the melee. Other then that just chull in the rear with your healers and peel for them and shot eveyone else in the face.
Wrath/Cata marksman was where it was at. Very mobile with Aimed shot just being icing on the cake. That’s what they should go back to.
9 Likes
MoP was my favorite personally for how marksman played. Legion i liked marked shot, but not how dependant the vulnerable window was to output.
4 Likes
mm needs help. this is disgusting. hunter is the only class in wow history going into a new xpac with only 1 SPEC!! melee survival dont exist to “real” wow hunters and mm is dead in the water. bm is O K at best but a parse and rng nightmare due to war orders nerf and nothing still coming close to it as a talent to pursue.
5 Likes
mop MM was a good spec it just had no aoe. if only they left it alone and added serpent spread instead of annoying trick shots.
they also need to bring back the big chimera shots. not the garbage version we have now.
4 Likes
It’s too bad they probably won’t do an overhaul until the next expac. Makes me sad, I miss playing marks.
4 Likes
Arcane shot should reduce the cast time of your aim shot stacking. Multi shot and trick shot should be baseline. Lone wolf should be baseline MM, Remove pet requirements for lust and other hunter abilities.
spec is instantly better.
5 Likes
I’ve been saying for years that Aimed Shot should be castable while moving, but it should reduce your movement speed during the cast. Fair compromise.
2 Likes
I like the way my hunter feels atm. I don’t like all the spammy shots like rapid fire, barrage, volley. I like having options. I focus heavy damage to one target and hitting others with trick shot.
The issue is, mm has always felt better when your major damage spell wasnt aimed shot. They brought it back that way in Legion, and it doesn’t feel right. It was much better in BC, wrath and cata.
3 Likes
Maybe WotLK and Cata (although Aimed Shot was a big part in Cata) but absolutely not BC. That was just static rotating between Steady Shot and Auto Shot and it was awful.
4 Likes
This is so easy, just make CHIMAERA SHOT a real shot with 5 secs CD and not replace Arcane, so we include it in the rotation and not depend only in Aimed.
6 Likes
You’d still depend on Aimed Shot.
Siphoning filler shots into Chimaera would only barely affect how quickly lost Aimed Shot usage screws over MM damage.
Even putting a significant mutually exclusive opportunity cost between Aimed Shot and Chimaera Shot would just cause one to preclude the other (making Aimed Shot defunct in favor of a short, unbankable CD, in this case, or making Chimaera Shot at best a situational skill for when one can’t manage their positioning well enough).
1 Like
The short of it is simply that Aimed Shot is slightly too long a cast for most modern mechanics. The portion of time spent immobile is fine; we’re just a little too likely to have to move at some point within that 2.5 second cast.
Simple solutions (pick one):
-
Reduce its cast time (say, to 1.33 [2s] or 1.5 GCDs [2.25s] instead of the current 1.66 GCDs), likely slightly decreasing its Focus cost and CD in turn for a similar portion of time spent immobile (just more granularly now).
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Make Aimed Shot castable while moving but return a revised version of WoD Sniper Training¹, likewise thereby retaining a similar portion of time spent immobile.
¹ Have Sniper Training generate 1 stack per second spent stationary or out of combat, to a maximum of 6, but only allowing you to benefit from up to 3 stacks (the last 3 therefore are protective margin). Each stack increases your casted shot damage by X%. Each second spent moving while in combat removes a stack.
- Ideally, attach a talent each for (A) bonus range and (B) movement speed based on Sniper Training stacks to the MM tree as optional utility after making Lone Wolf single-target only and baseline and pruning some dull bloat elsewhere.
1 Like