Their justification for increasing the focus cost of Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, and Multi-Shot makes no sense at all and really messes with the flow of the spec. It ESPECIALLY ruins the Trueshot phase and further cements all those moments where we ignore Precise Shots charges. Totally unneeded change.
I still think Careful Aim needs to be baseline. It used to be baseline and it’s just going to continue to be a mandatory pick.
Lock and Load’s proc chance is still far too low.
Serpent Sting, Steady Focus, and Streamline changes are very good. I don’t see Serpent Sting being viable as it adds an extra focus burden to a spec that is now going to have focus issues.
Reducing Rapid Fire’s channel time to 2 seconds is also a good change.
I don’t really get the Chimera Shot change. I don’t really envision Chimera Shot as a standard on-demand focus dump without a cooldown. But I guess I’ll have to see how it plays. What made more sense to me was putting Chimera Shot where Careful Aim is now so you have a row where you’re gonna gain an active ability no matter what and you choose whether to gain two-target cleave (CS), spread AoE (Barrage), or clumped AoE (ES).
There are still other issues that need to be addressed, e.g. Volley’s Trick Shots uptime is too low and Trick Shots still doesn’t work against 2 targets.
I want synergy because if MM is going to have a specialty, I want the spec’s talents to reflect that focus instead of looking like a bunch of random ideas chucked at a dart board.
Take a Murder of Crows - What am I supposed to do with this? I don’t have pets, where did I come up with a bunch of birds? Why should I pick Barrage and Explosive Shot when they have next to no interaction with any of my abilities, traits, talents, or borrowed powers? These talents don’t enhance anything, they get in the way because they’re redundant with the stuff I already have.
Dead Eye is only the strongest in the row because it gives two charges of Kill Shot, something that used to be baseline. Speeding up Aimed Shot would have been awesome if that 20% execute window was still there. Yeah, Dead Eye is only useful for that window…unless MM hunters go Venthyr for the Flayed Shot (which they will).
Just make Double Tap and Lethal Shots better: like hey, pick Lethal Shots and you also get a passive 5% chance to proc Kill Shot at any time, but if you pick Double Tap, you also get a passive 5% bonus to Critical Hit Damage. That way, I can be wrong when I call out Flayed Shot as the go-to covenant ability for MM’s ST DPS.
It’s nice that hunters have “variety” in their talent trees, but the fact of the matter is, at least one of those choices from every tier is straight-up garbage (and that’s if we’re lucky): it’s been that way since MOP.
What bugs me is that 100-70% is the easiest part of any encounter. It’s the closer that’s most important: nobody hardly ever said “if only we did more damage on the opener” during progression, but there’s a lot of folks who’ll wish they could have pushed out more damage for that last 20%.
To be fair, now all the level 25 talents suck: I get to do more damage for the easiest part of a raid boss, pull an entire room by accident for negligible amounts of damage, or have a slow-moving AOE ability that takes three seconds to do piddling amounts of damage.
But don’t worry, you get Kill Shot on a 10s CD, so it all balances out, and losing that bottom 20% window will definitely give MM the oomph it needs to take out trash mobs for AOE when it has to blow a GCD on MS followed up by a three-second cast on Aimed Shot.
Need more Kill Shots? Well, you’re definitely taking Dead Eye and going Venthyr.
Honestly super underwhelmed by these changes. I wish I could test them out and post feedback, but on the surface these changes seem very superficial. The line about “opening up more gameplay styles” doesn’t make sense to me. These changes seem to double down on the current gameplay.
With a focus nerf, we’ll be more reliant on both steady shot and rapid fire , not just steady shot as they suggests—which is a perplexing change. I think this will make the rotation feel worse overall. It certainly won’t help the extreme clunk the spec has.
Turning chimera into arcane shot is just disappointing and unimaginative . I’m never excited to press arcane, and now I’ll never be excited to press chimera either. Chimera continues to lose any sense of uniqueness or fun every change it gets. A great opportunity to offer divergent gameplay by replacing rapid fire was wasted here.
Rapid fire change is a nice buff to rapid fire, but it places an increased emphasis on an ability that a lot of hunters just hate. Hunters wanted rapid fire removed, instead, it gets buffed?
The SS talent change is a good idea, but having to maintain that 10s buff + RF is going to make for some awkward focus capping/AS capping situations. 10s is too short, and I think this will be punishing more than it will be fun.
The first talent row changes are very nice. I am happy with those. Hopefully the bleed not stacking is just a bug.
Just disappointed overall. Hopefully I’m wrong, but just so confused by the changes.
The obvious solution is just making trick shots proc on 2 target. Why take a fun, satisfying nuke ability and turn it into an arcane shot; a weak focus dump. With legendaries and volley and trick shots, I just think this makes chimera shot sound so lame, not exciting.
Just remove Rapid fire blizzard and replace it with Chimera shot for the love of god.
Put focus building emphasis on Steady shot and leave it at that. Make Chimera shot a high damage cool down based shot that doesn’t require a channel. Aimed shot damage needs to feel rewarding for having to stop to use it.
MM will need some serious damage output or durability buffs if they want to make MM work in PVP with how much they want them to not kite.
Also the bleed on the first talent row not rolling over to a refreshed bleed better be a bug or that talent is worthless.
Serpent sting IMO should be baseline and interacts with a baseline Chimera shot like it used to back in the day.
Yes, please! Someone explain to me what was wrong with that version of chimera shot? I just don’t get it. Now we’ll just be spamming it for some generic wet noodle damage.
Also, I can’t express enough how much I hate having rapid fire as an awkward, secondary builder.
Chimaera shot is dealing less damage than arcane shot on a single target in PTR even though arcane shot does 60% attack power and chimaera shot does 79% attack power. Hopefully that’s a bug, I submitted it as one. Picking chimaera shot is a dps loss compared to picking nothing in ST as is.
I agree, I think that stacking would be preferred, but anything other than it has to end then go again kind of thing.
I gotta say though, REGARDLESS of the changes, i’m glad there is some kind of additional work on hunters. This is great. As it started off, it talks about how its just for marksmanship, so who knows, maybe Surv and BM get additional work as well!
fact is everyone this is what hunter is getting a bad bm spec tthats nerfed. a very bad DOA mm spec and survival that is dead.
dead class at this point
really i’ll be deleting this character pretty soon along with my other 3 hunters. i know on my raid/m+ tank i will not allow any hunters into my dungeon or raid groups anymore. their dps is going to be garbage.
That’s how this effect has historically worked back when it was called Piercing Shots.
Rapid Fire is worse for Focus generation as well - 21 Focus over 2 seconds every 20 seconds down from 30 Focus over 3 seconds every 20 seconds, a reduction in 27 Focus/minute, and leaving you with 2 extra GCDs to spend on Steady Shot or Arcane Shot.
Hmm… As a fan of rapid fire my gut reaction is meh. However digging into the changes and thinking a little more I’m happier. The reduced channel time of rapid fire will give more room for steady shot to breathe.
I’m not a fan of the new matter Marksman. Bleed on crits is meh. I would rather it still give reduced focus cost, but that’s just personal preference.
I like the 35 row. Extra haste from a steady shot and reducing it to only 2 required. Streamline interacting with aimed shot is a nice contrast. I’m honestly meh on Chim shot, maybe someone can explain why it would be more fun other then it pumps the meters harder.