Almost blizzard, but you replaced the wrong ability…
Chimera shot should replace rapid fire, cost focus, and base focus regen should go up. rapid fire is NOT fun to press and it’s one of the most silly abilities i’ve seen in this game.
5 Likes
Plural… Still didn’t answer my question.
Moving on…
I like this! Rapid Fire’s whole identity is just screwy. They want a marksman that makes precise shots, but lets just spaz shoot some arrows for 2 seconds and while we are doing this manic arrow shooting somehow that increases our ability to focus.
Lovely, we are insane.
I had an idea for just making Rapid Fire a longer CD (45 seconds?), cost focus (40ish), and make it substantially increase auto attack speed for 6-8 seconds. Would synergize well with LnL, but wouldn’t be crazy in PvP because you could LoS the damage.
For everyone who is advocating for rapid fire to cost focus how would you solve the rotation problems. The focus generation is what allows us to pump through trueshot. Without it your going to be spending “half” the trueshot window using steady shot and not have the focus to leverage the reduced cool down.
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That’s because they removed the bug where both shots would hit a single target. The ability is going to be used solely in cleave fights. We’re going to need to talent swap a lot more.
Seems like there could be dozens of solutions for such a simple problem. Is this really a design challenge lol? I mean … the true shot window already sucks with rapid fire as a builder. I don’t see why true shot shouldn’t be changed regardless?
It should still be 79% AP for each head, so 19% AP more than arcane shot even if there’s only one target. On two it should be 79% x 2
I don’t think it’s ever intended for a talent to be a dps loss in any circumstance.
I disagree. Being able to just pump aimed shots and rapid fire constantly with out focusing on other abilities for a small window is super fun.
2 Likes
I agree. My point is that rapid fire being a spender or builder doesn’t have anything to Do with true shot. They can just increase focus gen during true shot so that we can spam those abilities without worry. For example, be increasing natural regen by 2-3x so we can use our abilities and precise shots
Trueshot would not be the only problem, just the biggest standout. If you make rapid fire cost focus then your normal rotation will be vastly focus starved. I did not mention it earlier because I don’t have the exact numbers, but I’m not sure you could generate enough focus just with steady shot to use aimed shot, rapid fire, and still spend arcane shots.
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They could just increase focus gen of steady shot then. Like I said there are probably thousands of ways to improve focus gen/spend regardless of rapid fires role or existance
I think the changes are great OTHER than the focus nerf. Who decided we need that? That’s gonna ruin the fun of the rest of the change
TLDR: Our focus economy is actually better in SL than on live even with these focus changes, and even compared to BfA’s Master Marksman, mostly due to the significant and relatively unpublicized increase to our base regen (3/s → 5/s). That alone is 60% more powerful than Master Marksman, in terms of focus per minute. We spend slightly more of our rotation casting Steady Shot, but overall it largely leaves us in a better spot than BfA on the focus front. RF having a 2.0s channel (and Streamline no longer increasing it) is also a huuuuuge win, imo.
That’s actually already largely been fixed. On live, RF does 10 ticks of 26% AP each over 3.0 seconds, for a total of 260% AP. On the PTR (changes haven’t been pushed to beta yet, but that also means anyone can test them using the PTR client), RF deals 7 ticks of 34.58% AP over 2.0s, for a total of 242.06% AP. So about 7% less damage and 30% less focus generated (10 → 7), but 40% higher DPCT. The 7% reduction is almost certainly made up for by the extra second of not-channeling-RF (and thus can do other stuff) that we gain.
I’m on the fence about the focus changes, however. We already had an issue where the majority of our passively-generated focus and default focus from RF was spent just on Aimed Shot and the follow-up Precise-buffed Arcane Shots. The GCDs used to cast those, and to reach focus neutrality, take approximately 40s out of every 60s, leaving only about 20s of “filler” time. That “filler” time is important, because that is what is consumed by talents like Serpent Sting, Barrage, Explosive Shot, Double Tap (stupid GCD…), Volley, Lock and Load, etc. That strongly limits the amount of those we can take at once, because we simply run out of room.
SL already made that tighter by adding covenant abilities and Kill Shot (which is rotational even >20% with Flayed Shot). Reducing the focus generation of RF and rather substantially increasing the focus cost of our abilities does not help that at all. It’s also based on a fallacy, tbh. The only reason we have as much focus as we do is because of the synergy between Surging Shot’s RF reset, Focused Fire’s +60% bonus to average focus gain on RF, and possibly Lethal Shots further increasing RF usage, and Master Marksman saving us a clean 75+ focus per minute.
All of those are already gone in SL. To hit our focus generation further just feels…unnecessary.
Going off of the PTR changes as they stand now, 5x Aimed Shot per minute costs 35*5 = 175 focus. Those 5 Aimed Shots generate 7.5 Precise Shots charges, which is another 7.5 * 20 = 150 focus. RF is 3 times per minute, 7 focus each, for 21 focus generated. Base focus regen for MM in SL is 5/s (which is an increase over BfA’s 3/s, so there’s that at least), which grants 300/minute. So that’s -325 and +321 per minute. To offset the tiny 4 focus deficit, we need to cast 40% of a Steady Shot.
Aimed Shot is 5 * 2.5 = 12.5s. Arcane Shots (to burn Precise charges) is 7.5 * 1.5 = 11.25s. RF is 3 * 2.0 = 6.0s. The sole partial Steady Shot is 0.4 * 1.75 = 0.7s. So that’s a total of 30.45s consumed per minute to burn off all of our Aimed Shot charges, RFs, Precise Shots charges, and reach focus neutrality. So that’s actually substantially better than current (which requires 41.94s to reach that point baseline, or 35.0s to reach it with Master Marksman). The remainder of the minute is filled with a focus-neutral combination of spenders (Arcane Shot, but also includes talented consumers like Serpent Sting and Explosive Shot) and Steady Shot for regen.
One of the issues with Serpent Sting right now is that, at a 12s duration, you have to cast it 5 times per minute. At 10 focus per cast, you also need 5 Steady Shot casts to offset that focus. That’s a total of 16.25s out of the 18.06s of filler we had, just devoted to Serpent Sting.
With the latest changes, we instead have 29.55s of filler time, and Serpent Sting only needs to be cast 3.33 times per minute instead of 5. That reduces Serpent Sting to consuming only 10.83s per minute (including the Steady Shots to balance it), leaving 18.72s of other filler, more than we have without Serpent Sting in BfA.
So while the focus changes on the surface look a bit rough, the increase to our base region in SL is actually quite significant (just the passive regen buff provides 160% as much focus per minute as Master Marksman does in BfA).
The only net negative, in my book, is that the nerf also shifts the filler rotation more towards Steady Shot. In BfA, a focus-neutral ratio for Arcane Shot to Steady Shot is 1 AS to 1.5 SS. That takes a total of 11.5 + 1.51.75 = 4.125s, so our “filler” time is spent 36.4% on Arcane Shot and 63.6% on Steady Shot.
In SL, the neutral ratio becomes 1:2, which takes 5.0s. That leaves our filler time spent 30% on Arcane Shot and 70% on Steady Shot. Combined with the larger amount of filler time, and my napkin math says we’ll spend about 3.4% more of our rotation casting Steady Shot compared to baseline BfA MM, and about 34% more of it casting Steady Shot compared to BfA MM with Master Marksman. /sadface.
7 Likes
Fair point! Probably bugged due to the bug fix then?
I think feral Berserk is worse. But it puts Trueshot in the same category.
Don’t know. Could be a combination of things like mastery damage amp not applying to chimaera, level 49 passive that increases arcane/multi shot damage not applying, or what you said, or something totally different. I’d just report it as less damage than intended.
I’m actually excited about the changes to Serpent sting. I feel like now in pvp if i pick venthyr for my covenant i can run Flayed shot, serpent sting, explosive shot, stream line, post haste, lethal shots, with lock and load.
I can have a pseudo RsV hunter in MM fashion.
Now i can be a mobile MM hunter and pump out Decent sustainable damage with small windows of burst opportunity with out having to be so tied down to Aimed shot. I really like the changes except increase on focus cost to arcane shot.
For pvp this looks exciting to me.
2 Likes
it will still probably bottom of the barrel in pvp, especially in arenas compared to the other two specs.
right now on the PTR, arcane shot does more signle target. chimera is basically a cleave spam ability now, will probably be taken for dungens and leveling and bosses with alot of adds. pvp arcane will still be it and anything ST focused. sad what they have turned chimera shot into.
I mean, that’s clearly unintended. Chimera Shot’s AP coefficient is 33% higher than Arcane Shot’s. If it’s dealing less damage, that’s a bug. Don’t base your judgments off clearly unintentional mechanics. Falls into the same boat is peeps that were in love with CS because both shots were hitting the primary target if there wasn’t a cleave target.
CS as advertised exists as a way of inserting passive 2-target cleave into the rotation, which is something critically lacking from MM’s kit. That’s hardly a bad thing, even if it’s not WoD CS.
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