EDIT: This bug has been fixed and the ability now works properly, confirmed as of 02/06/24. Thanks to the blizzard employees for their hard work!
The Chimera Shot rune for hunters says it does 40% of the damage of Serpent Sting instantly. However, Serpent Sting’s damage scales with spellpower - and this increase in damage is not reflected in Chimera Shot’s bonus damage as it should be. This was honestly the most exciting rune for me because I played a spellpower hunter throughout all of Classic. Unfortunately the ability is bugged and because of that it adds next to nothing to the play style. I’m hoping to get Blizzard to take notice of this so it can be fixed.
Chimera shot also doesn’t work with serpent spread rune, and yet the poison sting from serpent spread will still overwrite your full powered serpent sting or scorpid sting, effectively making the rune useless in most cases.
I don’t think chimera shot looks at serpent sting’s damage at all. iirc it will do the same bonus damage from a lvl 1 serpent sting as a max lvl serpent sting, but I might need to test that again.
You’re out of luck. Blizzard has consistently shown they only NERF and NEVER BUFF hunters. There are bugs in the game that effec thunter performance for the past 4 years that have never been fixed, have never been addressed, and people are permanently banned for bringing it up.
Not only does it not scale with the actual net total damage of Serpent Sting—but if you run Serpent Spread, Chimaera Shot bugs out and adds no extra damage, yet refreshes serpent sting sting at its full duration.
Now before you say “well it must add the bonus damage once the sting is refreshed,” you’re wrong. It bugs out and any Serpent Sting that refreshes from the initial Serpent Spread triggers no additional damage. You HAVE to manually apply serpent sting—in fact serpent spread will override serpent sting and effectively makes the serpent spread rune USELESS.
Fix this bug blizzard. It will actually add variety to the class for once. There are currently no choices on hunter.
I can confirm that the bonus damage is based on the total damage of Serpent Sting, not the damage done thus far. My lower rank serpent sting does 40 damage - the bonus from Chimera was 16 - 40% of 40. Though the rune is unfortunately bugged to not include Serpent Sting’s bonus damage from spellpower. (That’s the purpose of this thread - please fix it!)
Serpent sting needs to scale off AP, this will improve that ability and Chimera shot. They also need to bring Chimera Shot back to 125%. This was never overpowered.
They were worried about Hunters with the epic Xbow using Aimed Shot, Chimera, Multi combos in PvP. But to do that, you have to give up the BM rune and BM talents, meaning it would weaken the wind serpent that everyone is complaining about.
You guys are talking about rebalancing the class and the rune, and that’s a fine discussion to have. But I just want the stuff that’s already there to work properly. The Spellpower ratios shouldn’t just be ignored, even if they aren’t often used.
Just noticed this on my hunter as well as I was testing some stuff out. It only does the base amount. Spell power affects the total damage of Serpent Sting, but that increased damage isn’t reflected when Chimera’s Shot’s 40% Serpent Sting damage hits.
This needs to be fixed, considering they’ll probably add a rune later on that makes it so your Serpent Sting damage is increased by your rAP (to make it so it’s not useless at higher levels… like it already is lol.)
I did some more testing today to see how things are going - and I can confirm that this ability is still bugged. Chimera Shot doesn’t scale whatsoever with Serpent Sting’s damage. It’s supposed to do 40% of Serpent Sting’s damage instantly, but it counts the base damage. This is hugely disappointing. Some people like to play with spellpower on hunters for arcane shot, serpent sting, volley and such. This rune seems perfect for that offmeta playstyle but with this bug in play there is no synergy whatsoever.
This does make an impact for regular hunters as well - because they also get bonus spellpower from various sources such as the boon of blackfathom. That bonus spell power will do nothing for chimera shot, though it should.
People are scared of any possible buffs for hunter but this is not really a buff at all, just a bug fix. Keep in mind that those hunters that top logs aren’t even using chimera shot, they’re using beast mastery. This is an important fix for alternative hunter playstyles but it’s not going to move the needle for hunter parses.
Literally was about to post this bug as I just started testing today. Seems you caught this a while ago. Would love a quick fix from the devs, it shouldn’t be a terribly difficult coding issue to have the Chimera Shot check total damage of serpent sting before applying 40% proc. @Buuchan if you have an X / Twitter account may consider posting there, they seem to respond more readily there.