Using hunters mark should give you an eagle mark. You need the ability to generate one for yourself about that often. You need to still be able to make marks in roar of sacrifice.
Lock and load as well as ebon bowstring need to be proc per minute (ppm) instead of a direct chance on autos now that auto is long. Rapid fire auto shot bug also heavily contributes to this.
Why? Just glyph both pets.
To be fair, have you seen the price of glyphs these days?
It’s absurd having to re-buy the same glyph over and over for individual pets.
This doesn’t work because the glyph is linked to the call pet slot, not the special stable slot. So even if you summon a pet in the glyphed slot to shrink it, it loses the effect if moved to the special stable slot.
Thank you for this Update Kaivax. As I’m sure you are aware it seems like no matter what happens somebody somewhere will be mad about it. Personally I love this change (admittedly I was mad with my pet being taken away and have actively avoiding lone wolf even in group content and doing fine) but I feel this could possibly be the best solution if tuning is correct.
I think both talents on the node should be about even in regards to tuning. Let those of us who want to manage a pet do so. This also could open up some build variety as by taking a pet, spotter’s mark gets weaker, thus encouraging pet users to not take some of the spotter’s marks talents down below (for example in AOE we wouldn’t take Ohn’aran winds) whereas “lone wolf” hunters would probably want to take it.
Lone wolf hunters may also be more encouraged to take unerring vision as spotter’s mark is going to be very strong during the cooldown and getting more trueshots will be encouraged whereas Pet users will most likely want to take double tap for more power elsewhere.
I see a lot of potential and I hope with tuning this could be a wonderful talent tree for all MM hunters and I long for the day where we can band together and enjoy the spec we all love as opposed to dividing ourselves.
PTR Build today or tomorrow so reiterating again (because feedback is still being drowned out for some reason)
-Trueshot is still extremely weak and needs help. This is the nicest way I can put it. It is the worst DPS cooldown in the game without question and there are 6 TALENT POINTS spent on BUFFING it.
-Aimed Shot still feels terrible because streamline having RNG factors as well as waiting game makes things very rigid and not smooth or “iconic” at all.
-Lock and Load is currently proccing an average of once every 1.5-2 minutes. That is just absurd. The lottery and gambling tier set is a failure waiting to happen for MM if it’s gonna be built around Lock and Load in its current state.
-The spec overall is way too RNG heavy and way too sluggish. Auto Shot has a tier set bonus and multiple talents built around it and I notice none of them having any impact.
-The amount of Haste that will be required to attempt to make things less rigid is going to be way too much than we can get next patch.
The talent tree itself is it’s own issue. A lot of bloat for no reason and a lot of things on there that shouldn’t be. Prime example
-Trueshot takes 6 talent points and you have to take all of them to make it feel like a real cooldown. Why not just throw some of that into Trueshot baseline? Bullseye (execute) used to be 2 talent points and people told you it felt bad so you made it 1 point. Now for some reason it’s back to 2 points just to remove talent points from play. This makes no sense with how bloated the tree really is. This also contributes to the below issue of talent bloat.
-There are multiple talents around explosive shot and auto shot that again, are just bloat and all do very similar things.
-I will also continue to shout from the rooftop that the tier set bonus for MM being built around pure RNG of Lock and Load is absolutely terrible feeling wise and I am expecting the tuning of it to be a mess as well. I was not a fan of the lottery gambling sets to begin with and I still am not
you shoudl be already using different talent builds depending on where you are , a talent build for solo , a talent build for dwelves and one for dungeons M+ or raids , so I don;t see what the problem is to load a different built which takes 5 seconds to switch to if you want to use your pet spec or non pet spec .
Trueshot in its current state deserves a cooldown in line with bestial wrath or colossus smash. Tensile bowstring and feathered frenzy should be baseline for it. The two talents you spend below it should be calling the shots and then the choice node between DT and unnering. Base cooldown should be a minute. CTS should reduce it to the ballpark of 45 seconds. You also need those two talent points for other stuff.
It’s okay if trueshot is a bit weaker if it’s available that much more often. Getting a doubletap and CDR/charges on aimed and rapidfire for half the duration twice as often does a lot to solve the massive amounts of deadtime that there is currently. This version of marks is frankly not well suited to long dps cooldowns anyway, because of how intermittently bursty it’s output profile is without cooldowns. It will be much easier to tune this way.
Why are we not talking about moving Primal rage to the class tree so it removes pets from the equation for all specs?
yeah we should have a lone wolf bm and sv!
Why would I switch talents between soloing and delves?
Yes, I switch on the off chance I do a raid, and if I for some reason did M+. But I’m doing neither right now, so no, I do not.
Not everything in this game revolves around raiding and M+ and y’all need to stop acting like it does.
Solo, delves, timewalking dungeons, etc. all use the same hybrid build just fine. I don’t care about min/maxing a bit more damage in timewalking when scaling is already whack anyway and the level 70 I get grouped with will do 3x my dps anyway.
I have a few concerns about proc munching for MM.
Marksmanship has munched Precise Shot procs within Trueshot and/or Volley for a long time now. This has never felt good and I’m shocked it’s been in the game as long as it has, but it hasn’t been a big deal because Precise Shots hasn’t been a big deal. Now that consuming Precise Shots 1) generates Spotter’s Mark, and 2) generates Streamline, it is a big deal. Trueshot has accordingly been changed to encourage us to consume Precise Shots within it (to extend the duration by up to 5 sec, and to generate more Spotter’s Marks, and to generate more Streamlines), and that’s good. However, some of the new changes have created even more proc munching issues.
Rapid Fire now generates Precise Shots. On the surface this is great because it means more Spotter’s Marks and Streamlines, but it also creates an annoying interaction. Let’s say we consume a Precise Shots proc and it generates Spotter’s Mark. Great! However, let’s also say both Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire are off CD. So what do we do? If we cast Aimed Shot to consume the Spotter’s Mark, we miss a potential Rapid Fire reset via Surging Shots, so we don’t want to do that. But if we cast Rapid Fire (which does not consume Spotter’s Mark), then we end up with a new Precise Shots charge, which we don’t want to waste since it’s so valuable. So now we have a Precise Shots and a Spotter’s Mark both active. If we consume the Precise Shots, we waste a potential Spotter’s Mark proc, and if we consume the Spotter’s Mark (with Aimed Shot), we waste a Precise Shots charge. No matter what we do, we will waste a valuable proc. I know this seems minor, but this situation happens constantly and it just feels awful. Is there a solution that I’m not seeing? (This could easily be fixed by allowing Rapid Fire to consume Spotter’s Mark).
Volley granting Trick Shots has always been amazing in AOE. Dropping Volley with Trueshot, then spamming Aimed Shot / Rapid Fire for 6 seconds straight is dope. However, now that Trueshot no longer increases cast speed without Streamline, we cannot do this as much. Perhaps this was the goal (if it was, that makes me sad). Regardless, now that Precise Shots is so valuable, this creates a similar problem to above. During Volley we either 1) spam Aimed Shot / Rapid Fire and waste all our valuable Precise Shots procs, or 2) consume our Precise Shots with Multishot and waste our free 6 seconds of Trick Shots. It doesn’t matter which of these choices is higher DPS, what matters is that we’re wasting valuable stuff and it feels terrible.
I am trying to envision an opening AOE casting sequence in which we don’t waste a proc of some kind, whether it be Precise Shots, Streamline, or Trick Shots, while also trying to ensure we cast an Aimed Shot (with Trick Shots) right after each Explosive Shot / Salvo for our new Precision Detonation talent. I can’t seem to figure it out. I admit I may not be smart enough. It seems like no matter what we do, we will have to waste something in the opener, which, again, feels awful.
At risk of sounding like a simpleton, I feel the cognitive load associated with the Precision Detonation talent (where Explosive Shot explodes immediately when hit with Aimed Shot) is too high. We need 2 charges of Streamline to do it, and we need Trick Shots for our Aimed Shot. Easy, just cast Multishot → Explosive Shot. But also make sure you start with 0 Streamlines, otherwise you’ll waste one. But also make sure you have an Aimed Shot ready. But also make sure you can cast the Aimed Shot IMMEDIATELY. See what I mean? And we must do this every single time we cast Explosive Shot / Salvo, which is a lot. It’s a neat idea, and it sounds easy on paper, but in practice it completely ruins the flow of the spec. I would rather not deal with it, but +25% damage on Explosive Shot means I have to deal with it.
The blue post mentions “The flow of Marksmanship’s rotation is smooth and iconic,” to which I mostly agree, except for these constant proc munching issues. I was hoping the rework to Marksmanship would address the munching issues, not make them worse. I enjoy playing efficiently, not wasting valuable procs. Is there really no way to rework this spec to avoid these awful interactions?
Right, so at most you need to buy 5 glyphs of lesser proportion to shrink all 5 call pet slots. I really wish we could put the glyph on the stable slots instead of at the call pet ability so we could permanently shrink the secondary animal companion.
That said, if your main called pet is of lesser proportion, you can just cast “mend pet” and the secondary animal companion will then shrink to match. However, you have to do this EVERY TIME your secondary pet re-appears (like, if you zone or dismount) .
I have put in bug reports about this to no avail. I feel like the intention is that the second BM pet should always obey the glyphed or not status of the main pet, and the need to mend before they do is a bug.
While I appreciate your explaination and descriptions, I will say that the point of generating Precise Shot and stacking Streamline is to spend them. The Spotter’s Mark application is almost forgetful and unimaginary that it should never be tracked. Similar to Lunar Storm on Live in which no one cares about the owl.
It has been very easy to generate stacks of Streamline to the point that firing an Aimed Shot without at least one stack is uncommon and should never be done other than as an opener. There is now more of a reason to spend an Arcane Shot or Multi-Shot prior to Aimed Shot. Is it a bit clunky? Yes. Is it difficult? No. It isn’t much different to what we have now. One just has to pay more attention to what is being used. Decrease the cast time and Focus of your next Aimed Shot by stacking Streamline, Increase the damage done by spending Precise Shots.
Should Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot cost 40 Focus to Aimed Shot’s 35 but do 86% attack power as damage while Aimed Shot does 435% attack power? Of course it shouldn’t. It doesn’t make sense. Is Steady Shot a good filler? No, it sucks. For the 80% of attack power damage it does, it should be named Quick Shot or Hip Shot and have the cast time reduced or be instant.
Maybe extra charges/procs that would be removed and wasted if we do X,Y, or Z in situation where something useful must be sacrificed to cast anything, could instead just increase the damage of what we choose to do by some amount, like some over healing abilities can turn into a HoT or absorb.
I have never swapped talent builds as there was not a need. Like many players I don’t do M+ or higher level raiding. When I do participate in group content it is normal dungeons and LFR where there is no need to fully optimize the talent tree or character build. To increase DPS for these situations all I had to do was dismiss my pet an Lone Wolf took over. Instead of keeping this simple mechanism and separating utilities from the hunter’s pet Blizzard made it more complicated by moving the function to the talent tree. I’ll live with it because the previous implementation is worse. However I’ve always felt Blizzard goes out of their way to inconvenience players when they are forced to backtrack on a poor design decision.
What boggles me is they took that knowledge and then mucked up how the rotation feels with these changes.
Broadly I like the ideas they are trying, but in practice all it does is over-complicate what has been one of my favorite specs to play for nearly 20 years (through reworks, tweaks, and weird states).
Not every spec needs to be “Absolute twitch reactive gameplay the spec 
”. While the changes don’t cause it to be that way yet, it certainly seems like that’s the plan with how the feedback loops work right now.
You want to open with rapidfire → arcane shot. This gives you two streamline charges and builds your bulletstorm stacks. You don’t want to waste aimed charges before you’ve built bulletstorm. Rapidfire → arcane → spend 2x streamline on aimed → explosive shot (aimed cast before this lands at the same time and blows it up, should give you a streamline but is bugged) → spend precise → you now have two more streamline charges for your next aimed shot. The bugs active that impact this involve the streamline charge that should be granted by rapidfire or explosive shot when you cast them directly after an aimed shot that consumed streamline. You shouldn’t ever be running into a problem where you’re wasting precise or streamline charges.
Have 2 stacks of streamline before you cast volley (or use salvo). Cast aimed shot into rapidfire into aimed shot.
Salvo gives you two streamline charges if you apply explosive shot to two things. It makes the opening sequence extremely straightforward. Volley (grants streamline x2) → aimed → rapidfire → aimed.
Best way to use it is to cast explosive shot after aimed shot. Queue it up as you would an arcane shot. The aimed shot blows it up. Again, there is a bug preventing your streamline charge from being carried through the sequence, but this is how you should aim to use it. Casting the instant on global, waiting out the global, then opening aimed shot is more dead time on your globals than casting aimed shot with explosive queued up.
It’s really just too buggy at this point. The critical rotational stuff being fixed will give a better idea. Trueshot on half the cd for half the duration will solve a lot of the problems with dead time as well.
Edit: apparently my character switched (Jumpi).
This was extremely helpful, thank you! It seems I was vastly over-complicating the AOE opener lol.
To clarify my point #1, I was referring to a situation where you end up with Spotter’s Mark on the target, with both Aimed Shot and Rapid Fire off CD (not the opener). In that situation I can’t foresee us not munching either a Surging Shots reset, a Spotter’s Mark proc, or a Precise Shots. I suppose the first two are a low chance of procing anyway, so it probably won’t have much impact in the grand scheme, but it’s still annoying to know we might be wasting stuff. Oh well.
Overall, with what you describe (assuming they fix some of the bugs), this sounds pretty nice to play. I don’t really mind a longer Trueshot personally
I don’t either on live marks. New marks runs into a significant amount of dead time once your opening trueshot is done and you’ve used all of your charges after it. From a design perspective, this means that each of your trueshots have to do an inordinate amount of damage for you to average out over a fight. Halving both the duration and cooldown of trueshot eliminates most of this dead time and would be a lot easier to tune. It’s also more palatable as a weak-ish button if it’s more inline with bestial wrath or colossus smash in cooldown.
This is just my idea, not a patch note anywhere. I think this and an interaction with hunter’s mark and your eagle mark (i.e. using hm gives you a spotter’s mark) would make a lot of sense.