What I’m mostly confused about is that casting rapid fire during trueshot seems to be a DPS loss now (since Windrunner quiver guarantees 2 stacks 100% of the time as of last Friday).
Your best rotation seems to be Aimed shot → consume precise shots with Black arrow (or Arcane shot if you don’t have Deathblow), rinse and repeat, and they feed into each other until the end of Trueshot. Casting anything else seems to make your DPS drop.
I’m wondering if this is intended. Because if it is, then they basically changed the “Rapid fire, Aimed shot, Aimed shot, repeat” trueshot rotation from live to “aimed shot → arcane shot, repeat”, which is not more engaging. I hope I’m missing something.
Oh, I see. If you take the Headshot talent, it does simplify the rotation quite a bit, since Black Arrow will consume your Precise Shot. Without it, Black Arrow is worth pressing when it’s triggered by Deathblow.
Oh gosh. It’s gonna take me a few weeks to break that habit. I’ve been using Rapid Fire during Trueshot for years, since BFA.
I predict that a number of other players will struggle with this — especially the ones who don’t like looking up online guides and prefer to figure it out themselves. I mean, that’s flipping the script!
I asked Azortharion (the hunter theorycrafting guy) about this and he ran a quick sim on the PTR raidbots simulator for MM BiS single target build as Sentinel, and it was indeed a (very) small DPS increase to bypass rapid fire completely during Trueshot
Right, I understand that kind of language. Thank you for reaching out to him. I’ll be keeping an eye on all the theory crafters the first couple weeks of the patch to see what they figure out.
For my PVP testing I’ve mostly used short aspect of the fox (aspect of the fox + hunting pack) + Sniper’s advantage. Yeah, no feign death needed
So for every trueshot I have guarenteed aspect of the fox for the whole duration of trueshot and I’ve never needed to cast rapid fire because I can use aimed shot while moving and it’s about 1sec and does more damage than a rapid fire which can be interrupted with micro CC and is a longer cast. I only ever need to cast fast aimed shot into deathblow black arrow. Combined with Kill zone, it allows you to do some crazy things.
The best opener I’ve found is rapid fire to ramp up Bulletstorm (15% damage mod) into Arcane shot to get the 20% damage buff for aimed shot, at that point I have 2 stacks of streamline and all buffs, and I press the Trueshot+Aimed shot macro + Aspect of the Fox and go into the aimed shot → consume precise shots rotation.
Regarding double tap, it does not give you 2 stacks of streamline, you need rapid fire + arcane/explosive to get to two (or maybe you know some new tech I’m missing ). Only salvo gives you 2 streamlines out of the box as it sends 2 explosive shots.
I misunderstood what you meant with not casting rapidfire. I think it’s okay to have some situations where you have both aimed and rapidfire available and aimed is still the better choice.
Hey Blizz, Soul Drinker and Embrace the Shadows are still useless. Please fix thanks! Also the suggestion to make Wailing Arrow with Readiness the Dark Ranger Capstone talent sounds fun.
I am once again asking why 1 or more of the following changes can’t be applied to Trueshot to put it on par with every single other DPS cooldown in the game
Grants 20% critical strike chance baseline
Grant 40% haste baseline
Cooldown reduced to 1 minute
Reduces cast time and channel time of Aimed Shot/Rapid Fire by 70%
Any of these changes added into the current iteration of the button make it substantially better.
What I find most annoying about the spec is how you never seen to run out of Focus, but at some point you’ll be without Aimed Shot charges and in need of casting Steady Shot to reduce the AiS CD despite not needing any Focus. AiS charges are the actual resource you need to pay attention to.
It’s bothersome when you need to stop your rotation and cast Steady Shot like four times to get one and a half charges of AiS so you can resume the rotation.
With us now having a release date I will just say that this might have been the worst PTR cycle for Hunter in a while. BM and SV were completely forgotten about after their initial changes and MM has been a disaster from start to finish with a plethora of bugs and broken talents combined with all of the rotational and tuning problems AND Trueshot remaining in its current form.
Well you got two weeks to fix Huntmaster’s Call, Dire Command stacks are no longer giving it stacks meaning only pressing Dire Beast will give you stack. Making you summon a hati/fenryr every minute which is worthless and kills the talent.
I’m gonna be honest. Things feel a lot better after the last change to windrunner quiver, specifically because of how it impacts focused aim and your marking mechanic.
I am never really running out of charges or focus, which is a massive massive improvement. I can actually get close to keeping up with live single target numbers (with season 1 gear) on ptr with it. Dead time is also significantly less dead. Playing without either ais charge cdr talent is absolutely going to result in you having to cast a lot of steady shots and your dead time being extremely dead.
I was surprised at how much I was able to maintain the on target buff. The last time I tested on target, it felt pointless because before quiver change, you still ran out of charges and everything just falls off before you can really build up and sustain. Trueshot gets really really fast, even without imp. streamline because you’re sending a lot of marks. It actually feels really nice to play. I was a little bit sad to come to the conclusion that precision detonation is probably not going to be worth it for basic single target or pvp builds because I think it’s a fun interaction. Definitely worth dropping it though.
). Only salvo gives you 2 streamlines out of the box as it sends 2 explosive shots.