I am aware what Exposed Flank does and I am aware what Vicious Hunt does, but the two do not relate at all? Exposed Flank doesn’t give you any more frequency of VH.
Has nothing to do with VH.
You are vastly over-inflating any sort of synergy. People do not like cooldowns with constantly shifting cooldowns as that makes it obnoxious to play around. You are ignoring the new Haste buff from fote, which gives the same amount of “synergy” you are complaining about.
Exposed Flank causes Kill Command to cleave for 10 seconds. You set up and consume Vicious Hunt with Kill Command. This isn’t a complex mathematical equation.
Right…but Exposed Flank has NOTHING to do with Vicious Hunt or the frequency of you Kill Commanding. It is not cleaving the damage from VH at all. You are pressing KC the same amount you’d be pressing it regardless of it cleaving. You are generating and spending VH the same amount you’d be generating and spending it regardless of Exposed Flank.
They don’t co-scale. Vicious Hunt strikes only the first target. And it scales only with your own primary stat, Versatility and Mastery modifiers and its own “Vicious Hunt” modifiers, not pet damage nor the damage of Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, or Kill Command.
The point is that while Sentinel may be perfectly happy taking these redesigns that offer more free stacks of Tip, as Pack Leader I actually want to cast Kill Command because of Vicious Hunt, Howl of the Pack, Wild Attacks, Frenzied Tear, and the fact that Kill Command resets reduce the cooldown of Fury of the Eagle.
Since I’m going to be actually casting Kill Command, why would I not want those Kill Commands to strike 2 additional targets and apply Bloodseeker to those targets?
I’m confused, you ALWAYS want to cast kill command (as long as you wont cap focus/tip—even then this is less of a problem for PL), regardless of any sort of rework. Nothing about 11.0.5 changes that.
PTR Exposed Flank causes your next Kill Command to generate a stack of Tip for each target struck.
PTR Ruthless Marauder gives each strike from Fury of the Eagle a 20% chance to generate a stack of Tip.
This works for Sentinel as it has no incentive in its Hero Tree to cast Kill Command. You will Kill Command once for the Tip to buff Flanking Strike, then Flanking Strike to gain 3 stacks of Tip, then run your rotation free of Kill Command for those 3 gcds, then go right into Fury of the Eagle to gain another 3 stacks of Tip. If you’re running Symbiotic Adrenaline, you get another free 3 stack of Tip, and the PTR is increasing the number of Tip stacks granted from Relentless Primal Ferocity.
In other words, no, you don’t ALWAYS want to cast Kill Command.
Tbf, it was a response to…
And Focus remains a (modest) concern, ofc.
I likewise dislike the deemphasis of Bloodseeker-from-Kill Command, but harder to converse if things jump around.
Are you just ignoring this part?
Completely irrelevant, it has the same extremely high incentive Pack Leader does because Kill Command is your top priority as its how you generate Focus and Tip
Except I just listed off numerous ways you won’t need to press Kill Command for stacks of Tip of the Spear and Sentinel has Invigorating Pulse assisting with Focus generation. Add in Hero / Lust and the PTR change to Ruthless Marauder causing you to gain 8% Haste for 10 seconds after Fury of the Eagle and you have windows of a much lower need to press Kill Command.
Regardless of free stacks of Tip or increased Focus generation due to Hero / Lust and the PTR change to Ruthless Marauder, Pack Leader will need to cast Kill Command in order for its core mechanic to function.
Can’t rely on this at all
You still need Focus
the entire SPEC needs to cast kill command for the core mechanic to function over any fight lol
you are making giant generalizations of hero tree priority assuming that ALL fights are aoe and last less than a minute
Are you seriously going to sit there and pretend that Hero / Lust doesn’t ramp your Focus generation through the roof, drastically reducing your need to Kill Command for Focus?
Are you seriously going to pretend to have forgotten every bit of what was just needlessly explained to you about how many free stacks of Tip will be at your disposal?
These changes very clearly heavily favor Sentinel over Pack Leader. When Sentinel was already performing well ahead of Pack Leader, the last thing that needed to happen was for Pack Leader to lose function and synergy for the sake of further streamlining for Sentinel.
Damn teach me how to have lust for an entire fight that sounds op
Are YOU going to sit there and pretend under lust you’re not spending MORE focus due to the increase in haste? you know it’s relative, right? faster gcds = faster rotation = more focus spent
Are you seriously going to pretend like you use flanking strike / fote for EVERY SINGLE FIGHT ever in the game and subsequently pretending like these abilities don’t have cooldowns?
compared to current tip generation, new exposed flank will add up to 2 more tips every 30 seconds, and new ruthless will generally add 1 or 2 every 45 sec. with how many tips we chew through, that doesn’t sound like a crazy amount. i’d wager it’ll mainly make tip economy a little more forgiving/make tipping all your big hitters easier
Yep, this Tip playstyle blows and I’m over it. Been playing my Guardian druid and Warrior last couple of days.
After reading all the negative feedback I installed PTR 11.05 and tried survival with the exact same spec and rotation and felt there was very little difference. The main change I noticed was with less explosive trap procs. I tested single target damage on the pvp dummy and still getting really good numbers. I was getting around 1 million to 1.2 million dps with a pot and around 900k - 1 million dps without a pot with sentinel hero talents. I tried pack leader and still seems noticeably weaker to sentinel. For the spec I run I honestly feel like there’s nothing to worry about at all.
If your filler has a higher resource cost than your non-Haste-scaled CDs (such as Flanking Strike, Explosive Shot, Spearhead, Coordinated Assault, etc.) or soft-CDs (e.g., DoTs), then your rate of net Focus expenditure —not net Focus generation— increases with Haste.
As Survival’s fillers GCDs have a higher average cost than its GCD skills whose frequency does not scale with Haste, Survival will be, overall, less Focus-efficient as Haste increases.
Not by much, and perhaps to greater damage-per-resource-efficiency at certain thresholds, but resource-efficiency still trends downward with Haste.
hmm, just thought of something re: ruthless marauder. if fote still waits till the end of its damage to take a tip like it does currently, that means potential unnecessary tip waste unless you always use it at exactly 1 tip, since ruthless marauder should generate 2 tips fairly often.* if blizz could switch fote to a “ghost tip” system like explosive shot, where it moves a tip to its own invisible stack at the start of its damage and then consumes that tip at the end, that’d probably be good
*not sure what the exact average is because idk if the new cast time means it’s going down to 7 ticks of damage or staying at 9 ticks, but either way it’s between 1 and 2 tips on average