So whats the Beast Mastery covenant going to be?

Classes Hunter
23

Ya, and unfortunately a Precise Arcane actually deals more DPCT and DPF than Aimed Shot, which means from a damage perspective, I believe it’s actually better to use those Precise Shots, which means the vast majority of Dead Eye’s benefits are wasted.

But to be honest, part of that is that Dead Eye is hilariously right now. It’s not providing 60% increased cooldown rate for the duration, it’s providing a 60% reduction in the cooldown time for the duration. In other words, rather than CD / 1.6, it’s CD * 0.4.

That means each Dead Eye, rather than restoring a bonus 15% of an Aimed Shot charge per Kill Shot (ie. 4.8s of CD over 3s), instead restores 37.5% of one (7.5s of CD over 3s). And the thing is, that gets larger the more haste you have, because the duration is fixed. It’s actually just straight up multiplied by your haste, turns out. At 33.3% haste, for example, it instead restores 50% of an Aimed Shot chart (37.5% * 1.333)*.

And the weird part is, I’m pretty sure this is intended, even though it’s clearly not what the wording suggests, because they recently changed it. It used to say it gave “50% faster recharge”, but actually cut the CD by 66.7%. Now it says “60% faster recharge” and actually cuts the CD by 60%.

A proper wording for that would be “reduces the recharge time of Aimed Shot by 60% for 3s”. “Cools down 60% faster” says to me it should be acting like I gained a 60% haste buff, for the purposes of the cooldown. ie. the cooldown progresses through it’s “cast bar” at a 60% higher rate of speed, so the CD time becomes CD / 1.6.

However, this really highlights that MM is exceptionally brittle about it’s rotation. Giving us more AiS charges doesn’t necessarily increase our DPS substantially, because our focus balance is so easily thrown out of whack.

Part of this is because AiS requires a rather exceptional commitment per charge. You have the 2.5s cast itself, 1.5 Arcane Shots following it to consume the Precise charges, and then 2.2 Steady Shot costs to balance out the 65 focus consumed (also accounting for passive regen over the duration of everything). Net is that, per Aimed Shot charge, we have a mandatory 8.6s of casting to handle everything involved. Even if we drop RF and unbonused Arcane Shot entirely from the rotation (though iirc, RF is now higher DPCT than Aimed Shot), that means we are still limited to just a smidge shy of 7 full Aimed Shot combos per minute, and we get 5 innately by cooldown.

I’m more convinced than ever that Precise Shots needs to be taken out back and murdered. That would at least solve the capping issue in most cases, since the mandatory commitment time for AiS would only be the cast itself (2.5s) and the 1.2 Steady Shots needed to make up the focus, for a total of 4.6s. That gives us 13 combos per minute (though less if we’re still including RF and Kill Shot).

* Derivation: 12s CD / 1.333 = 9s CD. 60% reduction in cooldown time reduces that to 3.6s recharge, meaning you get 3/3.6 = 83.3% of a charge over those 3s. You’d normally get 3/9 = 33.3%, so the net gain is 83.3% - 33.30% = 50.0% of a charge.
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24

I really, really hope they fix Wild Spirits because the Night Fae is the only covenant that makes sense for my worgen character.

25

It won’t be, but principles.

26

For the vast majority of people the covenant abilities won’t make a huge difference in the content we do

27

Sure, as long as all you care about is world quests, LFR, heroic dungeons, and unrated PvP. But it won’t take long at all for certain covenants to be deemed “mandatory” for manually-assembled PUGs in the group finder. So sure, go Night Fae if you want, but enjoy being almost entirely excluded from M+.

28

Pretty much.

Blizzard seems to think they can balance away the meta and it’s never going to happen. Regardless of what you pick, you’ll be able to get into groups for M+ 1 - 9 with no issue because no one will really care, same with normal raids.

When it comes to +10 - 14 and heroic raids, people will care but not really as long as you can do the job, but the try hards are going to want the meta. 15+ and Mythic raids, if you aren’t the meta good effing luck.

29

Well, that’s assuming one of the covenants doesn’t get a bad rep for a given class, like certain specs have in certain tiers. Once that happens, that covenant for that class will be excluded from all but the most “who cares” content.

30

Basically choose your covenant wisely and as of right now as long as your not Night Fae you are so far going in the right direction. Things are subject to change and I haven’t locked on to anything yet until Beta is complete. It’s just Night Fae is so bad for our class right now that I know that is probably not going to be a good one to take because its been bad since like alpha.

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31

I loved the glaives from MoP. If the Chakrams work anything like they did it’ll be fun… assuming it does good DPS.

32

I’m still going Vethyr

1 Like
33

It does, more or less, except it’s 3 times the cooldown (Glaive Toss had a 15s CD, Death Chakram has a 45s CD). So it’s less of a rotational button and more of a mini cooldown, similar to Bestial Wrath or Double Tap. It also deals it’s damage over time, taking around 4ish seconds for all 7 hits to occur.

It does, however, do absurd amounts of damage right now. The first hit is for about 60% as much as an unbonused Arcane Shot, and the final hit is for around 150% as much as one. Total damage done is around 6.5-7 times as much as an unbonused Arcane Shot, or around twice as much damage as an Aimed Shot cast. And it restores 21 focus as a bonus (or 35 with the associated conduit, which also buffs the damage by up to 20%)

34

Necrolord is the one for hunter of both useful specs.

35

Despite the warnings, I’m going Night Fae because none of the other covenants make sense for my Worgen Hunter. I mean, the faction is called the Wild Hunt. How can I NOT pick the Night Fae?

My guild will prob make me switch once we start progression on heroic, though.

36

Here is what you do. Progess the covenant campaign as far as possible, then switch and then yell at blizzard about badly they failed at balancing covenants for hunters for 2 years, and then in 9.3.5 it’ll finally be almost balanced enough to only be like a 10% dps loss.

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37

I’ll be looking at what the cosmetic restrictions are before picking one. I intend to swap and do all 4 campaigns on my main. If cosmetics are available once unlocked, I’ll do the best DPS/most useful one last and stick with that (probably Necrolord). If cosmetics are locked to your current covenant, I’ll probably do Necrolords first for progression, then swap around to the others during downtime between tiers, landing in Night Fae at the end if the expansion.

The whole thing is just so screwed.

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