Piercing Shot and Explosive Shot have the same cooldown. And both ignore armor.
However, Piercing Shot deals much less damage, cost a lot more focus, and affects less targets (on average, depending on position of course), but it’s still a lvl 100 talent vs a lvl 30. The AoE on Piercing is negligible, and the single-target damage is only as powerful as two Arcanes…
So, what’s the deal with Piercing Shot? Is there something I’m missing? Of course Explosive has a delay, but why is Piercing so behind?
Both PS and ES are really just place holder. No MM hunter will even consider taking those talents, this is just plain old Blizzard lack of any tuning or creative imagination in BFA.
I really enjoyed piercing shot in Legion. Not sure why they changed it. Explosive was improved, but still is not really necessary. I run it occasionally for dungeons.
You are only missing something if you take Piercing Shot (your DPS). It is currently a DPS loss to take in most single target situations. Even where it is not a loss, it is WAY behind the other two talents in that tier. It is a trap for the unwitting, nothing more.
I’m with Masoschism. It’s not uncommon for Blizzard to, whether wittingly or not, desuade the use of certain builds in order to balance the classes’ preferred specs rather than all of the specs. I’ve often wondered why that is, but the results are what they are. I suppose that maintaining character spec flavor across all spec options across all character classes is ‘hard’.?.?
That said, I do like piercing shot as a spell concept, but it’s not worth passing up the other two talents if you’re concerned about DPS min/max.
No no no no. I remember Blizz clearly stating they were removing the old talent trees because it was promoting the same cookie cutter builds. And now we have no trees, but the same cookie cutter options, only more boring?
Piercing Shot has got to be one of the most undertuned tier 100 talents in the entire game. We are talking about an ability that has a 30 sec CD and a relatively high focus cost, and yet it hits like a wet noodle.
They would need to increase its damage rather significantly, or at the very least add a knockback effect to the main target.
2/3 of the tier 100 row is actually subpar. Lock and Load should be made baseline and its proc chance increased to 10%. I would replace the talent with Black Arrow (pre-Legion version) or the single target version of Explosive Shot (perhaps replacing Aimed Shot?). Idk, just my opinion.
