Thursday, December 11, 2008

Patch 3.0.8 Hunter Changes

Hunter
  • All Hunter pet abilities with a cooldown of 30 seconds or more are no longer on the global cooldown.
  • The coefficient of Rake (Cat) and Scorpid Venom (Scorpid) has been lowered.
Skills
Marksmanship
  • Volley damage has been reduced by 30%. (From 505 to 353 damage for Rank 6)   
  • Viper Sting now Stings the target, draining 16% of mana over 8 sec (up to a maximum of 32% of the caster's maximum mana).
  • Steady Shot now only gains 10% of attack power as damage (down from 20%).
  • Kill Shot cooldown lowered from 35 to 15 seconds.

Survival
  • Deterrence changed to - When activated, increases parry chance by 100% and grants a 100% chance to deflect spells cast by targets in front of you. While Deterrence is active, you cannot attack.  Lasts 5 sec. 1 min cooldown.
  • Aspect of the Wild now affects raid members.

Pet

Talents
Beast Mastery
  • Unleashed Fury now increases the damage done by your pets by 3/6/9/12/15%. (Down from 4/8/12/16/20%)
  • Serpent's Swiftness now increases pet's melee attack speed by 2/4/6/8/10%. (Down from 4/8/12/16/20%)
  • Kindred Spirits now increases pet's damage by 3/6/9/12/15%. (Down from 4/8/12/16/20%)

Survival
  • Improved Tracking changed to While tracking Beasts, Demons, Dragonkin, Elementals, Giants, Humanoids and Undead, all ranged damage done to those types is increased by 1/2/3/4/5%.
  • Trap Mastery now only increases periodic damage done by Immolation and Explosive Trap. (Old - All damage)

Marksmanship

Pet



I have been following the Hunter changes since they first appeared on the Damage Dealing forums. Let's break down the main 3 nerfs and the main 2 buffs...

Three Main Nerfs
  • Readiness doesn't affect Bestial Wrath anymore.
This is the largest nerf to BM Hunters, as the 50/21 spec was unbelievably amazing in PvE and PvP.  Readiness in conjuction with Bestial Wrath was just too powerful.  I totally agree that this needed to happen.

  • BM Talent Nerfs (Unleashed Fury, Serpent's Swiftness & Kindred Spirits)
These three talents were crucial talents and pretty much had to be picked up because of their damage increase.  I am okay with this nerf, as these talents are still very good after the nerf.

  • Steady Shot now only gains 10% of attack power as damage (down from 20%).
This is a big nerf to Steady Shot for all Hunters.  This actually ends up hurting Survival the most as it is the most important part of Survival's damage (BM Hunters have their pets which do more damage than Steady Shot).  All Hunters will see their damage decrease with this nerf.

I love this change.  I can only hope they go a few steps further with the idea of Steady Shot being a filler shot and not our most important shot.  As a BM Hunter I must say PvE is ridiculously easy and extremely boring as I have to spam Steady Shot to do maximum damage.

I believe Blizz will have to buff Arcane Shot for it to be weaved into a BM Hunters rotation, even with the nerfs to Steady Shot (as Steady Shot still scales with weapon damage and ammo, while Arcane Shot does not).  Introducing more scaling with Arcane Shot would be a good boost to Hunters in PvP and allowing us to use more complex rotations for damage in PvE.


Two Main Buffs
  • Kill Shot cooldown lowered from 35 to 15 seconds.
This is a solid buff to a very nice ability.  Being able to use it 2-4 times instead of 1-2 times on bosses is a dps boost, and having to wait on the cooldown in PvP will be a lot less painful.

  • Deterrence changed to - When activated, increases parry chance by 100% grants a 100% chance to deflect spells cast by targets in front of you. While Deterrence is active, you cannot attack. Lasts 5 sec. 1 min cooldown.
This is a huge change.  Deterrence is now totally different than before.

If facing the target is taken out of the requirements, than Deterrence becomes a solid ability.  If facing the target remains, than when you might need Deterrence most (during a stun), Deterrence probably will not help you (as the attacker will now be behind you).

I do not like that I cannot attack the target during Deterrence, but I understand why they would have that limitation with the ability.  I wonder if Deterrence stops the damage from ticking dots when you enter Deterrence...  Basically, time will tell if Deterrence is a good ability or not, but any change to the mechanics of Deterrence is good in my book.
 

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm a hunter and i have always been on top on damage metter and i have been playing my hunter for 3 years ,always on top of the dps chain and i swear if i won't be able to find the best rotation in 3.0.8 i'll stop playing.I've never spammed steady all time and i have been using arcane shot and aimed shot all along.What disturbs me most is changing old BM talents and decreasing pet's damage... a thumb down from me to blizzard since us the hunters have been nerfed a lot after 2.4.Somehow i always found a new method to sneak on first place on damage meters but if i'll see a weaker rogue/even fury war who will be buffed becoming number 1 in dps and outclassing me with several .x% while i m doing top dmg then this change is defently too much:)

Anonymous said...

Yes, I too (a BM hunter) have been on top of the DPS and DMG meters since I hit 70 and started raiding Kara. Our guild is fairly casual with raids on the weekends and no real pugs, but our fury warrior, mostly in quest reward blues, was coming dangerously close to me on the charts. I am not amused that they are getting buffed and we are getting nerfed. It's been pretty evident since the release that someone at Blizz hates hunters. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Ghostcrawler! j/k lol

Anonymous said...

I also play a Bm hunter at level 80 and can believe how far blizzard have gone to nerf the current bm build. I can now see myself dropping from 1st in DPS tables during naxx to 4th or 5th behind enhancement shaman and frostfire mage who as it is almost do as much damage as and i have heard fury warriors are also high on the tables. i don't understand that even though shamans and warrior do almost the same pve damage hey are being buffed and we are being nerfed and after this patch i am probably rerolling war or lock just because i dont this hunter is viable in raiding anymore

Anonymous said...

You won't drop in DPS to 4th or 5th at all if you are good.
Instead of easily being at the top of the DPS chart you will be competing with other classes quite closly if everyone is playing well.
The ability of us to be at the top will still be there.
Me personally welcome this nurf with open arms because I believe it will make playing a hunter fun again instead of the easy game it is at the moment.

Anonymous said...

I think hunters ain't that overpwrd. In my guild hunter's/pala dps is pretty equal. Of course if there is a lot of trash, and the hunter use aoe, they pass. But as hunter, using steady shot and one target, pala is pretty much equal in pwr.

I've been looking at total dmg in hro Nexus. A good pala often beat a good hunter in tot dmg :) but wierd enough, the hunter have a lot higher dps! :) Recount

Anonymous said...

You say you totally understand why we could not attack during this ability? Why is it so much to ask when so many other classes can temporarilty make themselves invulnerable and continue to attack? Just look at what this class has become. With deathgrip, the ranged stun from pallies, rogues that can throw off hunter's mark and sneak around at will... our only defense *was* a good offense. That offense has been nerfed just a little with each patch since 2.4, so now I do a lot of running around trying not to get two-hit by a pally or DK. I spend a lot of time trying to take away mana from my attackers or silence them (both of which have been nerfed also). So now I don't have time left over to fight back and my DPS doesn't matter. Now that I only live 2 seconds when I run across just about any other class in PVP I would need to do over 8k DPS to win. Other classes have the equivalent of freezing trap, only they can still attack you. Other classes have a scatter shot equivalent that doesn't despell on dmg. Why can't I use Disengage as often as a DK can use deathgrip? I just don't hear anyone screaming "nerf hunters" in the BG, but I hear a lot about pallies and DK. Whoever said that someone at Blizzard hates hunters they are right. I don't want to have my cake and eat it too, I don't think they should give us all the DPS and survivability too, but throw us a bone and give us one or the other.

Anonymous said...

Deterrence was a good ability before hand, I used it regularly in PvP(As a mostly MM build) as a part of popping all my trinkets and buffs mid combat. With the combination of that and dragonhawk it bought me a lot of extra misses from opposing PvPers and thus more kills. It worked similarly against boss fights in sticky situations...

Clearly it will play a different roll now, since it doesn't say anything about bandaging yourself etc, I would assume its a good chance for your healer to full heal you incase of emergency, if need be then feign (or shadowmeld) to drop aggro if need be at that point, and just sort of give the rest of your groups DPSers a chance to whack away while you are undamagable dummy when a fight happens to break down a bit.

Anonymous said...

I am playing a lvl 80 hunter. and i have been topping both DMG and DPS meters and i can´t believe that they nerfed me from 2900 dps down to 1900 i think its discusting since i dont wanna be the guy that gone from 1st to 3rd or 4th since our guild do loads of dps in raids.

Anonymous said...

I am reading some of these comments and now I see that there are more huntards then I thought.

I have played a hunter since the game was released.. I was hitting about 3000+ dps and always number 1 on dmg in Naxx..

I tried Naxx yesterday after the patch and dropped to 2700dps and 3000+ on some boss fights without changing much, this is not much of a Nerf, if you add Arcane into the rotation and change some glyphs, then there really is no difference.

Hunter needed to be nerfed. I was beating all the other dps classes with way better gear then me. Last night I was beat barely by a Ret Pally with full T7 and all Epics.

If you are a good hunter you will over-come this small nerf.

Anonymous said...

I think the comments like "i have always been #1 and will kill myself if i am not anymore" are plain stupidity....you cannot expect ANY class or specc to be #1 all the time...sometimes meelee should be better, sometimes range should be better, sometimes physic, sometimes magic...i think that is what most players can agree on that.

However, i really doubt anyone who says "BM have not been nerfed that much" has actually tested this himself. I did yesterday. I have played the hunter for 4 years now...MM most of the time, but in any of the FOTM-Times we had i tried every specc at least to see the difference. So i will not brag about having been #1 as a BM for weeks. But the dropp in DPS after 3.0.8 in my testing was EXTREME. I can really understand BMs who are saying their specc is broken now. MM did not change much...dropped slightly....SV on the other hand really topped ANYTHING in my tests, without any special training, reading, tweaking or whatever....add this to the fact that SV has already been the best scaling tree with its agi and sta talents even before 3.0.8.

what i would actually like to see is a rational explanation how a BM can still do good DPS. Not the shit "i have always been good because i never was 1-button and still am! L2P" that is sprayed in between the whining at the moment. I really have trouble to imagine any style of play ot talent pick that will still do good DPS compared to SV for BM. MM is (once again) falling behind, too.

In my tests i used a full arcane+multi rotation, steady as filler for BM and did about 80% of what was possible as SV. MM at about 90%. In long tests over several hundred thounsand damage it even got more extreme, since SV doesnt rely on any CDs and just races up in mana if you have to switch to viper due to hrill of the hunt and hunting party.

So please...if anyone can actually explain HOW to do good DPS as BM or MM right now compared to SV instead of the usual "L2P rofl" BS, so so.

Anonymous said...

To the poster above.. BM does good DMG.. It may not do as well as Survival does now with the changes made, but, with the Nerf and a few changes I was able to do the same dps and dmg but Surv seem to do more then before which was expected. I will post my shot rotation later which does not include Multi for mana reasons in a raid. If you want to see my gear and spec check out Evilfrosty of Lothar on the armory.

Anonymous said...

i repeated the tests i mentioned before because i wanted to share the numbers.

gear stats: 8% hit (capped), 270 haste, AP ranging from 3900(BM) to 4252(SV), crit ranging from 24,45%(BM) to 29,14(SV) - all same gear - all selfbuffed only (that is 4/5 T7(25), rest heroic blues/epics). using timeless arrows and a cat pet i went to the boss dummy.
i did two separete test runs:
a) From 100% to OOM without any cooldowns
b) From 100% to 0%, Viper to full and again down to OOM, all cooldowns
Each of those 2 tests i ran trice per specc and will tell averages.

SV: 0/15/56
a) dmg reached ~230k, 2265 dps
b) dmg reached ~480k, 2280 dps

MM: 7/57/7
a) dmg reached ~127k, 1950 dps
b) dmg reached ~305k, 1900 dps

BM: 52/19/0
a) dmg reached ~127k, 1650 dps
b) dmg reached ~320k, 1750 dps

Rotations i used:
SV: explosive+steady, serpent each 21 seconds
MM: chimera+arcane+aimed+steady, serpent once
BM: arcane+steady, serpent each 21 seconds

So as you can see all three speccs needed exactly 3 Skills in their main rotation...MM was a little more comfortable to play, just because you do not need to watch i timer bar....but klicking a button each 21 seconds is little effort to learn and can be made easier by many timer addons.
i tried to include multi/aimed in both the SV and BM rotation and ran MANY tests...showing that there was no real gain in it. MM is the only specc that really suffers when taking it out.

again: all of those tests were purely selfbuffed (no food, elixiers or something like that either) against the Boss-Type Dummy.

While you can argue i played one specc wrong or misplaced talent points...i really tried a lot for all three trees and those numbers show what worked best for me.

i did run a heroic with all three speccs, too, numbers were higher oc with the buffs...but the distribution was exactly the same:

MM: 80-85% of SV
BM: 70-75% of SV

and SV simply scales best of all trees. heck...it even scales with stamina. BM scales better with petbuffs, right....take a look in how many fights your pet will die miserably or is unable to attack.

From my PoV 3.0.8 made everything worse. BM was a domnating, OP specc....now it is wothless and SV dominates, but none of the three is OP...look at fury warriors, if you want to see OPness. all 3.0.8 did was weaken the zhunter class as a whole - it did NOT make the trees more equal.

Anonymous said...

correction: MM oc used 4 Buttons, like i wrote in the rotation, not 3....it is not that much fun having 3 skills on CD and fillig gaps with steady, really...at least for me. you have "work harder" and can mess up easier...on the other hand you have the advantage of not having to think of the 21s serpent yourself most of the time...this is really personal prefference, i think...but being stuck at 80% dps while using 133% skills still sucks.

Anonymous said...

GC posted that BM was indeed overnerfed and might be buffed again even before 3.1...MM he says is fine, SV too high.
Seeing that Fury Warriors and Enhancement Shamans are now quite constantly at the top of our Raid-DPS and even SV struggles to keep close (nothing can really touch Fury at the moment imho) i anticipate more nerfs for other classes, which are certainly in the queue.

oh well...MM is fine where its at? MM runs dry in 40s burst if using all shots...improved steady shot is completely useless as a talent if steady is weak and the casual procc is eaten up by some shitty arcane.

at the moment it is like that:
- imp steady shot proccs
a) use it up by arcane because arcane wil be sooner off CD -> waste the procc
b) save the procc for when chimera comes off CD and therefore stop using aimed and arcane until then -> lose more dps than the procc can ever give you

great choice...MM is right as is...yeah...

Anonymous said...

I'm a Hunter and I admit I spammed S. Shot with a macro that had Serpent Sting on cooldown and a blow out of my Racial and Trinket buffs and I was tops using the same set up after the patch I have noticed very little difference I added in Arcane Shot back into my rotation just because its low mana consumption, that's the only thing I changed and I'm still topping damage meters.

Anonymous said...

i really do not want to start a "brag-war" but from what i figured from reading many forums is that BM who were not doing OP dmg pre patch 3.0.8 have not seen that mich of a decrease...that would be those who were in the 3-4k range full epics, maybe 5k on fights with special encounter-buffs. those, however, who were pulling of 6-8k at pacthwerk cannot do that anymore and say their specc is broken.
Big WWS summaries are very kken at that point, too: since 3.0.8 all hunters even getting in the top10 of any worldwide dps-list have all been survivor....there were 2 oder 3 marks who made it into the 10 top-dps hunter-only lists, but not a single non-sv made it into the all-classes summary at www.wowmeteronline.com.

since i tested all three speccs for yself, too, i fully agree to the picture drawn there.

if they call back some of the BM nerfs specifically for pet-dps-talents and nerf explosive down some (almost 50% of SV dps comes from this one talent) without making steady viable again the tees might end up doing equal damage...if they then nerf down fury warriors tremendously you might even see hunters in top-dps-lists again...but the specc that suffers most is MM...why? because MM has the most options of filling GCDs with non-steady-shots and without ANY way of doing good dps when not hammering all CD buttons you git you run dry in seconds...and improved steady shot for example is not even worth a single talent point now...let alone three....