Soon...

Well, we know for sure now that 6.0 is coming on Tuesday.  A lot of the expansion's mechanical changes will show up, even though the content won't be available until the release date.  Some of these I will miss, and some I will not.

I will not miss...

• Hit rating, and the affiliated reforging.  So frequently I'd get into the later stages of a tier and either be dripping in excess hit rating, or unable to get enough of it, usually the former.
• Kor'kron guards.  I've been irritated by them since they moved into the Undercity, and I don't even like Sylvanas.
• Faction-separated auction houses.  I've got at least two characters I had to go to the other faction for to get transmog gear.  I will be glad to cut out the middle-men in Booty Bay.
• Having to macro Revive Pet and Mend Pet to save space on my action bar.  They've been like that since Vanilla.  That change is long due.
• Garrosh Hellscream.  Oh, wait...

I will miss...

• Flying.  Hopefully it comes to Draenor at some point - the place is gorgeous, and there are some views you only get from the air.
• A spammable instant shot.  I don't really care about Arcane Shot going from a rotational point of view, but for quickly pulling half a dozen things over for my bear to tank...
• Damage on the level 90 talents as Discipline.  It means I'll need to go Shadow to solo old dungeons via Halo.  It also highlights that Discipline really is a healing tree.  (There's a comment in the patch notes about them being between a full healer and a full damage dealer, which means there's a real chance they'll just suck at both.  I'll see how some dungeons go after Tuesday.)

I guess there's not a lot I'm really going to miss.  I'm a bit nostalgic about Scatter Shot going, since I used it a lot in Vanilla PVP, and Hunter's Mark - rogues get to hide again.

I've already mentioned that I'm looking forward to some of the changes to the inventory UI - I'm really looking forward to them.  I will likely spend most of Tuesday getting all that sorted out, and then running around buying yet more toys.

And maybe beating up Garrosh again for a fancy bow.

4.3

I really did intend to do the new 5-mans yesterday, but I came home and ended up sleeping for two hours.  So while there were no new dungeons run, I did get the formerly Valor Point/now Justice Point neck and ring, then bought bracers for my shaman and warrior.

And of course, I got a boatload of new ponies.

New ponies whose wings flap when they walk, not when they fly.

But anywho!  There were several quality-of-life squee moments yesterday:

• Putting my trinket collection into void storage.  I had two and a half bags of trinkets in Dusk's bank, and I pushed them all into void storage, along with some older "I got it when it was still in the game" stuff.  I had 47 inventory slots free when I got done!  That means I have 33 slots free in my bank now!
• Archaeology site tracking!  I initially noticed the sub-menus in the tracking menu, then noticed the archaeology and quest area tracking, and I may have made stupid noises of joy in guild chat for several minutes.  (I get to uninstall an addon because of this addition.)
• Transmogrification!  Actually, T12 hunter gear isn't too bad, and I'm not going to bother transmogrifying most of it.  T13, on the other hand... (How could they name such an ugly hat after Zeherah?!)  I have both the hunter tier .5 and tier 1 sets in the bank for options, though, along with the Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle, also known as the coolest looking ranged weapon in the game.  For now, though, I've just turned my hat into a better hat.
• Unbound Squashlings!  I had six I didn't vendor before the patch, and now they're going to go away through the auction house.  Hopefully.  I spent two thousand gold pushing stuff into void storage, and I could use a little cash.

I'll get home late enough tonight that I'm probably still not going to get a chance to run the new dungeons, but I may do some more rare hunting and farming now that I have more than 2 slots free.

Patch love

Aimed Shot is hitting and critting hard enough I was cackling at the target dummy. In fact, it's hitting hard enough I'm finding it worth opening on mobs while soloing - because if it crits, it's sometimes half their health.

One of the paragons of hunter-dom, Frostheim over at WHU, wrote a guide on using Aimed post-buff.

The Chimera Shot and Arcane Shot buffs were also nice - I'm sure the Kill Shot one was, too, but usually by that time in the fight I'm watching things besides my crit numbers. Overall I saw a 2-3k increase in DPS in Baradin Hold without gear (or even rotation) changes.

(The other thing that has made me giggle this week was watching my warrior's new Toxic Wasteling eat critters. She has the best holiday boss drop luck - Headless Horseman's mount and the Wasteling. If only I could have sent them over to Dusk. >.<)

More thoughts on the /castsequence

I'm running with a spec that looks something like this.

Since actually raiding Tol Barad (three times now), I've dropped one of the Arcanes from my macro, due to focus starvation outside Rapid Fire, and finally realized that dude, I can pop Aspect of the Fox during Felfire and keep my rotation going during all the running around.

No, other than the opportunity to raid-test the macro and tweak for focus consumption, my thoughts on the cast sequence have been centered around two of the other Steady Shot-centered talents: Piercing Shots and Master Marksman.

Ignore, for the moment, that Marksman is bottoming out raid DPS rankings right now. We play Marksman because we love it, right? (There is some irony, I think, that the hunter specs are sandwiching that list.) Besides, 4.0.6 will bring us some changes that will help with that. Aimed, Arcane, Chimera, and Kill Shot are all getting damage buffs. We'll be able to Auto Shot while moving.

Aimed Shot is one of the main things I've been thinking about regarding the cast sequence. We really only use it on proc, and the proc is reliant on Steady Shot and the RNG. The only way to really get more Aimed Shots in is to get more Steady Shots in. Add to this the bleed damage both Steady and Aimed (and Chimera) can inflict. If Aimed Shot hits harder, the target is going to bleed harder. Add in a bleed debuff from an Arms warrior, Subtlety rogue, Feral druid, or one of our own pets (I favor the hyena for this when needed), and we're looking at some nice little boosts.

But again, we need more Steady Shots to get more Aimed Shots. If we prioritize Chimera to be every 10 seconds (in a normal rotation; if you use Kill Shot or Rapid Fire or Readiness, the spacing will vary slightly), that means we've got 9 other seconds of global cool down to work with. Getting Steady down to a one-second cast requires amounts of haste that are more or less insane. How insane? Not quite 9000. Yes, with the two hunter haste talents (Pathing and Improved Steady Shot), you need 8817 haste rating to get your Steady Shot down to 1 second with no other haste bonuses.

No, a 1.5 or 1.6 second Steady Shot cast is probably what we're sanely looking at most of the time, without extra haste boosts - that is, for most of our normal rotations. That means that the two bundles of two Steady Shots makes sense, and pairing it with two Arcane Shots will make sure we're not sitting on buckets of Focus.

What about that extra second or so of GCD? We could add another Arcane Shot, but raiding Tol Barad - a fight that is, more or less, the ultimate in stand and shoot fights for 98% of it - has shown that 3 Arcane:4 Steady will leave us Focus starved at points. 2 Arcane:4 Steady makes sure we have enough Focus for our next Chimera. 2 Arcane:5 Steady, however, pushes us past the 9 second mark, towards an 11-second rotation.

At this point I'm going to stick with the 2:4 Arcane:Steady ratio. The half a second is useful for flexibility when you need to pop some extra shot (Kill Shot, Tranq, etc.) or a trap, or perform some other utility action. If you've got the extra time or Focus, another Steady or Arcane can be added, but with the upcoming changes to Aimed, I would lean towards the Steady Shot.

So for now, the macro remains:

/castsequence Chimera Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, Steady Shot

3.2 PTR notes

So, the 3.2 background downloader has started. 3.2 is probably going to pop before we down Yogg-Saron at this rate, but I guess that's ok. Hopefully Ulduar does not fall off the schedule just because something new is showing up.

Anywho! The current Hunter notes are on the PTR forums - who knows how much will actually go live, but there it is. Not much is changing that will affect Marksman talents.

Highlights:

• Because of the mount changes, Cheetah will be learnable at 16.
• Deterrence is no longer just frontal.
• Traps only last 30 seconds before they despawn, but! They've finally broken traps out into Fire, Frost, and Nature. Explosive Frost Snake goodness!

3.1.3 Hunter Notes

The first 3.1.3 patch notes are floating around out there, and the two hunter items are both nice for Marksman:

• Hunter's Mark: The ranged attack power bonus from this ability has been increased from 300 to 500.
• Master Marksman: This talent now also decreases the cost of Aimed Shot and Chimera Shot by 5/10/15/20/25%.

I'm curious to see if the changes to Master Marksman will be enough to let me move 2 points from Efficiency into Combat Experience. I'm pretty sure the increased Agi and Int will be a larger DPS increase if the mana consumption isn't too bad.

3.1 Patch Notes

The 3.1 PTR is up, although I'm not over there, and I've been hearing conflicting information about what's actually on the PTR so far as changes to Survival, vs. what's in the patch notes. But, I'm a Marksman hunter, so other than academic curiosity, I don't care what they do to the deep Survival talents. :P

From the patch notes:

• Disengage: Cooldown increased by 5 sec.
• Frost Trap: If the target who triggers Frost Trap is immune to its effect, the Frost Trap area effect will no longer be triggered.
• Talents
• Beast Mastery
• Improved Aspect of the Hawk now has a new spell effect.
• Improved Wing Clip: This talent has been removed.
• Marksmanship
• Piercing Shots re-designed: Your critical Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20/30% of the damage dealt over 8 sec.
• Ranged Weapon Specialization: Points reduced from 5 to 3, 1/3/5%.
• Wild Quiver: Chance increased to 4/8/12%, up from 4/7/10%. Damage increased from 50% of an auto shot, to 80%.
• Survival
• Hunting Party: This talent has been reduced to 3-points, and now increases your total Agility by an additional 1/2/3%.
• Lock and Load re-designed: You now have a 33/66/100% chance when you trap a target with Freezing Trap, Freezing Arrow or Frost Trap and a 2/4/6% chance when you deal periodic damage with your Immolation Trap or Black Arrow to cause your next 2 Arcane Shot or Explosive Shot spells to trigger no cooldown, cost no mana and consume no ammo. This now has a new spell effect and sound.
• New Talent: Trap Launcher: When activated, your next Trap will be launched instantly at the enemy target. 1 minute cooldown.
• T.N.T. re-designed: Increases the damage done by your Explosive Shot, Explosive Trap and Immolation Trap by 2/4/6%.
• Trap Mastery: This talent has been moved up to tier-2, up from tier-9.
• Wyvern Sting duration increased from 12 sec to 30 sec. PvP duration reduced from 10 sec to 6 sec.
• Pets
• Roar of Sacrifice can be used on the hunter only.
• Stampede (rhino) only affects 1 target, but adds a 25% bleed damage debuff (that does not stack with Mangle etc.) in addition to its knockback.

None of that seems particularly awful; we already got our nerf. The Disengage change is minor, and tweaking the CD back up a little after having it reduced previously isn't huge - especially since one of the undocumented changes is the removal of a minimum range on Kill Shot. You don't have to back up to pick someone off. (Side note: Something about the synergy of raid buffs last night in Naxx had me Kill Shot critting for 10k. We didn't even have a warrior or a druid. 2 prot pallies, 1 frost DK, 3 shamans (one of each flavor), 2 holy priests, a warlock, and me. I don't know what was going on, but it was sweet.)

The Frost Trap change is a small nerf, if I'm reading it correctly; it means that if the person/mob who triggers the trap resists or is immune, the trap just fizzles, instead of them just ignoring the effect.

Improved Aspect of the Hawk apparently looks different now - I'm guessing something along the lines of the cobra animation for one of the deeper BM talents, but we'll see. I'm not sure why the Improved Wing Clip mention fell under the BM notes - that's a Survival thing, and one of the few things I wish I still had from my 2-day Survival experiment.

The Piercing Shots change was announced a while back, and I will be shuffling points (or using dual specs for a raiding spec) to pick it up. The reduction of the points for Ranged Weapon Specialization means I may also pick it up for a raiding spec, but I'll see how many loose points I have to play with. Wild Quiver... meh, still probably won't bother.

The Survival changes mention Black Arrow, so I'm not sure why they didn't list it in the Survival talent section, but hey, at least you get the inkling that Survival hunters will now be able to do Fire, Nature, Arcane, and Shadow damage, on top of physical damage and two traps counting as Frost. If you ever doubted that hunters were casters, we may be the only ones with all five schools now. Woo. o.O

I'm really not familiar enough with Survival to know how good or bad some of the changes are, but it seems like they're trying to bring down the somewhat crazy numbers that Survival started doing after the 3.0.8 changes. Trap Launcher: a cool idea I've seen tossed out on the Hunter and Suggestion forums occasionally, and I'm a little curious how far down the tree it is. It should make Survival's trap dancing a little easier (to synergize with the undocumented tweak to Sniper Training?), but the idea of throwing a snake trap across the field at someone is just awesome.

The Roar of Sacrifice change - I don't have a Cunning pet right now (long story short: I had 3 pets that turned out to be Ferocity when they added talents, and wanted a bear as my Tenacity pet; I initially picked up a sporebat as my 5th, but switched it to a Hyena, theoretically for PVP). But this was the mana regen talent? I'm guessing it wasn't meant to be used on anyone but the hunter, and they're just fixing it. The rhino nerf disappointed my GM (who, post-3.0 warlock changes, has been a hunter full-time o.O), since he had a ball during the Lunar Festival 'defending' Thunder Bluff's elder from Alliance. (No, our guild wasn't subsequently KoS at the Alliance elders, really.)

Changes mentioned on the official forums that didn't get included in the PTR notes: remote stable use, and the ammuniton changes. I kind of wish remote stable use had been a saleable engineering item, but oh well. (It could have had awesome RP possibilities... /e pulls out her Goblin SAT Phone and issues the command: "Release the hounds!" Ahem.) The ammunition changes apparently aren't coming all in one piece - for now they're just increasing the stack size and removing (?) quivers. Hopefully this means that my Mammoth Cutters won't be useless yet, and that when they do eventually change, Engineering ammunition will just become a relic-like item of some sort, which we can still craft. We make some of the better ammunition in the game, and it would be nice if that didn't disappear completely.

Um, yeah, I've mentioned I'm a Goblin Engineer before, right? >.>

Two gear upgrades last week - both unexpected. A belt off Gothikk, and a sword off the Four Horsemen. My 2h sword skill was at 116 when I got it, heh. I mostly dual-wielded up until the Zulian Stone Axe (with an Agility enchant) from Venoxis in Zul'Gurub, and then mostly had two-handers from there on out, other than a brief switch into dual Stellaris with +Int enchants until I got the S3 axe. One of the things I've always understood about playing MM is that you can't neglect your mana pool; at least the gear reflects that now.

Patch Notes Update, and more about shot rotations

There are some tasty new changes to the PTR patch notes for 3.0.8 - nothing removed, but three new bullets:

• Arcane Shot: Mana cost lowered to match the cost of Steady Shot.
• Explosive Shot: Damage increased substantially, and additional scaling added to compensate Survival Hunters for the decrease in power of Steady Shot. No longer deals damage to secondary targets.
• Tranquilizing Shot has had its cooldown reduced to 6 seconds, down from 15.

The Arcane Shot change is going to be awesome for me. I've posted my shot macro here already, and Arcane Shot has always been part of my rotation. It hits and crits hard, and I'm talented to buff it. Pulling the mana cost down to the level of Steady Shot justifies its even more.

The Explosive Shot change doesn't affect me since, well, I'm a marksman hunter. The Tranq. Shot cooldown reduction is great, though - Gluth was the first thing that came to mind when I saw that. It'll just make it easier to keep things dispelled so that it doesn't pressure the healers to do it.

Going back to my shot macro, I've been thinking about the math more, and there really isn't much I can do to improve it. The criteria for it (my criteria, anyway) is that it use my 3 hard-hitting instant shots as often as possible, in the priority of Chimera, Aimed, Arcane. I want to be getting to my Chimera Shot in the rotation every time it's available, within the limitations of a 255 character macro, in order to keep my sting up. It's a free sting refresh. (I was not initially sold on Chimera Shot when I originally saw the MM tree, but like Silencing Shot, which I didn't spec into until probably 4 months after hitting 70, it's grown on me.) Manual weaving would actually be the best way for me to utilize those three instant shots, but I've had to admit to myself that my focus is, well, problematic. I get distracted by movement on the screen. (I had to turn off both the in-game screen flashes and the ones from Omen.)

So... the maths. The hunter Global Cooldown (GCD) is 1.5 seconds. That doesn't change. Every shot in your rotation has to budget a minimum of 1.5 seconds before you can do any other shot (besides autoshot, which is now in it's own happy little world of constancy). Steady Shot has a 2 second cast time until you start adding haste. I don't know how the haste numbers work in relation to Steady yet - i.e., how much haste pulls Steady down to a 1.5 second cast. This is my next area of research. But with basic GCD numbers, you can get in 7 shots in 10.5 seconds; you have to wait till 10.5 because otherwise you're sitting at a 9 second rotation, and your Chimera and Aimed aren't ready yet. 10.5 is your number. Three of those shots are dedicated to your instants - Chimera, Aimed, and Arcane. Chimera hits the hardest and refreshes your sting, so you can sacrifice optimizing Arcane for that (or manually weave... I used to be able to...). Those three shots are 4.5 seconds of your rotation, leaving you with 6 seconds to fill with Steady Shots. You're only going to get 3-4. Three with no haste; four with optimal haste.

If you hit optimal haste, though, Rapid Fire, Improved Aspect of the Hawk, and such become mostly unnecessary; you can't get any faster. If you're spec'd into these, it may make more sense to manually throw in an extra steady when you're proc'd into one or more haste effects (OMG Potions of Speed, seriously). Haste doesn't need to be the first stat you stack - your haste-buffing abilities and those of your group (Bloodlust, etc.) will help; you might find out what kind of gap you need to close between those abilities and reaching optimal haste to squeeze in an extra Steady and go for that, though. Haste will always speed up your autoshot, and if you do hit optimal haste, you can move those talent points around (and re-glyph!) to get more bang (or twang) for your buck.

I have considered rewriting the macro with /castrandom, to see if that will solve the rotation problem:

/castrandom [Chimera], [Aimed], [Arcane], [Kill Shot]
/cast [Steady]

I don't know if that will really work, though, or if it'll just pop Steady and ignore the instants that are available. (I didn't sign up to raid tonight, so maybe I'll remember to test it.) I would hope what that macro would do is pop an instant when there's an instant available, and then pop Steady when everything else is on cooldown. I kind of doubt I'm going to be that lucky, though. I don't really care what order the instants go off in most of the time (I don't have the Hunter's Mark related talents... I've been through that story, right?), as long as they're all getting used as often as possible.

Patch notes! Mmmm, patch notes.

The PTR notes are up, and although they say nothing about the female Tauren problems in Wintergrasp (if you take the portal from Dalaran, you can't get out of the room you port into - the doorway just acts as if it's too small), there's some hunter stuff (from the PTR notes page):

Hunters

• All Hunter pet abilities with a cooldown of 30 seconds or more are no longer on the global cooldown.
• Aspect of the Wild - This aspect is now raid-wide.
• Call of the Wild: The benefit from this pet talent now applies to only the Hunter and their own pet.
• Deterrence: Design changed to grant 100% parry and 100% chance to "deflect" spells coming from the front, but prevents the Hunter from attacking. Lasts 5 sec. 60 sec. cooldown.
• Improved Tracking(Survival): This talent has been slightly re-designed. Now reads: 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%.
• Kill Shot – Cooldown reduced to 15 seconds, down from 35 sec.
• Kindred Spirits: This talent now grants only 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
• The coefficient of Rake (Cat) and Scorpid Venom (Scorpid) has been lowered.
• Readiness: No longer resets the cooldown on Bestial Wrath.
• Steady Shot: Now gains 10% of attack power as damage instead of 20%.
• Serpent’s Swiftness: This talent now grants only 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet. The hunter attack speed bonus is unchanged.
• Unleashed Fury: This talent now grants only 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
• Viper Sting: Now drains a percentage of maximum mana.
• Volley: The damage has been reduced on all ranks by approximately 30% (including attack power scaling).
  

1. Taking things like Taunt (3 min. cooldown) and such off the global cooldown - heck, taking anything off the global cooldown is nice.
2. Aspect of the Wild becoming raid-wide means your shaman don't have to give up their water totem for NR to the raid - and the rest of a hunter's aspects are a self-buff, whereas water totems may be something like poison cleansing. And you don't have to worry about the boss's crazy aggro mechanics killing the totem. :P (Netherspite had a strange affinity for Searing Totems.)
3. Call of the Wild: Hopefully this means that Battle shout doesn't negate its utility anymore? I spec'd puppy out of it because there didn't seem to be a point to it, as it didn't stack with Battle shout.
4. Deterrence: Now a frontal "bubble"? o.O
5. Improved tracking change: Yay. For pulls with mixed mob types, or instances with multiple mob types (example: Sunken Temple has 4 - humanoid, undead, beast, and dragonkin), you don't have to micromanage your tracking. (Sunken Temple was the first time I realized just how useless tracking in an instance sometimes was - first for the multiple mob types, and secondly because of the layers. Karazhan was even worse for layers, even though pretty much everything was undead, with a few demons (and we never bothered with the beast wing).)
6. Kill Shot - yay! The reduced cooldown means I maybe get to use it more than once on a boss, and it will be much better for both soloing and PVP.
7. Kindred Spirits: BM, I don't care. :P
8. Rake seems to have been nerfed a little, but that's okay - kitty has been having aggro issues in groups, even if I consistently pull aggro off him while solo.
9. Readiness/Bestial Wrath: affects BM, not me.
10. Steady Shot nerf: anticipated. I stack for agi/crit/hit/int before AP, so meh.
11. Serpent's Swiftness: BM, so mostly meh, but - it does deal somewhat with the pet DPS overages without diminishing the hunter's DPS further.
12. Unleashed Fury: BM, so not me.
13. Viper Sting: I won't know if this is good or bad until I try it - depends what the %'s are.
14. Volley nerf: anticipated. While 11k DPS on a trash pull was pretty... Volley tended to make me the object of AoE pulls' aggression. Hopefully the reduced damage doesn't diminish its utility but helps some with pulling threat off the tank during AoE pulls.

I don't think this is going to close the gap between my DPS and the BM hunter who was kicking my ass on the meters, but she's probably going to see her numbers come down some. I don't think mine are going to be seriously affected in terms of boss DPS except by the Steady Shot change. I'm in mostly quest, crafted, and instance blues, and haven't touched a heroic yet - I expect to see my numbers reach acceptable raiding comfort levels once I do start doing heroics. (Maybe tonight? If the ice is bad enough that I can't come to work tomorrow, maybe tomorrow...)

I will confess, I'm itching to get S5 gloves, even though I've taken Multi out of my normal rotation since Aimed got added to Barrage/Imp. Barrage. The season starts on the 16th, though, and I don't think my husband is going to be ready for 2v2 - I may have to see if I can put something else together in the interim.