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.

Post-3.0.9

Okay, after having several weeks of weaker Steady Shots, things have somewhat normalized. I'm not pushing quite the same numbers I had been, but I made some adjustments.

I had switched over to the Whale-stick Harpoon, for the +hit, so that I could re-gem for AP/crit. That served me pretty well for a while, but then I got the Lightning Giant Staff, which was, overall, an AP/crit boost, so I've re-gemmed yet again, back to +hit gems.

I picked up the PVP boots initially, but then the Dragon Slayer's Sabatons dropped, and they are, overall, a PVE boost over the epics.

I got the heroic badge neck, which was an upgrade. Getting revered with the Ebon Blade netted me new shoulders. Heroic Azjol-Nerub got me pants and a ring. Grobbulus had another ring. I also have the Bands of Anxiety off Grobbulus, but with my current gear set-up, I don't know that I want to swap out from my Eaglebane Bracers. I get AP from Int, so the Eaglebane have more AP for me, and I would drop under hit-cap with the Bands. That would mean re-gemming something again.

Basically, between re-enchanting, re-gemming, and the new gear, I've added about 700 RAP since pre-3.8. I'm still hit-capped, and still over 30% crit. It's amazing how many people I talk to who are good hunters (seriously, better DPS than I am) who have trouble buffing their crit - I think it's just because I prioritize it until about 30% over AP.

It wasn't cheap, but I'm cleared for all wings of Naxx under our raid guidelines. I'm hoping we hit Malygos this week. >.> Granted, I found Aces High! to be kind of meh, and finding out that phase 3 is basically that quest... well, I want to at least do the fight once, and then I'm okay with never going back.

The macro has ended up mostly unchanged, just shuffled - the cast sequence is now Chimera, Aimed, Arcane, Steady, Steady, Steady. When Hawk procs, I can probably get in another Steady, but that only matters on fights where I can just stand and shoot.

Oh, and I'm now riding an orange raptor full-time for my ground mount. Mmm, raptor.

Ugh

The nerfbat hit a bit harder than expected - 16%-25% decrease in my Naxx-10 raid damage. I asked to be taken off the schedule for FWL (because I don't want them to spend the night wiping because of me), but I don't know if they will.

I'm still trying to figure out how getting half as much RAP to 23% of my overall damage (Steady Shot) dropped my DPS so much - I haven't changed anything. There was nothing to change. Marksman wasn't really touched like BM and Survival were.

I'll go hit up the target dummy again and see what my self-buffed numbers look like; I'm not confident I'll be raiding the later wings of Naxx-10 for a while, though. Dropped from ~2000 to ~1500. >.< And ~1500 doesn't cut it for Sapphiron and Kel'Thezud.

Another macro concept

Adapted from the thread on the guild forums where I've been mulling it over.

Another possibility is:

/castsequence Arcane Shot, Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot
/cast Steady Shot

Logically it would run through the cast sequence first on every click; I'll have to see if it will actually go to the /cast line when those three are unavailable. (The downside of doing all this on lunch at work.)

I think the cast sequence would still choke, though, in terms of the 6 second/10 second optimization; the first two iterations would be fine :

Arcane shot, Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot, (1-2 Steady Shots depending on haste), Arcane will be ready so Arcane, Steady, Chimera, Aimed, Steady, Arcane, Steady, Steady, Chimera, (Arcane would go here except the cast sequence goes to Aimed) Aimed...

So the cast sequence will still eat a couple Arcanes. I'm actually not sure purely manual weaving would help, since there may still be times that Arcane is ready at the same time as one of the others.

It might, however, help the macro be more flexible for variable haste with regards to Steady Shot - since the hunter GCD is static at 1.5 seconds, and Steady Shot's cast can't be made faster than that, if you're not stacking haste to keep it constantly at a 1.5 second cast (and my gear isn't good enough to even try doing that yet), it's Rapid Fire and Imp. Hawk occasionally boosting your Steady Shot cast speed (plus Bloodlust, and I'm liking Potions of Speed recently - need to fish more for more pygmies). The current macro doesn't effectively take advantage of that in terms of the occasional extra Steady Shots, but if the /castsequence + /cast macro does, it might be worth switching to.

I'll try it out on the dummies when I get home if I can fish up enough pygmies to make enough potions to test out the haste effects.

Update: the /castrandom

The /castrandom doesn't work like I'd hoped, so I'm sticking with the macro I had been using. Longer macros trying to optimize the 6 second and 10 second cooldowns are getting snarled by variable haste, so I'm just going to stick with it for now. (1900 dps on 10-man Archavon and 2400 on 25-man seems to suggest that I'm doing fine as-is.)

Speaking of Raiding...

We went into 25-man Sartharion last night with 23 people (22 at the last boss because of a connection issue). Six druids; one hunter. (I think four or five shaman.) Raid makeup phenomena aside, we one-shotted all the drakes and Sartharion himself. (I died at about 25% because I somehow ended up tanking all the little flame guys. >.< Go go magic Volley aggro.) It was the third time I'd been in there, the first time I'd seen the 25-man version (first time the guild had, actually), and the 2nd time I'd actually seen the Sartharion fight. I got the 22-slot bag last week. This week I got the 25-man badge bag. :) After that, we broke down into two 10-man raids and killed him twice more. (Dragon fights have always been popular with us, I guess.) I could actually really use the gloves - any gloves, actually, since I'm still wearing S4 gloves - but I really like the place overall. (Onyxia is my favorite old-world raid. Magtheridon was my favorite TBC raid.)

My DPS numbers averaged around 2000 overall, dropping to 1700 on some of the 10-man drakes (I think I lost Strength of Earth in that group) and pushing around 2400 on Tenebron in the 25-man (we don't do the portal, and I popped my Speed potion).

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.