Why is Focus Allegedly Too Weak in PVP?

To the PVE hunter, Focus can seem perfectly fine.  It satisfies the costs of a rotation.  It requires enough management to be interesting but not enough to be distracting.  It can largely be considered a successful class change on Blizzard’s part.  But many PVP hunters think otherwise.  The official forums are riddled with threads about issues related to hunter PVP and almost ubiquitous among them is the complaint that Focus is fundamentally flawed in PVP.  Why is this argued?

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No New Sic ‘Em! Bug

There is a rumor going around that Sic ‘Em! is horribly bugged.  This isn’t the case.

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A Note on the Pet Focus Bug

I just wanted to quickly confirm that pet Focus is back to normal on the PTR.  For more on the issue, check out the forum thread here.

And, as long as I’m confirming things, yes, the new model for the Dark Phoenix mount does look much better.

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Lessons from Other Classes

What can we learn from other classes about how to deal with Focus and this newfound potential to hand out a variety of buffs?

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DPSCheck: 4.0.1 Shot Priorities

Hi folks, Pherra here. I just uploaded a new release of the DPSCheck addon to WoWInterface and Curse. This new version has the first pass at priority checks for Beast Mastery and Marksmanship builds, along with a new buff/debuff checking feature. The priority checks are designed to help your shot selection in any fight, while the buff/debuff checks are for maximizing your DPS over longer fights.

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Episode 43!

Hi folks! This week, Darkbrew, Frostheim, and Euripides talk about the Cataclysm debuffs, the changes to the latest beta hunter talents, and answer some reader emails!

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com. Also, we love iTunes reviews. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

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Hasty Conclusions about Cataclysm Hunter Mechanics

Editors Note: Another big hand for Pherra, the guy who is thanklessly coding that stupid hunter DPS addon idea.

Blizzard’s announced design changes give the hunter community a lot to absorb in the months leading up to Cataclysm. The biggest change was the “ranged rogue” change from mana to focus that was announced at Blizzcon. This post looks at the various smaller changes around the haste stat and hastily concludes that haste will be a lot more relevant to Cataclysm hunters. [Edit 2010-04-12: added links below about preventing DoT clipping]

Haste and Focus Regeneration

The first new effect of haste is to improve our focus regeneration rates. How important is focus regeneration? Well, we have 100 focus and it regenerates at 6 focus per second. That means we can completely recover our focus in just under 17 seconds. How fast can we spend our focus? How much do our shots cost?

• Aimed Shot, Multi Shot: 60 focus cost
• Arcane Shot, Chimera Shot, Explosive Shot: 45 focus cost
• Steady Shot, Cobra Shot: 9 focus gain

Suppose we are Survival specced and the GCD is still 1.5s. We might start a fight as follows.

• Start of 1st GCD – cast Explosive Shot, down to 55 focus.
• End of 1st GCD – regenerated, up to 64 focus.
• Start of 2nd GCD – cast Aimed Shot, down to 4 focus.
• End of 2nd GCD – regenerated, up to 13 focus.
• Start of 3rd GCD – cast Steady Shot, up to 22 focus.
• End of 3rd GCD – regenerated, up to 31 focus.
• Start of 4th GCD – cast Steady Shot, up to 40 focus.
• End of 4th GCD – regenerated, up to 49 focus.
• Start of 5th GCD – cast Explosive Shot again…

Now, that example totally ignores Black Arrow and Serpent Sting, both of which are still likely to be early in our rotations, but the take home message is that we will be running out of focus very quickly. In that example, we had no choice but Steady or Cobra Shot after two shots. That’s about 3 seconds, well under the 17 seconds to completely recover. Without significant boosts to our focus regeneration, we’ll be casting Steady or Cobra Shot most of the time. Haste is currently the only known way of improving focus, so it will likely remain important as talents and glyphs are revealed to help our focus management.

Haste and Damage over Time Spells

The second new effect of haste is to increase the tic rate of DoTs such as Serpent Sting or Black Arrow. Hasted DoTs will have the same duration, but the time between damage tics will be decreased and more tics may occur. As Euripides noted [ed: after Pherra told me about it], this benefit from haste will not give a smooth benefit as you add more haste since you only gain tics passing particular tic rates. I’d like to add a few observations here.

1. The Glyph of Serpent Sting will decrease the amount of haste needed to squeeze in more tics, since each additional tic is a smaller percentage increase. For example, to increase from the unglyphed 5 tics to 6 tics, 20% haste is necessary. With the Glyph of Serpent Sting, the first gain is from 6 tics to 7 tics, which only requires 17% haste.
2. Without the glyph, Black Arrow and Serpent Sting gain tics at the same haste levels. With the glyph, they are staggered so the gains are somewhat more regular.
3. Unless your last point of haste added a tic, there will be a dead time at the end of the DoT debuff. You can safely clip the DoT at this point without a DPS loss. Supposing all you did was refresh your DoTs as the last tics hit, then haste would scale their DPS perfectly linearly without a stair step pattern. Practically, you might reapply the DoT a second or two earlier, but you won’t see the smooth linear benefits with your full rotation.
4. Warlocks will have it easier since they’ll always extend the duration instead instead of clipping the last tic. [Edit: Here is the warlock preview announcing this change. Also, in a comment below, Jodalpho points out a blue post following the priest preview where Ghostcrawler says they want to prevent DoT clipping in general.]
5. Marksman hunters will have it even easier since Chimera Shot will take care of refreshing Serpent Sting. Serpent Sting gains from haste will always be linear for Marksman hunters.
6. All these issues are particularly interesting for Explosive Shot and high haste levels. Around 33% haste, the last tic is within the same GCD, so you can’t clip it. This would make the debate over Lock and Load rotations moot. At 50% haste, you would get a 4th damage tic, which would be a 33% boost to Survival’s strongest general use shot.

As a historical aside, this haste change is a followup on a 3.3 experiment by Blizzard. Blizzard wanted to test reducing the time between tics for all damage and healing over time spells using haste. In 3.3, this became optional for Corruption and Rejuvenation by means of  Glyph of Quick Decay and Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation. With those glyphs, the time between tics was reduced by haste, but the number of tics stayed the same and the duration decreased. My understanding is that these glyphs were great for warlocks and very situational for druids — some fights were better served by longer lasting HoTs. A similar issue would exist for Survival hunters would be wanting to keep the Serpent Sting uptime high for the Noxious Stings damage bonus. Keeping the duration fixed avoids such pitfalls and improves the damage or healing per cast.

Hasty Conclusions

We really know very little about the new hunter mechanics to be released with Cataclysm. There will certainly be similarities to rogue energy use, but we’ve already seen plenty of hints that our game play will remain quite different from just being ranged rogues. In this post, we’ve looked at a few released details and seen a surprising importance to the haste stat. At this point, we are ready to conclude that hunters should stack as much haste as possible in their Cataclysm builds. Or that just might be hasty.

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What I Love About Cataclysm Hunters!

I’m a fairly laid back hunter blogger, and as such, I tend to see things through a rose-colored monocle. It was not needed today- the Cataclysm hunter changes were 100% good ones, in my opinion.

I’ll complain if I feel the results need tweaking, but as all we’re seeing now is a design philosophy, I have to say that it looks like they’ve nailed down a bunch of gripes we’ve had for a long time. Assuming they can balance it so we’re ahead of feral druids when we all hit 85, I’ll be a happy camper!

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Cataclysm Hunter Changes Live!

Nethaera posted the hunter changes. Reposting now, analysis and follow up quotes will be edited in at the end.

Of course this would happen while I was at lunch. I called it.

With the upcoming World of Warcraft: Cataclysm many game elements will be changing, and each class will be receiving a number of tweaks. Here, we will explore the changes that are being made to the gun-wielding, pet-training hunter. The information you’re about to read is certainly not complete, and is only meant to act as a preview of some of the exciting new things to come. Without further ado, let’s take a look at the new hunter abilities!

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Hunter Cataclysm Changes Scheduled!

According to Bashiok, we’ll be hearing more about what will happen to us in Cataclysm on April 9th. So far, we’ve only had a sneak peek. What’s on your wishlist? Myself, I’d like to see:

• The new talent trees
• A granular explanation of how mastery will work for each tree
• Tamable druids (maybe just a mind control thing for PvP)
• Ammo with more interesting stats than DPS done
• A more complex rotation that would have the potential to reward excellent players with more DPS
• Hunters back on top of the DPS benchmarks for at least some fights

What about you guys? What do you want to see?

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ICC Macros

This post holds macros that you may find useful for Lady Deathwhisper and Saurfang in ICC.  If they fit your play style, great; if not, don’t use them.  Also note that these macros are at their bare bones.  You should add in Kill Command, trinket activations, etc., as appropriate.

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Culling The Herd!

As you guys probably know, we have a new pet talent replacing avoidance. Now that a 90% AOE reduction is baked into pets, culling the herd was replaced in the talent tree exactly where avoidance was. It provides a 3% damage done boose to you and your pet every time it procs, and procs from pet crits on their focus dump ability (claw, bite, or smack).

First, what is it’s uptime? Because this scales with pet crit, raid buffs play a part in this. On a target dummy, I measured a fairly low uptime, however I’ve seen raid parses with 70%-80% uptime.  That’s a pretty nice buff.

Second, what will this change? Mainly, you want to make sure that your pet is never focus starved. If you skipped that single point in go for the throat because you felt you had a better use for it, you might want to reconsider your options now that focus dumps contribute to the uptime on this thing. This also slightly increases the DPS we can get from crit, as our crits give our pet focus.

Lastly- while this is much more of an upgrade for BM hunters, I still haven’t seen any compelling evidence that BM has caught up with marks and survival. At least not yet. I suspect this might happen at later levels of ICC gear, but if you really like BM, the gap between theoretical top DPS has never been narrower. At least not since they nerfed scorpids and steady shot ;)

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Beginner’s Raiding 101!

This is a short guide to help people get started raiding. Much of the advice is not class specific, however it was inspired by an email I got from a fresh level 80 hunter, who had never grouped for an instance.

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Mana to Focus Change Sooner Than Expected?

Coiamin pointed this out to me on the 3.3 hunter changes post- all of the crafted agility mail has no intellect on it. Could this mean that we’ll become ranged rogues before the actual launch of cataclysm? Take a look (links open new window):

• Earthsoul Boots
• Rock-steady Treads
• Lightning-infused Leggings (fail blogger is fail)
• Draconic Bonesplinter Legguards (fail blogger is fail)

Thanks for the tip Coiamin!

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The Hunting Party Podcast, Episode 5!

Episode 5 of The Hunting Party was done without Darkbrew, who is on vacation (lucky blighter), but we got Brigwyn to fill in. We started with the interview, and then went over the news.

Today’s show notes contain a lot of links:

• Most importantly, the squirrel launcher.
• Brigwyn’s blog, podcast, and forums.
• The Hunting Party Podcast iTunes link. (leave us a review!)
• I’ve been getting questions about the song we use- the song is called “Turn You Out” from the “Deliverance” album, and the band is called “Bionic”.

As always, here is the Hunting Party Podcast feed, or here is the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the show. Send an email to outdps@gmail.com, and mention “podcast comment” in the subject.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts (iTunes, or whatever) but just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

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A Hunter’s Guide to 5v5 Arena

5v5 has always been the hunter’s strongest bracket. We’ve never had enough support abilities to really shine in 3v3, and always lacked the burst to dominate 2v2, but in 5v5 playing a hunter feels just right. I really live for the moments when my 5v5 gets to queue. If you are lucky enough to find 4 (or 5, or 6, or 7, because people tend to quit before a season ends…) dedicated people to play 5s with, I guarantee it will be the most fun you ever have. How do you do your job, though? After some preliminaries, that will be the question I address today.

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Hunters in Cataclysm!

According to the class Q&A on wow.com:

• They’re replacing mana with energy, like rogues. We’ll have a maximum of 100 focus, and it will regenerate 6/sec (a little slower than rogues’ 10 energy/sec), or a little faster (12/sec) if we use steady shot. No more mana regen, aspect of the viper, or int needed.
• There will be a complete wipe and overhaul of our talent trees. Again.
• They’re probably doing away with most talents that increase chance to hit.
• They’re doing away with armor penetration, and replacing it with “mastery”.
• Haste will now speed up focus regen
• Attack power is gone, replaced with agility.
• There’s a legendary 2h axe called “Shadowmourne”, that whether it’s appropriate or not, we’ll be rolling on :)
• In general, they’re getting rid of training every new rank of abilities- spells will scale with level, no need to drop by the trainer.
• Ammo will no longer be consumable, but be an item.

There will, I’m sure, be much chewing on this, but I’m gonna save it for this week’s podcast. Cheers!

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