Today, I am going to try to confine my ramblings to the subject of the hunter talent tree upgrades. Pet changes, new spells, and upgrades to old spells will have to wait until a future post or two. And of course, I’ve also got to write about the priest changes. Hmm… And I’m trying to get my warlock to 70 before the expansion as well… Anyway. Hunters. Talents. Go.

Beastier Mastery

At present, my hunter is a pretty heavy beast mastery spec. If things remain largely unchanged, he will likely become even heavier beast spec immediately upon getting the expansion. Of course… there is so much goodness in the pending changes that I might not actually stick with beast spec much past 70, but this is my current plan for day one in Northrend.

First, let’s discuss what I’m planning on giving up (initially). In order to get 53 points in beast mastery, I will have to give up 11 points from marksmanship and survival. The talents that are going byebye:

• Humanoid Slaying (3 points, T1 survival) – No real pain here. This reduces my damage & crit damage caused to Humanoids by +3% each. Of course… this talent is gone in the expansion anyway. It’s being replaced by the 5 point Improved Tracking ability which gives you +5% base damage to whatever you’re tracking. It’s nominally an upgrade, but it’s not worth the points.
• Improved Hunter’s Mark (5 points, T2 marks) – Shrug. This talent causes my mark’s +AP bonus to apply to melee damage as well (ie, my pet’s). That means -110 AP that my pet would normally enjoy against a target I’ve marked. That’s roughly 8 dps + whatever specials might gain from AP. In the expansion… the talent gets a major buff. Cost is reduced to 3 points and it also gains +30% to resist dispel. I like the improvement, but it’s still not earthshaking.
• Go for the Throat (2 points, T3 marks) – This one makes me cry. Go for the Throat causes my pet to regenerate 50 focus every time I score a ranged critical hit. Getting this talent back will probably be my first major focus – with the planned build, I’ll be able to get this back at level 77.
• Aimed Shot (1 point, T3 marks) – This one also makes me cry. I refuse to explain aimed shot. Anyone who’s read this far knows exactly what it does. I might pick this back up, but it will take some careful juggling.

But oh… oh what am I going to get in exchange It’s gonna rock.

Aspect Mastery is a new T3 beast talent. For one point, it buffs your 3 basic aspects. Viper gets +10% to its mana regen rate. Monkey gets 10% damage reduction – that’s right, flat out absorption when the dodge fails. This also means monkey now helps when you’re getting hit by spells. Hawk gets +50% to its AP bonus. At level 70, hawk is worth +155 AP, so this talent is worth +77 AP. At level 80, hawk will be worth +300 AP…

While I’m going this deep in the tree (and since I don’t need the point for Aimed Shot any more), I’ll also be picking up a 3rd point in Catlike Reflexes for an additional +1% to my dodge and +3% to my pet’s dodge.

Invigoration is a new T8 beast talent that for two points causes you to instantly regenerate 2% of your mana every time your pet scores a crit with a special. My pre-existing talents already give my pet +10% crit chance and double focus regen. I’m losing the focus regen from Go for the Throat but am also picking up both of the new T9 talents…

Longevity costs 3 points at T9 beast and reduces cooldowns on Bestial Wrath, Intimidation, and all pet special abilities by 30%. Intimidate’s cooldown goes down from 60 seconds to 40; Bestial Wrath is down from 120 seconds to 84. These cooldowns were already short enough that I have macros that ensure I am able to burn them almost every time they’re up. The buff makes me giddy.

Reducing the cooldown on pet specials by 30% means I don’t have to rely on my pet’s focus dump ability any more. 30% more frequent crits from specials means 30% more frequent procs of Invigoration and happy joyful mana regeneration.

Cobra Strikes costs 3 points at T9 beast and gives me a 60% chance when I crit with Arcane, Steady, or Kill shot to cause my pet’s next 3 specials to crit… In conjunction with Invigoration, this effectively reduces the mana cost for my Steady shots into the realm of the microscopic.

And of course, then there’s Beast Mastery, the new T11 talent. This will allow me to tame exotic pets (devilsaur, chimera, silithid, etc…) and effectively gives all of my pets +20 levels worth of talent points.

The only new beast talents that I’m not actually picking up with this build are:

• Animal Handler (T6, 2 points), which gives my pet +4% to hit (that’s never been a problem) and reduces the cooldown on the new Master’s Call ability by 10 seconds (from 60 to 50). I don’t think I’ll be using Master’s Call much. I’ve already got 84 second Bestial Wrath.
• Separation Anxiety (T10, 5 points), which is quite probably very cool, really. Fully trained, it gives your pet +10% movement speed when <=20 yards from you and then turns the speed bonus into +10% dps once it gets 20 yards away. This makes interception time even faster and generally translates into an almost permanent +10% pet damage (since 20+ yards is a quite normal range for hunters to shoot from).

I’m vaguely torn by Separation Anxiety. Insert pun here. To pick it up immediately upon WotLK launch would mean foregoing +5% crit chance, and my crits already give my pet huge bonuses that I wouldn’t want to go without.

Of course… the other two talent trees have gotten an even bigger upgrade. Beast was already terribly overpowered, so it is only fair. If it weren’t for the lure of exotic pets, I’d be all over the other trees. As it is, I’m having a hard time deciding what I want out of their first 3 tiers.

Marksmanship

The changes to the marks tree mean major improvements to hunter shots, reliable improvements to baseline DPS, and absolute gobs of bonus mana efficiency.

One of my longstanding gripes has been Improved Concussive Shot. In BC, it was a 5 point talent that gave the dubious benefit of a 20% chance of proccing a 3 second stun in addition to the daze effect. There are numerous problems with this that I really don’t want to get into since the bad talent is finally going away. In return, we get a sleek new 2 point talent that increases the duration of the daze by 2 seconds. This is pure awesome. If I were leveling a newbie hunter, this would be my first talent, hands down.

T1 marks also gets the 3 point Focused Aim talent, which gives hunters the same sort of 70% interruption resistance (while charging Aimed & Steady) that other mana-using classes have traditionally been able to buy for low tier talents. I find this to be of questionable usefulness, however – especially since it’s a T1 talent that buffs abilities that aren’t available at level 10. Aimed shot is a T3 talent, so it is first available at level 20. Steady shot rank 1 is level 62…

T2 marks gets some amazing changes, I’ve already mentioned the buff to Improved Mark.

Careful Aim makes an appearance at T2. All the way down from T7. Yup. They moved a tier seven talent down to tier two. And then they buffed it 3x. In stead of a puny +45% of your int converted into RAP, it now gives a full +100%. Epic win.

They have also switched the locations of Mortal Shots (+crit damage) and Efficiency (-mana cost). Mortal Shots is now T2 and becomes Aimed Shot’s pre-req (in stead of the other way around). Efficiency wasn’t very important at low levels, so moving it up to T4 makes more sense (when it’s saving you more than 1 or 2 mana per spell).

In stead of Careful Aim at T7, marks hunters now get Piercing Shots for 3 points. This gives Steady and Aimed shots the ability to ignore 6% of target armour. Very unshabby.

Rapid Recuperation is a new 3 point T8 ability that helps mana efficiency. While using Rapid Fire, both the hunter’s and pet’s abilities are 60% cheaper. This makes for a lot of focus dump happiness for your pet. Additionally, Rapid Killing (which already reduces Rapid Fire’s cooldown) is improved by giving you a mana regen tick that heals you for 150% of the damage dealt by the +20% damage shot you fire to use the Rapid Killing charge. This is quite probably enough to keep high level hunters at full mana forever, so long as things keep dying.

Wild Quiver is a new T9 (3 point) talent that gives you a 10% chance to fire an additional auto shot at 60% damage. Combine this with the fact that heavy marks hunters will likely be using Improved Hawk in stead of Viper (since the marks tree is really taking care of the hunter’s mana needs without it now)… and you have a LOT of extra arrows flying.

T9 also gets Improved Steady Shot (3 points). This gives your steady shots 15% chance to increase the damage of your next aimed/arcane/kill shot by 15% while reducing its mana cost by 40%. See? I told you. Mana efficiency.

The new T10 marks talent is Marked for Death (5 points). It gives your already improved hunter’s mark an additional +10% damage dealt by the hunter & pet and increases your critical strike damage bonus of all shot spells by a further 10%. This really encourages the hunter to mark their targets but I wonder how it plays out with multiple hunters firing on the same target. Do they all get the bonus, or does only the hunter who placed the mark?

And Chimera Shot is the new T11 talent. It’s a 10 second cooldown shot for 125% damage that refreshes your current sting and procs an additional bonus depending on which sting was active. Serpent deals 40% of the sting’s normal damage instantly. Viper heals you for 60% of the amount it drains (mana efficiency). Scorpid procs a 10 second disarm attempt that can only occur once a minute. All told, way cool.

Survival

The big change at T1 for the survival tree is that the former pair of 3 point talents Monster Slaying and Humanoid Slaying have been replaced with the 5 point Improved Tracking. I’ve already discussed this above, but just to reiterate:

• Only costs 5 talent points in stead of 6.
• +5% damage in stead of +3% damage and +3% crit damage.
• Works on whatever you’re tracking in stead of just 4 different creature types.

T2 gets a new talent called T.N.T.. Hehe. This gives your fire traps 15% chance to deal a 2 second stun when they do damage (I assume this means 15% each time the dot procs…). It also increases the crit chance of your explosive trap by 15%. And… the talent also extends these bonuses to your Explosive Shot (which is the new T11 talent that effectively acts as a ranged explosive trap). I could live with this.

Tier 2 also gets Survival Instincts. Yup, another high tier talent moving down into cherry picking range. They didn’t even nerf it in the process (but they didn’t buff it like they did Careful Aim). This formerly 5th tier talent gives you a whopping 4% damage reduction and 4% AP for 2 points.

T3 sees an upgraded version of Deflection. This talent previously cost 5 T2 points for +5% parry bonus. Now it costs 3 T4 points for +6% bonus. Deflection also becomes Counterattack’s new pre-req (since the old pre-req, Deterrence is becoming a baseline ability now). Win.

T3 also gets Trap Mastery, which is currently unimplemented. But I believe it is supposed to be a combination of the previous T3 Clever Traps talent and the previous T4 Trap Mastery talent.

And… T3 also gets an improved version of the formerly T4 Improved Feign Death. Survival Tactics (2 points) is Improved Feign Death (+4% to difficulty to resist feign) plus a 4 second reduction to Disengage’s cooldown.

At T4, Surefooted is slightly changed to cut the duration of snares in half. Previously it supposedly gave you a +15% chance to resist them, but I’m not the only one who’s noticed that a lot of CC/snare/etc… type effects are, well, simply irresistible. So this is a nice improvement. They’re actually doing this sort of thing all across the board (changing chance to resist effects that weren’t ever actually resistible to a reduction in that effect’s duration).

Lock and Load is a new 3 point T4 survival talent that gives you a crazy weird clearcasting type effect that procs whenever you trap a target or 15% of the time you sting something. The proc is that your next 3 arcane and explosive shots are free to cast and have no cooldown (they normally both have a 6 second cooldown). I really wonder if successive explosive shot dots stack… because explosive trap + 3x explosive shot = actual big boy aoe dps. This would actually make hunters vaguely useful in situations where previously only mages & warlocks would do.

Hunter vs Wild is a new T5 talent for 3 points that increases you and your pet’s AP by 30% of your total stamina. 5 points in Survivalist are the nominal pre-req, but when considering taking a talent like this, who’d pass up a +10% stamina bonus anyway?

Noxious Stings is new at T8 and has Wyvern as a pre-req and gives your wyvern sting a backlash effect that hits the dispeller for 50% of the remaining sting duration. In addition, it also increases all damage dealt to victims of your serpent sting by 3%. This really improves the usefulness of wyvern in pvp and makes serpent a nice addition to an improved mark in group situations. I don’t think this should be a T8 talent with a pre-req… but there really isn’t room to put it anywhere else

Point of No Escape is a new T9 survival talent that costs 3 points and increases the crit chance of all attacks on victims of your ice traps (and possibly bear trap, but I think they’re doing away with that one). This is very nice for frost trap and potentially very very fun with the rumored changes to freeze trap (it won’t break on any old damage now). This means you might get to cycle off two big crit shots into something when breaking its freeze now.

Sniper Training is another new T9 talent (3 points). This increases the damage dealt by steady, aimed, and explosive shots by 6% when you are >30 yards away from the target. It also (possibly more importantly) improves your chance to crit by 15% when executing with Kill Shot. It’s kind of a shame this is so mutually exclusive with Separation Anxiety (+pet dps at long range).

The new T10 survival talent is Hunting Party (5 points) and serves as an awesome hunter version of Vampiric Touch (shadow priest spell that dots an enemy and turns the damage into mana for the party). Hunting Party has Thrill of the Hunt as a pre-req (regen 40% of shot costs when you crit) and heals your whole party’s mana/energy/rage/runic power slightly whenever you crit with an arcane/explosive/steady shot. Hehehe. Oh, and remember, TNT gives explosive shots +15% to crit while Lock and Load makes them subject to chain clearcasting

And of course then there’s Explosive Shot at T11. We’ve already seen numerous other talents that improve it, but what is it? It’s a ranged explosive trap on a 6 second cooldown. It hits the primary target for a good chunk of fire damage and then splashes everything within 5 yards with a dot for half of the base damage again over 2 seconds.

And so… with so many wonderful options, I am really starting to wish for the first time that they will let us dual spec somehow. It would mean I can keep my insanely heavy beast spec for soloing and take something from marks and/or survival for groups/pvp. Mmm. Happy ideas.

Anyhow, I’ve spent entirely too long on this, and now I’m less sure than ever of what I’ll be doing with my 10 shiny new lvl 71-80 talent points. Oh well. Respecs aren’t really that expensive after all.

I did it right this time. Kiki spent the vast majority of her post-newbie levels as a holy/discipline hybrid build and eventually ended up at 28/33/0. Smite and mana efficiency FTW.

I also planned ahead. Not only did I have 5 pieces of lvl 70 eq waiting for me (including the Primal Mooncloth set). Not only did I have enough money saved up to buy my flying mount, but I actually “camped the chicken spawn”. I hit level 70 less than 30 yards from the riding trainer in Wildhammer, bought my chicken, and flew away.

Kiki currently has 6741 hp, 9266 mana, just shy of 1250 bonus healing and 154 mp5 while casting (354 while not casting). She has over 400 int and spirit. Her /played is just over 10 days.

boring history

(Seriously, I’m about to ramble for a few hours… Hey, I said this took 12 years…)

I’ve always enjoyed healing in RPG’s, and I like to think that I’ve gotten fairly good at it over the years. I play clerics and druids in pen and paper RPG’s. I cried like a baby when Aeris died – and not just because I was emotionally involved in the story (which I was), but also because she was my healer. My first MUD character became a priest on September 10th, 1996.

I’m not sure what exactly it is about healing in games that I enjoy so much, but I like it more than summoning (a close second – playing healers who can summon makes me giddy). I’m pretty sure my original obsession with clerics was strictly the result of numberchasing munchkinitis. In AD&D, clerics felt like the most flexible class to me. They could heal, they could smite, they could summon at very low levels, they had good hp and could wear heavy armour and hit things with big hammers. My online handle “Allaryin” comes from my first successful D&D character, a chaotic good dwarven cleric of Tempus – the Forgotten Realms god of war.

However, in subsequent games, I recanted this position. Somewhere along the line, the idea of being able to do anything and everything at any time started losing its appeal. I became less interested in whacking things with hammers and calling down fire to consume my enemies whole… and more interested in passively altering events. Why wield the hammer yourself when the fighter can do a better job at it – especially with my help keeping him alive?

Future incarnations of Allaryin stopped following warrior gods like Tempus and started following Lathander the god of light and creation… and eventually evolved into followers of Ilmater the martyr’s god. I became obsessed with keeping my party members standing, even if it meant they had to find another priest to raise me when I fell.

When ‘96 rolled around and I was introduced to muds, it was a happy coincidence that the guys who kickstarted the addiction were a knight and a priest. I quickly gravitated toward the priest’s guild and when the time came, chose to play as a priest of Morike, the game world’s goddess of healing. Though I eventually played almost every other class in the game, I always came back to Morike. If I logged into the mud right now, Allaryin would still be there, a very dusty and unplayed but still very fervent follower of the light.

Fast forward to March of 2004, FFXI hit my PS2 and I was all ready to reinvent Allaryin again as a Tarutaru white mage, but the game’s user interface had other plans. I was unable to figure out how to choose a name of my own, and after several attempts finally gave up and decided to use the random generator. Kikichikki was born.

Kiki was also doomed to failure by a game that made solo play absolutely impossible, especially for the entirely defensive white mage class. I don’t think I ever hit level 21, but I hit level 20 about 50 times… having not quite mastered the fine art of controlling aggro in order to avoid getting killed in groups.

Kiki saw a brief reincarnation as an Agatean Pishite on the Discworld mud that lasted a few months before real life conspired to prevent me from playing. When I returned, the character had been wiped for inactivity

In early 2006, Kiki’s next stop was City of Heroes. I rolled the character four or five times but never really got into it – however, when City of Villains came out, I rolled Columns, a Necromancy/Poison mastermind who spent most of his time keeping people alive (or reanimating them as the case may be).

When World of Warcraft launched, I was unimpressed with my options for healers. During the open beta, I determined that paladins, druids, and shamans were too confusing and priests were too squishy. Summoning was where it was at, and a few months later when I was finally bullied into opening an account, I rolled Allaryin as a dwarven hunter.

In the intervening years, I have tried leveling healers several times, but the closest I ever got was a 40 paladin (who isn’t even healer spec any more). Priests were always squishy, I hit level 15-20 with several attempts but always gave up at my inability to solo with the class – but I had always tried to level as a shadow priest since that’s what common convention states is the best build for soloing.

shadow is overrated

I repeat. Shadow is overrated.

I originally (like 2 months ago when the topic was fresher on my mind) meant for this to be a separate rant, but as I never wrote it I may as well go into the subject briefly here.

Again, this time with feeling. Shadow is overrated.

Maybe I’m just complete noobsauce, but I just couldn’t make a shadow priest work. I’ve got a level 50 warlock, which you’d think would be comparable. But it isn’t. In World of Warcraft, playing a low level shadow priest is more like playing a melee hunter. Just because the game lets you spec for stupid doesn’t mean it actually works.

I’m not saying that the shadow talent tree is worthless. I’m not saying that high level shadow priests aren’t amazing and viable in groups. Nor am I saying that shadow priests can’t be obnoxiously effective in PvP, and I am certainly not suggesting anyone try to solo to 70 w/o picking up any offensive talents.

I am saying that shadow priests are pointless in low level (<50 or so) PvE solo content. I am saying that the holy and discipline talent trees have much better options for solo players at lower levels.

When Kiki was in her early 40's, I figured I'd give shadow another chance. I had been a holy smite build until this point and had intentionally waited to respec shadow until I could buy enough talents to make it worthwhile. I advanced two levels as a shadow priest before giving up in disgust.

What is wrong with shadow priests? Let me count the ways.

At level 10, a priest is highly squishy. They're going to be healing themselves a lot - their fights take longer since they do less damage and they've got less defense (not getting the first rank of their personal armour spell until level 12).

Going immediately into either of the available shadow talents means delaying or neglecting Healing Focus (2 points for 70% resistance to interruption while healing). Time wasted trying to heal through interruptions means a corpse run.

Waiting until level 12 to take your first shadow talent point means you can't get Mind Flay (the first really useful shadow talent) until 22.

Everyone talks up Spirit Tap (increased mana regen for 15s after a kill) but water really is very cheap and low level priests really shouldn't be using mana to kill things anyway. Wand DPS is much more reliable and even outperforms smite at low levels. Lowbie priests should never run out of mana since they've offloaded their spells to before the mob closed into melee and are spending the rest of their time in combat wanding and regenning for the next fight.

Blackout is even more useless at low level. 10% chance to stun the target for 3 seconds with your shadow spells? There is only one direct damage shadow spell before Mind Flay, and it’s on an 8 second cooldown.

For the same five talent points that would have been wasted in regen you don’t need or stuns that you can’t depend on… you could have 70% resistance to interruption while healing AND one of:

• +15% wand dps (up to 25% after 2 more points).
• +15% healing over time from your renew spell (which should be your most commonly cast spell at this level).
• +3% crit from your holy spells (up to +5% after 2 more points, this includes heals and nukes).

Shadow damage can be mitigated. There is no such thing as holy resistance. Smite always works. And it’s not on a cooldown, so you can actually spam it.

Shadow priests’ damage output is highly equipment-dependent. To truly be worth the pain of playing a shadow priest, you need gobs of +shadow damage equipment. The soonest a character can be effectively loaded up with +shadow gear is level 40.

Shadowform requires level 40 at the absolute minimum. That’s if you completely ignore the other two talent trees…

Can’t cast holy spells while in shadowform. Since you still have access to discipline spells, this isn’t a huge nerf (unlike a druid’s specialized caster forms which pretty much limit you to nuking or healing)… but it is still inconvenient. If for whatever reason you do need to cast a holy spell while soloing in shadowform, switching back costs a huge amount of mana.

DoT’s don’t crit.

Shadow priests blow through mana like nothing I’ve ever seen before. With one’s primary sources of damage being a DoT and a channeled DoT, you waste a lot of mana. Shadow Word: Pain suffers from the same problem that all DoT’s have – it rarely has a chance to tick to conclusion. Likewise, with Mind Flay, any hit you take while channeling will reduce the damage/mana ratio of the spell dramatically.

When hunting trolls as a shadow priest in Arathi, Kiki had to stop and drink after every other kill, even with Spirit Tap. As a smite priest, both her dps and her mana efficiency were higher. She could take 3 or 4 mobs before resting.

After the failed adventures in shadowform, Kiki gave a heavy discipline build a whirl. It too was disappointingly less effective than the heavy holy build had been – but, while she did less damage and her heals were weaker… at least she was sturdier and had more mana to cast the weaker spells with.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that from a purely munchkin standpoint, shadow spec is not a good idea for solo PvE before level 50, and is just… well, unplayable before 40.

If you want to play a shadow priest, do yourself a favor and either always party or level a hybrid build of some sort or another and respec to shadow when you get to Outland.

Let the flames commence.

Oh wait, that’s right. You can’t do that in shadowform

(Yes, I know the pun was horrendous. I’m sorry. Kind of.)

In the games we’ve watched, discussed, and played over the last week or so, several interesting observations have been made:

• Infantry are way overpowered.
• The game is all about money, but then again, lots of games are.
• Light artillery is useless.
• The RNG hates me.
• Alliances win.
• It’s dangerous to be identified as the big threat.

infantry == free money

When we say infantry are overpowered… there really is no easy way to describe just how overpowered they really are. Light infantry cost $75 and heavy infantry cost $100. The difference is that light infantry move 2x as fast as heavy and heavy infantry hit vehicles 2x as hard as light (the game says that heavy have 4x the offensive power vs vehicles as light do… but that doesn’t seem to translate to 4x the damage potential). Infantry can capture bases. Infantry can cross mountains. Infantry get substantial offensive and defensive bonuses for being in heavy terrain. They suffer penalties in swamps, but then again, so do vehicles.

Compare this with your basic light tank. The tank costs $300 to produce, moves like light infantry, cannot cross mountains, suffers offensive and defensive penalties for being in heavy terrain, and will come out hurting very badly if it tries to solo a heavy infantry unit. Two heavy infantry who get the drop on a tank are assured a win. And it’s entirely possible that both units will survive – allowing them to heal up and fight something else.

This is where the game comes down to money. If $200 worth of infantry can beat $300 worth of vehicles, then the player with the infantry has tipped the money scale dramatically in his favor. To further illustrate the scenareo (which is not 100% realistic, but still illustrates my point), I present the following detailed example. Much of this example is just an extension of ideas Adam expressed a few days ago, so I take very little credit here

Player A and player B are playing a game on a very small map consisting entirely of basic grassland, no fancy terrain bonuses here. Both players control two bases and the battle front is incredibly close. Each base produces $100 per turn. Let’s begin the scenareo with $300 per player and no units.

Turn 1: Player A moves first and creates two heavy infantry, bringing his money down to $100. Player B creates a tank for $300, wiping his money out.

Turn 2: Player A moves his two heavy infantry forward and creates two more. He is spending exactly as much money as he is earning, so his balance remains at $100. Player B had $0 coming into this round, earns $200 for his bases, and decides to keep that money in favor of producing a tank next turn.

Turn 3: Player A attacks the tank with his two foremost infantry and almost kill it. He then moves his second pair forward and creates a third pair of heavy infantry. Player B gets his second tank, dropping his balance down to $100. He attacks one of the infantry that attacked his first tank and kills it, but also takes some damage in the process.

Turn 4: Player A moves his injured infantryman back and attacks the injured tank with one of his fresh units. The tank dies, barely scratching the full strength infantry unit. He moves his 5 other infantry forward and creates two more. Player B attacks the unit that just killed his first tank and injures it fairly badly, dropping it down to 4/10 health, but not after taking 3 damage himself. He creates another tank and is back to nothing in the bank.

Let’s take a moment to count score. Money in the bank doesn’t count, but it doesn’t really matter anyway, since both players have similar amounts of money on hand and coming in. However, compare the monetary value of their units on the board.

Player A has 7 full strength heavy infantry worth $700. He also has one more unit at 40% health for a total value of $740. Player B has one full strength tank on the board worth $300 and one unit at 70% health for a total functional value of $510.

Turn 5: Player A swarms the injured tank with 3 of his uninjured units and kills it. He then moves his 4 remaining uninjured units forward, they are on B’s doorstep by now. His one previously injured unit rests for +1/10 health. He creates two more heavy infantry, bringing his population up to 6 uninjured, 4 moderately injured infantry.

Player B has one solitary tank now. He cannot afford another one. He cannot reach any of player A’s injured units to attack them, his only choice is to attack one of the uninjured units, which he does, injuring it heavily, but not enough to destroy it, and not without taking damage himself.

Turn 6: Player A stomps the injured tank, clearing the board of player B’s units. He moves one of his remaining uninjured infantry ont o each of player B’s bases and begins capturing. All of his injured units rest for +1/10 health. He creates two more units, just to be cheeky about the whole situation. Player B earns $200 more, bringing his money in the bank up to $400, but he can’t do anything with it since both of his bases are occupied.

Turn 7: Player A creates two more units, finishes capturing player B’s bases, and wins the game.

The final tally shows player A having not even broken a sweat. He has 14 units on the board and $100 in the bank, compared to player B’s zero units on the board and his useless $400 in the bank.

So… while it was a slightly unfair example, the point stands. Hordes of infantry are worth way more than their equivalent weight in tanks. Put them in rough terrain and the difference becomes even more marked, the infantry may move slightly slower through rough terrain, but they become significantly tougher. Of course, infantry through rough terrain are usually faster than vehicles through rough terrain anyway… What then, is the counter to heavy infantry? An equal or greater quantity of light infantry. They cost 25% less, move faster and hit heavies just as hard as the heavies hit them back. No contest.

Resting is free money. Remember, the only money that really matters is money that’s already been spent to produce units. If you can get more use out of your units…

There are only two other unit types in the game worth discussing.

Raiders (recon bikes) are the fastest units in the game, they cost $200, and they hit infantry as hard as light tanks. They are great at closing gaps, blocking bases, and picking off solitary infantry. A small group of raiders can hit and run a poorly organized group of infantry into oblivion w/o taking any permanent casualties.

artillery

And then there’s artillery. In basic games, there are only two varieties of artillery. Light and heavy. Light artillery cost $400, move rapidly, and have an attack range of 2-3 hexes. Heavy artillery cost $600, move slowly, have a range of 3-4 hexes, and hit much harder. They have very little defense, so once a normal unit gets next to it, the artillery unit is pretty much dead. “Pro” games have a few more types of vehicles, including more two more varieties of artillery, both of which are quite nifty.

A wall of cheap infantry takes time to carve through, especially if they’re rotating their wounded out to heal. Stick a few heavy artillery pieces behind them and they’re unstoppable.

Why did I say that light artillery is ~useless? Well, for one, it only has an offensive rating of 4|4 (vs infantry|vehicles). Heavy infantry have an offensive rating of 3|4 and you can field 4 of them for the price of one light artillery, or you could get yourself a pair of 5|2 raiders for the same money. The other problem with light artillery is that they have a short range and cannot move and attack on the same turn. Thus they must get very close to the enemy to attack anything at all. That, and despite their speed, they’re pretty much incapable of attacking heavy artillery w/o getting blown to pieces along the way.

Heavy artillery have 5|5 offense, 2x the range, and 1 more armour than light artillery for only 50% more money. Thus, for $1200 you could either field three light artillery and have a hard time positioning them in such a way that all 3 can attack on the same turn w/o being exposed to attack themselves… or you could field a pair of heavies and slowly creep across the map flattening all who oppose.

What’s the solution to heavy artillery? Raiders. Large quantities of infantry. Anything that can close into short range and kill w/o being killed first.

How do you keep your artillery from being killed? Keep a thick wall of cheaper units in front of them. Remember, you can buy 8 light infantry for the cost of one heavy artillery. Nothing in the game has AoE attacks… so 8 cheap units take a very long time to carve through… especially if you’re able to cycle the injured ones back to rest.

unbalanced dice

One gripe I have about Weewar is that the random factor really is a bit too random for my taste. I like my tactical games to depend more on tactics than luck. Right now… it is too easy to have a run of bad luck and get knocked out of the game for a few bad rolls.

In Advance Wars, the attacking unit always gained an advantage. Healthier units always did more damage than injured units. Not so with Weewar. It is not unusual for a pair of fully healed infantry to attack a raider and both wind up taking the same amount of damage.

Infantryman 1 attacks the raider, does 3 damage, takes 4 damage.

Infantryman 2 attacks the raider – which should now be operating at only 70% power, does 2 damage, takes 5 damage.

To compound the situation, the game’s official documentation says that multiple units attacking the same target from multiple angles get bonuses.

With small numbers like this, slight variations due to a fickle RNG are still large enough to make any such advantage very hard to notice. It is there. It must be. I’ve convinced myself that it is. But the numbers only occasionally support this.

If you could see the dice, maybe? At least then you could brag about the crits when they happen and blame losing an attack on obviously poor rolls.

I don’t mind randomness… but the game doesn’t even keep a text log of attacks and their results (much less the numbers involved), and I think that makes the occasional spot of ill fortune seem even more pointless and arbitrary than it might otherwise. It’s not unheard of to attack a unit that you should by all rights be able to kill with minimal injury and wind up losing your attacking unit in the process – despite supposed terrain modifiers in your favor, etc…

Shrug. For now, the wide range of possibilities from the RNG are just one more reason that infantry are superior. You don’t feel so bad when the game throws your infantry away as you do when you lose a heavy tank to bad dice

strength in numbers, sometimes

Another thing we’ve noticed about the game is that teamwork really makes a difference. Not only does an alliance mean you don’t waste your time killing each other’s units… it typically means ~2x the units pointed at your enemies.

I recently lost a game rather soundly because I was winning. Yup. Lost because I was winning.

See, it was a four-man match on a square board. Each player started in one quadrant of the board. I started in the NW and made a tentative peace with the player to the NE while I built up units along my southern border. The SW player provoked both myself and his other neighbor, the player to the SE. Meanwhile, NE and SE had some minor tussles but nothing too major.

SW made a mistake and I sort of crushed him up against SE and took most of his bases. This left me in control of something like 10 or 12 bases while NE and SE only had 6 or 7 each. This worried them, so they stopped their minor border conflict and charged west at me. Every turn for 4 turns in a row, my line was pushed back by one hex. I didn’t have time to repair any units, the push was too strong.

When I finally surrendered, I had captured SW’s remaining bases but had lost several of my other bases along the border. Between the two of them, they held 15 bases compared to my 11 – a 36% advantage in production capacity. I had started the conflict slightly depleted because of my successful campaign against SW (who had actually held the biggest army before I overtook him), and their collectively superior income were sufficient to give them an overwhelming majority of numbers.

It doesn’t pay to be too big. One-on-one, I could have mopped up either one of them. Unfortunately, because I had such an enormous lead on either one of them individually, they realized the obvious and allied against me. Like lobsters in a tank who can’t stand to let another one climb out…

I think I could have had a chance at the game if I hadn’t taken all of SW’s bases. In stead, I was greedy and took off a bigger bite than I could keep down.

ideas

So, aside from the issues discussed already (infantry need a good nerf batting and the RNG is too random), there’s only really one problem with the game. It’s written in clingy, needy, zero self-esteem sort of AJAX. It’s the kind of code that feels the irrational compulsion to phone home to the server every time you click a unit to select it. I mean… if you’re going to wait for the server to do all of the thinking, why bother with any sort of client-side logic at all? The game could be so much faster, and the server could handle so many more players if they moved most of the incessant click management logic to the client where it belongs and only sent final moves to the server for validation.

And, aside from that little gripe… I’ve a few other things I’d like to see in the game.

Namely, I want to see a greater variety of units. The game is already a paper-rock-scissors contraption, let’s make units even more specialized, eh wot?

A few new types of infantry, perhaps?

• demolitions squad – normal movement, 1.5x cost of heavy (bazooka) infantry, 1 defense, 0|6 offense (useless against infantry – death to tanks), unable to capture bases, ability to “sabotage” enemy bases. Sabotage destroys the demo squad and reverts the enemy base to neutral – instantly, in stead of having to wait 2 turns for a capture by a normal infantry unit.
• flamethrower squad – slow movement, 3x cost of heavy infantry, 2 defense, 4|2 offense, deal splash (reduced, indirect) damage to the two hexes behind and to either side of their primary target. Splash damage always happens and attacks any units in the area, regardless of team affiliation.
• mortar squad – slow movement, 2.5x cost of heavy infantry, 1 defense, 3|5 offense, attack range of 1-2. Attacking adjacent units still counts as indirect fire. Only artillery that can cross mountains. Do not get offensive bonuses or penalties for terrain.
• recon team – fast movement, 1x cost of heavy infantry, 2 defense, 2|1 offense. Reduced movement penalty for moving across otherwise slow terrain.
• engineering team – normal movement, 3x cost of heavy infantry, 2 defense, 1|1 offense. Ability to build bunkers that act as immobile 3|3 retaliatory units until destroyed. Building a bunker costs the team 6 health. Bunkers have 2 defense and cannot be repaired once damaged.
• skirmishers – normal movement, 1x cost of heavy infantry, 3 defense, 2|2 offense. Can use any remaining movement after attacking.

Of course these numbers aren’t really balanced. At least, they’re not balanced any more than the current ones are

If we allow flamethrower infantry, we probably want flame tanks as well. Perhaps cluster bomb artillery that randomly hit 2 or 3 hexes adjacent to their target? Maybe some type of AoE that is good vs vehicles but not against infantry? Maybe give a unit the ability to deal damage that tunnels on to the unit behind it, but only on a kill? Rail gun?

How about special map restriction options or victory conditions? No artillery allowed, no infantry allowed, no recon bikes allowed? Game ends after 10 turns, with whoever controls the most of the map wins? First player to cap 7 bases wins? Etc…

Fog of war? Probably not. It could work, it does in Advance Wars… but I don’t see it working very well in this sort of environment. It’s too easy for players to share intel, it drags the game out too long if they don’t, etc…

I like the idea of adding shallow water to the game that only infantry are capable of crossing. It would slow them down just as much as mountains would and it gives an offensive and defensive penalty worse than swampland.

If we’re allowing infantry to move in water, how about naval units? That would require a whole new set of maps, but no harm there. Air units? Those would be nice too.

Other terrain types? Jungle is thicker than forest and is the ultimate entrenched position for infantry. Artillery cannot target units in the jungle. Roads give vehicles a bonus to movement but make you terribly vulnerable to attack. Bridges function exactly like roads except they make you even more of a sitting duck.

Could possibly allow engineering units to terraform the map, changing forest to plains to roads and building bridges across rivers, etc…

Mobile factories? Very slow, non-combative units that can only move along roads and over grass. Able to build units wherever they are for 50% extra cost. Can’t drive and build on the same turn. Possibly cost resources to maintain?

But, what I’d really like to see would be troop transports. Infantry are slow. APC’s are not. They’ve got no offense and minimal defense, but they’re cheap and they’ve got movement like a raider. What better way to deliver your bazooka wielding guerrillas to the jungle outside of your enemy’s base

math

The quick math shows that fel iron prospecting produced 1.13 (35/31) uncommon gems per attempt.

Adamant gave me a 1.14 (40/35) uncommon gems per attempt and 0.26 (9/35) rare gems (total of 1.4 gems per attempt). Getting two uncommon gems at once is not unusual, and getting an uncommon and a rare gem together is also not unusual (looks like what’s guaranteed in the new math is at least one uncommon gem, anything else is extra).

I also had one adamant prospecting attempt out of the 35×5 adamant that produced three gems at once (2 uncommon, one rare). This could be a case of the two different chances (14% chance for an extra uncommon gem and 26% chance for a rare gem) both rolling at the same time. The small numbers math says that there’s a ~3.5% chance of both coming up at once, which jives neatly with my experience (1/35 ~= 2.8%).

One point of interest is that the uncommon gem production seems to be roughly even now between the two ore types (roughly 4.5 uncommon gems per stack). The only difference giving adamant a higher drop rate is its production of approximately 1 rare gem per stack of ore.

The sample isn’t big enough to make any definitive statements about individual gems having higher drop rates than others but my sample at least does seem to hint that orange gems are slightly more likely to drop than average and that blue and red are less likely. The difference here is well within statistically meaningless fuzzy grey territory, however, so don’t complain if you prospect 100 stacks of ore and get all azure moonstones

old math

By popular request, I have hunted down some of the old prospecting math. Kaliope has a wonderful blog on WoW crafting issues and recorded some numbers on the subject. She also has posts on mithril, thorium, and lowbie ore prospecting results before patch 2.1.

Her numbers use smaller sets than mine and are therefore even more prone to the vagaries of the random number deities. What she did notice was an 83% drop rate on gems from thorium (15/18), 1.35 gems per prospecting with mithril (27/20), and 1.29 gems per attempt with adamant (18/14). These numbers jive with my memories of the experience. She reported rare cases of getting 3 gems per attempt and several attempts w/o getting anything.

These are all over the charts but show two things:

1. the results from prospecting were much more random before this recent patch
2. rare gems really were pretty rare

Her one talasite from 3.5 stacks is a 7.1% drop rate… compared to the 26% drop rate that I noticed under the new math. The higher randomness prior to 2.1 meant it was possible to burn an entire stack of ore and get only dust. I remember very acutely a stretch of 6 adamant prospectings where I got no gems.

If her rate of ~1.3 gems per prospecting (assuming the thorium exercise was a fluke) was accurate, then the numbers are similar enough to mine to assume that no real change in the overall rate of gem production resulted from the patch… they just normalized things a bit, and I like it

thottbot

It just occurred to me (4pm, May 23rd) that Thott might have some data on the subject. Turns out they do. I’ve saved a snapshot of the data before it becomes too corrupted by the changes in this patch, but the trends they show are pretty easy to spot.

The adamant prospectings show a rate of 2.2-2.4% for each rare gem and 18.8-19.7% for each uncommon gem. Add things up and they give a 13.8% chance of getting any rare gem and 115.6% chance of getting an uncommon gem for a grand average of 1.29 gems per prospecting – confirming Kaliope’s numbers but showing that rare gems aren’t quite as rare as in her experience.

The fel iron attempts have about half the sample size, but are still quite statistically valid. Rare gems had a 0.7-1.0% chance of dropping (5.3% total) where uncommon gems had a 15.5-16.8% chance (97% total). So with fel iron, people were getting ~1.02 gems per attempt. Fel iron clearly had a lower drop rate.

So in conclusionary fashion, I will finally give a rest to this post by stating that my current guesses as to the changes to the new math:

• Both fel iron and adamant have been given the same base chance to prospect green quality gems. This chance is probably similar to the old adamant rate of 1.15 gems per attempt.
• Adamant rare gems look like they might have had their drop rate doubled. Clearly, making this statement from only 35 samples isn’t as accurate as it could be… but something like 0.25 rare gems per attempt sounds like a perfectly reasonable number to me – especially if I were the one pulling these numbers out of the proverbial hat when tweaking the algorithm

With the advent of Burning Crusade, I was pretty torn on how to respec my hunter. I’d played up into my 50’s as a heavy marksmanship build before switching to heavy survival. I’d meant to post my build ideas before the expansion landed, but I was otherwise occupied.

Currently, I am back to a very heavy marksmanship build (43 points). I’d planned on spending the remaining 18 in survival, but decided against it when I dinged 61. At present, I have a 1/43/9 build and am planning on spending my remaining points in the recently upgraded low tier beast talents in an attempt to increase my general durability.

== current build – 9/43/9 ==

The general thought behind my current build is reliable damage. I don’t crit nearly as much as I used to, but I hit hard and I hit consistently, and I can continue doing damage even when low on mana.

Beast Mastery (9 points)
    5/5 Endurance Training
    1/2 Focused Fire
    3/3 Thick Hide

There’s not a whole lot to say about these talents except that they’re much better than they used to be. Endurance Training and Thick Hide together give me +5% hp and +10% armour from eq and give my pet +10% hp and +20% armour.

The point in Focused Fire is planned as my my lvl 70 talent. It gives +1% damage output and +10% crit to kill command. It might almost be worth getting two points in Focused Fire for the additional +1% damage in exchange for a small loss in defense.

Marksmanship (43 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Improved Hunter's Mark
    5/5 Efficiency
    2/2 Go for the Throat
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    5/5 Mortal Shots
    3/3 Concussive Barrage
    1/1 Scatter Shot
    2/2 Combat Experience
    5/5 Ranged Weapon Specialization
    1/1 Trueshot Aura
    5/5 Master Marksman
    1/1 Silencing Shot

Not a lot to say here. My goal here was to get Silencing Shot. It’s nice. I like it. I wish the cooldown were a bit shorter, but it does still work well as a ranged interrupt (the only reliable ranged spell interrupt in the game, I believe). More importantly, it allows you to pull casters. This has always been a pain, LoS pulls not generally being possible in wide open places

Efficiency is critical. Every build should have it. 10% reduction in mana costs to shots and stings (where 99% of your mana is going in the first place…) are not to be underestimated. Especially for a hybrid class that gets way less mana than full caster types.

Rapid Killing is nice. It’s only two points and it gives you a 20 second buff when you kill something that gives you +20% damage to your next hit. This encourages opening combat with Aimed Shot. In addition, these two points also reduce your Rapid Fire cooldown by 40%.

Rapid Fire is amazing. +40% ranged attack speed for 15 seconds in exchange for 100 mana. So… in stead of firing one arrow every 2.5 seconds, you wind up firing every 1.8 seconds. What that really translates to is an extra 2 shots for 100 mana. The single most mana efficient attack ability hunters ever get.

Concussive Barrage isn’t that impressive initially. Woo hoo. It dazes your opponents. Occasionally. This sort of thing would be nice while kiting… but you’re prolly already using concussive shot and frost traps already… No, what Concussive Barrage is really all about is the new shot that hunters get at lvl 62.

Steady Shot costs 110 mana and can be fired off once a second. It does (RAP * 0.3) + 150 damage and an additional 175 damage to dazed targets. Thus, if you pay attention and spam steady whenever your concussive daze goes off… you can get 3 or 4 hits in on the dazed target for some happy bonus damage.

Survival (9 points)
    3/3 Monster Slaying
    3/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye

The nine points in survival go well with any build.

Hawk Eye is absolutely critical, however. With it, hunters have the longest attack range of any class in the game. Without it… shrug.

Monster and Humanoid Slaying give +3% to all damage dealt to beasts, humanoids, dragons, and giants and an additional +3% to crit damage against them. These mobs make up the vast majority of the killable things in the game. You can do a lot worse than to spend points here.

== heavy crit – 0/20/41 ==

The general idea behind this build is to crit hard and to crit often.

Beast Mastery (0 points)
    None

Marksmanship (20 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    2/5 Improved Arcane Shot
    5/5 Efficiency
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    5/5 Mortal Shots

Survival (41 points)
    3/3 Monster Slaying
    3/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye
    5/5 Deflection
    5/5 Survivalist
    3/3 Surefooted
    3/3 Killer Instinct
    5/5 Lightning Reflexes
    3/3 Thrill of the Hunt
    1/1 Wyvern Sting
    3/3 Expose Weakness
    4/5 Master Tactician

Wyvern Sting is great (12 sec crowd control, 2 minute cooldown). Now that you can use it in combat, it’s even better. It’s awesomely fun in PvP, and is one of the only ways I know of to reliably take people down as they fly past you on their epic mounts. If you go anywhere near this deep into Survival, it’d be a crime not to pick up Wyvern.

Killer Instinct is an additional +3% to crit rate on top of the +5% you pick up from Lethal Shots. With the +3% to hit from Surefooted, you will be scoring dramatically more crits with just these few talents alone. Add in +15% agility from Lightning Reflexes, and that crit chance goes up even higher.

Thrill of the Hunt means that any time one of your shots (aimed, arcane, steady) crits, you get 40% of the mana back.

Expose Weakness means that 30% of your crits cause everyone attacking your victim to get a heavy bonus to their attack power for 7 seconds.

Master Tactician means that every time you land a ranged hit, you have a 6% chance of getting a +8% buff to your crit chance for 8 seconds. I’m only grabbing 4 points here because I think the 5th point in Mortal Shots is worth slightly more than it would be here. Ie, that is a +2% to crit chance that is effective for 8 seconds after every 6% of your hits versus +6% to crit damage every time you crit.

== chainmail tank – 11/27/23 ==

This build is meant for hunters who somehow manage to keep taking damage. It’s not enough to make you tank better than, oh, say… a shaman… But it gives you some incredible survivability when you do wind up getting hit. The goal here is to avoid dying long enough to either kill your enemy or to run away.

Beast Mastery (11 points)
    5/5 Endurance Training
    3/3 Improved Aspect of the Monkey
    3/3 Thick Hide

Marksmanship (27 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Improved Hunter's Mark
    5/5 Efficiency
    2/2 Go for the Throat
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    1/5 Mortal Shots
    3/3 Concussive Barrage
    1/1 Scatter Shot
    2/2 Combat Experience

Survival (23 points)
    1/3 Monster Slaying
    1/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye
    5/5 Deflection
    5/5 Survivalist
    1/1 Deterrence
    3/3 Surefooted
    2/2 Improved Feign Death
    2/2 Survival Instincts

4% damage reduction from Survival Instincts is not to be underestimated. That’s four percent of every hit from every source you ever take. This is better than getting +4% max hp. Much, much better.

Deflection is a very nice toy. +25% to both parry and dodge sounds like +50% to avoid getting hit to me. It only lasts 10 seconds, and is on a 5 minute cooldown, but 50% damage avoidance for 10 seconds can make an enormous difference. Throw improved monkey and deflection into the mix and you are now dodging at +39% and parrying at +30%.

Add do this the numbers I’ve already talked about from the other low tier beast talents and +10% more hp from Survivalist… it’s still not always enough.

There’s nothing shameful about running into a corner and playing dead.

Feign rarely fails against stuff of your own level or lower, but it frequently fails vs stuff that’s bigger than you. Improved Feign Death pretty much reduces your chance of failure to zero versus mobs of your own level, and gives you a very good chance against things 1 or 2 levels higher.

Scatter Shot is a great stalling tactic when running away. It works within the dead zone and as an instant cast, you can fire it while jumping around a corner.

Finally, the +15% chance to resist movement impairing effects (snares – daze?) from Surefooted can’t hurt when trying to get out of a crowd of uglies in order to find a safer place to fall over.

== machinegun dps – 7/45/9 ==

With the death of the old 10 second cycle and the improvements to arcane shot, I like the idea of a hunter build that can not only keep up with a rogue for burst dps, but can make the rogue look like a paladin by comparison. This is the closest I’ve come up with. Of course, it makes an OOMkin druid look like a Dark Pact warlock, but shrug

As long as you keep yourself well hydrated, load up on mana regen eq and take advantage of Aspect of the Viper between fights and when low on juice, it can work.

Beast Mastery (7 points)
    5/5 Improved Aspect of the Hawk
    2/2 Focused Fire

Marksmanship (45 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Efficiency
    2/2 Go for the Throat
    5/5 Improved Arcane Shot
    1/1 Aimed Shot
    2/2 Rapid Killing
    5/5 Mortal Shots
    3/3 Concussive Barrage
    1/1 Scatter Shot
    2/2 Combat Experience
    5/5 Ranged Weapon Specialization
    3/3 Careful Aim
    1/1 Trueshot Aura
    5/5 Master Marksman

Survival (9 points)
    3/3 Monster Slaying
    3/3 Humanoid Slaying
    3/3 Hawk Eye

We’ve seen most of these talents before in the other heavy marks builds. But the philosophy behind this build is a bit different.

Improved Arcane Shot means a 16.7% increase in the rate at which you can bombard things with arcane damage. In addition to loading up on mana/5 eq, a healthy smattering of +spell/arcane damage eq would not be entirely wasted either. You’re still doing a mix of physical and arcane damage and should be switching over to Steady Shot whenever you daze an enemy, but the arcane shot damage is pretty impressive when you speed it up.

Rapid Killing is also still important in this build, much more so because of the 2 minute cooldown reduction on Rapid Fire. The extra 2 or 3 shots you get from Rapid Fire are two or three chances for physical damage crits on top of whatever you’re getting with arcane. When you have the Rapid Killing buff in place, consider opening fights with arcane in stead of aimed shots, a crit with magical damage can be a lot more impressive than with physical. And it’s faster.

In addition to spamming Rapid Fire and Arcane Shot, the other important part of this build concept is Improved Hawk. I’ve talked about this talent before (in basically every other post I’ve ever made on hunters), but it bears repeating here in context.

Improved Aspect of the Hawk gives you a 10% chance with every normal ranged attack of getting a +15% attack speed buff for 12 seconds. The 10% chance means that this effect should proc roughly once every 25 seconds of combat if you’ve got a 2.55 normal ranged attack rate (that’s a 3.0 second weapon and a +15% speed quiver). 12 second buffs proccing every 25 seconds = 50% of the time Plus, of course, there’s also the slightly increased chance while the buff is active that the effect will proc again.

With a +15% speed quiver and a 1.8 speed weapon, you get a normal attack rate of 1.53 seconds. Improved hawk should proc roughly once every 15 seconds in this case, ie, it should be an almost constant effect that gives you an attack speed of closer to 1 second. Throw Rapid Fires off whenever you’re under the influence of the improve hawk effect and … your attack speed number suddenly becomes something closer to 0.36 for 15 seconds. That’s 41 arrows.

War Master Voone drops a lvl 55 green 1.6 speed bow. It’s only 36 dps, but…

== animal trainer – 46/12/3 ==

I am strongly tempted to play with this build, and I’m probably going to at least give it a whirl when I hit 63 and catch myself a warp stalker…

The goal is to stand back and let your pet do all of the work. Fire normal shots with a fast bow and concentrate your mana on keeping your furry little assassin friend alive.

This is the only beast spec I’m going to discuss, so pay attention

Beast Mastery (46 points)
    5/5 Endurance Training
    2/2 Focused Fire
    3/3 Thick Hide
    2/2 Improved Revive Pet
    5/5 Unleashed Fury
    2/2 Improved Mend Pet
    5/5 Ferocity
    2/2 Spirit Bond
    2/2 Bestial Discipline
    2/2 Animal Handler
    5/5 Frenzy
    3/3 Ferocious Inspiration
    3/3 Catlike Reflexes
    5/5 Serpent's Swiftness

Marksmanship (12 points)
    5/5 Lethal Shots
    5/5 Improved Hunter's Mark
    2/2 Go for the Throat

Survival (3 points)
    3/3 Hawk Eye

First off, the things I’m not picking up. I’m not grabbing Efficiency, I’m not grabing Rapid Killing, and I’m not grabbing the Human/Beast Slaying talents. You don’t need these as much here. You’re relying on your pet to do all of the work. Firing your own weapon (ideally something fast) is just a way of scoring crits in order to proc the 50 point focus regen bonus from Go for the Throat.

I’m also ignoring the whole Beast Within chain because I see it as primarily useful in PvP. The goal with this build is not to send a pet charging through fear spells to eat mages, it’s to let the pet eat mobs for you.

Ok, grabbing Improved Revive and Mend should be a no brainer for any beast spec hunter. Keeping your pet alive and getting rid of nasty debuffs is essential… Spirit Bond is also incredibly nice, 2% max hp regen every 10 seconds for both you and the pet equates to +40/5 hp regen if you have 4000 hp. This regen continues during combat.

Unleashed Fury means +20% dps. Ferocity means +10% crit rate. Bestial Discipline means 2x the focus regen (+whatever you’re giving your pet from ranged crits). Animal Handler means +4%. Catlike Reflexes means +9% dodge (on top of the +10% hp and +20% armour already mentioned). Improved Hunter’s Mark means your Mark is suddenly quite useful to your pet (increases their damage).

Serpent’s Swiftness means +20% to attack speed for both you and your pet. More attack speed for you means more frequent crits and more +50 focus heals to your pet means more often your pet can use its own attacks.

+20% attack speed for your pet means a vicious feedback circle of destruction. With Frenzy, your pet gets an additional +30% buff to attack speed that lasts for 8 seconds after every crit the pet lands. By giving your pet +10% to crit from Ferocity… the faster attacks are much more likely to crit, which procs more faster attacks, which are likely to crit and maintain the maniac attack speed…

To top it all off, Ferocious Inspiration gives your entire party (self and pet included) an additional +3% to damage done for 10 seconds after the pet scores a crit. This is phenomenally better than Trueshot Aura’s +100 AP (~7 DPS), especially when you consider you don’t have to actively cast it, and that it improves damage for casters as well as physical types.

update – Feb 4th, 2007

I was sick most of this weekend, so naturally I had to do something silly when not curled up in bed. That something silly was a respec to the beast mastery build above. I’m lvl 63 at this point, and have only purchased the one point in Serpent’s Swiftness (so am missing the 4 points in swiftness and 3 points in Catlike Reflexes). And… the build is useful.

I feel much more durable in general than the other build (I’ve got about 5000 hp and 50/5 hp regen). However, not having Aimed Shot or Wyvern or Silence is weird… In fact, I don’t have any abilities gained from talents. My personal DPS (ie, that achieved by shooting arrows into things) has decreased by about 20-30 since the rebuild. However, my pet’s DPS has increased by 40-50 points. Plus the pet’s inspiration buff is almost always active… for +3% DPS to the entire party.

The beast build kills slightly more quickly than my “reliable” build. But it feels VERY different, and takes a very different mindset to play effectively. I am also basically guaranteed to die when my pet dies. I’m planning on trying to stick with this build until 66 or 70, depending on my mood. I suspect that the final 4 points in swiftness will make an enormous difference in my attitude, but I’ll have to wait and see.

My general experience is that in instance runs, my hunter would be forced into operating at some sort of really low damage output level because despite mage waters, he’d be perpetually drained of juice. I now have some +regen gear (a whopping +11/5 atm) and am loving it to death – because it’s SOMETHING.

The normal procedure for a hunter in general bombardment mode is to use a big, slow weapon and fire off aimed and multi shots in what some people call the 10 second cycle (even though the cycle actually works out to be much longer than that).

So the question is this. What do I (and most other hunters) do wrong with my mana?

disclaimer

My math here isn’t perfect, in fact, it’s kind of lazy. But, even considering that, the point should be pretty clear and valid.

the ‘experiment’

Supposing 100 spirit on hunter with all the right talents for max damage and efficiency with shots and stings in question and no +regen eq.

Mana regen is 100/5 + 15 = 35 every 2 sec tick. 5 seconds after casting a spell that uses mana, this regen is disabled.

Aimed has a 6 sec cooldown and a casting tim of 3 seconds. Multi has a 10 sec cooldown and replaces your normal auto-shot. Aimed shot fires in addition to auto-shot and does not interrupt the auto-shot cooldown.

We will assume that there is only one target and that there’s no kiting or any other silliness going on, and that the hunter is using a weapon with an approx 3 second rate of fire.

The number in brackets is the approximate timestamp in seconds of the action, the column to the right shows what would happen if multi shot were not used.

[00] aimed start
[01]
[02]
[03] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)
     auto
[04]
[05]
[06] multi (+172 damage, -217 mana)               auto
[07]
[08]                                              regen (+35 mana)
[09] auto
     aimed start
[10]                                              regen (+35 mana)
[11] regen (+35 mana)                             (no regen)
[12] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)               auto
[13]
[14]
[15] auto
[16]
[17] regen (+35 mana)
[18] multi (+172 damage, -217 mana)               auto
     aimed start                                  regen (+35 mana)
[19]
[20]                                              regen (+35 mana)
[21] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)
     auto
[22]
[23]
[24] auto
[25]
[26] regen (+35 mana)
[27]
     auto
     aimed start
[28] regen (+35 mana)
[29]
[30] aimed (+600 damage, -279 mana)

So, over a 30 second period, it is reasonable to fire off 4 aimed shots and 2 multi’s for a total of +2745 damage +4 extra normal hits worth of damage (from the aimeds). It cost a total of 1550 mana and the player regenned a total of 140, bringing the cost to 1410 mana.

If multi-shots are removed, the amount of damage inflicted is reduced by 345 and the amount of mana spent is reduced by 434 AND the amount of mana regenerated is increased by 3 more ticks of 35 (105) for a total overall cost of only 766 mana.

verdict

Using multi-shot more than doubles your mana cost over time and if used against a single target, only increases your damage output by the equivalent of one extra normal shot (your normal shots -do- hit for 300-400 damage each, right?).

Just to grind the numbers a bit further… 10+4 shots in 30 seconds for an average of say 350×14 = 4900 damage (barring criticals) + 2745 from the spells gives us a total of 7645 damage (255 dps) for 1410 mana. 5.42 damage per mana.

Removing multi from the mix, we get 7300 damage (243 dps) for 661 mana and a ratio of 9.53 damage per mana.

Figure the average hunter has 4000 mana. Using aimed+multi, he only has enough juice to go for roughly 90 seconds this way (it’s actually a bit less because after the first 30 end, his next shot is a multi, which slows the regen down even more).

Using aimed alone, he can go for 180 seconds of solid bombardment w/o potions or other sources of mana regeneration.

stings

Throwing stings into the mix makes hunter mana efficiency even worse.

Over the 30 second period, assume a hunter fires off two serpent stings (one at 4 and one at 22 seconds). This costs him an extra 450 mana for a maximum of 1221 damage with a few gotchas.

1. sting damage is nature type, which is subject to resistance.
2. dots don’t crit, so the 1221 is the absolute max you’ll inflict with a pair.
3. because sting is a dot, that also means that the mob has to last for the entire duration to take all the damage.

In addition to costing 450 mana in the 30 second period to fire off the two stings, it also eliminates another mana regen tick, effectively costing 35 more
mana.

7645 damage + 40.7x(15+8)=936 from one and a half stings = 8581 damage total in the 30 seconds if the hunter uses sting (286 dps). But it costs 1860 mana to do it, giving us a ratio of 4.61 damage per mana spent and an approximate burn time of only 65 seconds before drained.

+regen/5

As I mentioned earlier, I finally have some +regen/5 eq and I love it. Tony brings up the point that a lot of the endgame hunter gear has this sort of buff on it (not to mention trinkets, etc…).

Most notable among these options would be the new Cryptstalker set (Tier 3 raid gear), almost every piece of which grants +mana/5 (to a total of +26/5). Completion of 6 pieces of the 9 piece set means you get 50 mana back every time you land a crit (which happens a lot since the set has +7% crit in addition to the +283 agi from the entire set for an additional +5.4% crit). Completing 8 pieces of the set reduces the total costs of your aimed and multi shots by 20 mana each…

Of course, I’m never gonna even see a piece of cryptstalker gear, much less ever wear it, much less ever see any of these set bonuses, so why do I care?

So, I corrected the math and it turned out that over 5 minutes, the 3.0 second xbow could hope to get an extra 3 arrows. From 100 in 300 seconds to 103 in 300 seconds So, yeah.

But that also got me to thinking that the speed of the bow really does make an enormous difference in how useful this talent can be. So, I’m going to figure out how good the fastest weapon in the game would be…

According to Thott, they ship a few bows with base attack delays as low as 1.6 seconds, but it looks like there is an epic rifle with a 1.5 second attack speed. So, I will do the math given the unlikely event that you somehow managed to score a Precicely Calibrated Boomstick and are using an ammo pouch that gives +14% attack speed – lowering your delay to 1.32 seconds.

20 shots * 1.32 sec/shot = 26.4 secs
8 seconds / 0.92 sec/shot = 8 shots + 0.64 seconds toward next shot
12 shots * 1.32 sec/shot – 0.64 sec = 15.2 secs until next buff
8 shots/8 secs + 12 shots/12.2 secs = 20.2 seconds for each additional 20 shots

Without improved hawk, the boomstick is delivering 227 shots in 5 minutes. With improved hawk, you’re looking at 288 bullets. That’s a blooming 27% increase in sustained damage output with this baby. Of course, this machine-gun comes with a heavy price tag.

The boomstick in question is an epic world drop – which means there’s no realistic way to get it short of paying 100-200g for it. It is also only a level 43 item (despite its purpleness), which means that there are about 50 other weapons (both blue and purple) that deliver more damage, including a few with only 1.6 or 1.7 second base delays.

The +14% attack speed quiver/pouches aren’t difficult to get. I’ve got one. They’re 16 slot. Apparently, with a bucketload of Alterac Valley reputation, you can buy one with +15% to attack speed, but that one is also still only 16 slots.

16 slots x 200 rounds/slot = 3200 rounds on your person at a time (unless you’re packing multiple quivers…)

3200 rounds consumed at a rate of 288 per 300 seconds? 3328 seconds of combat before you are 100% out of ammo. That’s 55 minutes – iff you don’t actually use rapid shot as well. You’ll be running out of juice during each and every instance you try to run

Back when I was running around with my 1.7 second bow and a 12-slot quiver. I remember having major problems keeping myself from running out of ammo. And this was before improved hawk worked like this (it used to just be a +attack power buff).

My final analysis? I think this would be a very fun toy to play around with in a straight PvP build hunter. Get yourself a Bloodseeker Bat from ZG, move into Alterac Valley and mow down those pesky mages and priests like nobody’s business.

Apparently my last rant was actually too long. It borked out and clipped the last few paragraphs on survival spec talents. So, I’m moving the entire talent section of my hunter essay into this new post.

Talents

When the game launched, the hunter talent tree was terrible. Survival was a complete waste of time, beast mastery was only vaguely tolerable for soloing, and marksmanship was nice, but not wonderful. That all changed a few patches ago, with the new (and much happier) talent tree.

Beast Mastery is now insanely good for soloing and PvP (rabid flying pet of doom == superglue mage killer). Survival is actually quite worth the trouble for endgame play, and marksmanship is still worth your time. Beast talents aren’t very useful in high level groups (where your pet is frequently obsoleted, more on that later).

I used to be marks spec with a bit of beast. I’m now survival with a bit of marks. I can’t really imagine trying to play a hunter without at least some of the marksmanship talents, even if you don’t go in for the higher level abilities.

Beast Mastery

Tier One

The tier one beast talents are both vaguely seductive, and really pretty nice when soloing at low level. More health for your pet can be a no brainer if you’re soloing and your pet is tanking for you – especially if you burn training points on giving the critter even more stam.

Improved aspect of the hawk gives you a 1-5% chance per auto shot of becoming hasted and firing at +30% speed. This is really nice for conserving mana, and if you are already relying on a fast bow to do your dirty work. Even more fun is at level 26 when you get rapid shot and remember to trigger it when your improved hawk buff procs – that turns into 8 seconds at +70% rate of fire and 7 more seconds at +40%

The problem with improved hawk is that the proc only lasts for 8 seconds – and is thus only arguably useful during prolonged combat. During quick fights, it’s not likely to proc and if it does, it tends to get wasted. Tony and I did the math back when I respecced at 60 and to actually decided to drop this talent.

Let’s assume that since you care about rate of fire, you’re going to be using a fast weapon (1.8 sec cooldown after quiver and stuff).

Over the course of 5 minutes of combat, you will have time to fire off about 166 arrows. With five points spent in improved hawk, that means that your haste buff will proc every 20 shots. So, 20 normal then buff for 8 seconds. Over those 8 seconds, your rate of fire will be increased to 1.26 seconds per arrow for 6.3 arrows in that period as opposed to only 4.4.

Unfortunately, these fractions don’t seem to carry. So when the buff dies, you’re back to normal rate of fire and will have only spent 0.44 seconds recharging your bow of the 1.8 it needs before the next shot happens. The math in summary:

20 shots * 1.8 sec/shot = 36 sec
8 seconds / 1.26 sec/shot = 6 shots + 0.44 seconds toward next shot
14 shots * 1.8 sec/shot – 0.44 sec = 24.76 seconds until your speed buff is likely to re-proc

You thus are taking 36 seconds to fire off your first 20 shots and 32.76 seconds for each additional batch of 20. So, with a 1.8 second bow over 5 minutes, 5 talent points spent in improved hawk will net you a total of something like 181 arrows as opposed to 166 = 9% increase in sustained damage output.

But if you switch to a slower weapon… It is much less impressive. The same math performed with a 3.0 second delay on an end-game crossbow (after quiver):

20 shots * 3.0 sec/shot = 60 secs
8 seconds / 2.1 sec/shot = 3 shots + 1.7 seconds toward next shot
17 shots * 3.0 sec/shot – 1.7 sec = 49.3 secs until next buff
3 shots/8 secs + 17 shots/49.3 secs = 57.3 seconds for each additional 20 shots

103 shots in five minutes as opposed to 100 shots = only 3% increase in sustained dps.

This is sustained DPS. This is not counting time for arrows potentially lost from aimed shots or for running to get back into position. It is also assuming that you’re actually able to stay in combat for a very long period of time. Mobs don’t like it when you shoot them. Eventually, they’re going to try to get out of range (usually by charging into melee with you when your pet/tank loses aggro). This is even less useful in PvP, when nobody’s gonna stick around and let a hunter hammer them with arrows long enough to make the thingy matter.

In more realistic situations, you’re not firing off 20 arrows per kill and when you do proc the haste, it gains you an extra one or two arrows for the duration of the fight. One aimed shot >= two arrows. One serpent sting > one arrow.

So, the only reason to actually rely on improved aspect of the hawk to actually increase your DPS is if you’re expecting to spend a lot of time in long battles where you’re not planning on using any mana… ie, a poorly organized raid or something. Shrug.

My recommendation with improved hawk is that it can be quite worth it for soloing with a tank pet or if you consistently run out of mana. It could even be worth cherry picking with one talent point if you are using a very fast bow and have nowhere else to put it for the 1% chance per shot of getting the haste buff

Tier Two

If you’re spending points in beast mastery, tier two is nice. Improved monkey means +5% dodge potentially means -5% physical damage taken if you’re remembering to use monkey in stead of hawk when you’re getting hit.

A +30% pet AC bonus is potentially incredible – and again, can be made even more brutal by training your critter for even more armour. If you’re burning talents to create the ultimate pet tank, then you probably want to grab all 3 points in thick hide as well as both points in improved rez. Normally, revive pet takes 10 seconds to cast, costs something like half of your max mana, and brings teh critter back with 15% hp. Two talents in improved revive = 4 second casting time, only 30% or so of your mana to cast, and a revived pet with 45% hp. This makes it potentially useful during combat, as opposed to an after battle only sort of thing.

Improved eyes… boggle. Burning two talent points to let you run your pet around for 2 minutes (as opposed to one minute) is kind of beyond me. I guess if you have a cat (which critters can stealth) and really really really want to use it to scout, a lot, it might be worth it? But in all reality, if you’re scouting with your pet, you can just blow through crowds of mobs and keep running – the pet will unspawn if it’s far enough away from you when the spell expires. And any decently fast pet is going to be able to make some good distance in one minute Sitting around, vulnerable, for two whole minutes in an area dangerous enough that you’re using your pet to scout… yeah.

Tier Three

Tier three offers one of the must-have sort of talents for all beast type hunters. Namely, unleashed fury. +20% pet damage output. When you’re using a dps pet effectively, it will typically account for 25% or more of your total damage production. Using this as a conservative estimate means that your total damage output is consistently increased by 5%.

Combine unleashed fury with bestial swiftness and a fast pet with dash/dive, and you’re on your way to chewing through mages like candy. Note that the swiftness buff only gives your pet the +30% movement rate while outdoors, and most instances are indoor. This is definately a PvP sort of talent and isn’t all that useful if you’re killing mobs (dash/dive are generally more than enough of a boost for your pet to catch up with a runner or something).

Pathfinding is… meh. Two talents to bump your travel aspects from a +30% speed buff to +36%? Shrug. This one’s kind of a rip-off. Druid travel form is 40%, releases them from rooting effects, and doesn’t stun them when they get hit (in exchange for being fairly expensive to cast and having to wait until level 30 for the spell). Shamans also get +40% speed in their travel form that also doesn’t stun them like our aspects do (only vaguely more expensive than ours and has the downside of only working outside – which is where you spend most of your travel time). Yeah.

Our aspect is kind of cruddy. Its only benefit is that like all of our aspects it is exceptionally inexpensive to cast, and it is instant cast. It’s slow, and isn’t useful in combat except with some careful planning (wing clip, get well out of melee range, then pack to increase distance, aspect back to hawk, concuss, resume shooting, etc… sort of deal).

The only real use I can conceive of for this talent is if the preceeding example is your standard mode of operation. Because the only other scenareo I can come up with that would motivate somebody to spend talents on this is if for some reason they’re always using pack to travel with a bunch of slow allies for some reason (aspect of the pack comes at 40 – when people just buy +60% travel speed mounts anyways).

Tier Four

Well, if you’re using your pet to inflict PvP damage, you probably want the +15% crit chance that ferocity gives – and are going to pick it up anyways since it’s a pre-req for the tier six beast talent.

Improved mend pet is kind of neat. It effectively renders your pet immune to most debuffing effects if you’re healing them often, or at least means you can cleanse them between fights. My recommendation if you pick up this talent is that you allocate two action bar slots to mend – one at your maximum current skill rank for healing hp, and one at rank one (only 50 mana – mend 7 costs 480 to cast) specifically to make use of this talent.

Tier Five

Ahh, spirit bond. This is another must-have talent. For two points, it gives both you and your pet 2% hp regen ticks every 10 seconds. This healing continues during combat, so is very nice – especially if you’ve already buffed your pet’s max hp up, and can give you sort of the troll effect of reduced downtime for healing between fights.

Figure the average level 60 hunter probably has around 4000 hp. This turns into an 8 hp per second regen effect. That’s not shabby – it’s the kind of effect people buy epic trinkets and stuff for.

Intimidate is just plain mean. One minute cooldown, 130 mana, long range. Three second stun attack that works like an improved taunt for your pet as long as it’s actually able to hit your victim in melee – which any decent beast spec hunter’s pet would.

This is another mage killer. Three seconds = aimed shot casting time. Aim, send in pet to maul him a bit while aimed cools down, intimidate and aim again. Even if your shots don’t crit (which they probably won’t since you’re beast spec), this is enough damage to put more than a little fear into the heart of your average cloth-wearing finger wiggler.

The other tier five beast talent is bestial discipline, which translates into +20% pet focus regen, which translates into 20% more special attacks from your magekilling little friend.

Tier Six

There is only one ability at tier six in the beast mastery tree. And if you’ve made it this far, you’ve been drooling over it. Five points in frenzy gives your pet an improved hawk style attack speed buff whenever it scores a crit.

Now… I’ve never played with this talent, but the math kind of speaks for itself – especially if you’re PvP and are interested in disrupting spellcasters. More damage, more speed, and you’ve already bought +15% to crit chance per attack… and probably +20% focus regen for more frequent claw attacks with which to crit as well…

Tier Seven

Bestial wrath is the final nail in the proverbial coffin of any caster you come up against from here on out. It requires intimidate, but you already have that. The spell has a two minute cooldown and costs about 200 mana. In return it gives your pet +50% damage output and makes them immune to all forms of crowd control effects for a whopping 15 seconds.

Marksmanship

Ok, unlike the previous talent branch which is 90% PvP oriented, marksmanship is kind of 50/50 PvP/PvE. It contains several talents without which no hunter is really worthy of the name. Several must-have abilities, regardless of the rest of your spec.

Tier One

And, just to make it difficult, since they know that everyone needs later talents, they wave some very confusing talents at you on tier one of the marks tree.

Improved concussive shot bothers me. I tried it for a few months. I don’t like it. Other people seem to swear by it. At least, most marksmanship spec hunters I’ve seen have it. Basically what it does is cost 5 talents to give you a 1 in 5 chance of stunning your target for 3 seconds when you concuss them.

Now, at 8% of your max mana per use, concussive shot is expensive. It is also slow, with a 12 second cooldown. This means that it is generally only usable once or perhaps twice per fight. So… assuming I am in a fight that lasts more than 12 seconds (which means I’ve fired off two aimed shots and still not killed my target), I could have a 40% chance of proccing a 3 second stun on my enemy in exchange for 16% of my mana. Not worth the trouble, if you ask me. Having this talent promotes firing off concussive shots and blowing mana in the vain hope that it’ll proc.

Improved concuss promises an average of one proc worth 3 seconds of stun per minute spent spamming the spell. That’s in exchange for five talent points and upwards of 40% of your mana.

It has been suggested to pick up just one rank in improved concuss, for the 5% chance of proc. This is almost worse than encouraging the waste of mana. This means that for every twenty times you fire off the shot – fully expecting that it will only slow your target down – it in stead roots the critter for a few seconds. This can be incredibly jarring and can totally throw off your groove if you use a complex kiting pattern.

On the other hand, the other tier one talent, efficiency, is totally worth the trouble, yet I’ve seen several people fail to pick it up. Five points to reduce the mana cost of every ranged attack you have by 10%. Sure, on a single shot-by-shot comparrison, this doesn’t make much of a difference. Supposing I only have 3000 mana, aimed shot 6 costs 310 points. With efficiency, the cost is only reduced to 279. Meh, that one shot’s savings wasn’t worth five talent points. But what this talent does earn you is reduced downtime over the course of your entire career.

The only places you’re going to be spending mana other than shots are in switching aspects (fairly trivial costs), spamming raptor strike (all of 16 mana per second), and in laying traps (which usually happens during downtime anyways).

Given the choice of the two talents, I’ll let you guess which one I have.

Tier Two

Lethal shots is a must-have talent for any hunter. 5 points for +5% chance to crit with all aimed attacks.

On the other hand, improved mark is kind of a waste. Lots of people seem to pick it up. But when you consider that 5 talent points earns you a +15% bonus to the attack power your mark gives… that only adds up to an increase of 16 attack power at level 58 when your mark is normally giving ‘only’ 110 attack. That’s an increase of 1.15 dps in exchange for 5 talent points IFF you’re level 58+, otherwise, it’s not even worth that much.

Tier Three

Aimed shot. Buy it now. 6 second cooldown, 3 second cast time. Does insane damage, and when it crits, it can outperform a rogue’s ambush. If you only dig into marksmanship for aimed shot, your trip will have been worth it.

But, as long as you’re on tier three, you really should spend 3 more talents to pick up the extra 6 yards of range that hawk eye gives you.

The other tier three talent is improved arcane shot. For five points, this reduces the cooldown on your arcane shot from 6 seconds to 5 seconds. What they don’t seem to tell you is that arcane shot is on the same timer as aimed shot. So… if you have the talent points to burn, that’s an 8-9% speed increase in your aimed shot barrage

Tier Four

Mortal shots increases your damage output with ranged crits by 30%, and since you’ve already gotten +5% chance to crit to begin with, this really starts to add up. The talent applies to all ranged attacks – including your aimed shot. This is totally worth it if you’re digging this deep into marksmanship.

Improved serpent on the other hand is another kind of wasteful talent, at least at low levels. At level 60, serpent sting does 555 damage over 15 seconds (37 dps). Five ranks in this talent means +10% damage for a total of 40.7 dps from your sting. So, 5 talent points for 3.7 dps increase? Shrug, your call. I dropped this when I left my marks spec, but had it for most of my player’s career.

Tier Five

Scatter shot is the hunter’s only ability that functions inside of the dead zone. It’s a short range attack that confuses your target for 4 seconds. Fairly inexpensive, 30 second cooldown, shootable while running, it is dead useful. But, it also has one major gotcha.

Any damage caused will remove the effect. This renders the ability all but useless as temporary crowd control while in groups and makes it rather difficult while soloing – since both your pet and your dots like to break the effect as soon as it begins.

Generally, if you’re in a situation where you’re gonna be using scatter shot, you are also entirely probably in a situation where you don’t have the enemy dotted, so that’s not usually a concern. The pet however… that stupid little monkey. Or cat. Or whatever. Your pet is going to keep mauling the enemy unless you call them off or something.

Back when I had scatter shot, I had a macro that put my pet back into follow mode before firing off scatter. It seemed to work fairly well. Of course, this also interfered when my pet was dealing with one mob and I tried to scatter an add that got too close… shrug.

Improved scorpid is utterly useless. At level 52, rank 4 of scorp does -68 str/agi to your enemy. In and of itself, that’s already a seriously useful debuff when you consider that the str/agi reduction really equates to -136 attack power = -9.7 dps. To spend 5 talent points in order to temporarily reduce your enemy’s stamina by 6 points… is kind of dumb.

One point of stam = 10 points of max hp. So… 5 talent points for what is potentially a 60 damage attack that could very likely fade away in 20 seconds… yeah.

Barrage is nice. +15% to your two area attacks, multi-shot and volley. Now, volley itself isn’t all that great as far as AoE’s go. It does 80 dps for 6 seconds and has a stinking minute cooldown. Three points in barrage bumps your area dps up by 12, which is useful.

Where I really enjoy the talent is with its increase to multi-shot damage. At level 60, multi-shot replaces one normal attack with one that does +150 damage to up to 3 targets. So, even if you’re only hitting one target with it, multi is a great attack to spam. Suppose you’re hitting for 300 damage with your normal arrows. Your multi-shot is going to do 450, which is increased to 517.5 With a 10 sec cooldown on the attack, that means an increase of 6.75 dps.

Of course, the real reason to pick up barrage isn’t its dps increase. The talent is a pre-req for the tier seven marksmanship talent.

Tier Six

If you’ve come this far, you’re gonna spend the 5 points in ranged weapon spec to increase your overall damage output by five more percent.

Tier Seven

Trueshot aura is the ability I drooled over from levels 10 until I picked it up at level 41. I later learned that it wasn’t entirely drool-worthy. It’s nice. Not wonderful. Not amazing. But nice. At level 60, it gives +100 attack power (melee and ranged) to all party members (and pets) close to the hunter. In a full group of physical damage dealers, that’s pretty nice. 7.1 dps for everyone involved.

The big downside to the ability is that you have to constantly re-cast it. Unlike your aspects, it only has a 30 minute duration. And it it’s expensive. 525 mana to renew at max level.

Survival

When the game first launched, survival was primarily for them dolts as wanted to try to play melee hunters. This has since changed quite happily, and there are several talents in the branch which improve your ranged combat capabilities in a major way – specifically by bumping up your traps and crit%.

Tier One

This is an interesting tier one in that it is possible to spend 11 points here in stead of 10 as is normal. Deflection is a no-brainer, and every hunter with the points to spare should pick it up. +5% to parry is just one more layer of defense, and being a tier one talent makes it exceptionally convenient to grab if you don’t want to dig any deeper into survival.

The humanoid and monster slaying talents each bump your damage and crit damage versus the appropriate critter types by 1% (that’s a plus for base damage and an additional plus for crit). Monsters are beasts, giants, and dragons according to this talent, making elementals, demons, undead, and silithids the only things unaffected by these two talents.

PvP spec hunters should strongly consider humanoid slaying. It means the difference between aimed shots that hit mages for 1800 damage and aimed shots that hit them for 1900. Monster slaying is nice for soloing/grinding. Trolls with monster slaying will be doing +8% base damage to beasts before the extra crit damage gets applied

Tier Two

Tier two of survival is a bit problematic. Savage strikes costs two points to increase the crit chance of your raptor and mongoose strikes by 20%… So, while that is nice if you’re spending a lot of time in melee, it doesn’t help your ranged combat abilities any, so I can’t recommend it.

Improved wing clip is interesting, and is a good tier two choice, especially if you’re not planning on going any deeper. Five talent points buys your wing clip attack a 20% chance of rooting your enemy for 5 seconds. This is in addition to the attack’s snare effect that will continue for a little bit after the root effect fades.

Wing clip is cheap – at level 60 it costs only 80 mana – is instant cast and has no cooldown timer. So you can spam it quite happily for a few seconds in order to guarantee a rooting effect before you run away.

I actually use wing clip for training weapon skills, especially with two-handers.

Entrapment is like the wing clip rooting effect only applied to your traps, with a 1% higher chance of success per talent point spent. I am actually using this talent right now, because it works miracles with your frost trap.

The chance of rooting seems to be triggered every time a mob steps into the ice patch. This means that if your frost trap hits four mobs, you’re almost guaranteed to proc the effect. I use this any time the party is heading into an AoE encounter.

Tier Three

Trap efficiency bumps the damage on your fire traps by 30% and the duration on your ice traps by 30%. This is amazing. At level 60, your freezing trap is a 20 second crowd control effect. This talent bumps that up to 26 seconds.

For comparrison. Level 60 polymorph has a 50 second effect that only works on humanoids and beasts, heals the victim, and leaves them liable to wander into an AoE storm or something (in addition to drawing much hate toward your mage). Level 48 sap only works on humanoids, can only be used out of combat, and lasts for 45 seconds. Level 60 shackles have a 50 second duration, but only work on undead, and level 48 banish lasts 30 seconds and only works on elementals and demons.

So, frost trap has half the duration of the big crowd control abilities, and isn’t targetted like them. It also requires you to be out of combat to use – which isn’t a big deal if you remember how to use your feign button. Frost trap’s big win is that it potentially works on just about everything. If a mob is immune to frost trap, it is likely immune to other forms of crowd control already.

Survivalist is nice. It means +10% max hp. For cows… that’s really happy.

Deterrance is an interesting one. I’m using it right now. It gives you a 10 second buff of +25% to dodge and parry on a 5 minute cooldown. Add deflection and improved monkey to this and you have 38% to dodge and 30% to parry before stats and equipment come into the picture. That’s a pretty decent amount of damage reduction in hairy situations.

The big problem with deterrance is that you can’t just hit it every time you wind up in melee, because the 10 second duration divided by the 300 second cooldown leaves you potentially wishing you had saved it. It is also dangerous when PvPing against warriors – you dodge a warrior and he uses overpower on you (an unavoidable attack for +damage).

Deterrance is also the pre-req for the tier five activated ability, for whatever that’s worth.

Tier Four

Surefooted gives you +3% to hit and +15% to resist roots and snares. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to give you a chance to resist the daze effect that cheetah and pack will hit you with. It also doesn’t help against polymorph or stun type effects. So shrug. But +3% to hit is +3% to hit, and the movement impairment resistance buff is probably pretty cool in addition to the one orcs already get.

Trap mastery makes your traps 10% harder to resist. Not that critters resist traps very much, but I like to think that it helps the entrapment effect proc more often, so I’m using it right now.

The other tier four talent is improved feign, which makes your feign dead ability 4% less likely to fail. This really matters when feigning stuff higher level than yourself. If you’re only fighting mobs your own size, it shouldn’t matter much since they rarely resist the ability.

But… if feign fails, you die. So it’s up to you

Tier Five

Ok. Another must-have ability on tier five in killer instinct. +3% to crit with anything, even swords if you are so inclined.

The other tier five ability is counterattack, an ability that activates off of a successful parry (with mongoose activating off of dodge). Like mongoose, counter doesn’t do much damage. Unlike mongoose, however, counter is unavoidable and procs a 5 second root effect.

I don’t use counter because I’m avoiding melee if at all possible. But more realistically, I’m not using it because I don’t have room on my action bar for it. My 1-3 keys are mongoose, raptor, wing clip respectively. 4 is whatever shot I’m using most frequently, 5-7 are stings.

Even if I did move things around to make room for counter, it’s an ability that doesn’t activate all that often that is now taking up action bar space, and I become in constant risk of wasting it by missing the parry message and forgetting to activate it when the time comes. It is this reasoning that’s been tempting me to actually remove mongoose from my action bar and put an interesting macro on the 1 key. Haven’t done it yet, but I am sorely tempted.

Tier Six

Ok. Tier six is the pinnacle of coolness in the survival tree. This is why you specced survival, after all. Lightning reflexes gives you +15% to your agility. At level 60, suppose you have 300 agility. This talent bumps that up by an additiona 45 points.

45 points of agility means 6.4 more base dps, 90 more points of AC, 1.7% to dodge, and 0.8% to crit. Of course, if your agility is higher… the bonus is even happier.

Tier Seven

The tier seven ability is really pretty useful, howbeit difficult to master. Wyvern sting is a 12 second sleep attack that can only be used outside of combat. When your enemy wakes up, they receive a bigger dot than serpent sting (at level 60 this is 600/12 secs as opposed to serpent for 555/15 or even improved serpent at 610/15). Like most other cc powers, wyvern’s sleep is interrupted by damage dealt.

Wyvern is on a two minute cooldown, so you can’t realistically expect to use it every single fight, much less more than once in a single fight (by feigning). The dot is also sometimes problematic. If you are using wyvern to extend the duration of your crowd control from a freezing trap, you’ll need to remember to hit your target with scorp before they hit the trap – or the dot will turn your potential 38 second field of containment into a 13 second one.

Of course, lay trap, wyvern, wait 12 secs, scorp, untarget so you don’t break the ice with auto-shot, feign, lay another trap means you can keep something out of combat for 64 seconds. So, while much more complicated than repeatedly sheeping something, this is potentially a lot more entertaining

Especially if you realize that feign is only on a 30 second cooldown, so if you’re quick about it, you can probably throw a few more frost traps into the cycle once it’s started, and if you keep it up for very long, wyvern -will- get a chance to recharge.

This can be very mean in PvP if you want to play with your food, especially if stalling for reinforcements