Thursday, September 25, 2008

Double the Red?

I'm in the WotLK beta. This morning when I woke up and checked the beta forums, I found this:

Aimed Shot - This shot will now be instant cast, its damage/effect/cooldown will remain unchanged.
Scatter shot - This will now be an 11-point Survival talent.
Readiness - This will now be the 21-point Marksmanship talent.
Trap Mastery - This will now be the 41-point Survival talent. Granted, not very sexy for a 41-pointer but we'll do some changes there in a future patch (after WOLK ships).
Surefooted is swapping places with T.N.T. (so Surefooted is now in tier 2)

These changes will be live in an upcoming beta build.

Source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=10043283732&sid=2000

Questions that come to mind:

1. Will 50/21 BM/MM (ie BW, Readiness, BW) do more DPS than a 51pt BM build? Exotics are looking less exotic than ever, and although I'll still probably end up with most of my talents in the BM tree, I just don't know if having a Devilsaur by my side instead of a Cat will be worth it.

2. As one of the posters further down the thread noted, with Aimed being instant cast, does that mean Aimed will be back in the DPS rotation? Steady was supposed to take the place of Aimed; this could bring us right back to where we started.

3. Hybrid build FTW? I'm not really a hardcore theorycrafter, but even I can see that all 3 of the 51pt talents are falling rather short... Why take 51pt BM (Beast Mastery) when you can take BW/Readiness? For PvP, why take Chimera (51pt MM) or Explosive (51pt Surv) when you could take Intimidation/Readiness/Scattershot, or Silencing/Readiness/Scattershot?

I'm really going to have to rethink my talent choices now... I'd been optimistic about the possibility of introducing a Devilsaur and Rhino into my stables, but a Longevity/BW/Readiness build is looking very, very appealing...

4 comments:

Pike said...

Just a warning, a beta tester recently reported that for some reason Readiness does not work with Bestial Wrath in the Beta-- it resets the cooldowns of other hunter abilities but not BW. Whether it is a bug, or intended, people are still not sure.

Phyllixia said...

Yeah, I'm not entirely surprised. Between the BW glyph and Longevity, the cooldown for BW is actually pretty low already; having BW up 2/3 of the time might be a little OP for PvP :P

Anonymous said...

I'm getting a rhino for sure, but I'm also going back to a gorilla again.
The Thunderstomp change is just awesome.

Even when not using exotics I NEED the extra pet points, there just aren't enough for my taste..

Oh, and Phyllixia, you weren't on at the time, but I definitely Rhok now!

Phyllixia said...

Gratz Kin! Welcome to the club :D