Got my quest from the nice Tuskarr guy, leaped down into the area behind him to start my quest, and:
Note: The person in General Chat who says he is a “big game hunter” clearly has his words confused with “a normal person who lives where Pike does and has to deal with the local wildlife.”
Gaahh! Dazed and confused and blind. A relog didn’t solve the problem so I wound up having to hearth. I’m worried that this might be an OpenGL problem (us Linux folks run the game with OpenGL instead of Direct3D), since I had a similar one with one of the Death Knight starter quests and that’s what it turned out to be. But hopefully it’s a bug that will be fixed. Hopefully. I reported it to Blizz, anyhow.
However, the point of this post is not silly Beta bugs, rather, it is hunter talent specs. Those of you who looked closely at the screenshot may have noticed something rather decisively un-Pike-like.
Yeah, see the Trueshot Aura?
Today I spec’d 3/51/7. Then went out and shot stuff. (Note: This probably isn’t the best level 70 Marksman build. I don’t know very much about the Marksman tree. I just sort of winged it =P)
Now, I regret to inform you that I do not have fancy DPS charts or anything to share with you, largely because the way I have always gauged my DPS has been through the use of a group of addons. SWStats + SCT Damage, to be precise. SCT Damage is basically like the game’s built-in Scrolling Combat Text except it looks much nicer, in my opinion, and much more importantly it tells you what shot you did next to the floating damage number, or what move your pet used, and in short I find it to be very valuable for getting a good “feel” for my own personal DPS. Sadly, I don’t have it in Beta, and without it, it’s much harder for me to get a feel for DPS than I thought it would be.
So, I now present to you Pike’s Thoughts on the Marksmanship Tree Based on Pure Intuition Which May or May Not Have Merit:
Things I Liked:
– Opening up my character panel and seeing a “zohmygawsh-huge” AP and crit number.
– Trueshot Aura
– Being able to do more than just spam Steady Shot. I said it way back in my spec-testing days of level 50, and I’ll say it again: Marksman is the “cool calculating blue” to Beast Mastery’s “frantically red hot”. You shoot nice and slow as a Marksman hunter, and you can focus on weaving in other shots, and it’s pretty neat.
Things I Did Not Like:
-Lack of Bestial Wrath
-Lack of Intimidation
-The fact that I really, really wanted to use Readiness with Bestial Wrath and Intimidation, and only with Bestial Wrath and Intimidation, and, um… that would kind of defeat the purpose of Marksmanship and be overly ironic.
-Lack of the four extra talent points for my pet (I honestly missed these more than I initially thought I would.)
-Shooting felt too slow. =[ Serpent’s Swiftness is a drug; so sue me. Or arrest me.
I whispered BRK and told him that I was testing Marksman. He said, “Wow, you must be even more sick than you said you were.” It was of course in jest, but really, he had a point. I can see the appeal and I’m really happy that my Marksman friends got so much love this time around, but it’s just not Pike. It’s not me.
Armed with new resolve I gallantly leaped off Scryer’s Tier, died (I forgot my horse cannot fly), rez’d, and ran to Stormwind and respec’d to Big-Red-Om-nom-nom-chew-your-face-off-goodness.
Of course, that’s not gonna stop me from continuing to test out specs, and try them more thoroughly! Next stop: Survival. Though I am sort of expecting that my “Things I didn’t like” list will look frightfully similar to the Marksman list. I’m kind of spoiled I think.
In closing, I now have a Gorilla named Günther. I <3 him dearly. So many pets, so little stable space. FIVE SLOTS IS NOT ENOUGH. Also THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS. Er, EXTRA PET TALENT POINTS. Or something. /cough
Hee hee.
I like puns d(^_^)
Or arrest me.
Don’t tempt me.
Rilgon creates [Goblin Boom-Blaster Handcuffs].
Seemed you got the same results with MM as all my hunter friends. Any plans of trying out Surv? That 26 sec duration freezing trap combied with 24 sec cooldown really shines in instances.
My main is a druid, and we use to jump off the Aldor/Scryer tier, change to bird form before crashing and nobly fly away. That’s what I did the other day, jumped off and near the bottom changed into *tree* form…
Well, from its years in survival readiness is useful for 4 things really; resetting trap cooldown when a trap is resisted, resetting deterrence when a warrior/rogue (/deathknight) is hugging you in pvp, resetting feign death after a resist and resetting rapid fire for a nice long batch of hastey goodness!
I would have mentioned misdirection, but that’s on a 30 second cooldown now, so its not really worth using readiness for.
Do try survival though, you might like it, *I* tried BM, so trying survival is the least you can do!
I would suggest RECOUNT for damage analysis, it shows your damage, your pets, it can detail you all moves used, their min, max, avg damage, how many hits, misses, crits, it can show you a graphical dps display live as you are shooting, etc etc etc It’s the best damage analysis tool out there, and of course works solo or in raids.
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/recount.aspx
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunter=000000000000000000000000000323202510003330030100000000035305201230013050133000000
This is what I’d got for in terms of deep Marks myself, Pike. If you don’t have BW in offensive terms, you’re going to want Scatter/Surefooted/Wyvern/Readiness in defensive.
I agree with you on maintaining your individuality, though. Marks and BM are two very different games; always have been. I probably have as much trouble myself with BM as you did with Marks…although 40 point Surv is a bit different from Marks again.
Rilgon probably wouldn’t like deep Surv very much…at least in terms of the pre-wotlk tree, it’s a lot less damage than he’s used to. 😉
Thanks for making me laugh this morning. Jumped off the Scryer’s Tier indeed. Bravely and Nobly even. 😀
Pike,
Saw your comment over at Rilgon’s blog on MM and it being tasty looking. I know Drotara’s commented lately that he’s looking to raid Beta as MM because it seems to have good damage potential; he’d also commented that it was moribund from lack of mana. I wonder if that’s been corrected somehow. During your brief MM trip, what did you think of the blue-bar mangement?
BTW, love the 4-lights reference, we use that in my office whenever they try to make us drink the koolaid…
Boss: “We’re going to re-org. Everything will be fine.”
Resisting Employee: “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!”
Boss: “…”
🙂
I’m not sure if it’s a problem with Linux. There’s a “mist” that’s supposed to be in the area but it’s only supposed to effect the outer edges of your screen. I found it distracting and annoying. Did you contact a GM?
I tried Marks and I couldn’t stand it. Powa to da pets!
Come to the dark side! =P
But seriously, yeah, that’s why there’s a spec for everyone. All the stuff you mentioned not liking was simply stuff you’re used to or enjoy, which is another reason I just can’t do BM. I leveled as MM and it’s just what I’m used to, and why I stuck with the class. =D Props for trying something new, though. I find myself leaning toward BM for the xpac, at least for leveling.
On another note, what the heck did they do to Viper? I keep reading things but can’t find the specifics. Do you have a link by chance? Thanks. Oh, also thanks for the blog suggestions. I think I’ll just stick with low profile for now since I don’t have much time to edit anyway.
Zeuxis – MM is looking tasty right now to me in terms of delicious talents, but overall I don’t see myself seriously spec’ing to it. I didn’t really have a chance to test out mana efficiency I am afraid. From what I experienced I didn’t notice much of a difference between it and BM but really, to test it I would head out to one of the training dummies.
Nassira – in short, the new Aspect of the Viper decreases your damage by 50% while it is active and allows you to regenerate mana by shooting. Pretty nice in PvE (full mana regen happens pretty quickly, despite the irritating damage decrease), not so hot in PvP.
I’m glad that you know how to spec, Pike – I didn’t see any points in talents that your MM friends wouldn’t place 😉
Good for you for trying it though. I suppose it does require a certain taste, but so does loving BM 😛
MM still looks bleh to me. I don’t see enough deep in the tree to make me really want to spend 40+ points in it. It’s slow and the most mana inefficient spec of the three. And I question now with scatter shot being taken out if it’s even a good pvp build anymore.
At least Survival has hunting party, lock and load, and explosive shot. In addition to having scatter shot now. So speccing Surv actually looks fun. Though they definitely need to give “Trap Mastery” a lot of love for being a 41 talent point.
I’m not sure what the solution is exactly but I can guarantee you I don’t see any point speccing deep into it.