So at level 71, you get Kill Shot. Let’s talk about it a little.
Kill Shot is sort of like an Old School Aimed Shot, in that it does a ton of damage and it doesn’t just crit, it Mondo-Crits. The big differences between it and Old School Aimed Shot are 1.) No cast time, and much more importantly, 2.) It can only be used on an enemy with 20% health or less. In short, this is the shot that is supposed to “finish off” your target.
I’ve been playing around with it for the past level, not enough to be able to write up a Hunter Kindergarten post on it yet but enough to discuss some initial thoughts on it. Here is what I have found:
1.) Kill Shot makes me happy because it’s sort of like the New Kill Command. Er, the New OLD Kill Command. When I can use it, one of my addons (not sure which one >.>) pops me up a warning telling me I can use it, just like it used to do with Kill Command before it changed. I always dig that kind of stuff.
2.) Most of the time when out leveling/questing, you kill stuff too fast for Kill Shot to be useful. Two reasons for this: Your pet is still pounding away at the mob (especially if you are BM and your pet is doing lots of damage), and you are typically mid-shot-rotation. If you’ve just queued up a Steady Shot, and your Kill Shot opens up, by the time your Steady Shot goes off your mob is probably already dead either to your pet or to your Steady Shot.
3.) It has a fairly long cooldown of 35 seconds, presumably to prevent you from spamming it at the end of a long boss fight.
Now let’s talk about some situations where it might be really handy but where I haven’t tested it yet:
1.) Those aforementioned super long boss fights. I’m sure most of you who have done a little raiding can think of at least one boss that always seems to take eons. Every boss will get at least one Kill Shot, but if the boss is at 20% health or less for more than 35 seconds, that’s more than one Kill Shot– almost two Kill Shots for every minute. And Kill Shots are huge so that’s gonna be a nice little bonus for you.
2.) PvP. It always takes longer to beat a fellow player than it does most quest mobs because of stuff like stamina, resilience, et al. I haven’t done any PvP at all since the expansion hit but I’m sort of thinking a Disengage/Kill Shot combo would be really fun, in an I’m-wearing-a-devilish-grin sort of way.
3.) If you are spec’d into Readiness you can do two Kill Shots in a row. Yeah. I dunno about you guys but I am 99% sure that if I did two Kill Shots in a row, and they both crit, I would blissfully die from hunter ecstasy. Just sayin’. (Has anyone else noticed all the billions of fun things you can suddenly do with Readiness now that it’s easier to spec into? I don’t mean any sort of disrespect to my long-time deep-Survival friends, but its versatility now is really quite amazing.)
In short, I welcome Kill Shot to the Hunter Abilities Stable and look forward to learning about its uses even more!
Now I go to do important things, like eat breakfast, and play WoW. Not necessarily in that order…
One thing i noticed about Kill shot is that the max range on it is 45 yards, when my other shots only go up to 35. This is somewhat useful when some classes try to run away near the end of a fight. Mage blink and rogues come to mind.
Also it is nice when you are soloing elites and you have T5 2 piece bonus. By that point in the fight your gorilla is gonna be getting low. So that is a nice chunk of damage to the mob (esp if you crit) AND some decent healing for your pet.
Gunsnbutter Excelsior/Uther
Oh my gosh, Kill Shot will be so nice against healing classes. Specifically pallies and druids. I can think of so many times I’ve gotten them down to 5 percentish only to have them spam HoTs or bubble-heal and I have to start all over.
Kill shot, very nice. Though while questing with another hunter we are usually complaining to each other we are killing stuff too fast to use it. ^_^
And Pike? Now I have to go listen to Bon Jovi. You just had to use one of my favorite songs!
presumably to prevent you from spamming it at the end of a long boss fight.
/cast Kill Shot
/cast Readiness
/cast Kill Shot
/cackle
And yeah, I had back-to-back 7k Kill Shot crits on Cyanigosa in Violet Hold yesterday. I almost died laughing.
which mod are you using that pops those up for you? thanks!
Man I love Killshot. Lilt is 76 now and her best Killshot crit is somewhere in the 6200 range. Freakin amazing. But I fell in love with it at 7, when I was jumped by a 72 warrior in Grizzly Hills. He definitely got a few good hits in on me, and things were looking grim. I had used Bestial Wrath to break some sort of snare, and done my best to kite him, but after about 30 sec, I was almost down for the count. I disengaged, but only left back a short distance, saw his health was slowly dwindling to that magic 20% mark, but mine was under 10%. The moment I saw his HP hit 18% I took the shot.
Shot through the heart indeed. That one shot finished off his health bar, and had me cheering.
I decided that since he was the one who jumped me, I’d give him a chance to try again, so I waited for him to rez. Unfortunately, a warrior who tries to jump a hunter isn’t the most honorable fighter, and a minute or two later, his Paladin friend shows up and steamrolled me.
My point: Kill Shot rocks my socks.
That should say “fell in love with it at 71”
Readiness is crazy good. I guess it’s a testament to how few Survival hunters there were that we haven’t heard it praised to the rooftops before now. Tons of stuff is possible with it, and I love it to death.
I’m only 73 at this point — it will be years before we get this much new content again, and I’m intent on chewing and savoring every bite — so it’s been of limited utility, especially since Aimed Shot now benefits from all the Multishot talents. (And, when I get it, from the Glyph of Trueshot Aura.)
It definitely has some good potential. I’m thinking of macroing it to another shot, probably Steady Shot, so that it automatically gets used if the target’s under 20 percent and the shot timer is up.
o(<..>)o i have to go get training, forgot all about it lolz
you may be wondering what that is ^
well, i typed two (elaborate) side looking faces, like so >.>
and that THING is what came out. it looks like a mutant face, or a pig face, you decide.
*shocked to the core*
Like ihols I totally forgot to go get trained! I’ve been wasting so much time thinking about my next pet to fill up those nice free stable spots (still reveling in that) that I failed to realise my trainer would have some new goodies for me.
I agree that Readiness is just awesome for a hunter. I’m BM but I gave up those extra points and speced in Readiness instead of the exotic pet. I love mixing that thing up with my traps – in PVP if they break my trap because of their pvp trinket I just hit Readiness, lay a new one and BAM that sucker is now trapped with his trinket on cooldown and wondering how on earth I could lay another trap so fast 🙂
/mad cackle
i adore killshot, the moment i got it i rushed to queue for WSG and nailed a 5k crit on their flag carrier, i was in love.
@ Elly – It’s either XPerl or SCT/SCTD. I’m leaning towards SCT/SCTD though.
Oh dear. I won’t be able to play Wrath until I get a new laptop, and considering that I’m a college student, that would take a while. I really, really, REALLY hope Blizzard doesn’t nerf Kill Shot before I get a chance to enjoy it. 🙁
@ihlos — I forgot about it until level 72 as well. 😛
Actually there might be an in-game interface option that will pop it up. I only run with Omen and Recount and it pops up for me.
@ Elly, Pike: I’m pretty sure it’ll be scrolling combat text thingie. That mod seems to essentially modify the text blizzard already makes available (there’s an “official” option to do that in-game with no mods, but it’s uglier), and you can turn on notices for things like execute and kill command using the official stuff. A = B B = C A = C etc.