Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Rejig

I respecced last night before we took on Al'ar and Void Reaver, but before Chain Trap and BRK get all excited, I'm sticking with Marksmanship for now. The talents I dropped were:

Trap Mastery 2/2 - I'm doing less heroics these days, so the extra trap resist is less important. I've also got a lot more armour and HP, so if a trap gets resisted I'll probably survive and be able to kite the mob around.

Improved Hunter's Mark 5/5 - This was a tough choice. The talent adds 110AP to all melee attacks on the marked mob, which can add up to quite a bit if you have a large cadre of rogues and DPS warriors. Our raids don't seem to have that many melee classes though, and most of the time another hunter marks the boss and invalidates the buff, so I think I'll let this one slide.

Barrage 3/3 - I don't tend to use Multi-shot much in raids because of the chance of breaking CC, and I don't use it on bosses because of its mana inefficiency. I do use it in PvP whenever I can get myself into a decent position, but this isn't very often.

With the 10 extra points, I grabbed these talents:

Efficiency 2/5 - I already had three points in this talent, so I added two more points to help with my raiding mana issues. I'll still be potting aggressively, but it will give me a bit more headroom.

Go For The Throat 2/2 - This one's a bit of an experiment in boosting my pet's damage. I crit pretty regularly, so this talent should give him a lot more focus to burn on Bite and Claw. In long boss fights, this hopefully will add up.

Improved Stings 5/5 - Another experiment, with a mainly PvP focus. With these five talent points, Viper Sting will burn 1778 mana off an enemy, and reduce the chance to dispel it by 30%. It also ups Serpent Sting's damage by 30%, which makes it a bit more formidable and efficient. I might even use it in raids if I'm in a group with a mana regenerating buddy.

Combat Experience 1/2 - A small overall buff to Agility and Intellect, which means a few more points of RAP, a teensy bit of crit and a tad more Intellect, which gives me a little bit more mana.

It'll be interesting to see how much actual difference these changes make. Improved Stings in PvP will probably be the most visible, although if Go For The Throat works the way I hope it might it might boost my pet's damage significantly in long battles. Cross fingers!

2 comments:

Chain Trap said...

Survival! You know it makes sense!
*chuckles*

Seriously tho, I have never found that Trap Mastery made much difference one way or the other with resists, and so dumped it in my last rejig. I'd really miss Imp HM tho, if I dropped it, or at least my roguey, warrior, and pally friends would.

Let me know how you get on with improved stings, as I've not really found stings to be worth much in pvp, except serpent sting to annoy rogues (and that, in itself, is a delicious pastime) and viper to make pallies blow all their mana on cleanses. Scorpid is a must have for boss fights, of course, but the others aren't so handy. At least not so much that they are worth 5 points. However, I've never had the talent, so it might turn out to be worthwhile.

Fingers crossed the changes work for you, but if they don't, there's always lovely Readiness.

Varshak said...

Thanks for the comment! I'll have to see if dropping Improved HM really makes a difference... it looks like Bliz are stopping normal HMs from overwriting Improved HMs in 2.4 - this might be enough for me to reinstate it.

As for Improved Stings... my arena team has a druid healer, and against similar 2 DPS / 1 healer teams it's often a race to OOM the opposition healer. We'll see if it really makes a difference.

It would be nice if they enhanced Scorpid Sting with Improved Stings too, by increasing the duration or something. It's still one of my favorite hunter skills, and one of the true tests of whether a hunter really knows what he's doing.

Oooh yes, Readiness. Very tempting. :-)