Tweak the Striker's Garb "buff"

[Snakeman]

I hate to be that guy, but the spell damage buffs on the hunter AQ40 set feel like an absolute slap in the face. Warlocks and shaman get primary DPS stats from their spirit replacement, and hunter gets a buff to something that wasn't even useful to them in the first place?

My suggestion is - along with tweaking the 3-set bonus, though I'm not sure to what - to either nerf the spellpower back to vanilla values and change it to mp5 (like on tier 3), or to remove the spell power entirely and convert it either to mp5 or just straight up agility. As it is, putting spell power on a physical DPS item isn't a "buff" at all - no hunter in their right mind should be using arcane shot or serpent sting in vanilla if they care about their mana bar or their raid's boss debuffs. If a hunter wants to build towards spell damage for whatever reason, there are crafted and dungeon blues in every one of those slots with up to double the amount of spell power.

On that note, arcane shot attack power scaling pls.

Afterthought: hunter shouldn't *really* be using full 2.5 over other classes on their token anyway, but if you're just joining a raid that has AQ40 on farm, it's a very nice set to pick up, with a cute 5-set bonus to boot. I don't think small agi buffs would make the 5 set better than full t2 or 3pc t2 bug suit sets, but for those that don't have either set it'd be cool to have.

[Ugoboom]

So spellpower-built hunter is a cool idea. And old blizz thought so too, and thats why they experimented with t2.5 like this. But yeah, the build just needs a loot work. Base values, spellpwoer coeffs, and debuff limits need fixing to make arcane shot and serpent sting and volley worth using when comboed with spell gear. Ideally you end up where spellpower hunter is within 10-20% of dps of a phys built hunter.

I think the turtle devs agree that spellpower hunter would be a shame to lose, but they really haven't put a single drop of effort into making it viable. So yeah I do understand your desire to just see it useful for phys hunter and if the devs ever decide to say hardline "ok spellpower hunter is dead, we will not support it" then yeah I totally +1 your suggestion.

[Ninoa]

So spellpower-built hunter is a cool idea. And old blizz thought so too, and thats why they experimented with t2.5 like this. But yeah, the build just needs a loot work. Base values, spellpwoer coeffs, and debuff limits need fixing to make arcane shot and serpent sting and volley worth using when comboed with spell gear. Ideally you end up where spellpower hunter is within 10-20% of dps of a phys built hunter.

I think the turtle devs agree that spellpower hunter would be a shame to lose, but they really haven't put a single drop of effort into making it viable. So yeah I do understand your desire to just see it useful for phys hunter and if the devs ever decide to say hardline "ok spellpower hunter is dead, we will not support it" then yeah I totally +1 your suggestion.

Knowing what we know now, we can safely say that beyond this set, the idea of a spell-powered hunter never took off and Blizzard has ever since favoured more pet-friendly builds or melee-oriented setups in later expansions. With the introduction of new abilities (Apect of the Wolf and, albeit bugged, Avoidace, etc.) in 1.16.1 TWoW developers seem to be heading in a similar direction.

If the set isn't going to be updated to provide a meaningful upgrade for raiding MM hunters (for example, by adding 1% hit to make it a viable alternative to T2), then at the very least update it so it caters to the two alternative hunter play-styles this server does seem to - somewhat - support. Simply adding more spell power just seems like a wasted opportunity if you really want to revisit obsolete items designed almost 20 years ago.

[Snakeman]

So spellpower-built hunter is a cool idea. And old blizz thought so too, and thats why they experimented with t2.5 like this. But yeah, the build just needs a loot work. Base values, spellpwoer coeffs, and debuff limits need fixing to make arcane shot and serpent sting and volley worth using when comboed with spell gear. Ideally you end up where spellpower hunter is within 10-20% of dps of a phys built hunter.

I think the turtle devs agree that spellpower hunter would be a shame to lose, but they really haven't put a single drop of effort into making it viable. So yeah I do understand your desire to just see it useful for phys hunter and if the devs ever decide to say hardline "ok spellpower hunter is dead, we will not support it" then yeah I totally +1 your suggestion.

Knowing what we know now, we can safely say that beyond this set, the idea of a spell-powered hunter never took off and Blizzard has ever since favoured more pet-friendly builds or melee-oriented setups in later expansions. With the introduction of new abilities (Apect of the Wolf and, albeit bugged, Avoidace, etc.) in 1.16.1 TWoW developers seem to be heading in a similar direction.

If the set isn't going to be updated to provide a meaningful upgrade for raiding MM hunters (for example, by adding 1% hit to make it a viable alternative to T2), then at the very least update it so it caters to the two alternative hunter play-styles this server does seem to - somewhat - support. Simply adding more spell power just seems like a wasted opportunity if you really want to revisit obsolete items designed almost 20 years ago.

This, basically. I don't disagree that it's a cool idea, but in practice it's less viable than full melee because, even if you do manage to build up to shadow priest levels of spellpower, your only spellpower-scaling spells are a 6s cd instant cast, a dot, a 1 min cd periodic AoE you can't cast in melee range (meaning the scaling coeffs for all three are dog), and traps, which, if you're able to pre-place one before combat, functionally are on a 30s cooldown after the first 15 seconds, unless you want to equip Maelstrom's Wrath in your neck slot for a 2s reduction on the cooldown of feign death. Most of your damage still is going to come from auto shots without a massive overhaul of how spell hunter works. Blizzard realised this, and made arcane shot scale with attack power in TBC and volley/traps/serpent sting scale with attack power in WotLK.

Hell, even in the next raid tier they added a hunter set bonus that increases pet attack power

[Snakeman]

I've also just come to the realisation that the reason Striker's even has spell power in the first place was because Blizzard most likely were trying in a last-ditch effort to make a set that would allow otherwise physical hunter DPS to use sting/arcane shot in rotation. Somewhat obviously, given the existence of t3, it didn't work.

[Gantulga]

You can actually use serpent sting freely now with the debuff limit practically lifted so this isn't half bad.
Hunters are already powerhouses on this server thanks to Trueshot.

[Ugoboom]

Yup, i await seeing if its now worth adding serpent sting into rotations alongside multishot.

[Ninoa]

Sure, if only it scaled.

[Snakeman]

It wasn't worth using on Season of Mastery, or in TBC. Complete waste of a GCD.

Edit: Bad napkin maths so feel free to correct me if i'm wrong, but:

Serpent Sting rank 9: 555 damage over 15 seconds, ticking 5 times (every 3 seconds) for 20% scaling each

Striker's Garb "buffed" set features 80 extra spellpower, giving 80 extra damage over 15 seconds,

= 635 damage over 15 seconds.

If you wanted to go the extra mile and take 5/5 in Improved Serpent Sting (spoiler alert, you don't), you gain an extra 10% damage on Serpent Sting,

= 698.5 damage over 15 seconds, if I'm generous and allow the extra spell damage to scale with the talent

Now, I don't know if the talent takes into account extra spell damage. I assume it does, but vanilla is weird like that. Not that it matters, because you lose important talent points elsewhere - you would have to replace either Mortal Shots, Ranged Weapon Specialisation, or Ferocity in the BM tree, all of which are incredibly important DPS talents due to the way hunters scale. So, we assume

The other burning question is, do we have room in the rotation to be casting serpent sting every 15 seconds? Assuming we're taking full advantage of boss debuffs, none of which buff periodic nature damage, you should be casting one Trueshot between your auto swings. Depending on your weapon speed (I have succeeded greatly with Rhok'delar, but it's tight; anything faster than 2.9 you probably will not be able to execute this & instead have to replace a Trueshot entirely) you may be able to fit another global in after a Trueshot every, say, ten seconds or so if you cast it right after your auto goes out. Sounds good, right?

Except you also have a 0.5s cast shot with a 10 second cooldown, that deals 172 extra damage on top of your normal auto shot damage. And it can crit. And it can cleave.

With my gear currently, Multi-Shot rank 5 deals almost 750 damage to a low-armoured target (level 1 training dummy) and will only get better with better gear and more consumables up.

Conclusion: Serpent sting is a complete and utter waste of a GCD. I can't believe I have to be proving this to people.

[Piffo]

It is obvious that the changes were made without looking at the twow hunter class changes (Trueshot).

If the game designers would have looked into the twow hunters mechanics and realised they didn't use serpent sting or arcane shot any more, they would have done the opposite and removed the spell damage and added something useful.

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Trueshot replaces the need of bad dmg / mana ratio shots that fill in the gaps since it has no cd.

It's not easy to explain the shot rotation since it depends on your ranged weapon, but all you can do without losing out on dps is put serpent sting and arcane shot in the gap after you use multi shot.

Do so and you get one arcane and one serpent sting in 20 sec. at best (depends on your weapon speed and haste procs), including the complex math on arcane shots and the simple math on serpent sting (100% sp ratio), you get around 120 extra dmg in 20 sec...

Lets say 6dps in 600 total. That is about what +1%crit would add and it costs you mana and it is not usable in many situations with sheeps/neutrals around (no multishots).
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My suggestion is add +1% crit on shoulders and 3 agi to the head and legs and remove the close to useless spell damage from all pieces. You get a set that has tiny better stats than t2 and a close to useless set bonus compared to t2.

Noone would call that too much.

I am not even talking about the bad gearing for hunters in AQ40 in general. Its more like a naxx waiting room to me.