One of the changes coming in Warlords of Draenor is a modification to how Explosive Trap works. It’s not a drastic change, but it will alter the thinking behind how you use it.
The way it works in 5.4 is you place the trap on the ground, and the first enemy that walks into the trap will ignite it. Any additional enemies that enter the trap’s radius will take damage from the trap. If an enemy moves out of the trap’s radius they will stop taking damage.
In WoD, Explosive Trap is changing as follows,
- Explosive Trap now places a periodic-damage effect on each target within the radius of the explosion, rather than a persistent effect on the ground.
The first enemy that walks into the trap will ignite it, and any enemies in the blast radius will receive a DoT. Once ignited, the trap is done, and any enemies that wander into to where the trap was initially laid will not be affected by it.
What is the impact here? In an AoE situation you want to make sure your trap affects as many mobs as possible. You may want to delay setting the trap until all the mobs have been rounded up, or if the mobs come in waves, you’ll want to ensure your traps hits the largest wave.
In PvP there’s a good chance that Hunters will glyph for the knock-back rather than damage, so the mechanical change has less of an impact there.
Survival has the Enhanced Traps perk that reduces the cooldown of traps by 50% so they’ll be able to use it every 15 seconds. The short cooldown allows them to be more liberal using the trap than Beast Mastery or Marksman.
Overall I like the change to Explosive Trap as it prevents enemies from escaping the trap’s damage, and any mobs hit by the trap will receive the trap’s full damage. It’s up to the Hunter to ensure they’re using the trap to its maximum effect.
Stay thirsty and kill them with fire!
SV is looking to be in a great place for RBGs next xpac. Add this to our already significant DoTing with serpent spread, and we’ll be able to keep the best of healers busy (especially with the dumbing down of “smart” heals).
If we get any type of dispell protection for BA, just send a Survival hunter anywhere there are large packs of opponents and and we can keep them all dot’ed while doing significant burst. I suppose this is a lot of hopes at this point, but I’m assuming they’ll be upping the damage from ES to make up for the loss of KS.
Might not be enough to compete with single target burst from MM or even BM in 2v2 or 3v3 arenas, but it should be very viable for RBGs and 5v5.