The week the patch 4.06 hotfixes went live, and while Blizzard may have missed the mark in terms of adjusting the MM rotation, they seemed to have succeeded in introducing parity between all three specs.
Just to recap, here are the changes that went live.
- Aimed Shot damage has been decreased to approximately 160% weapon damage (at level 80+), down from 200%.
- Aspect of the Hawk now provides around an additional 2000 attack power at level 85.
I went and switched my specs to SV and BM. I just don’t like having to hardcast Aimed Shot in the MM rotation, and I really enjoy playing SV and BM.
Last night during Halfus we managed to have three hunters each running different specs. Here’s how we fared.
Euripides was MM, Autoshott was SV, and I was BM. We finished second, third and fourth on the meters for this fight. As you can see our numbers were extremely close.
So in my little pond all three specs are performing about the same. That’s not to say some fights won’t favor one spec over another. I certainly plan to do my share of spec switching. The point is we seem to finally have choices, and can honestly choose to play the spec we enjoy the most. Hunters haven’t been in this position since as far as I can remember.
And while there will always be a spec that comes out on top (at least on paper) the “penalty” for not choosing to play that spec is negligible, and I, for one, find that refreshing.
By the way just to show you how far BM has come with these changes. My numbers were enough to actually be ranked in the top 50 for BM on Halfus 25N. While I fully expect to get knocked off the list as more people give BM a try, I think it’s safe to say that BM has arrived. Welcome to the party!
Just a question…how close are these three toons in terms of ilvl. I completely agree that any spec is worth raiding at this point, but did not know if any one of these guys just out-gears the others? (In PvE gear, I checked armory, but there was PvP stuff on there).
Thanks.
That's a great question. Right now I'd say we're almost identical, although it should be noted that Auto got five upgrades off of the four bosses we killed.
So I'd say that wall have an average ilvl around 353-356. Auto tends to perform very well for his gear, and I'm curious to see how he does tonight with all of his new toys.
Euri has a PvE set very similar to my own.
My PvE set is 359, but it contains 3 pieces of pvp loot with all their wasted resilience.
Very strange, we both tries MM, SV on BWD and TB.
At last, MM is far better than SV (I like SV). SV can be a little bit ahead on AOE bosses like Maloriak otherwise MM is really better.
The 4.1 patch will kill this aoe advantage.
To compare our last pull on Halfus 25 HM, MM was at 56K dps for 49K SV.