MM scaling problem

Classes Hunter
1

I will not post here about our weaknesses in pve or PvP. What I wanted to talk about was scaling. Mm is known as low scaling spec for a long time now.

  1. Current most popular covenant NF with Niya soulbind, gives flat mastery, same for Kyrian. With DR introduced in shadowlands, and innate diminishing returns our current top 2 soulbinds mentioned earlier give flat amount of mastery on use. This is great and good early in the expansion but it falls down rapidly as gear progresses.

Suggested fix: make these soulbinds give damage% or mastery% increase.

  1. Haste value is much lower for our spec compared to any class with mana.
    Focus regeneration does not keep up with aimed shot cooldown reduction as aimed shot is just small part of DPS rotation, as such during trueshot we need to skip even more procs of arcane shot buffed by precise shots.

Suggestion 1: Make haste reduce rapid fire cooldown as well. It would increase focus regen we get by using our skills, and improve rotation when trueshot is not active by making us use less steady shots and get more rapid fires out.

Suggestion 2: Make trueshot aura give haste %so instead of cooldown reduction and cast time reduction for aimed shot.
This would allow us to slot in more precise shots during our burst window with extra focus we would during trueshot. This in turn allows to deal more damage from dots as well, even if we aren’t dot heavy class,

There is another issue with scaling as well but for now until I find a solution to it, I will wait.

6 Likes
2

while i agree with the problem u present

Remember ur buffing EVERY class who uses that tree also. which will retain the same problem as u’ll buff every other classes accessible scaling also.

your other suggestions look more solid though.

i think alot of MMs problem was, it was showing Really high numbers til mobs started dying slower. MMs Burst seems amazing, but after their burst they fall by quite a amount.

but u have BM which is a high Scaling specc, so its almost as if u have the MoP Warrior transition with your class.

your play Arms til u amass enough stats to then go fury… it looks like its a comparable to Hunters, while that isnt what MM players wanna hear, it might be entirely by design your suspose to go BM in the later parts of the expansion.

3

MM having bad scaling is a complete myth.

This is literally the same for every class.

There are like barely any DPS classes with mana not even sure what you mean by this. But our haste values are fine. Just because a stat is our worst doesn’t mean it’s bad.

MM will scale just fine.

4

No, you miss some things from this which should be noticed.
Warlocks double dip into haste by reducing cast times and also increasing amount of dot ticks. With mana as a resource, it allows to dip more into haste as long as mana pool allows it.
A few dots scale from Vers and Vers by itself gives damage as such double dipping into Vers as well.

But back to hunter. Hunter double dips into crit, with master marksman talent giving crit 15% increased value by giving bleed damage which scales from initial damage dealt. As such on condition that enemy survives until dots finish ticking. Crit has 115% value of its regular value if talented.
However crit is hard caped stat and also affected by two DR’s.

MM hunter has excellent scaling on mastery, problem is that flat values from covenant is undesirable and in no way would it buff other specs, as it is hunter specific soulbind option.
It might buff survival and BM with flat% damage increase but they could use those buffs anyways.

5

That’s not a ‘double dip’. I don’t know why you are talking about mana classes, there is literally one dps spec in the game that uses mana as a resource and that’s a spec that isn’t played right now. Whether or not a spec uses mana is utterly irrelevant.

For reference, my hunter currently has a stat value of 1.58 DPS per point of haste. My warlock, who is in slightly worse gear is at 1.37 DPS/point. In equal gear, they are probably about the same.

I don’t even know what this means honestly. All dots scale with vers. 3% vers increases DoT damage by 3%. There is no double dipping or anything going on here.

15% extra crit value is not double dipping. But yes, crit has a 1.15 multiplier. It would only be considered ‘double dipping’ if the master marksman DoT could also crit itself, which it doesn’t.

No it’s not. Almost everybody is using Niya mastery buff right now. Warlocks, Boomkins, some mages, Hunters, almost everybody running night fae are also playing niya outside of koralyn fire mages.

6

It is double dipping. 1st increase into crit increases crit chance this directly increasing damage. 2nd dip is talent giving crit 15% more value as a dot in perfect situation. Also … MM hunters don’t have a single dot outside of talents so it is irrelevant if dots crit or not.

Warlock double dip into haste by 1 getting normal value from haste like everyone else plus as a class with mana as a resource that is not gated by many cooldowns on many dots, it increases ticks of agony and some others which makes it generate more shards which allows it to spend it for more spells which need soul shards. This is just 1 example. Not only dot damage increases but they get more casts of stronger abilities in their rotation.

Now about versality double dipping on some classes. All damage scales from versality but! Some dots in case of some classes (I’ll take warlock as an example) have dot modifier in them which scales from Vers. Not all classes got Dots which scale from Vers.
This is the 2nd dip into versality.

And that is the reason warlock scales well into later parts of expansions.
It should be a widely known fact by now.

Yes I made a mistake about soulbind but it does not change fact that our crit is hard caped so towards end of expansion crit will start losing value.
Mastery due to flat stats beeing less useful than % stats and only those 2 stats having high impact on MM hunter damage overall means:
We will scale good up to a certain point. Might be after 9.1 or even later we lose stat values, who knows. I am not talking about MM hunter current gear scaling.
I am talking about potential as gear increases. However our stat values scale linearly for the most part while some others curve up.

In the end unless this scaling is fixed, or we get some changes MM hunter will fall short as expansion goes.

7

Honestly all of this is so painfully wrong I won’t even bother.

8

Ok I’ll explain it basically. Hunter using current 2 most popular soulbinds decreases value per point of mastery.
They take immediate benefit but devalue mastery later on by a small margin faster due to nature of diminishing returns. It is case of bad scaling. Other classes might encounter it too sure, but not every class has mastery as 1 of best stats as such they might have lower amount of it, making diminishing returns kick in to a lesser extent. This is what I mean by first point.

9

Yes, but if we have so much mastery then it’s not one of our best stats then is it. We will simply gear for a different stat. All of our stats are very close in value and this makes virtually no difference.

The issue I have is with all of your complete rubbish about double dipping (Which I don’t think you understand what that actually means).

10

While what you said is true, you can focus different stat then and gain more value from it, it does not change fact that some other classes have higher base stat values due to dipping into said stats more, so not only stacking certain stat increase damage directly it does also increase damage indirectly.

The example I gave is affli warlock gaining more soul shards from haste.

Also, you should not look only at Sims.
Simcraft might say you need more haste on WW monk but please let me ask you why all top monks aim for 0 haste.
Haste Sims fairly well on MM hunter too, but most MM hunters I do know, won’t ever go past 10% haste this expansion as it simply said increases burst windows giving more faster aimed shots. But with current raid content, you would want harder burst in many many cases over better sustained DPS if overall DPS is not impacted too much. It just is that way.

Please don’t take simcraft stat values too seriously unless it is a fight withouth any mechanics and you just DPS a stationary target, withouth doing anything else, with no phases etc.

11

Yes, and we gain more focus and more aimed shots. Haste does a ton of other things too for all specs (GCD, RPPM increase, CDR, etc). Just because it does multiple things does not mean that it double dips.

There is no reason to add an arbitrary number. You build a sim to suit whatever situation you are aiming for (For example, i’ve recently been simming 3 mins with sire denathrius mythic talents to simulate the last phase for the DPS check) and you generally go with the best setup with some nuance. If that means playing with haste, then you play with haste. My gear setup has almost none whatsoever, so it’s worth quite a lot.

Stat weights are useless, but top gear sims are absolutely not.

Yes, some classes scale better with specific secondaries than others. It’s not because of ‘dipping’ though, which is what you don’t understand.

You think that simple class mechanics that scale with stats is ‘double dipping’. This is not true. Hunters dont double dip with crit, and fire mages dont double dip with crit because they happen to get heating up procs from crits.

Let’s use an example for double dipping and what it actually is, using master marksman.

Master marksman does not ‘double dip’ on crit. If you crit, it applies a DoT. Simple.

Now, for it to double dip, it would then need to have the DoT itself crit too. But it doesn’t. There’s no double dipping here.

Maybe you remember Huntsman Altimor the first reset of the tier. The damage bonus to shades of bhargast was broken, and allowed for douple dipping mechanics to come into play. You crit the bear with a huge % damage increase, which then lead to a master marksman DoT application. Then, this master marksman DoT application then multipled AGAIN with the shade debuff, leading to instances of 100k+ DPS with master marksman doing 80% of your damage. This is double dipping. Something gaining an effect twice.

None of what you have said shares this interaction. Name one bleed that does not scale with versatility. I already know you are going to say a bleed that scales with versatility indirectly, such as master marksman itself.

12

Our best stat, that is crit atm, has many outside sources for boosts and has a hard cap.
Optical target enbiggener, trinkets etc.meaning crit will lose value much sooner than it normally does.
With mastery beeing single stat and with 2 points of Diminishing returns, our playstyle will highly likely change to sustained burst with high haste towards end of expansion.
There shouldn’t be arguments about this. Problem with stacking haste is for MM hunter, it means less mobility, with higher count of aimed shots needing to be cast which ofc cast faster but movement windows become shorter so you don’t lose DPS.
That is an unintended consequence I believe.
That in an of itself does not mean scaling is bad but we are one of the builds which faces this problem.

2nd problem is, once we need to stack haste or Vers to be optimal our damage profile changes from burst to sustained burst which means:

  1. Less PvP kill potential during burst windows even If we can unload more often.
  2. Lesser % of our damage will be during burst window and larger % will be split more evenly. We all know sustained damage is not the preferred type and almost never was. You could say that in an of itself is a small problem.

Current top builds do not have either of these problems. And this is the scaling issue I see.
You use more stats to increase your viability but we, after a certain point start changing, which I would take as falling off.
How high do the stats need to be for this to happen? Well it happens the moment crit starts losing value and during BFA it was around 53-55%.
Due to current traits and external sources it might be higher or lower, depends on what 9.1 brings but we do fall off.

Now you might say but we will still be doing damage and yes, we will do good damage however for same reasons we don’t take certain specs which don’t really underperform damage wise now, but don’t bring utility to raid or have bad damage profile, it will happen to MM hunter

13

Almost everything you said is simply incorrect, still.

This is the same for all classes. All classes have new SL diminishing returns on stats. Hunters are not a special case in this. You are never ever going to hit 100% crit chance. If scope would ever put you anywhere close, guess what, you’d just use a different scope! Or on a ton of encounters you’d run sinful anyway.

Like, what??? Firstly, it only has one aspect of diminishing returns - the exact same as any other stat. The higher you get, the higher of a penalty is applied. Yet again, this will apply to every DPS spec in the game. If this effects niya, we switch soulbinds/covenants. Literally completely irrelevent.

Sustained burst? What does that even mean LMAO. We won’t run ‘high haste’ we will literally run a ton of all the stats, because guess what, all secondaries are pretty decent for MM. In fact because of the new DR’s on stats, it will probably heavily benefit MM over other classes that have vast differences in stat values.

Even in your hypothetical world of stacking haste, it has no effect on mobility. Your % time spent casting aimed shots is almost identical.

Sustained burst isn’t even a term. What does it mean, CONSTANTLY doing HIGH damage? Like what?

You realize that vers has the same impact on burst damage that it does non-cooldown damage too right?

You also realize that during wild spirits/cooldowns, haste is actually one of our best stats right now. On a 40 second sim, haste sims as my highest stat by far. This is a reason that frond is so good right now.

We will just invest in other stats that are almost equally as good. We are very lucky in this department. Specs with 3rd/4th secondaries being significantly worse will have a far bigger problem than we will.

I have honestly never seen somebody so confident and be so wrong about so many things. It’s clear you think you understand this all, but there is some really fundamental misunderstandings going on here, really highlighted by your failure to understand that almost all of the things listed effect every spec in the game, not just MM. MM is actually good at countering some of the DR later in the expansion since all of our secondaries are pretty good/equal.

In reality, even in your hypothetical scenario if all of these things were true (which they aren’t), they would have an almost miniscule impact compared to what you think it would.

14

You will spend same amount of time casting yes, however in between having to use aimed shot due to cooldown reduction from haste you will have shorter windows of movement. Let’s say now.
You will cast both stacks of aimed shot and have 24-2*(2.8) seconds of free movement. Which is 18.4 seconds of full mobility in between burst that you have no need to stay stationary or lose DPS. Twice 2.8 seconds as 2nd casts goes into 1sts cooldown and you gotta start precasting before you hit 2 stacks for optimal DPS.
With say 30% haste before 2nd DR kicks in, you will have 18 seconds in between burst with 2 casts of aimed shot taking 1.91 seconds each so 18-2*(1.91). Your window of free movement becomes around 14.18 seconds, it got shorter by whole 4+ seconds.
Sure you will spend exactly same amount of time grounded over a long period, but you will need to stay put casting more often to deal optimal DPS.
Should be easy to understand no. More haste= more often you gotta stop to cast and stand still. It means more we get of it, more stationary we become, as we approach 50% haste we have 6 second cd of aimed shot but adding in global cooldowns and spending stacks of arcane shots, rapid fire, explosive shot etc our rotation gets impossibly hectic as focus regen is saved by rapid fire fire quite often, but haste does not cover rapid fire CD and as such we will be more energy starved than we ware before. As we will have less rapid fire in our rotation.

Haste has super bad scaling for hunter after certain point no matter how much mastery Vers or crit we have stacked, we will be need to cast filler more do burst rotation.

You are absolutely right MM scales with all stats pretty equally, but some have hard cap(crit) some are bad at higher levels by design(haste) and some are best stacked(mastery) but are affected by two diminishing returns.

And please don’t tell me it Sims well.
Try to Sim it at higher stats by changing values manually.

15

…But still the same amount of time to move overall. Which is what matters.

No it doesn’t. The overall time spent standing still and moving stays the same. How is that hard to understand.

That’s not even remotely how CDR works. 50% haste does not mean half the cooldown on aimed shot. It’s more like 8 seconds.

Haste scales linearly, we will never ever reach a point where we have some mythical massive amount of haste that the rotation is too hectic to even play like you seem to think. This isn’t the land of corruption.

Crit hard cap is absolutely irrelevant. Haste is linear and is not bad at higher levels that we will reach by the end of the expansion. Mastery is no better stacked than anything else, and has one DR just like every other stat.

16

Good! Seems like everyone is against you on this one and in every thread. maybe do some research and then come back?

17

You are more than welcome to try and argue against any of my points, but so far you haven’t :slight_smile:

It’s always funny when people get upset that i’m being positive about the spec, because usually people only come to battle net forums to whinge and complain.

18

Yes time spent standing and time spent beeing able to move stays similar. However if this expansions go into same substatd like BFA with corruptions, MM will scale badly on haste.
There is no question about that.

Simple example. Does 5 seconds of casting and 20 seconds of free movement sound more appealing or 10 seconds of free movement and 2.5 of casting sound better repeated twice.
In 1st case you have more choices when to stop and unleash your burst, you are less pressured by time to do it asap. It is better for raid mechanics that need heavy movement with small gaps every say 15 second and infinitely better for PvP, if you can do same damage while stoping less often.

Also you seem to be forgetting that during trueshot with higher haste you will be forced to cast aimed shot into aimed shot more often and giving up precise shot stacks. Reason is simple. With 0 haste 12s cooldown is reduced to 6. Cast time is 1.4 rapid fire casts over q second. If you need to slot in DT, explosive, etc with 2 uses of aimed shot you will: have 1.8 seconds so enough for a global to use 1 precise shot. With 20 haste cast time Is reduced by 0.48 seconds ending up at 2.32 halved at 1.16, you save 0.15 seconds on global. So needing to cast same rotation you will end up forgoing cast of precise shots. Simple that’s how globals work and also energy starvation.

19

It won’t. Corruption is gone and DR’s have been introduced specifically to avoid it. You can literally go into simcraft right now, add massive amounts of each secondary and see that it scales linearly.

They both sound…about equal. Because it completely depends on the encounter which of these is better. Therefore it’s completely irrelevant. Factoring this into a conversation a bout scaling is so far from anything that even remotely matters.

That’s not an issue. We already almost drop all of our PS stacks during trueshot anyway.

No it isn’t. That’s not how CDR works, yet again.

20

During true shot it is, please read in whole.

Also for pve maybe, but in PvP haste litteraly makes it worse at high values by changing movement patern into a worse one… Which other class faces this problem.

Also, maybe we will avoid situation with corruptions ok. However bloodlust exists, troll racial exists. While we have low haste they don’t seem negative at all. At decent haste gained from stats, plus bloodlust, steady shot 7% haste buff, trol racial, etc haste will make you energy starved even without big investment in it. Since after 9.1 changes we will most likely DT rapid fire now in pve, and it beeing on a non scaling cooldown means we are forced to use more steady shots to fill energy gap. By increasing our DPS with haste we will be needing to cast more filler at certain points in haste, current first point is about 9% which adds I believe 1 more steady shot into rotation increasing total time we spend casting filler. And we are casting 1 less unbuffed arcane shot giving up some DPS for that reason. This is if I remeber it right over 2 minutes time.
Might not seem much really it’s only less than 2 seconds you might say, but please try to calculate it at higher haste values to be surprised.