I had a lot of fun testing the Marksmanship tier bonuses. Much like BM's 2-piece set bonus, MM's set bonuses completely change your rotation.
To be clear, that's a total of 35 focus. That means when TotH is proc'ed and Aimed Shot crits, you'll be building focus, not dumping it. During Careful Aim, without the 2-piece when TotH is up, you're better off just spamming Aimed Shots (unless you have enough focus to make it all the way to the end of Careful Aim without running out), because the amount of damage you can do hitting Chimeara Shot and 2 Steady Shots (to get back your focus) is less than the amount of damage you'd do in the same amount of time, just spamming Aimed Shots for 10 focus each. However, in the same rotational situation, with the 2-piece, you'll now be building focus by spamming Aimed Shots. So you'll need to hit Chim Shot on CD, just to keep from focus capping.
Another consequence of the 2-piece is, aside from burst AoE situations, there's really going to be no place in your rotation to use barrage. The ultra high Focus cost is a complete waste during Rapid Fire, despite how much Barrage benefits from the Haste buff, because it's damage per focus just doesn't compare to Aimed Shots with guaranteed crits. Barrage will, however, still be very helpful in helping MM be viable in AoE situation, though it's really not looking like it will be viable for heavy AoE situations anyhow.
Speaking of AoE, I am a bit disappointed to see that while BM's 2-piece set bonus is an incredible buff to BM AoE, MM's isn't going to do anything to help with AoE situations. The 4-piece, however, will at least have some effect on AoE:
This isn't going to be a game changer for MM, but it does mean that we'll be seeing a little bit more damage out of our Multishots and Barrage. In Heavy AoE situatioins, with TotH and Bombardment, we should be able to get some considerable Multishot spam, and start to get a bit more damage out of it. This has the downside of still being very RNG intensive, and you will lack a lot of control, since you won't be able to make the damage go to a specific target, but will instead get randomly more damage to random targets.
I haven't done a lot of testing with AoE coefficients yet, so I don't have an exact number of targets where Multishot becomes more valuable than Aimed Shot. With the 4-piece, during Rapid Fire, that number will go up. That is to say, you'll need your Multishot to hit more targets to make it worth more DPS than the guaranteed Aimed Shot crits, as they will (at a certain crit rating) always be benefiting from the 4-piece set bonus.
In single-target situations, the MM 4-piece set bonus is much more clear cut, of course, and it really doesn't have any effect on our rotation. There may be a slight addendum that it will be even more important to make sure you can spam Aimed Shots the entire way through Rapid Fire (you do not want to be using Steady Shots), but you should be doing that anyway, so it's hardly a change, just more important to do it right.
Another single-target effect of the 4-piece is it will, for the most part, make Lone Wolf your talent of choice in the lvl 100 tier. When those buffs start multiplying together, you'll being seeing unreasonably large crits. From my last logs, I had Aimed shots crit as high as 86,870, and a Chim Shot crit at 144,329 (which, at least for the Chim Shot crit, was about 50k higher than I'd seen before, with similar gear but without the set bonuses). Given that your 2-piece will cause Aimed Shots to be returning a lot of focus anyway, though it may be a bit too early to rule it out completely, I don't see much reason to use Focusing Shot.
Closing Remarks:
Overall, the MM tier bonuses were a lot of fun. There's something really satisfying about seeing those ridiculous crits. Especially if the devs have decided that MM will be a slow, casting type spec. It is a little strange, that I was really upset about the prospect of a two button rotation. But now that those two buttons are Aimed Shot and Chim Shot (at least, during the first 20% of the boss's health) with their monster crits, I'm surprisingly ok with it.
It is amazing how large numbers make long and boring rotations seem a little more exciting. Hey, that is the way of the caster since the beginning of time and MMs are just casters now.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the write up.