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Comment by 102520

An interesting hybrid ability, the steady shot component of this talent seems to be designed for mostly raiding where as the aimed shot component is obviously designed for bg and arena. Since armor penetration is an exponential dps increase, it's in your best interest to stack armor pen as much as possible if you choose this talent.

Also shares the tooltip icon for the long gone beta ability "disarm shot" so there is most likely no chance that disarm shot will ever return to beta and/or make it to live.

Comment by yjesus

It's nice that it has a % modifier. The more armor your target has, the more armor u ignore. Pretty nice.

Comment by 176639

Admittedly, that is a slightly strange icon for an ignore armor ability. (This statement was written earlier in Beta when the icon was actually a sword being shot, recycled from the once-considered Disarm Shot that never saw Live)

Redesigned in 3.1: Rather than giving armor penetration, it instead gives three of the more important shots the ability to bleed the target for 30% of the damage over 8 seconds. This would seem to be a pretty solid damage increase overall, although it is not as good as Deep Wounds since the bleed takes longer, does a smaller % as damage, and only procs off of specific attacks. I approve.

Comment by 27804

As I'm playing around with specs a lot to see what im gonna be lvl-ing / instancing with in wotlk... this talent see totally not worth the 3 points... and the comment made about scaling (percentage vs rating) tho true.. still makes it not worth it... yes 6% of 100.000 would be a whopping 6000, but then you'd still have to get past the other 94000.

This talent would be more interesting (and overpowered) if it would be:
Your Steady Shot and Aimed Shot have a 6% chance to ignore your target's armor.

but thats just wishfull thinking ;)

Comment by semlar

It doesn't matter how much armor your target has (above zero), the same % reduction will reduce their time alive by the same amount (percentage-wise).

Comment by 169131

I did a lot of battlegrounds in BC days. Ten thousand kills as a 0/41/20 Silent shooting marksman, ten thousand kills as a 0/21/40 Wyvern slapping survivalist. Give or take.

There is something I learned from those two trees: Marksman was great offensive against casters but poor defensive against melee, and Survival was great defensive against melee but not as strong towards casters.

I know things are changing in the Frozen Crusade. Please don't remind me about Dragonhawk or Freezing arrow.

Let me just say this. Without any stringent testing or data analysis, it is my contention that this talent is to give Marksman hunters some extra oomph against warriors, paladins and bears. Don't overlook it if your fights against these classes seem tipped in their favor.

Comment by 41366

Heres some PvE calculations for this talent:
rank 3 = 6% armor reduction

According to Elitist Jerks, bosses in wotlk have 13083 armor (43.9% reduction), which is roughly 7898 with raid debuffs ( 32.1 % reduction ).

I'm guessing that the armor ignore is post-debuffs, so 7898 * 0.94 = 7424, or a reduction of 473 armor.
According to wowwiki, armor reduction is computed as follows:
%Reduction = (Armor / ( + Armor - 22167.5)) * 100

30.8% = (7424 / ((467.5 * 83) + 7424 - 22167.5)) * 100

which means that this talent increases the damage done by Steady Shot and Aimed Shot by about 1.8% ( 0.6% per point) against a debuffed boss mob.

That is assuming max debuffs, heres a quick computation against a boss with no reduction. It reduces the bosses armor down to 12 255, which equates to about a 1.5% increased damage.

This shows that armor pen effects still perform better the more points you have invested into it. It will give you a minimum of 1.5% increased damage with your Steady Shot and Aimed Shot abilities. The more armor penetration you have the more powerful this talent is, but I wouldn't consider investing 3 points for a lousy 1.5% - 1.8% increase in raw damage for two abilities.

Comment by 151381

http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/02/05/patch-3-1-class-changes-for-mages-hunters-death-knights-and-p/

At this time, it appears that in 3.1, Piercing Shots will (at 3 points) make Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20/30% of damage dealt for 8 sec.

That is affected by Mangle too!
Not only is this awesome, but it might be a bit too awesome to go live. I'll update this post as information comes in.

Comment by 206160

if only to prevent rogue from steal thing, then even 1 point can do the job.
it will get refreshed anyway...

Comment by 307852

It'll proc only on crits. The big question is if it'll overwrite greater bleeds or not.
I guess it should be just like the warriors' deep wounds abilities.

That would be a bit less DPS than the aimed or chimera bleed, but it would do about the same damage constantly.
The best -of course- was the current form, with the boost of not overwriting bigger debuffs.

Though, a nice chimera crit is about 7 k nature damage which means 2100 bleed damage over 8 seconds ( 525 every 2 seconds or 1050 every 4 seconds) which is -though a decent buff to it's previous form- we'll not rely on this ability as much as I expected. To add, 7k chimeras (I guess, sting bonus doesn't count, then there would be over 10k chimera shots) are rare, you have to be very well-geared and buffed to shoot them.

Putting only 1 point on this talent gives us a nice pvp ultity against stealthers/mages (with invisibility), which means we can change our cat to something else - like a nether ray with its silence ability.

Comment by 302039

basically the only rogues that can get away are Dwarve rogues with stone form....but Dwarve rogues dont exist XD

Comment by 160934

Silly gooses,

this is also a giant nerf to any hunter CC effect.

Comment by zapiks44

From my tests on the PTR, it appears the way this ability works is, if you get more than one piercing shot effect within 8 sec, then the bleed ticks (which tic every 1 sec) will be temporarily increased. However, 8 sec after the first crit which started the piercing shot effect, the value of the tick will decrease, essentially taking it off the "stack", so to speak.

For example, if you get a chimera shot crit for 7k, then 2 sec later a steady shot crit for 4k, your piercing shot ticks will look like this (assuming no other crits, of course):

:01: 262
:02: 262
:03: 412
:04: 412
:05: 412
:06: 412
:07: 412
:08: 412
:09: 150
:10: 150

Comment by kaze950

Is this talent bugged? I attacked a target dummy for 3 minutes, however according to recount my piericing shots did only 229 damage. Even one crit of steady shot for 2400 should've done 720 damage, and I crit far more times. Is this a problem with recount or the talent or is my math wrong?

*Ah, I understand now. The combat log does not report "overkill damage" for piercing shots. And since everyone's fighting the training dummy, it has 1 HP. I guess this means, until they fix this (or was this intended?), you can't do a fully accurate DPS measure, since a chunk of your damage will be missing.

Comment by 326508

For leveling pourposes this talent is bad. From lvl 71 to 73 overall it had done 1.6% dmg. From 73 to 75 1.4%. So over 4 lvls of questing it had dealt about 1.5% of my dps. Worth the 3 pts? Up to u.

Comment by 376749

All in all for PvP Scatter Shot/Freezing traps this is a horrible ability to have just for tracking rogues.
I see CoS I pop serpent sting regardless. As it is not considered a "spell" such as arcane shot.

/stopcasting
/cast serpent sting

For Groups/raid boss fights, with Mangle and Trauma, as well all the other buffs, this talent is Viable.
Here's the run down theorycraft pseudo numbers. Bold numbers are Bleed Effect per second.

PS (Chimera Shot): 5000 * .30 = {1500)}/ 8 = 187.5 * 1.30 (Mangle) = 243
PS (Aimed Shot): 3000 * .30 = {900}/8 = 112 * 1.30 (Mangle) = 145
Barrage (Aimed Shot): 3000 * 1.15 = 3450 (PS: * .30 = {1035}/8 = 129) * 1.30 (Mangle) = 167

So for the most part until they nerf the ability, I'd recommend it for raiding and non-practical groups, as it's another form of sustained DPS, in case you need to run around/are CCed, you're still doing damage with Serpent Sting and Piercing Shots, similar to a Surv Hunter's SS and Black Arrow. Without the 15 second blackout while waiting on CD.

As well the lower damage from steady shot STACKS with the higher.
So if you crit Aimed, then Crit Chimera, and Crit Steady, all three stack, but are on their own respective timers. As zapiks44 noted.

Comment by 317120

When you get this talent at level 40, (Probably 41, because you may want to invest into trueshot aura) be warned that only AIMED, STEADY and CHIMERA shots can trigger this.

So, if you don't have aimed shot, this wouldn't be your cup of tea until level 50, where you get steady shot, a much more commonly used shot.

Aimed shot also shares a cooldown with Multi-Shot.

Just a note.

Comment by 104412

This talent double dips on fights such as twins, so the bleed effect receives the damage bonus as well as the shot itself.

Links

Piercing Shots

Piercing Shots

Talent

Your critical Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 30% of the damage dealt over 8 sec.

Spell Details

Duration

n/a

School

Physical

Mechanic

n/a

Dispel type

n/a

GCD category

n/a

Cost

None

Range

0 yards (Self)

Cast time

Instant

Cooldown

n/a

GCD

0 seconds

Aura proc chance

100%

Effect

Apply Aura: Proc Trigger Spell (13)
Value: 30
PVP Multiplier: 1
Affected Spells:

Steady Shot	Steady Shot	Steady Shot
Steady Shot	Aimed Shot	Aimed Shot
Aimed Shot	Aimed Shot	Aimed Shot
Aimed Shot	Aimed Shot	Aimed Shot
Aimed Shot

Flags

Is Ability
Passive spell
Aura is hidden
Cast time is hidden

Piercing Shots

Buff

Spell Details

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