We all know that patch 3.2.2 is going to see a reduction in effectiveness of armor penetration, but how much will this affect you? Well, the best answer is to load your character into a calculator (like www.femaledwarf.com), save your DPS, then check “Enable 3.2.2 Changes” under settings, recalculate, and see how much it went down.
Here’s mine before, 8341 DPS:
And here’s mine after, 8276 DPS:
Not a huge deal because, as survival, much of my damage comes from sources that don’t particularly care about the boss’s armor. Namely, explosive shot. Marksman, however, gets a much larger nerf. A huge portion of their damage comes from auto and steady shot.
Here’s a random public marks hunter profile (with considerably better gear than me) before 3.2.2, 9940 DPS:
And here’s the same hunter with 3.2.2 changes included, 9631 DPS:
So you see, even a marks hunter only loses around 3% of their overall DPS to this nerf. The ArP nerf is from 125% to 115%, but that boils down to less of a nerf than it could have been. Notice, that the MM hunter still gets more DPS from ArP than agility. The crossover point just happens later, now.
Euripides
jurgwena
lemli
eidotrope
pherra
femaledwarf
Shadowstreak
if a hunter is at the cross-over point where arp gems exceed agi gems in dps gain, should arcane shot still be used/specced or ignored except when moving?
Hey Jurg, there is a compelling case to do that for MM hunters before they reach that point. I didn’t gem for ArP at all, and I found a slight increase when I took it out of my rotation in Ulduar 25 normal mode gear.
I’m finding the same, and (fully decked) I’m still about 200 ArPen below the soft cap, and have none of the On Use trinkets. It’s mostly a mana issue… Keeping Arcane Shot in the rotation on the default 6 minute fight puts you in Viper enough to actively drop DPS. It’s even worse if you try to model a 10 minute fight.
From what I’ve seen so far, it’s still a good idea to have ‘Arcane Shot’ on your bars because if you have to move for a certain thing such as Fire which is everywhere in the new instance, you can shoot it while moving so, you don’t lose any DPS while moving. Of course if Chimera or Aimed is off CD, use those instead of Arcane. I figured I’d add this since AS is removed from the rotation when you’re armor pen.
Absolutely- I didn’t explicitly mention it in this post, but your stand still rotation is all that changes if you take improved arcane out of your build.