We’ve received conflicting reports from the PTR on Steady and Cobra Shot cast times. Frostheim claims that our casted shots are “not changing at all” in the present PTR build; however, a thread over at the Arena Junkies forums asserts that cast times have been reduced by .5 seconds. Who is right? Well, according to my tests, the AJ thread is right. See my numbers on Steadies, Cobras and Aimed Shots after the cut.
For this testing I got rid of all sources of Haste (talents, gear, etc.), stripping down to my guild tabard and my gun (which has no Haste on it). I did this on both the PTR and on my live server. This left me with the base cast times for Steadies and Cobras when shooting at target dummies. I imported Quartz over to the PTR so that I could get initial duration reads on the casts. Quartz does not set its displayed cast times by tooltips; rather, its cast times reflect the actual duration of whatever the present cast is. It should therefore be a reasonable initial test of the different claims.
The Quartz cast bar showed a 2 second cast time on Live and a 1.5 second cast time on the PTR. This initial test suggests, then, that the cast times are shorter on the PTR. However, I wanted a backup test to confirm the results.
The next test involved an out-of-game stopwatch and queued series of casts of 12 casts each. If there really were a difference between the PTR and Live, then the PTR cast series should be about six second shorter than the series run on Live. That is, it should take roughly 18 seconds to cast 12 Steadies/Cobras on the PTR as opposed to 24 seconds on Live. I found this to be the case: I got 18-19 second series on the PTR and 25-25 second series on Live.
I performed similar tests with Aimed Shot. I could not run series (obviously), so I just checked Quartz and fired Aimed Shots in pairs. The Quartz cast bars showed 2.9 (Live) verus 2.4 (PTR) second cast times, and the fired pairs showed a difference of six versus five seconds. These findings support a conclusion that hardcast Aimed Shots are half a second shorter in duration on the PTR.
Overall, my tests suggest that the base cast times on Live and the PTR are different: the PTR casts are .5 seconds shorter for Steady, Cobra and Aimed Shots. As always, keep in mind that things on the PTR are suject to change.
I’ve been doing a bunch of testing on this, and the cast times have definitely been reduced.
With ISS, 3/3 Pathing, the 10% haste buff, and stacking enough haste rating to get Matrix Restabilizer to proc haste rating, I can get Aimed Shot down to a 1.6s cast. Add in either Bloodlust or Rapid Fire, and Aimed gets close to the gcd.
If this change goes live, along with the t13 2pc bonus doubling the focus gained from Steady Shot, I would expect a big jump in dps using Aimed Shot as the primary focus dump.
Except, the four piece bonus encourages dumping with Arcane Shot.
Just back from ptr and tbh you dont really have to test anything, its pretty obvious the cast time is different, if this goes live id be very surprised tbh.
I agree that it’s pretty obvious when you see it, but I’m trying to convince people who may not be on the PTR.
Anywho doubt you.. a swift backhand will resolve that ;)
I too would be surprised if this went live, as it would seem to me that the tier gear would be leaning towards awarding a buff to both Beast Mastery and Survival, however this change alone is a huge buff to the Marksman spec as well.
There was probably a task to “fix” the cast times. Someone reduced the cast times to match the live tooltip and then someone fixed the ptr tooltip to match the live duration.
The tooltip change was probably the only change that was supposed to happen and not the actual cast time. It’s probably a mistake and will get fixed shortly.
If PTR casts were matched to the Live tooltip, then they’d be at two seconds, not 1.5. I don’t see how your explanation gets things that low. To me, the lineup of tooltips and cast times suggests that there’s intent there.
There are two sets of tooltips; the current server side tootips (which the data miners such as MMO Champ & Wowhead) show the cast time of steady shot as 1.5 seconds (see Steady Shot on Wowhead). MMO Champ’s data mining showed a change INCREASING the cast time of all these shots by 0.5 seconds, which in reality was bringing them in line with the actual live gameplay.
When you look at these server side tooltips what Jaeger says makes sense.
Frost’s post was to quell the crying from the community about being nerfed. He did not have access to the PTR at the time, and made the reasonable conclusion that the server side tooltips were being updated to reflect the current live gameplay. I doubt that when the article went up anyone was actually on the PTR, it went up fast to preven masses of QQ. It’s a bit rough pulling in that post when it was not written about a reduction in cast time (taken out of context for drama perhaps?).
My intent was only to resolve conflicting messages about the PTR. I just noticed that Frostheim’s post and the AJ thread were both out quickly after the release and saying contradictory things to the hunter community in a time of uncertainty.
I guess if this post were about tooltips I’d be more inclined to agree with you, but it isn’t. It’s about actual shots as they exist on the PTR. What Frostheim said about our shots “not changing at all” is flatly incorrect. Either he wasn’t on the PTR and had no evidence for saying what he did or he was on the PTR and was simply wrong. Either way, I don’t see how it’s improper for me to say that his very expansive claim is incorrect.
If the bast cast time of steady and cobra were dropped by half a second, this would be a retardly good buff to a class that doesn’t need it (Well, MM anyways). What does 2000 + haste from gear do to a 1.5 second cast time fully raid buffed? You’d be casting an extra cobra shot every explosive cycle/SS every CS cycle and would be so focus positive you’d double your arcane output. No way I see this happening.