Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Revised: Survival 4.0.6 Latest Hotfixes Talents and Serpent Spread

Survival Talent Overview
For Survival it looks like 3/7/31 gets me the best bang for the buck.  However, I'm thinking 2/7/32 may be better for the AoE encounters.  In both cases, I'm opting out of some free pet focus for the now very potent one with nature talent.  At 85, our Aspect of the Hawk is getting us 2000 AP or 2600 AP with a full three points in one with nature.  REVISION:  I haven't figured out the Serpent Spread question, but I'm going with a different 3/7/31.  It is a theoretical +41dps (meaning nothing) but it gives up on point in the stay-in-one-spot buff talent, which is often questionable, for an always-there buff.

Serpent Spread Now Makes Serpent Stings
While playing with the target dummy I noticed something interesting.  I do not know exactly when this happened.  I suspect it is new.  It used to be the case that when I multi-shotted, my serpent spread talent would apply a DoT very similar but not exactly the same as a Serpent Sting.   In the past, I could not "re-fresh" that DoT with a cobra shot.  But now we can.

3/7/31 or 2/7/32?
Multi-shot is generally not modeled or considered important for most fights.  AoE is kinda dumb, but we still like Survival for it's awesome multishot ability.

I don't know is if the 9 seconds of a tier two serpent spread with the improved serpent sting talent uses that 9 seconds now.  Again, this really isn't modeled anywhere that I know of.  Generally, when I am AoE'ng I don't wait 9 seconds between multi-shots.  At most, I'll do one cobra shot in-between.  That's far less than 9 seconds of DoT time.  So I don't know if I should recommend a level 1 serpent spread or a level 2 serpent spread.  I do know however that taking a third point in one with nature gets you a nice single target boost.  It would also help boost all serpent stings which use a (RAP * 0.4 + (460 * 15 sec / 3)) damage formula.

I suspect, I'll have to go back to the various forums and see if there are any claims with confirmations about the behavior of Serpent Spread DoTs.

3 comments:

  1. The cobra shot refresh of stings put up by serpent spread was fixed in 4.0.6

    ReplyDelete
  2. So the big question is: Does the 9sec DoT from serpent spread get the +30% instantaneous damage? I'm guessing yes, now that the serpent spread is actually yielding a serpent sting DoT. But it may be an effect of the cast and not the DoT application.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Improved Serpent Sting doesn't affect Serpent Stings applied through Multi-Shot. You can check this through Recount.

    Additionally, 2 points in Serpent Spread is a bit excessive. In most cases, you fire off 2 Cobra Shots to regenerate focus after a Multi-Shot, which at most will take 4 seconds. When you then fire off another Multi-Shot, you won't waste too many ticks if you only have 1 point spent on the talent.

    I realize this is quite late, but perhaps it'll be useful if you had yet to find an answer.

    ReplyDelete