Has Marks Retruned & Time For New Macros?

With the announcement of the buff to chimera shot hunters that enjoy playing marksman have something to rejoice about.  Depending on which napkin math you choose to believe marks is either a lot closer to survival and beast mastery now or slightly ahead of it.  Either way you look at it, it is in a much better place since blizzard pulled their head out of their ass and noticed that chimera was the marksman signature shot and it hits like a wet noodle.  So they increased the damage done by it by 50%.  I would still like to see something additional added to it, to make it more robust.

Bake in widows venom with chimera, or add a buff that chimera leaves on the target for 6 seconds where it increases the critical change of all auto shots by 50% for those 6 seconds.  Something small, something extra.  The big extra chimera used to have was it refreshed serpent sting but being all specs can do that now, BM and SV with cobra, it is not special any longer.  If the other two specs needed to keep reapplying serpent sting then chimera would still have its bonus that a signature shot should but as it stands now it still doesn't and hasn't since focus was introduced.  Unless you want to call the heal a bonus, but unless you are doing a fight with constant AoE that heal usually goes to waste.  It is nice for PvP and for soloing however, and not bad for raiding, but not huge either. 

All the 50% buff to chimera does it make it not hit like a wet noddle any longer.  It still needs a new signature identity because that heal just isn't enough to be considered a bonus.  Maybe if they changed it so that if you are full it would put an absorb shield on you for the over heal then that would be pretty damn sweet for a signature.  And if it stacked, avoiding damage and building that shield would become freaking huge in raiding and take a truck load of work off the healers already busy hands.  Now that would be a signature ability.  But that is a huge pipe dream.

At least they are moving in the right direction for once with MM by recognizing that there was something lackluster about what is supposed to be the big shot in the rotation.  Perhaps if they do the whole revamp next expansion like we saw with locks this expansion marks seems to be the one that will probably have the most changes.

I am thinking of changing my off spec to marksman again.  Might even go to main, if it can be competitive, would not want to go too far behind even if I enjoy playing it and basically leave numbers on the table that could have been used to help us down a boss.

If the early numbers I have seen turn out to be somewhat accurate then using marks would not be a great loss, at worst 7K, and at best, it could even take top spot on a single target fights.  Sadly there are not too many fights of that style in SoO.  At least now it is something of a "choice" whereas before the only choice it really offered is the choice of doing it wrong. 

Sometimes the expression doing it wrong is over used, like people saying if you use talent X over talent Y you are doing it wrong when the difference between the two is 800 DPS.  No, you are not doing it wrong.  Don't listen to those fools.  If adding a different button to press from an active ability or having a passive ability are the two choices and you are used to the passive, adding that extra button to press might mathematically be an 800 DPS increase but in practice, if you miss pressing it by even 0.2 of a second a few times in a fight, that 800 gain is now a loss and probably a lot more than 800 loss.

But with that said, before with marksman so far behind, using marksman was doing it wrong.  It would be like a warrior tanking in arms spec.  Could they pull it off?  Maybe with the right healers and a weak hitting boss they could tank something, they could easily tank a heroic dungeon, but over all they would be doing it wrong. 

Marks had that feeling about it all expansion, that if you played marks you were doing it wrong.  Now at least people could argue that it can be competitive on some fights and might even be tops on a few.  Even if it ends up 7K behind when you look at those top BiS numbers that 7K of 400K is pretty much nothing.  It is less and 2%. To some people that like to stoke their epeen that 2% might be huge, to others the comfort and enjoyment of playing a spec they want to play is so much more.  Playing marks is no longer "doing it wrong" it is now "this spec would do better".  The difference is one is wrong no matter what and the other is actually a discussion.  At least marks is worth talking about again.

Now on to me having to make a few new macros.

Not sure if all you hunters did this but I know I did as soon as I logged in for 5.4.  My old stop casting silencing shot macro became a stop casting counter shot macro.  Except I misspelled it at first and was like "why the hell is this not working".  After I looked I was, "oops".

Have you ever misspelled something in a macro?  If I had a nickle for each time I did that I would most likely have enough to buy a starbucks coffee, and in case you do not know, those things are really expensive.

I got two piece of raid level tier gear now, a huge difference from last tier when I did not get my second piece of raid level tier gear until 4 days before 5.4 came out.  What a difference a raid patch makes right?

With the Assurance of Consequence, flex version upgraded, decreasing rapid fire by 37% and the two piece set decreasing my rapid fire by 8 seconds for every aimed, arcane or multi shot that means I could be firing off rapid fire more than a few times each fight.  Being it does not trigger the global cooldown it can be macroed with other abilities and now I have a decision to make.

Should I just macro rapid fire into all my shots to assure I get maximum up time or should I manually fire it off at set moments where I think it can be best used?

I already have every shot macroed because when they removed our shots from auto targeting mobs I made macros that will automatically select a target on press and shoot on the second press.  It really helps, sometimes.  It does sometimes hit a flagged person by accident, but whoops, no biggie, I can use some honor kills.

Either way, it would not be an issue for me to add the line /cast Rapid Fire to every macro being I already have a macro made for every ability.  I am thinking I am going to go that route but I am not sure if that would be the correct route to go.  As I love to say, research time.

Side comment:  WTB more marco slots.  Thank you blizzard.

I can't believe I actually have 3 tier pieces so far, one from LFR so only two raid level ones, but still, having 3 of the pieces this early is completely new to me.  Hope my luck holds out until I can nab the forth one.  Rocking the two 2 piece sets seems to have helped me a lot more than I would have expected.  I did an ordos group yesterday and did 264, which is a marked increase over the 235 I did the week before without it.  And that is with some massive lag to deal with as well.  Did rapid fire being used more really have an almost 30K boost?  I know, right.

Anyone else that usually has no problems with fight graphic lag end up in slow motion during ordos?  No matter what character I am on, as soon as that fight starts it is like moving in slow motion.  Quite annoying if you ask me.  Maybe I just need to remember to actually set my graphics down when I do it next time.

For the moment I'll just think about those macros and which spec to drop if I want to play around with marksman.  I might ditch BM.  It has felt more whack a mole than the other specs since mists came out and while it was a little overwhelming at first and a little fun while learning it, it is just boring and sometimes frustrating now.  Even with the removal of readiness BM still feels like you are always trying to hit 3 buttons at the same time and I can't really dig that play style.  So I might roll with survival while testing marksman out.