Oh look, set bonuses!

Haha, woops. I made my music video post, then opened up my feed reader and everyone was making posts about the new set bonuses. Here are the hunter T12 bonuses:

• Hunter 2 Pieces - Your Steady Shot and Cobra Shot have a 10% chance to trigger a Flaming Arrow, dealing 0% instant weapon damage as Fire.
• Hunter 4 Pieces - You have a 10% chance from your autoshots to make your next shot cost no focus.

2pc is as boring and passive as they usually are. Just a damage bonus. It's of course hard to say how much damage it will be worth, but I would guess somewhere in the 50-100 DPS range. Just a nice little nudge upwards in damage done with no extra effort, so hey, that's fine.

4pc will be interesting. The way to make set bonuses engaging for DPS classes is to have them alter our priorities or cycle in some way, and this will do that. The current priority systems as MM already requires cycle to cycle alteration sometimes, at least for me. There are times when I'll want to tack a third steady shot onto the SS pair between chimeras and other times when I'll want to put a third arcane shot in there instead, depending on how high or low on focus I am.

I'm quite curious as to what will end up making the best use of the procs from the bonus. On the one hand, I'm inclined to feel like it would be wasted on arcane shots, but on the other hand, chimera shot is generally on cooldown and aimed shot has such a long cast time that I'm unsure if making it free will make it something you're free to use. Especially since the need to keep the ISS buff up 100% of the time means you can't just cast the free aimed and then two arcanes and a chimera, because if you do that you're going to lose the ISS buff. The bonus may just end up being a thing where if it procs before a pair or trio of arcanes, it forces us to use a trio? I'm not sure.

I suppose the problem with it in general is that MM hunters are already so tightly constrained in our cycles. We are bound by duration of the ISS buff and further circumscribed by the chimera shot cooldown. The T11 4pc is good because the reduction in steady cast time makes the DPS cycle looser. T12 4pc is perhaps not so great because it's difficult to cram more stuff in there.

This is less of a concern for SV hunters, for whom it will pretty much translate into free arcanes. I mean it will mostly get used on explosive shots, but the excess focus that creates will get dumped into arcanes. So it's a good bonus for them. BM as well will just get free arcanes out of it.

Also: why is there mastery on EVERYTHING in the firelands? Gah! I mean it's not a terrible stat, but not as good (for any hunter spec!) as haste or crit.