Piercing Shots - Rolling dots

By Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union
 

The Cataclysm changes to the MM talent Careful Aim and the way this interacts with Piercing Shots has brought up some questions about exactly how the MM hunter bleed effect of Piercing Shots works.

Specifically if you’re just watching the debuff on the target, it looks like every new piercing shots proc overwrites the debuff with the new one — making it look like you’re actually losing part of your previous piercing shots bleed. This is not the case.

The short version is this:

Every Piercing Shots proc from Aimed Shot, Chimera Shot, or Steady Shot crits gives you a bleed effect that does 30% of that crit damage. You get this effect for every single crit from those shots. It does not overwrite the existing buff. It does not refresh the existing buff — so you aren’t actually able to get more than the 30%, or less. You just get the full 30% extra bleed damage from every aimed, chimera, or steady crit, just like the tooltip says.

When you see the piercing shots debuff refresh, here’s what the game is actually doing:

The game looks at how much damage is left to be done on the existing piercing shots, then adds that to the total damage of the new piercing shots — it then takes that new total and divides it by 8 seconds, doing that damage each second.

Piercing Shots Example

So if your steady shot crits for 10,000 damage (for the sake of round numbers) it then gets a piercing shots proc that will do 3,000 damage over 8 seconds — or 375 damage per second for 8 seconds.

Now lets say three second later you get another steady shot crit for 10,000 damage, which will also get a piercing shots proc for 3,000 damage over 8 seconds. That first proc has ticked for 3 seconds at 375 per second, and has done 1,125 damage — but has 1,875 damage left to do over the next 5 seconds. We add that 1,875 to the 3,000 damage of our new proc, to get 4,875 damage that will be done over the next 8 seconds — so piercing shots now has a full 8-second duration, but will do 609 damage per second.

This is why if you look at combat logs, the average tick of the piercing shots bleed is so much higher than it should be based on your average crits.

The 30% Bleed Buff

It’s worth noting that Piercing Shots is a bleed effect, and its damage is increased by the 30% bleed debuff, which can be provided by the hunter pets hyena, boar, and rhino (exotic). The buff is also provided by arms warriors, subtlety rogues, and feral druids.