WotLK Forecast: Attack Rotation and Aspects

Gweryc is growing fat and lazy these days, enjoying an extended rest and a good bit of fishing. Meanwhile I'm playing melee hunter on paper, tracking Wrath of the Lich King changes. There's some interesting stuff going on right now.

Cayl of Dentarg pointed out a couple things:

• The near-useless Aspect of the Beast is being buffed to increase the hunter's melee AP by 10%.
• The conditional for Mongoose Bite has been removed. It's now on a simple 5-second cooldown -- no need to dodge first.

The Aspect of the Beast change is astounding and completely unforeseen. As DPS today, I run with Aspect of the Viper up. No other aspect is worthwhile. This is good, because it lets me focus on collecting agility/AP gear, whether or not it has int on it. My mana pool today is really no consideration. In the future, I'll clearly want to keep Beast up instead of Viper. This means that I'll have to be a lot more careful about the size of my mana pool, and I may be forced to use mana pots instead of haste pots during long fights.

The superb Mongoose Bite change will completely alter my DPS rotation. It's nice to note that Mongoose Bite scales with AP. And both Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite, as my staple attacks, will benefit from from Savage Strikes, ensuring a reasonably steady stream of Kill Commands.

But what in the world has happened to Wing Clip? It's been consolidated to a single rank, no longer deals damage, and costs 6% of the hunter's base mana. The old Wing Clip(Rank 1), at a cost of 40 mana, would have basically been free when you consider the increased size of our mana pools in WotLK. With this change, Wing Clip is completely useless to me in a PvE DPS rotation. No more spamming it for procs. This is a horrible disappointment.

Taking all this into consideration, my DPS rotation should look something like: Immo trap, Mongoose Bite, Kill Command, Raptor Strike. Of course, I'm efficient (lazy), so I'll probably cram all the melee attacks into a /castrandom macro or something.