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A Murder of Crows

A Murder of Crows

30 Focus	40 yd range

Instant cast	1 min cooldown

Requires Hunter
Requires level 75

Summons a flock of crows to attack your target over the next 15 sec. If the target dies while under attack, A Murder of Crows' cooldown is reset.

Buff

Spell Details

Duration

15 seconds

School

Physical

Mechanic

n/a

Dispel type

n/a

GCD category

Normal

Cost

30 Focus

Range

40 yards (Long)

Cast time

Instant

Cooldown

1 minute

GCD

1 second

Effect

Apply Aura: Periodic Dummy
Value: 60 every 1 second

Flags

Guides

Hunter DPS Guide
(Beast Mastery,
Marksmanship, Survival)

Raid and Class
cooldown list.

Ranged DPS
Overview -
Tips and Specs

Comments

Comment by SoooWhoCares

Looks cool but at the moment the other 2 talents are better.
If this doesn't scale too well it'll stay that way.

How this works:
Crows constantly attack the target. 1 wave of crows attacks per second resulting in 30 crow attacks total. The effect can't be dispelled (but I bet some abilites will remove the effect). At the moment each attack wave does around the same damage as an auto attack of my pet and double damage on crits as usual.

Because it works like a dot with 1s ticks it'll be useful for PVE (especially for 20% HP targets) but only against raid bosses which may life long enough for any benefit of this.

Limited use.

Comment by anodynex

are murder of crows and snake trap affected by BM mastery?

Comment by stickshift

Why exactly is a group of crows called "A Murder of Crows"?

Sorry, even The Word Detective says,

"As for why we call a group of crows a “murder,” the inspiration for the term is a mystery, lost since the 15th century. As the Oxford English Dictionary suggests, “murder” may “perhaps to the crow’s traditional association with violent death, or … to its harsh and raucous cry.” Then again, since crows have recently been demonstrated to be capable of advanced reasoning and even tool-making, maybe they actually did plot a few murders back in the 15th century."

EDIT: Just a fun addition to add - I found this PBS documentary "A Murder of Crows" online and if you can suffer the pre-advert it's good viewing about these "feathered apes".

Comment by JoyCrux

"Brother, Brother wait! When I am alone... When I have no one to scare... I get very frightened myself. The crows could..."
~Professor Screweyes, We're Back: A Dinosaur's Story

Comment by eli2112

Should be called "A feast of crows" for extra awesome.

Comment by Irozal

Could this name be reference from The Simpsons episode : Weekend at Burnsies ?

- Marge : Hmm... Homer, I'm very uncomfortable about having a gang of crows in our bedroom.

- Homer : It's a murder, honey. A group of crows is called a murder.

Comment by torquezzz

The Murder of Crows is an awesome addition to go along with Dire Beast and your pet.

Use Readiness and you can have a second Dire Beast in at the same time, though the Murder Of Crows just re-starts if you use readiness to hit it a second time.

Comment by Sas148

I still am wondering what the damage output is. Does anyone know?

I have been using it the last two weeks, and I find it very limited. Phenomenal for long boss fights that are tank and spank. All other scenarios this spell is overkill and you do not receive the benefit. The spell should not cost 60 focus, it should be free or a shorter cooldown. I have it though and will keep it because I enjoy soloing so for the long boss fights this is great. At the moment I use it at the beginning of the boss fight and I half the time I can get it off a second time at the end unless the groups dps is "gone is 60 seconds".

Comment by kadjaft

Mangekyo Sharingan, Itachi Uchiha's Tsukiyomi...

Comment by zharshoul

wait a second... what if you run with a team of 5 crows/ravens.. and use stampede and this move on the target....

damn thats a lot of corvids

god i need to go do this

tried... the effect isnt as amazing as you should think , they tend to all stack on each other and since they are the same model, a lot of times there appears to be only 1-2 of them

was hoping for a full equidistant encirclement

Comment by Thorngral

Procs Marksmans Mastery, Which i find odd

Comment by BMHunterMain

Ghostcrawler has confirmed that A Murder of Crows is getting a damage buff in 5.4, which would seem to indicate that (aside from any possible situational benefits), this talent was either lacking damage-wise, or possibly just that not enough top-tier PvPers were taking this talent over the others... something I find hard to believe. At least on my realm, A Murder of Crows has seemed to be an extremely popular choice ever since it was first introduced.

Then again, this might be an effort to get the talent to balance out with the increased damage that BM-specced Hunters get with the new-and-improved Blink Strikes, which can be very powerful considering that it is Passive & scales with every beneficial attribute including Mastery in-spec. I am interested in seeing exactly how much this is being buffed, because right now I can't seem to find even situational uses for this... it would take a lot to make this preferable to the flat 150% pet damage (only to basic attacks) in most of the combat I engage in.

A Murder of Crows would have to get a huge damage buff for me to take it over Blink Strikes as things are now... I usually roll with a Spirit Beast (+3000 to Mastery increasing all pet damage & pet threat generation) specced for Ferocity, and I use a simple macro that attempts to use Spirit Mend whenever I fire off an Arcane Shot, which also increases pet threat generation, provided that there is damage for it to heal. This helps keep aggro on my pet instead of me even without my pet specced to Tenacity, which is nice... no need to re-spec to Tenacity unless my pet needs the added survivability, the damage (and healing) it does alone are enough for it to maintain aggro most of the time.

I don't PvP much, but with the most well-accepted PvP stat priority tables (as shown at noxxic & other resources) putting more emphasis on Mastery than they do in their PvE stat priorities, the amount of pet damage done by BM Hunter PvPers seems like it would be so high that there wouldn't be many situations where this could really compete with a flat 50% increase in pet damage for all basic attacks... but we'll see exactly what 5.4 holds soon enough.

Comment by JodiLane

Does anyone know why this attack doesn't say how much damage it does? All of my other attacks do, except for this one. If anyone knows for sure, I'd love to know because until then I'm just going to use Lynx Rush! Thanks! ;o)

Comment by Spifty

This spell has more uses than any other talent in the tier. If you are a PvPer this is a must. This is the only DoT effect that interrupts the victim constantly even when the casting hunter is dead. The victim cannot capture a flag, cannot mount up, cannot drink mana, etc. A hunter can buy so much crucial time defending a flag with this in their toolkit. The spell lasts quite a while and can only be removed with immunities.

In RBG play for example, especially if there is a cliff involved like Lumber Mill or any flag in EoTS, a hunter adding this to knockback trap, knockback shot, LoSing objects and pet attack, multiple CCs and not to mention corpse running in non RBG play, well let's just say that flag isn't getting capped. You can buy precious minutes for your team to show up.

One of my favorites is 1v2 and one of the opponents will just take themselves out of play trying to cap, trying to cap, trying to cap while the crows are on them and you whittle down their teammate 1v1 and then proceed to them in an orderly fashion.

Comment by Sarthorius

More usefull than the other two: you can control who will be damaged (mostly bosses and high HP adds) during 30 seconds at the start of fights, a good dps booster; dispellable only by imunities; you want AoE dps boost, you can still 'Beast Cleave' the adds around the Boss for example while he himself will be taking a ton of damag from the crows. More control because on fights like the SoO Dark Shamans, in mid fight when they spawn the slimes, you can pop the crows on one of them, and go get the slimes down, and if you are a good hunter like me (knowinig how to keep your pet alive, and MD agro properly), your pet will survive long enough to kill them, and still the crows will be damaging the boss. Yeah the tooltip says its cooldown is lowered by half if target is below 20%, but which hunter would use such awesome dps booster only on that, is asking to kill the group. Most raid fights at least, last long enough for you tu use it a lot.

Comment by Karazanic

I made a macro to use A Murder of Crows and Lynx Rush without having to change buttons on bars - it changes icon and tooltip depending on talent you're using.

#showtooltip
/cast A Murder of Crows
/cast Lynx Rush
/script local s1,s2,gsi=131894,120697,GetSpellInfo SetMacroSpell(GetRunningMacro(),gsi(gsi(s1))or gsi(gsi(s2)))

Comment by Rhacius

Does this do more damage for BM?

A Murder of Crows

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