Possible hidden mechanics behind Lock and Load
The Hunter's Mark's Atkallen takes a good look at one of my new favorite Hunter abilities: Lock and Load. I'm pretty late to the party on this one (BigRedKitty showed us all how awesome it was a while back), but ever since I went dual spec and started raiding Survivalist, most of my time is just spent waiting for a Lock and Load proc. And oh boy, when it hits twice in a row and I can throw off Explosive Shots for free on just a global cooldown, look out.
But Atkallen's post suggests something a little sneakier about the buff, which procs off of any trap snares or damage, or, more commonly, off of Black Arrow, another Survivalist talent. It used to proc off of Serpent Sting, from 3 to 10 percent of the time according to how many points you put into the talent, and when it was changed to the current form and lowered to 2, 4, and 6 percent, most Hunters worried that they wouldn't see it pop up as much. But here's the thing, and I can attest: it still shows up all the time.
The problem may lie in the tooltip -- for a while, it still said 3, 7 and 10% chance to proc, and that was scheduled to change in 3.1.2. It's fixed now though, and Atkallen speculates that maybe they were waiting to change the actual proc down too. But that was only the tooltip, and Atkallen is convinced that, anecdotally, LnL has something else going on. Finally, Voldenmist in the comments over there points out that LnL also had its own cooldown removed (which is why I can chain it occasionally), so that may have something to do with it as well -- maybe the procs coming closer together make it seem like more procs in general. Hunters, are you getting more LnL procs than you expect?
