This page is where we will keep and ongoing confirmation of the status of changes withing the game. As changes are confirmed week to week we will update this page.
Undocumented Changes based on MMO-Champion’s Website will be provided during the PTR Weekly Round-up each Friday.
Hunters General
- Ammunition: All types of gun and bow ammunition now stack to 1000.
- All quivers and ammo pouches no longer provide haste. 15% ranged haste is now built in to Hunter Autoshot. - CONFIRMED
- Aspect of the Pack is now raid wide, and radius increased from 30 yards to 40 yards.
- Call Stabled Pet: This new ability lets the hunter remotely access the stable. 30 min cooldown. - CONFIRMED
- Cunning, Ferocity and Tenacity pets now all have +5% damage, +5% armor and +5% health bonuses. This should make more pet families feel viable, while additional talents have been added to distinguish a pet’s abilities based on its specializations.
- Disengage: Cooldown increased by 5 sec.
- Frost Trap: If the target who triggers Frost Trap is immune to its effect, the Frost Trap area effect will no longer be triggered.
- Pets now inherit more spell hit from the hunter. Pets with magic attacks should not require a player to stack additional hit compared to pets with physical attacks. - CONFIRMED
- Viper Sting re-designed: Stings the target, draining 4% of mana over 8 sec (up to a maximum of 8% of the caster’s maximum mana), and energizing the Hunter equal to 300% of the amount drained. Only one Sting per Hunter can be active on any one target.
Hunter Talents
Beast Mastery
- Animal Handler: No longer reduces the cooldown of Master’s Call, instead increases the duration of the Master’s Call effect by 3/6 sec. - Confirmed
- Improved Aspect of the Hawk now has a new spell effect.
- Improved Wing Clip: This talent has been removed. - Confirmed
Marksmanship
- Chimera Shot: Mana cost reduced from 16% to 12%.
- Piercing Shots re-designed: Your critical Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20/30% of the damage dealt over 8 sec. The damage done by this talent no longer receives modifications from effects that increase or decrease damage done by a percentage.
- Ranged Weapon Specialization: Points reduced from 5 to 3, 1/3/5%.
- Rapid Recuperation re-designed: You gain 2/4% of your mana every 3 sec while under the effect of Rapid Fire, and you gain 1/2% of your mana every 2 sec for 6 sec when you gain Rapid Killing.
- Wild Quiver: Chance increased to 4/8/12%, up from 4/7/10%. Damage increased from 50% of an auto shot, to 80%.
Survival
- Explosive Shot: Base damage lowered by 10%. Attack power scaling reduced by 12.5%. The periodic damage from this ability no longer triggers Judgement of Wisdom and Judgement of Light.
- Hunting Party: This talent has been reduced to 3-points, and now increases your total Agility by an additional 1/2/3%.
- Lock and Load re-designed: You now have a 33/66/100% chance when you trap a target with Freezing Trap,Freezing Arrow or Frost Trap and a 2/4/6% chance when you deal periodic damage with your Immolation Trap or Black Arrow to cause your next 2 Arcane Shot or Explosive Shot spells to trigger no cooldown, cost no mana and consume no ammo. This now has a new spell effect and sound.
- New Talent: Black Arrow: Fires a Black Arrow at the target, increasing all damage done by you to the target by 6% and doing periodic shadow damage for 15 sec. 30 sec. cooldown. - CONFIRMED
- T.N.T. re-designed: Increases the damage done by your Explosive Shot, Explosive
- Trap and Immolation Trap by 2/4/6%.
- Trap Mastery: This talent has been moved to tier-2, up from tier-9.
- Trap Mastery, Resourcefulness and T.N.T. now all affect Black Arrow.
- Wyvern Sting duration increased from 12 sec to 30 sec. PvP duration reduced from 10 sec to 6 sec.
Pets
- Bullheaded now adds 20% damage reduction for 12 sec along with its current CC-removal effect.
- Cornered: The crit reduction when this ability is active has been increased.
- Feeding Frenzy increased to 8/16% damage up from 6/12%.
- Furious Howl (wolf special ability) now stacks with Battle Shout and Blessing of Might, however, it only affects the wolf and hunter. Its effect and cooldown have been doubled so that it provides the same benefit but isn’t up 100% of the time. – CONFIRMED
- Gorillas now have a new family ability, Pummel, which works like the warrior ability and has a single rank.- CONFIRMED
- Grace of the Mantis and Roar of Sacrifice are now also available to Cunning pets.
- Great Resistance increased to 5/10/15% magic damage reduction, up from 3/6/9%.
- Roar of Recovery cooldown decreased to 3 min, down from 6 min.
- Roar of Sacrifice can be used on the hunter only.
- New Talent: Shark Attack: This new two-rank talent is available to Ferocity pets. It increases pet damage.
- New Talent: Silverback: This new two-rank talent is available to Tenacity pets. It heals the pet when Growl is used.
- Stampede (rhino) only affects 1 target, but adds a 25% bleed damage debuff (that does not stack with Mangle etc.) in addition to its knockback.
- Thunderstomp is no longer a gorilla-specific family ability and is now available to all Tenacity pets. It has been reduced to one rank.
- Turtles and Crabs now dwell in waters of and off Eversong and the Ghostlands, giving Blood Elf hunters access to local Tenacity pets.
- New Talent: Wild Hunt: This new two-rank talent is available to all 3 pet trees. Increases the contribution your pets get from your Stamina by 20/40% and attack power by 10/20%. - CONFIRMED
Hunter Glyphs
- Glyph of the Monkey: Removed - CONFIRMED
- Glyph of Chimera Shot: Reduces the cooldown of Chimera Shot by 1 sec.
- Glyph of Explosive Shot: Increases the critical strike chance of Explosive Shot by 4%.
- Glyph of Explosive Trap: The periodic damage from your Explosive Trap can now be critical strikes.
- Glyph of Kill Shot: Reduces the cooldown of Kill Shot by 6 sec.
- Glyph of Raptor Strike: For 3 sec. after using Raptor Strike, you take 20% less damage.
- Glyph of Scatter Shot: Increases the range of Scatter Shot by 3 yards.
Hunter Bug Fixes
- Savage Rend (raptor special ability): Fixed a tooltip error to correctly note this ability boosts damage rather than attack power.
McGyver is looking for the Trueaim Long rifle. It’s the next gun upgrade after the 4000. It drops in 5 man Heroic ToC. It’s in the Black Knight’s loot table. Excellent gun, I used it for a long time until I got the crossbow out of PoS.
If you are pursuing a soft ArP build the gun is better than the crossbow until you get more ArP on other items to get you to the soft cap(Marksmanship). I do think he said he was survival though.
cool idea….maybe a wall in the Stonefire where we can mount our prizes
I just posted the calculations for the total BM hunter dps gain from the changes using top BM raid parses for a baseline. The total was a bit less than 1% net dps gain. You can see the numbers here: http://www.warcrafthuntersunion.com/2010/02/bm-changes-math/
wheee!!!
Had to go find this, since I heard parts of Dae’s side … I’m the night elf priest that disarmed a pally partway through.
Frostheim, your math is elitist and will not be tolerated!
True believers will embrace the 11% and never be swayed!
OMG WTH is that “Scottish” accent…I am offended!!
/nightelf bounce
Your mistake in the calculation is assuming that ammo is “damage”, not “DPS”.
Every entry of “91.5″ in your calculations should be “(91.5 * 2.80)”.
Gem your gear slacker!
I would do a 10 man Raid PUG if it is set up like LFD. That would be cool and I would then get into raiding. The hardest thing would be making sure lockouts always match up.
Addons I use enhance my playing. I can’t say that I could not play without them. I use DBM, but honestly like the Mike Tyson eye twitch, there are signals in game when something is going to happen. However, with all of the magic that gets thrown around making a players screen look like the 4th of July, DBM can come in handy.
An example that I know of is HoR. The rifleman uses a frost trap that at times will cover the mages fire AOE so that a player will not notice it until maybe it’s to late. When that fire is under the frost trap you can’t see it. That’s a slight design flaw, maybe a bug even.
If 10 man Raids become full fledged LFD PUGs everyone will not have vent. Addons such as DBM will save some frustration in that regards.
PUGs don’t really communicate much. When LFD first started people talked a lot. Nowadays, people just go. Hi, thanks for the great run, goodbye.
Viper Notify is a must have for me. Sometimes I forget with the switching I have to do in and out of it, and the tank’s pace. I played without DBM from the time I started in late TBC until about Jan. of this year. I wanted an edge when facing fresh bosses. DBM was the edge needed.
Like Daewin, I play off of sounds also. It actually made switching from a gun to a crossbow hard. I had to readjust again.
If you want a small dinosaur get a raptor Brig.
Yeah, but see these are the things I’m talking about. Maybe think of it this way.
When WoW started, the games UI was one of the best, if not the best, out there. Everyone was talking about how easy it was compared to many others.
Now though, it seems they’re getting lazy and letting the add-on devs take the lead in showing improvement.
As someone in IT, I understand why. It’s more cost effective and software companies have always done this.
But look at the specs now and see how much you “need.”
Think of Lock-n-Load or a thousand other Procs that are easily missed in the game w/o using an add-on b/c of the buff only appearing in the top-right corner or somewhere out of site?
Or the cast/cooldowns only being a simple sweep of the icon and not as noticeable? These small things are what makes people switch to special addons like Power Auras or Quarts. All these just because we “need” to see the info and can’t with the default UI.
So is it REALLY a need? Nah. We can play without them. But how many actually do?
Also, please understand I’m not bashing those that do. I’m actually, more upset at Blizzard for not improving the games UI or spell effects so we don’t “have” to.
I don’t think you’re bashing those that use addons. Heck I changed my whole UI by going with SpartanUI instead of the default (used default for almost 2yrs).
I don’t have other MMO experience to compare WoW’s UI to something. I can only compare WoW to WoW. I was a console only player prior.
I will agree to some degree Blizz has dropped the ball on continuously making the UI better. I say to some degree because at this point it seems they are being very careful as to what they integrate. A type of careful respect for the community of free developers.
Playing w/o SpartanUI at this point would be a pain to me. I did go back to the default UI right after 3.3.2 dropped for couple of days, but it was really odd and felt wrong. As soon as SUI was updated, I went back to it. Muscle memory was way to far off to use the standard UI.
I only play with 2 hunter specific addons. They are Viper Notify and Track-o-Matique. The first keeps me from remaining in Viper by mistake (Blizz should have built that in knowing that it was a temp aspect), and the second changes my tracking for improved tracking to give me my DPS boost (Blizz could have done this, but then they would have to do it for all classes).
Blizz helped to birth an outside developer community. Is Blizz prepared to step on lots of toes in said community to make its current UI better? They’ve smashed a finger or two, but seem to really drag so in doing it.
I think healers have it worst than us to be honest. I may find out how bad if I give my baby shaman a secondary healing spec.
I agree, when WoW first came out the UI was the s*#t! But I’m also a converted user of Spartan UI and am very add-on sparse as well. I use auctioneer, omnicc, DBM and omen. While you can play fairly competently without a host of add-ons, independent developers have done what Blizz should have been doing all along with each patch, and that’s improving some of the core elements of their own UI to make cooldowns, dots, procs, etc more visible and customizable. My comment for the show in an email was that if there is an add on that will help me get an edge and help my team why wouldn’t I use it. Even the little mistakes can mean the difference between a wipe and a dead boss.
One of the sites I found has a great deal great information on herbal teas and was really helpful. Its really difficult to find good info
Brig, is it true that you got Starcaller as SV and not as BM?
Heya Prolix,
Yeppers. It’s true. I switched to SV a while ago.
I hadn’t played SV since way back when I first started and felt it was only right to learn that one and see how it played.
Just curious though, why are you asking? I’ve always said I’d play any spec and that I’m not tied to any one in particular. (Well I did say I’m partial to Marks personally, but that’s just me.)
I’m happy that you can find the love for all hunter specs. I myself raid as MM but will always be BM outside of raids and have spent many hours getting 4 spirit beasts and then dumping one of them for the challenge of taming King Krush.
I just thought that you had become more partial to raiding as BM as the flavor of your posts the last few weeks have indicated. You’ve been assuring everyone that the BM spec is fully able to raid all current content content. Now that you’re raiding as SV I wonder if your opinions of the last few weeks have changed. Yes, you’ve previously been familiar with all three hunter specs but you’ve only recently been raiding WotLK content, correct? From what I understand, when you were defending BM as a raid viable spec all your level 80 raiding experience has been BM. Now that you’re trying something new I’d love to hear your thoughts on BM if they’ve changed all. Even if your thoughts on the matter haven’t changed, I don’t think the lodge has recently had any of your thoughts on SV or MM for raiding. I’m not talking about any sort EJ theorycrafting or advice on rotations either because we can always go to 100 other sources for that. I’m talking about your general opinion on the feel of SV or MM maybe even as a comparison to BM.
Anyways Brig, thanks for the lodge and the podcast.