PATCH 4.2 NOTES - General Hunter Discussion - Hunter Forums

Quoted from Frostheim ( Warcraft Hunters Union) ………..

We just got an update from Blizzard with new additions to the patch 4.2 patch notes, and this one includes some hunter-specific stuff. Here’s the important things (which is to say, the hunter things).

• The Aggressive pet stance has been removed and replaced with the Assist stance. This stance will cause the player’s pet to attack the player’s target. The pet will not change targets unless the master attacks a new target for a few seconds.

• Multi-Shot damage has been reduced. It now deals 120% weapon damage at level or higher, down from 137%.
• Traps now scale with hunter stats such as hit, expertise, spell penetration and attack power as intended.

Frankly, I’m not surprised that we’re seeing a slight downward adjustment to multi-shot after the giant buff we just got in patch 4.1. Happily, the decrease isn’t that large, and it seems to be only the weapon damage component, and not the coefficient. So nothing to be alarmed about here — we’re still going to have the improved and powerful multi-shot, and the downward scaling shouldn’t hurt too much — possibly it’s there to somewhat mitigate the effect of slower weapons (Zeherah once mentioned that they didn’t normalize multi-shot).

Trap scaling is a bug fix — good to see, and as predicted they keep pecking away at those hunter bugs with every patch. Still wish they’d go after some of the more annoying ones (here’s a big one you may not have noticed: hunter’s are able to die in-game. This bug has been around for a while, and clearly is not intended behavior).

No More Aggressive Pets!

The big change here is the removal of aggressive stance for hunter pets. This is huge, and frankly I think it’s a good one. Aggressive was mostly a tool for new hunters that didn’t know what their buttons did yet to accidentally pull entire dungeons. Okay, and occasionally to help defend the lowbies that you’re running through a dungeon while you go out to smoke “Just stay near me, and let the pet deal with anything that comes near.”

It does sounds like Assist will be the new default stance that we’ll use for our pets when running our 5-mans. Unlike defensive, it sounds like in Assist your pet will switch targets when you do (or a little while after you do) rather than continuing to fight each thing until it’s dead. And if you want your pet attacking an entirely different target then you — no problem, we still have defensive stance, or even passive.

Overall this is a nice start to the patch 4.2 hunter notes. Hopefully we’ll see them deal with that death bug, and then down the list until we finally have a pure hunter experience.

[Update: as commenters pointed out, I totally forgot about using my pet on aggressive to sniff out stealthers in pvp -- okay, losing that's gonna hurt! Damn, like they need more ways to totally screw us? But it's worth it if they fix the death bug too. And remove minimum range to boot.]