Blizzard has updated their Mists of Pandaria section with a new MoP Talent Calculator. It’s still very early on, so don’t expect any-or-all of these abilities and talents to be set in stone. In fact, I’m hoping there’s still a good deal of finish work left for the class and spec abilities.
As far as hunters are concerned, very little has been done with the existing skills. I imagine they will be making a few tweaks here and there, maybe removing a few skills, and introducing a couple new ones. Considering the class abilities only go to 85 in this iteration of the calculator – I’m assuming we’re going to see at least two to three new hunter class abilities added in the next few months.
As mentioned at BlizzCon, many of the core abilities in each of the trees have been made into passive skills – meaning that each of the specs should still feel very familiar in Mists of Pandaria. One of the benefits of this new system is that all of the ‘dead wood’ talents have been removed from the trees, leaving us with mainly just the ‘exciting’ and valuable talents.
One thing that scares me, however, is that Longevity is not included in the Beast Mastery passives. I really hope that doesn’t stick. That would be a PvP nerf on par with the great Bestial Wrath / The Beast Within nerf of 2009. Perhaps it will be added as a passive further on in the BM spec’s progression. That’s what I’m hoping for at least.
It’s obviously way too early to try and predict how the three specs will shake out in PvP and PvE, but I’m certainly going to have some fun playing with this new toy.
Off the record… were this talent system to go live tomorrow, Survival looks like it would be a pretty formidable PvP spec once again. The aspects of it that were broken have been removed and the inherent strengths that its retained are fantastic, e.g., nice spell damage w/ Explosive Shot, great burst with Lock and Load, passive haste, improved traps…then toss in some of the talents that are available now to all trees and SV looks beastly.
I’ve got some early opinions, but I’ll reserve them for now. I need to play around with the calculator some first before I make any sort of initial assessments. One thing’s for sure… this new talent system is going to allow for some awfully unusual hunter builds, at least different from what we’ve been used to all of these years.
Perhaps you’ve got some build ideas you’d like to share in the comments?
I kinda like the whole idea of the new talents, but i think that at least one tier should focus on our pets, since theyre a unique part of being a hunter, and lets face it, weve all eventually camped some rare spawn for hours to get a new cool looking pet.
I really liked the ideas for the warlock. I mean an overall stronger pet, maybe 2 sligtly weaker pets instead of just one strong one a new pet spell, making the rotation slightly different and increasing the dps by doing that would be a nice option.
Give a look at rogues and after, a look at hunters on MoP talents. Its nuts how a class supposed to be, you know, a hunter (literal sense), can be easily ambushed, CC’ed and beated by a class supposed to be a “glass bulldozer” (heavy damage output, few to none mitigation-hp). Some love for our PvE would be sweet too.
Blizzard always hated -and will always hate- hunters.
That’s a fact.
No longevity, maybe its because we can pop readiness to reset beastial wrath. Happy face 🙂
Good point. Only mild concern I have about that is being focus-starved during the second BW, but I suppose a new technique could involve spacing them out a bit to allow for some interim focus regen.
Yeah focus would be the issue. Hopefully we can get some focus back quick with rapid fire/focus fire. Having our cc’s back up should mean we can keep healers out of play until we can pressure again.
Definately an improvement, but as LePer said other classes have got some amazing new abilities.
Our abilities are on the way. I only hope they’re much more exciting than the ones we got for Cataclysm — Cobra Shot, Trap Launcher, Aspect of the Fox and Camouflage. I’m betting they will be considering the amazing and imaginative ones I’m seeing for the other classes. The new Druid (Symbiosis), Warlock (Demonic Portal) and Mage (Alter Time) spells look really interesting, and the blinding flash spell that Pallies are getting is awesome.
I hope ours are as good or better. Of course, if Stampede goes live I’d be happy with that. 🙂
Blizz made a herp derp move. Disengage isn’t on the spell list at all. And with 3 talents that works with it, we can say that it’s still ‘work in progress’.
Heh, you’re right. There’s nothing there when it should be at level 20… =/
Anyone else end up choosing “middle” option all the way down?
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Honestly i think they haven’t really done any real changes for us Hunters.. Check out the Warlock and how many new changes they’ve received compared to us.. It’s crazy how much the dev’s have focused on that class so far and hope we get the same treatment soon.. The new Demo lock changes are just so very sexy and creative.
One of my major complaints, which I ONLY hope they’ve overlooked in the talent calculator, is the promise that Kill Command will finally be a BM-only special with (slightly) increased range. I checked the specialization talents and noticed that KC still isn’t exclusive to the BM tree. This may be because it’s the only anti-LoS offensive ability all 3 specs have for PvP, but seriously…we’re better off spending that focus elsewhere.
I do hope they restore Longevity somehow, or at LEAST bake part of its talented reduction into the respective abilities it affects. So even if they get rid of it, I want an across-the-board 15% base cooldown reduction on BW, Intimidation and–IF I choose the BM spec, all pet special abilities by default.