If you haven’t been keeping up on what’s going on over on the PTR, well don’t worry ’cause I got your back. Here’s a summary of the most recent undocumented changes to Hunters:
Marksmanship
- Viper Sting now Stings the target, draining 4% 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.
- Auto Shot now gives 15% haste to all attacks fired by a Hunter.
Survival
- Explosive Shot damage reduced, rank 4 now deals [ 14% of RAP + 386 ] – [ 14% of RAP + 464 ] fire damage. (down from [ 16% of RAP + 428 ] – [ 16% of RAP + 516 ])
- Wyvern Sting now has a 1.5 minute cooldown. (Up from 1 minute)
Pet
- Pummel (Gorilla) cooldown has been increased to 30 sec (Up from 10 sec.) and silence effect duration lowered to 2 sec. (Down from 4 sec)
Overall, I’m pleased with the passive haste bonus and the thought of not having a quiver anymore. What I’m not happy about is… it took nearly half a bar of experience back in the day to grind out the quest chain to obtain this for my 19 Hunter. 😕 Oh well, no biggie. Most of you probably aren’t concerned with that silly twinking business anyway.
30 second cooldown on Pummel. Did I call that or what?! I predicted (and hoped for) 30 seconds. 30 seconds is more balanced, but if they were to increase it to say 45 seconds or more, then gorillas would be scarcely seen. The silence was cut in half which makes me sad in the pants, but my guess is that it must have been way too overpowered in initial testing.
Gorillas are going to be popular arena pets among BM and MM Hunters. Beast Master’s can stick the Gorilla on the healer with Pummel on manual cast, and have their own ghetto silence. MM will now have Silences on 20 and 30 second cooldowns. Imagine a MM with 11 points in Survival for Scatter Shot, Silencing Shot, Readiness, and then throw Pummel into the mix. Holy Schnikes!
There’s also ome noise being made about marksman’s mana efficiency and how it can be improved. No changes have been reported yet, but apparently it is something they’re working on.
Wild Hunt is going to see a slight nerf (10/20 down from 20/40). Here’s an official post from Ghostcrawler regarding the change:
Wild Hunt is being changed to 10/20% extra AP from the master. There was a bug where the talent was just applying the hunter’s AP to the pet twice, which is too generous.
If you have 6000 attack power, your pet probably gains 1320 attack power from you. With 2 ranks of this talent, it should gain 1580 attack power instead. Your pet’s attack power will be higher than this by a few hundred from other sources.
Two races available to the Hunter class, Draenei and Dwarf, are also seeing changes to their racials. These changes aren’t final however.
- Gift of the Naaru now also removes 2 harmful magic effects from the friendly target.
- Stoneform no longer gives a 8 second immunity to disease, poison, and bleed effects. Cooldown has been reduced to 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.
More news available at: MMO Champion