Any other Hunters out there feel like they just got kicked in the stomach?
I had high expectations for Patch 3.2 and how it was going to positively address the needs of Hunters in both PvE and PvP. While a couple of the changes are a step in the right direction, I feel like the devs took a few more steps backwards with the class as a whole.
Actually, after reading about all of the upcoming love we were supposed to be receiving and then reading over these patch notes, I feel more like Ned Beatty’s character in Deliverance. The Blizz Devs being representative of them hill folk.
Let’s examine some of these changes to the Hunter class, shall we…
General Changes: Pets
This change applies to all classes that use pets
- All pets now receive 40% of their master’s resilience and 100% of their master’s spell penetration. In addition, if a player is at their appropriate spell hit chance or hit chance maximum, their pet will be at the maximum for spell hit chance, hit chance, and expertise. If they are below the maximum, their pet will be proportionately below those maximums.
40% resilience inheritance is a slap in the face. I have 808 resilience while decked out in my PvP gear. That means my pet will be receiving 323 resilience. While some resilience is better than none of course, you really need about 500-600 before you start noticing a difference in survivability. 800 resilience is about the highest any DPS class would want to go anyway, because eventually you start to sacrifice too much in the way of DPS.
If I were to be grouped with a healer, then I’d probably want to swap out some PvP pieces for higher DPS PvE gear, thus lowering my resilience to about 600. 240 resilience for my pet at this level is practically worthless. Also, what happened to all of this talk about pets inheriting crit %..?!
This needs to be more around 60%, or at the very least they need to offer BM Hunters a way to obtain more PvP survivability for their pets. Since they broke Animal Handler, that may be a good place to start. Pets could inherit 10% more resilience and maybe have a 2% reduced chance to be crit per level. So, 2/2 in AH would give them say… 20% more of the Hunter’s resilience, a 4% reduced chance to be crit along with extending the length of Master’s Call to 10 seconds. This way it would be a pure PvP talent. I hate how some of these talents have a use for one aspect of play but not for the other.
The way hit % is apportioned now is a good thing, but a fairly negligible change IMO. It looks as if the only players that will really benefit from it are leveling Hunters who have not yet been able to reach the desired hit cap. I don’t intend on going 7.89% just because my pet will receive 7.89% too. I’d rather not miss at all ever… how about you?
Pets being expertise capped is nice, but what will become of Animal Handler? Without the expertise portion of it, Animal Handler now gives you just 6 additional seconds of Master’s Call which is absolutely useless for anything outside of battlegrounds or arena. I’m thinking they’re not done with this yet, so I’m just going to sit tight and wait for future patch notes.
Hunter Changes
- Aspect of the Cheetah: Can now be learned at level 16.
This will make leveling easier from 16-20. Woot..? If they weren’t lowering the Apprentice Riding Skill to level 20, then this would be a nice convenience buff for lower levels.
It does however add a bit of excitement for the 10-19 twink bracket though. But… does anyone twink 10-19 anymore..? Right, didn’t think so.
- Deterrence now has a new visual spell effect.
Neat.
- The time that traps will exist in the world after being put down has been reduced to 30 seconds, down from 1 minute.
Ugh… why’d they have to do that.
- Traps now have separate 30 second cooldown categories: Fire (Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap and Black Arrow), Frost (Freezing Trap, Frost Trap) and Nature (Snake Trap). A hunter can have one trap of each category placed at one time.
This is the one change that is pretty cool. Well, for PvP at least. It’ll be nice to get a little added DPS in with a frost/fire or frost/snake combo. Plus it can buy us a little bit of extra time if the player chasing us tries to avoid the Immolation Trap by skirting around it.
Only thing I see sucking here is having to burn 2 GCDs to lay 2 different traps. I suppose if you were being LoS’d by a healer in Nagrand Arena you could drop a frost, along with some fire and snakes for a little extra DPS and interrupts.
However, it is nice that Black Arrow can now be used with Frost Traps in arena.
Beast Mastery Hunter Changes
- Catlike Reflexes now also reduces the cooldown of your Kill Command ability by 10/20/30 seconds.
Yay. Another PvP/soloing talent linked with a DPS ability. I think a better use of this would be a 15/30 second reduction, and attach it to Animal Handler. Raiding BM Hunters are used to dumping two points in there ayway, so this would be like 6 of one, half a dozen of the other. Plus, it would make for a nice buff for BM PvP.
This one is frustrating. Being that it’s the only improvement for BM DPS so far, why have it linked to a tanking talent..??!! Is it really worth 3 whole talent points that deep into the tree?
Survival Hunter Changes
- Entrapment: This talent no longer works with Immolation Trap or Explosive Trap.
Lame. The unlinked trap cooldowns would have made for a nice PvP buff had it not been for this ridiculousness.
- Lock and Load: Now has a 22 second cooldown. The Lock and Load effect cannot be obtained on targets immune to snare effects when Frost Trap is used.
Ouch. This is going to upset Survival Hunters. Why add a cooldown when the proc rate is so low to begin with?!
Hunter Pet Changes
- Roar of Sacrifice: Redesigned. This ability can now be used on any friendly target to make that target immune to critical strikes, but the Hunter pet takes 20% of all damage taken by that friendly target. Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.
Wow. I thought the idea was to make Hunters more viable and better represented in arena? What the hell is this crap?! 2 minuted CD… you gotta be kidding me…
Please make this go away. It’s making my head hurt. 🙁
If you want to read about some of the more exciting and positive things being introduced with patch 3.2, including a new dungeon and battleground, head over to MMO Champion.
F**K BLIZZARD YOU STUPID C**TS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I love the new & improved Animal Handler.
Blizz did well with that change. Now if we could only get Bear Trap…
It’d be easy to implement too.. It’d be just like Snake Trap, but with bears…
I just noticed Animal Handler was changed around. I don’t know if this is actually in effect, but ANIMAL HANDLER now increases pet’s attack power by 10%. So since the pet is already hit capped with the master’s hit chance cappted — The animal handler talent has changed.
I actually really liked this patch a lot… >.> The Animal Handler and Wild Hunt changes were huge, I’m doing big numbers as a Beast Master again (so long as paladins remember to give my pet Might). Not as big as MM or SV, but frankly, I don’t care, I’m not a super endgame raider and I hate arenas, so… XD
I like this patch too. It’s buffed me by a decent amount since I PvP as BM. I thought about taking my Devilsaur out to a raid for old times, but I’ve just become too fond of Marksmanship.
You just keep on representin’ Beast Mastery and doing your thing. I’ve looked at some of your Recount results as BM and I gotta say… quite impressive. 🙂
Grats again on your two-year-blogoversary!
Haha, ” I rolled a druid to play around with in the hopes that one day they will stop “thinking” they know what they are talking about and actually understand the class.” Ooh my Bliz has broken the Druid for years now. They finally got it fixed? and now are on to hunters. Don’t expect your druid to be unbroken for long!
What is that saying? Better to be quiet, then to speak and let people know you are ignorant? Again, every time I read the patch notes and especially the Dev conversations I am flipping out saying, “Do they even have anyone on staff who knows how to play a hunter?” Way to go and tell the whole world you still don’t know anything about the hunter class mechanics of your own game. If that does not say ignorant I don’t know what does. There is just no hope. I rolled a druid to play around with in the hopes that one day they will stop “thinking” they know what they are talking about and actually understand the class. They just make themselves look like fools. It really is a shame.
“Will 3.3 be the rising of the hunter?”
No. 🙂 We are still the worst class in arena but we will fight anything happens. 🙂
Only good is the 3 traps once in arena but maybe it will make some mana problems. Or you have to use them with brain.
As early as it is, the wording may be wrong on the roar of sacrifice change. But as it is, it almost makes me want to quit. They took a great pet talent (which allowed my guild to down 3-D Sarth fairly early when it could be cast on any friendly target) and made it mediocre (atm it is pretty much useful for pvp and nothing else). Now (with the current wording) they want to make it give the enemy 20% more overall damage for a relatively minor benefit. In all the previous incarnations of RoS, the tooltip specifically stated that the damage was transferred to the pet, now it just appears that your pet takes the damage as well as the target.
Playing MM on a PVE server only (and never playing PVP) I admit this patch wont change anything for me. I hoped for some ammo news but it seems Blizzard has some serious problems with them. I also hope they will fix the damned autocast bug for our pets, that’s VERY annoying.
Alchemy and herbalism buffs will be great for me. Being a Dreanei I’ll cast a powerful insta-healing (Gift of the naaru + Herbalism healing) at no cost :).
lol yeah that was a gut shot indeed. I remember me posting that i though hunters had big things coming for them lol was i wrong, but hey i’ll use one common comment on the forums; atleast we get a new cool visual effect when we die (deterrance) 😀
The diffrent trap types not sharing cooldown will be nice though, about the only positive out of this.
Where’s the ilvl 226 gun/bow buffs? ammo changes? Will 3.3 be the rising of the hunter? 3.3 sound very late/ending in WotLK :-/
I hope the hunters going berzerk all over the forums will make some more changes for the next rounds of PTR patches 😛