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The History and Evolution of Hunters
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The project is finished at last, and just in time, might I add.
For quite some time I have been viewing endless amounts of WoW Patch Notes and filtering out anything that involves Hunters. Why? You may ask? Well, what inspired me was an accusation that Hunters were just a side project with mana slapped on it and shipped with the release of WoW. Therefore, I decided to do a little bit of snooping and can confidently say Hunters are a class of their own.
So what is this project? Each post will have an "expansion's" worth of patch notes contained within, split based on the numerical series of release. After each set of patch notes are some of my own comments, free as possible of any hate or distaste. Keep in mind I never played Vanilla WoW or did endgame in Burning Crusade, so any analysis there is assumed and not from my own recollections. However, if I do have recollections of some Hunter changes I will note them and possibly even what I thought about them.
This isn't complete by any means. It's a constant work in progress, as the game isn't dead yet. I am also probably missing large amounts of information about patches and other changes, as I only used sources from Wowpedia and Wowhead, as the official site doesn't seem to have old patch notes any longer.
And so we begin. Constructive feedback is appreciated, and I hope this invokes some discussion. Might I also add I timed this to my 50,000th post? It's all for you guys =D.
Quick Links:
Vanilla WoW (This post)
Burning Crusade
Wrath of the Lich King 1
Wrath of the Lich King 2
Cataclysm
Vanilla Patches:
Patch 1.1
Patch 1.1.1
Patch 1.2
Patch 1.2.2
Patch 1.3
Patch 1.4
Patch 1.5
Patch 1.6
Patch 1.6.1
Patch 1.7
Patch 1.8
Patch 1.9
Patch 1.10
Patch 1.11
Patch 1.11.2
Patch 1.12
Patch 1.12.1
Vanilla WoW
Series 1.1
Patch 1.1.0
Dwarf
•Stoneform: Activate to gain immunity to poison, disease, and bleed
•Gun Specialization: Increase Gun Skill
•Frost Resistance: Increase Cold Resistance
•Treasure Finding: Activate to see treasure chests on mini map – lasts until canceled – no cooldown
Gnome
•Escape Artist: Activate to break out of a Root or Snare effect
•Expansive Mind: Increase Intelligence
•Arcane Resistance: Increase Arcane Resistance
•Engineering Specialist: Increase skill bonus to Engineering
Human
•Perception: Activate to increase stealth detection radius
•The Human Spirit: Increase Spirit
•Diplomacy: Bonus to faction point gain
•Sword Specialization: Increase Sword skill
Night Elf
•Shadowmeld: Activate while immobile and out of combat to enter stealth mode
•Quickness: Dodge chance increased
•Wisp Spirit: Become a wisp when dead with movement speed increase
•Nature Resistance: Increase Nature Resistance
Orc
•Blood Fury: Activate to increase Strength
•Hardiness: Increase resistance to stun & knockout effects
•Command: Pet melee damage increased
•Axe Specialization: Increase to Axe skill
Tauren
•War Stomp: Activate to stun opponents
•Endurance: Max Health increased
•Cultivation: Increase skill bonus to Herbalism
•Nature Resistance: Increase Nature Resistance
Troll
•Berserking: Activate when "Wounded" to increase melee & spellcasting speed
•Regeneration: Increase health regen bonus
•Beast Slaying: Increase damage bonus to Beasts
•Throwing Weapon Specialization: Increase Throwing Weapon skill.
Undead
•Will of the Forsaken: Activate to become immune to fear, sleep, and charm effects
•Cannibalize: Increase health regeneration while consuming a corpse
•Underwater Breathing: Underwater breath increased
•Shadow Resistance: Increase Shadow Resistance
Hunter
* Glimpse of Instincts: Removed.
* Outdoorsmanship skill line renamed Survival.
* Ranged Combat skill line renamed Marksmanship.
* Removed facing requirement from Hunter's Mark and Scare Beast.
* Aspect of the Cheetah: Speed increased.
* Aspect of the Pack: Speed increased.
* Concussive Shot: No longer causes additional threat, duration and cooldown slightly increased, mana cost reduced.
* Disengage: Effect boosted, cooldown added.
* Hunter's Mark: Duration increased, dispels itself if the Hunter dies.
* Mongoose Bite: Damage increased, mana cost increased.
* Scare Beast: Increased the chance of breaking early.
* Wing Clip: Slow effect now scales with level.
* Feign Death: Duration increased.
* New Spell: Track Beasts (Level 1).
* New Spell: Track Humanoids (Level 10).
* New Spell: Track Undead (Level 18).
* New Spell: Track Hidden (Level 24).
* New Spell: Track Elementals (Level 26).
* New Spell: Track Demons (Level 32).
* New Spell: Track Giants (Level 40).
* New Spell: Track Dragonkin (Level 50).
* New Spell: Distracting Shot (Level 12).
* New Spell: Aspect of the Wild (Level 46).
The starting point for Hunters. Can’t exactly make remarks here, but it seems we had tracking right from the off on release day, among other things.
I will note that the “Outdoorsmanship” skill line naming is just plain amusing.
Patch 1.1.1
Bug Fixes
* Damage modifiers will now be calculated before armor points are considered, instead of after.
This is a pretty big change for anyone dealing Physical damage. Hunters are included in this.
Patch 1.1.2
Nothing
Series 1.2
Patch 1.2.0
Hunters
* Hunters can no longer sit while under the effects of Feign Death.
* Disengage will cause the Hunter's target to immediately check for a new target.
* Hunters will no longer show mana while they are under the effects of Feign Death.
* Claw: Ranks 3-8 focus costs increased to match ranks 1-2.
* Beasts under the effect of Beast Lore will now display whether they are tameable or not.
* Pets: Bite and Claw tooltips now list the damage that is dealt when the pet is content. Actual damage is unchanged.
* Scare Beast: Beasts now have an increasing chance to break free of the effect, such that it is unlikely the effect will last more than 15 seconds.
Nothing much to say here. Just seems like a few basic changes and some rebalancing.
Patch 1.2.1
Nothing of note.
Pat]ch 1.2.2
Bug Fixes
* Pets and summoned creatures attacking enemies will now tap the enemies for their owners.
Other
* Hunter and Warlock pets will now correctly "tap" the targets they attack, thus giving the pet owner kill credit for a target even if another player later attacks the same target.
To be honest, this really should’ve been the way tapping should have worked on release. It’s not that big of a deal though.
Patch 1.2.3
Nothing of note.
Patch 1.2.4
Nothing of note.
Series 1.3
Patch 1.3.0
General
* Skill-up rate improved for bows, crossbows, guns, thrown, and wands.
* Improved line of sight for large creatures.
* The Drunk effect has been greatly enhanced.
Hunter
* Training costs adjusted. Total training cost was decreased.
* Sandfury Guardians are no longer tameable.
* Fixed a bug where Hunter pets were sometimes unattackable by opposing faction players.
* Fixed a bug where creatures were keeping their innate resistances after being tamed. This was unintentional and the fix will affect all existing pets.
* Distracting Shot - Is now properly improved by the Efficiency and Hawk Eye talents.
* You can no longer use Eyes of the Beast to leave a flight path.
Pets
* Pets in defensive mode that respond to attacks will no longer flag their masters for PvP. If the master issues an explicit attack command, the master will be flagged.
* You can issue pet commands while you are stunned, fleeing, etc.
* Pets and summons no longer get stuck when you get on a boat or zeppelin.
* Non-aggressive enemy NPCs no longer attack pets and summons.
Bug Fixes
* Hunter pets immediately gain training points when they level up.
* Fixed bug where melee weapon abilities were causing durability damage to ranged weapons.
* Fixed a bug where Ammo Pouch and Quiver bonuses were stacking together. Now only the better bonus should be considered.
* Fixed a bug where Quivers and Ammo Pouches were granting a larger haste bonus than intended in some cases.
* Items like the Eye of the Beast will correctly increase your spell critical hit chances.
Seems like a few more bug fixes and rebalancing changes. In addition, we get the amazing (though somewhat nonsensical, I suppose) ability to give commands to our pets while unable to realistically do so, which would be something we could do for eternity up until now.
By the way, yes the drunk effect change being part of the notes is a joke. =D
Also, regarding line of sight against larger creatures: I’m hoping they re-evaluate that at some point in time because at the time of this writing, as mobs can get really huge (I’m looking at you Whale Shark) and cause line of sight issues.
Patch 1.3.1
Nothing of note.
Patch 1.3.2
Nothing of note.
These are mostly bug fix and minor balance patches that don’t involve us. Next!
Series 1.4
Patch 1.4.0
General
* Mana regeneration is now disrupted when a spell has completed casting rather than at the start of casting. It will resume normally five seconds after the last spell cast. This change increases the total time spent regenerating mana and therefore increases the total contribution from Spirit for mana-based classes.
* When a non-Hunter resurrects a pet, the pet will no longer receive resurrection sickness.
Racial Traits
* Blood Fury - Now increases base melee attack power by 25% for 15 seconds. When it fades base melee attack power is reduced by 25% for 45 seconds.
* Perception - Increased detection bonus.
* Berserking - Is now usable after being the target of a critical hit. Increases melee, ranged and spell casting speed by 25% but increases all damage taken by 10% for the duration.
Hunters
* A new Hunter epic quest series is now in the game and waiting to be found.
* Scatter Shot (Talent) - Now usable while moving and no longer interrupts ranged combat. Now properly reduces the ranged attack power contribution by the percent modifier.
* Highland Striders no longer have Cower (Rank 3) when tamed.
* New Pet Ability: Dive - Increases movement speed for a short duration.
* New Pet Ability: Dash - Increases movement speed for a short duration.
* Freezing Trap - Visual changed.
* Track Hidden - Increased stealth detection.
* Scorpid Sting - Fixed a bug where it was not considered a poison. It can now be removed by poison curing effects.
* Aspect of the Cheetah/Pack - These Aspects will now be canceled when mounted.
* Viper Sting - This spell can no longer be used on warrior and rogue targets. In addition, while it can be used on a druid target at any time it will only drain mana when the druid is in caster form.
Bug Fixes
* Fixed a bug where weapon skills were inappropriately capped at 5 times level. Characters should now gain benefit from weapon skill bonuses beyond their normal cap.
* Extra attacks gained from spells and abilities are applied immediately and do not affect normal combat swing time.
* Ranged attacks use the target's defense skill instead of target's level to determine chance to hit.
* Pets and summons will now go with you if you use a hearthstone or other long range teleport.
A good number of these changes are quite nice. In this patch, we get to see the amazing pet dash ability get implemented. Even to this day, the ability remains relatively useful in allowing our pets to close the gap against targets we want dead.
As you may have also noticed, a good number of Hunter-related changes are ones that will remain until present day (such as AotC cancelling upon mounting and pets going with us when taking long distance teleports). Amazing how convenient things like that get forgotten quickly.
Oh, did I also mention the quest for Rhok’delar and Lok’delar is the one implemented into this patch?
Patch 1.4.1
Nothing of note.
Patch 1.4.2
Nothing of note.
More patches that don’t really involve us, pretty much.
Series 1.5
Patch 1.5.0
PvP
* Dishonorable kills - gained by killing a trivial Civilian NPC - now has a negative impact on a player's honor. Enough dishonorable kills will reduce a player's rank all the way to zero.
Hunters
* Special ability shots (e.g. Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot) no longer add the ranged weapon speed or take into account ranged weapon haste when determining the actual cooldown. The tooltip and cooldown timers should now properly reflect the actual cooldown.
* The Hunter Epic quest has had some of its Demonic Corrupters retuned. It should also be noted that Hunters that attempt to bypass the single player portion of the encounter by using another class to do their tasks will fail the quest in a most glorious fashion.
* Tranquilizing Shot - Is now properly affected by Efficiency and Hawk Eye talents.
* Unleashed Fury - Fixed a bug where the damage increase was lower than stated in the tooltip. It should now increase damage by the listed amount.
* Growl - Rank 1 effect improved.
* Volley - Damage increased.
* Pet speed has been increased when out of combat and following their master.
* Spirit Guides in Battlegrounds will now summon/resurrect your current pet when the Hunter is resurrected.
* Unstabling dead pets no longer puts players into a degenerate state where their pet only partially exists. Unstabled dead pets can now be properly revived, and players can no longer train more pets than their stable can hold.
* Fixed a bug where magic shots were missing too frequently when used on a target with Blessing of Protection active.
A few more changes that are to the convenience of the Hunter. The biggest one to note is cooldown normalization. However, Aimed Shot I believe would have a cooldown (or cast time, I can’t remember which) affected by a ranged weapon’s attack speed until Wrath of the Lich King.
Patch 1.5.1
Nothing of note.
Series 1.6
Patch 1.6.0
General
* Will of the Forsaken (Undead Racial) - duration of the lasting immunity effect decreased to 5 seconds.
* Cannibalize (Undead Racial) - Regeneration increased to 35% of a character's total health over 10 seconds.
* Stoneform (Dwarf Racial) can now be used to cancel self-inflicted poison effects.
* Fist Weapons will now have the normal chance to parry that all weapons use.
* It will no longer be possible to swap any equipment while stunned.
* Pets will now enter passive/follow mode when their masters mount.
* The Dazed effect caused by NPCs will now stack with all other movement slowing effects. Note that the movement slowing effects will not stack, but the debuff icons will remain to ensure the full duration of these effects persist.
* Several creature spells that silenced players are now properly flagged as silence effects, which will allow talents such as Unbreakable Will to provide a higher chance to resist the effects.
* Spells that drain mana will now properly report the amount of mana gained in the combat log.
* Knockback effects are now synchronized with any associated missile impacts.
* Special abilities which are parried will correctly activate abilities which are usable after parrying.
* Fixed the duration of Frostbite on pets which are dismissed and then recalled.
* You no longer spout profanity when talking about sitting while drunk.
* Fixed race condition allowing hunters to control a charmed unit and a pet at the same time.
PvP
* Hunter traps work properly in duels if the target is flagged for PvP and the hunter is not.
Hunters
* Counterattack - Will now cause damage to targets immune to immobilizing effects.
* Wing Clip - Will now cause damage to targets immune to immobilizing effects.
* Explosive Trap - Fixed a bug where the trap's effects suffered inappropriate damage reduction against high level targets. In addition, damage caused by this trap should no longer kill opponents in duels.
* Aspect of the Cheetah/Pack - Non-damaging spells and abilities will no longer cause the dazed effect. In addition, when switching between Pack and Cheetah, you should no longer receive the "A more powerful spell is already active" error message.
* Beast Lore - Will no longer flag you for PvP or cause guard retaliation when used on an enemy faction target.
Not much to mention here. A good small thing to note is that Wing Clip and Counterattack now scale off of weapon damage (Wing Clip’s damage gets removed later on). Another one is the convenient fact that only lethal attacks can daze a Hunter using AotC.
Patch 1.6.1
General
* Spell casting is no longer interrupted when leaving combat.
Just a rather minor (not really minor, I guess) change for casters. Since Hunters are ultimately affected by this, I chose to include this in the patch note records.
Series 1.7
Patch 1.7.0
General
* The debuff limit has been increased to 16 (from 8). In addition, the client will now display all 16 debuffs.
* Switching weapons in combat triggers a 1 second global cooldown for all abilities for rogues and a 1.5 second global cooldown for everyone else.
* Possessed units (e.g. Mind Control, Eyes of the Beast etc...) can now cancel combat mode by clearing your current target. In addition, the UI will have a gold border when the possessed unit is actively in combat mode with the target.
* Several stun spells and abilities that were previously unresistable can now be resisted as was always intended.
* The targeting circles for area effect spells will no longer be cancelled when the caster moves.
* If an attack deals non-physical damage, the type of damage is now reported in the combat log.
* Fixed bug where you couldn't right click to attack a hunter who is feigning death.
* You can no longer unequip weapons while they are disarmed.
* Debuffs and area effect spells now use their actual cast level rather than effective cast level for calculating periodic resistance.
* Damage absorption is now applied before damage splitting effects.
* Casting spells on your pets and summons will no longer cause guards in neutral towns to attack you.
* Fixed a bug where mana was being regenerated while channelling spells that use mana.
* Fixed a bug where the Dazed ability used by creatures when attacking targets from behind was countered/dispelled by some spells (e.g. Blessing of Freedom).
* Fixed a bug where area of effect periodic damage spells were being resisted more frequently than they should have been when casting lower level ranks of the spell (affected spells were Blizzard, Consecration, Explosive Trap, Flamestrike, Hurricane, Rain of Fire and Volley).
* Escape Artist works with Frost Nova and Frost Trap.
* Spells and effects that reduce attack speed will no longer stack with each other. Some spells this change effects include Thunderclap, Frost Armor, the Doomguard's Cripple spell, the Icy Chill enchantment, and Hurricane.
* Players who have died can now view the contents of their bags and view menus (ie the character sheet, quest log, etc). This change also applies to Hunters that are using Feign Death.
* Pets now switch to a new target if possible when their current target is polymorphed.
Hunters
* Due to significant talent changes, Hunters will have all talent points refunded and can be respent. Training costs for all talent spell/ability replacements have been significantly reduced.
* Survival and Beast Master talent trees have undergone major revisions in an effort to give Hunters additional, viable choices when selecting talents.
* Deterrence - Will now increase parry chance when using Fist Weapons.
* Deflection - Will now increase parry chance when using Fist Weapons.
* Improved Concussive Shot - The stun effect can now be resisted.
* Trueshot Aura - Attack Power and Ranged Attack Power bonus increased, mana cost decreased, area of effect increased.
* Frost Trap - Updated tooltip to reflect duration of the Frost Trap Effect.
* Aimed Shot - Fixed tooltip to correctly display shot time.
* Auto Shot - Fixed a bug where switching targets would cancel Auto Shot. Switching targets should now continue firing on the newly acquired target.
* Scatter Shot - Should now cancel combat mode when used.
* Eyes of the Beast - Cast time reduced.
* Flare - Fixed the tooltip to accurately reflect the actual radius of the effect.
* Ranged Weapon Specialization - Now affects all ranged weapon attacks (e.g. Arcane Shot).
* Improved Concussive Shot - Will now have a chance to stun targets that are afflicted with other slowing effects (e.g. Wing Clip).
* Hawk Eye and Barrage have swapped locations, and we added 1 more rank to Barrage.
* Freezing Trap now shares the same duration in pvp as other long-duration forms of crowd control (ie: polymorph, fear, sap).
* The resist rate for hunter traps is now based on the hunter's skill rather than the level of the trap.
* The tooltips for quick Hunter shots have been updated to show them as instant abilities.
* Feign Death is no longer resisted by players.
* Hunters are now able to name their pets while mounted.
* Hunter's pets will be smarter about when to use Dash/Dive.
* Fixed bug where Aimed Shot wouldn't cancel properly when the target moves out of range.
* Fixed a bug where lower level versions of Immolation Trap and Explosive Trap were being resisted more than they should be.
* Pet abilities have been modified (see below).
Items
* With the new ability to train Hunter pets with considerable magical resistance, the amount of pet resistance granted by the set bonuses for the Giantstalker's and Dragonstalker's has been reduced while the pet health granted has been increased.
Pets
* You can now modify the auto-cast status of pet spells in the pet spellbook.
* Hunters now have the first round of pet customization available. New passive abilities include increased armor, stamina, Fire resistance, Frost resistance, Nature resistance, Shadow resistance, and Arcane resistance.
* All Hunter pets have their abilities unlearned. Training points have been fully refunded. (Abilities the Hunter has learned to teach their pets have not been lost. For example, if you have the ability to teach your pets "Claw 3", you will still be able to do so in this patch. However, your pet will have to be taught this ability again by using the Beast Training interface.)
* Hunter pets can now be untrained of all their skills from any beast trainer in the major cities. Similar to talents, untraining a specific pet scales up as you do it more times: 10 silver, 50 silver, 1 gold, 2 gold, 3 gold, etc., eventually stopping at 10 gold.
* Training point costs for all abilities have been rebalanced. You'll now be able to use all your pet's training points with meaningful choices. To help make "hunting" pets more viable in more situations, the Growl ability is now free to all pets.
* Hunter pets can now learn a maximum of four active abilities. Active abilities include Claw, Bite, Dash, Dive, Cower, Prowl, Screech, Scorpid Poison, Growl, and Furious Howl.
* Bats, owls, and carrion birds can now learn the Screech ability, a fast single-target attack that also lowers the attack power of all enemies within melee range of the pet.
* Cats can now learn Stealth. In addition to being unseen, they receive a damage bonus for their first attack coming out of stealth.
* Scorpids can now learn Scorpid Poison. The poison deals Nature damage over time and stacks up to five times on a single enemy.
* Wolves can now learn Furious Howl. The howl adds a flat amount of damage to all nearby party member's next attack (within 15 yards).
* Hunter pets now gain experience based on the level difference between them and their target rather than the difference between the Hunters and their target. This will make it much easier to level up a low level pet. Keep in mind that the Hunter must still kill creatures from which he/she will gain experience.
User Interface
* Pet spells in macros are now supported, both using /cast and using CastSpellByName().
Whole lot of changes here. Pets can learn cool new abilities and the Marksmanship and Survival Tree get some revamps (mostly balance changes). Since I didn’t play during this time though, I can’t say much more beyond that. I find the best change to be the fact the Hunter can change the autocast toggle in the spellbook for pets. That was indeed a much needed change that would continue to remain.
Patch 1.7.1
Nothing of note.
Series 1.8
Patch 1.8.0
General
* Guardians and pets in aggressive mode no longer attack civilians.
* Channeled spells that are cancelled by movement can no longer be cast while moving.
* Pets no longer break off attacks when their target is affected by Warlock Fear.
PvP
* Hunter traps no longer affect opposing players when the hunter is not flagged for PvP.
Hunters
* Counterattack - Now properly sets its cooldown.
* Throw - Use of this ability will no longer cause a global cooldown with all other abilities.
* Auto-shot is now cancelled when you die.
* Added Lightning Breath pet ability for Wind Serpents. This ability instantly hits a single target for Nature damage at medium range.
Items
* The ability to transform Rhok'delar and Lok'delar has been removed, but you can talk to Vartrus the Ancient to receive the item you currently don't possess.
Bug Fixes
* Fixed bug where your pet would be both in and out of combat simultaneously when you were dismounted by pursuing creatures.
* Fixed a missile bug that could cause crashes in large battles such as Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, and Arathi Basin.
Just a few bug fixes and random balancing. Not too much to see or analyze here.
Patch 1.8.1
Nothing of note.
Patch 1.8.2
Nothing of note.
Patch 1.8.3
Nothing of note.
Patch 1.8.4
Nothing of note
Series 1.9
Patch 1.9.0
General
* All Disorient effects have been renamed Incapacitate effects. This includes Gouge, Sap, etc.
* All Confusion effects have been renamed Disorient effects. This includes Blind, Scatter Shot, etc.
* Food and Drink are now in separate categories, so you can only have one food effect and one drink effect on you at a time. The only effect should be that foods that used to stack with each other (you could have two food effects on you at once) no longer will stack.
* On-next-swing abilities will no longer cause multiple weapon procs on a single swing.
Hunters
* Arcane Shot - Will no longer trigger two Judgement of Wisdom effects with one shot.
* Aspect of the Pack and Aspect of the Cheetah - Periodic damage will no longer trigger the Dazed effect.
* Aspect of the Wild - Radius increased. Tooltip updated to display radius.
* Improved Concussive Shot - The stun effect's duration no longer diminishes or is diminished by controlled stun abilities and spells (e.g. Cheap Shot, Hammer of Justice, Charge etc.).
* Tame Beast - The hunter will now turn to face the target during the taming process.
* Bestial Wrath - Damage bonus reduced, duration increased. In addition, while enraged, the beast will be immune to Disorient effects (e.g. Scatter Shot, Blind, etc.)
* Unleashed Fury - Damage bonus increased.
Pet Changes
* Base pet speed is now standardized for all pets, including legacy pets. Pet speed can still be modified through the talent Bestial Swiftness and pet abilities such as Charge, Dash, etc.
* All hunter pets will now always deal Physical damage for their base attack.
* Turtles can now eat raw and cooked fish.
* Turtles can now learn Shell Shield, allowing them to reduce all damage taken by 50% for 10 sec.
* Hunters can now tame Sons of Hakkar. Sons of Hakkar are in the Wind Serpent family and will know Lightning Breath (Rank 6).
* Boars can now learn Charge, an ability that allows them to charge to an enemy, immobilize that enemy for 1 second, and add a large amount of Attack Power to the boar's next attack.
* Gorillas can now learn Thunderstomp, an ability that causes high threat area Nature damage.
Racial Traits
Troll Racial Abilities
Troll Berserking
* New functionality: Berserking is now an activated ability that increases your melee, ranged, and casting speed by 10% to 30%. The value scales upwards towards 30% depending how low your health is when you activate the ability.
* Now lasts 10 seconds.
* Now requires a small amount of mana, rage, or energy (depending on your class) to activate.
* No longer requires being struck by a critical to activate.
* Now has a three minute cooldown, up from two minutes.
* No longer has a global cooldown.
Throwing Mastery
* Trolls now also receive a bonus to Bow weapons in addition to Throwing weapons.
Orc Racial Abilities
Blood Fury
* Now applies a healing effectiveness debuff on the user instead of the attack power penalty. The healing debuff is applied immediately upon using the ability.
Hardiness
* Resistance is now applied to just Stun mechanics.
Gnome Racial Abilities
Escape Artist
* Casting time lowered.
Dwarven Racial Abilities
Stoneform
* No longer snares the user.
* Armor bonus increased.
* Duration lowered.
User Interface
*A new option has been added to Interface options, "Sticky Targeting". When this is turned on, you will not deselect your current target when you click on empty space.
* Key bindings can now be saved either globally or on a per character basis.
* Add-ons can now be saved either globally or on a per character basis.
* In addition to the set of macros shared by all characters, each character gets an additional 18 macros available to them.
* Resurrection spells will return pets to life with the appropriate amount of health and mana.
* Talent improvements to buffs will persist across instance boundaries and logging out.
Bug Fixes
* Fixed a bug that allowed pets to be targeted by "Wild Polymorph" during the Nefarian encounter.
There’s a pretty large variety of changes so let’s go through them by each category.
General: Pretty basic changes here. They primarily consolidated crowd control effects and made it so you couldn’t “stack eat” and “stack drink” I guess.
Hunters/Pets: Some Beast Mastery buffs. The Bestial Wrath effect is beginning to reach its full, crowd control-immune potential and Aspect of the Cheetah/Pack is getting polished a bit more. There are also a few pet normalization changes (goodbye, ultrafast Takk the Leaper) and some new abilities for certain pets to learn!
Finally, it would seem there are some other minor changes, primarily to racials.
Patch 1.9.1
Nothing of note.
Patch 1.9.2
Nothing of note.
Patch 1.9.3
Nothing of note.
Patch 1.9.4
Nothing of note.
Series 1.10
Patch 1.10.0
New High-Level Armor Sets! (Dungeon Set 2 released)
General
* All spells/abilities that remove existing effects (e.g. Dispel Magic, Cleanse, Remove Curse etc...) will now verify that there is an effect that can be removed before casting.
* You will no longer lose your current target when affected by a crowd control spell (e.g. Fear, Polymorph etc...).
* Various tooltips updated.
* Pets no longer modify your reputation if you kill them.
* Traps can now be detected in the same way stealthed units can be detected.
* Reputation will no longer be gained if a pet kills a monster without aid.
Hunters
* Multi-Shot - This ability now has its attack power normalized the same as melee instant attacks. This means that the attack power contribution from all ranged weapons will be the same, no matter what their speed. All weapons will contribute attack power as if they were 2.8 speed. Weapons slower than 2.8 speed will do slightly less damage than previously; weapons faster than 2.8 speed will do slightly more damage.
* Aimed Shot - This ability now has its attack power normalized the same as melee instant attacks. This means that the attack power contribution from all ranged weapons will be the same, no matter what their speed. All weapons will contribute attack power as if they were 2.8 speed. Weapons slower than 2.8 speed will do slightly less damage than previously; weapons faster than 2.8 speed will do slightly more damage.
* Improved Aspect of the Hawk - The buff from this talent has had its duration increased from 8 seconds to 12 seconds. Note that the haste it provides does not begin until the second shot after the triggering shot. This change is to compensate for that delay.
* Hunter's Mark - This spell no longer triggers procs on the spell caster. This was being abused to land debuffs without getting on the creature's hate list.
* Claw and Bite - Pets using these abilities will now generate the correct amount of threat. Only ranks 7 and 8 of claw were generating the correct amount previously.
* Bestial Wrath - No longer generates threat for the Hunter.
* New high-level boars now exist in the Eastern Plaguelands and have a new rank 6 version of the pet ability: Charge.
* The special turtle ability Shell Shield has been improved to no longer root or pacify the turtle, but instead apply a 30% melee slow for the duration of the effect. Cooldown has been improved from 5 minutes to 3 minutes.
* Freezing Traps are now affected by diminishing returns.
* Pet Frenzy - This effect will now trigger off any kind of critical hit by the pet.
* Fixed problem where a tamed pet would be lost if the hunter died as the tame completed.
* Distract no longer rotates hunters who have feigned death.
* Hunter traps now use the same rules as stealth rather than being invisible. Detect Trap has been changed to reflect this.
Items
* The following item sets have had their set bonuses adjusted: Valor, Magister's, Lightforge, Shadowcraft, Dreadmist, Devout, Wildheart, Beaststalker, and Elements.
* Biznicks 247x127 Accurascope now only affects ranged attacks, and Elemental Sharpening Stones no longer will affect ranged weaponry. The schematic for the Accurascope will now drop once again in the Molten Core.
Firstly, let’s begin with analysis of the general changes. The first part regarding dispels is quite important to note because not until Cataclysm would that mechanic be changed back. Dispels could be mashed without penalty (i.e. casting it without actually dispelling). This includes Tranquilizing Shot for Hunters.
The other part of General changes that strikes as very important is the fact Traps can be “detected” like a stealthed unit. This means that traps were indeed invisible at some point (way) prior to Cataclysm.
Regarding Hunter changes, take note of how shots got “normalized” to a specific attack power contribution from the weapon. This means slower ranged weapons (there are a lot of those) will deal a bit less damage. Eventually attacks would scale with weapon damage in general for all classes that were affected by “attack power normalization” and attack power would increase weapon damage at some rate.
Not too much to mention besides that.
Patch 1.10.1
Nothing of note.
Patch 1.10.2
Nothing of note.
Series 1.11
Patch 1.11.0
General
* The cost to unlearn talents will now decay over time. This cost will be reduced by a rate of 5 gold per month to a minimum of 10 gold.
* Fear: The calculations to determine if Fear effects should break due to receiving damage have been changed. The old calculation used the base damage of the ability. The new calculation uses the final amount of damage dealt, after all modifiers. In addition, the chance for a damage over time spell to break Fear is now significantly lower. Note that Fear continues to be roughly three times as likely to break on player targets as on non-player targets. In addition, Intimidating Shout now follows that player versus non-player distinction, while previously it did not.
* All controlled units will now be titled based on the creature type. All beasts will be referred to as Pets, for example (no matter how they are controlled). Previously, there were several inconsistencies.
* Chain targeted spells and abilities (e.g. Multi-shot, Cleave, Chain Lightning) will no longer land if target cannot be seen by the caster due to stealth or invisibility.
Hunters
* Counterattack (Survival Talent) - All ranks of this talent will now share the same cooldown.
* Scorpid Poison: Duration slightly lengthened.
* Changed the way hunter pet family armor bonuses and penalties are applied to allow the exact value from the Natural Armor talent to be applied correctly. This may result in a very slight loss of armor to some pets (less than a third of a percent).
* Improved Scorpid Sting: The aura from this Sting will now be removed (as intended) when a different Sting aura is placed on the victim.
Items
* We have re-evaluated the mechanics of consumable items in the game and concluded that these should work in a more intuitive manner. As such, most items that can not be equipped with right click abilities have been streamlined into one of three categories. Using an item of a particular category will trigger a shared cooldown among all other items in the same category. The categories break down as follows with category cooldowns as listed.
___
- Potions 2 minutes: This includes items such as Health Potion, Mana Potion, Invisibility Potion and Mighty Rage Potion.
- Aggressive 1 minute: This includes items such as explosives, Really Sticky Glue and Discombobulator Ray.
- Non-Aggressive 2 minutes: This includes items such as Healthstone, Night Dragon's Breath, Whipper Root Tuber and Target Dummy.
___
* All food/drink can be eaten while silenced. Previously some food/drink could not be consumed when under the effect of a silence.
Bug Fixes
* If Heroic Strike or Raptor Strike fails, your combat swing will do normal damage.
* Pets can no longer aggro creatures in rooms above or below them.
* Friendly creatures' pets no longer occasionally attack a player's pet.
* Area-of-effect spells will no longer occasionally damage creatures with which you are not at war.
* If a Hunter dies just as a pet is tamed, the pet won't lose its innate abilities.
* Fixed a bug that caused abilities to lock up after being feared, charmed, or polymorphed.
* Fixed a bug where characters were able to exceed 100% of their normal mana regeneration while casting.
Pretty major general change to note here. Talent resets will now have cost decay after a certain amount of time, and then there’s also fear having a break threshold (pretty sure this includes Scare Beast as well) and pets finally being called “pets.”
There’s really nothing too significant for Hunters besides that, so let’s move on.
Patch 1.11.1
Nothing of note.
Patch 1.11.2
Hunters
* Players are no longer able to animate emotes while using Feign Death.
Heh.
Series 1.12
Patch 1.12.0
General
Threat Reduction Effects
* This system has been redesigned to eliminate inconsistency in how the effects work. Previously, some were additive (for example: 30% reduction + 20% reduction = 50% reduction) while others were multiplicative (30% reduction and 20% reduction made 44% reduction, from 0.7*0.8). They are now all multiplicative. This also prevents unpredictable behavior when the total reduction percentage was equal to or greater than 100%. Please note that in almost all cases, when stacking multiple threat reduction effects you will experience less threat reduction than previously.
Haste and Slow effects
* Previously Haste and Slow effects worked inconsistently, with spells working differently from weapons, and hastes and slows not acting as inverses of each other. We have revised the system so that all haste and slow effects work the same way, and haste and slow percentages of the same magnitude perfectly cancel each other out (30% haste and 30% slow combine to no change). As a result, we had to change the tooltip numbers on all spell haste effects, and on all melee and range slow effects. The numbers in the tooltips are different, but the game functionality is unchanged (other than slight rounding errors). Those tooltips that changed will now display larger numbers than they used to display. Conceptually, haste values indicate how much more of that activity you can perform in a given time. 30% melee haste means 30% more swings in a given time. Slow values indicate how much longer an activity takes to complete. 30% slow means an action takes 30% longer to finish.
Hunters
* Spirit Bond: This ability will now be correctly reapplied when you resurrect in a battleground and your pet is polymorphed or otherwise unable to act normally.
* Improved Concussive Shot: The effect of this talent will now still be placed on the victim if the hunter is killed before their shot reaches the target.
* Growl now correctly initiates combat when used by a pet in passive mode.
* The Ferocity talent now correctly applies to non-physical hunter pet abilities such as Lightning Breath and Thunderstomp.
* If a hunter has tamed one of the following creature types, they will no longer potentially change colors if resummoned:
Son of Hakkar - Red
Frenzied Bloodseeker Bat - Brown
Deep Stinger - Red
Dark Screecher - Gray
Cave Creeper - Brown
Bloodaxe Worg - Black
Scarshield Worg - Brown
Items
* Ranged Elemental Damage: Our ranged combat system does not allow a ranged weapon to do a mix of Elemental (Fire, Frost, Arcane, etc.) and Physical damage. Many ranged weapons existed which were listed as doing Elemental damage and did not function properly (the damage was dealt, but was treated as Physical). All of those weapons have been changed to deliver the Elemental damage as a chance on hit effect. Hurricane was previously changed this way in 1.11. The following ranged weapons are also fixed in 1.12: Bow of Searing Arrows, Dwarven Hand Cannon, Heartseeking Crossbow, Dark Iron Rifle, Galgann's Fireblaster, Quillshooter, Shell Launcher Shotgun, Venomstrike, and Verdant Keeper's Aim.
User Interface
V key functionality has been improved in several ways.
* V key now shows summoned monsters (such as the gargoyles in Stratholme.)
* V key now shows both monsters and player enemies.
* V now shows enemies only (no longer shows friendly targets.)
* Shift-V now shows friendly targets only, not enemies (with a new bindable hotkey.)
* Control-V shows both friendly targets and enemy targets (with a new bindable hotkey.)
* New floating combat text has been added to the game with a number of options. You can see when you take damage, when you are healed and how much, when you acquire and lose auras and much more. You can turn on the new options in the newly revised options screen.
Bug Fixes:
* Recasting Feed Pet while using Feed Pet will reset the duration of the cast.
* Activating passive pet abilities while targeting an opposite faction player will no longer aggro neutral town guards.
* If a Hunter is unflagged for PvP, an enemy faction rogue won't be able to disarm his trap.
* Players can no longer drop from combat by repeatedly placing their pet into passive mode.
Undocumented Changes:
Hunter
* Solenor the Slayer's Soul Flame buff can now be correctly removed.
The threat reduction change actually didn’t affect us all that much (Feign Death dropped all threat), but it’s good to note.
Haste has gotten a rework to be more consistent (not sure if it’s using the current haste formula).
We also got some new pets to tame.
The V nameplate toggle was added this patch(##RESPBREAK##)652##DELIM##Neutronimity##DELIM##
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Burning Crusade
Burning Crusade Patches:
Patch 2.0.1
Patch 2.0.3
Patch 2.0.6
Patch 2.0.7
Patch 2.0.10
Patch 2.1
Patch 2.1.2
2.1.3
Patch 2.2
Patch 2.2.2
Patch 2.3
Patch 2.3.2
Patch 2.4
Patch 2.4.1
Patch 2.4.2
Patch 2.4.3
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Series 2.0
Patch 2.0.1
General
* All players will have their talent points reimbursed and will have access to new talents throughout their trees; this includes the 41-point talents. Several new abilities have also been added for all classes.
* All pets will now receive a percentage of their master's armor, spell damage, spell resistances, attack power, and stamina.
* Low-level spells cast by high-level players will receive smaller bonuses from +healing and +spell damage.
* HoTs, DoTs, and channeled spells have been re-balanced to receive a more appropriate (higher) percentage of +spell damage and +healing.
* HoTs from different sources will now stack (i.e. multiple druids can cast the Rejuvenation spell on 1 target).
* New item property "Resilience" has been introduced. Resilience reduces your chance to be the victim of a critical strike, and reduces the amount of damage critical strikes do to you.
* Weapon Skill now does the following:
- Weapon skill will no longer reduce the percentage damage lost due to glancing.
- The player will gain 0.1% to their critical strike rating per weapon skill against monsters above their level.
* When casting a buff on a low level target, the appropriate rank of the buff will automatically be applied.
* In PvP, Crowd Control effects will last no longer than 12 seconds instead of the full duration, with a chance of a heartbeat resist.
Hunters
* Traps can be set while in combat, but require a 2 second arming time.
* "Auto shot" will be automatically enabled if the Hunter steps out of melee range while in combat with target.
* 1 Agility will now grant 1 Ranged Attack Power.
* "Auto shot" is now reset when casting Aimed Shot.
* "The Beast Within's" Bonus damage caused has been reduced to 10%, but now also reduces the mana cost of all spells by 20%.
* Freezing Traps will now cancel combat when cast.
User Interface
* The Hunter ability, "Mend Pet," will now turn red when a pet is out of range.
Bugs
* Fixed an issue where effects with 100% chance to be applied were being resisted.
* Fixed an issue that was putting Hunters back into combat when they have the "Spirit Bond" Talent or have the Cryptstalker set bonus.
* Player pets will no longer attack CC'ed targets while in Passive mode
* The Hunter, "Auto Shot," ability will no longer activate on resurrection.
* You will no longer die when Feign Death is finished channeling.
* "Scatter Shot" will now properly do damage even if the target is immune to the confuse effect.
* "Aspect of the Cheetah" will now properly trigger with absorbed damage.
* "Beastmaster's Gloves" will now give the proper 2% crit chance for Hunter pets.
Known Issues:
Hunter
* The troll tame beast quest cannot be completed unless the taming rod is equipped.
* Silencing Shot does not activate Auto-Shot after using the ability.
* The pet UI bar is appearing on screen, despite the pet not being resurrected with the Hunter while in a battleground.
* Readiness isn't resetting the cooldown on Wyvern Sting and Flare.
* Hunter serpent pet animations are not correctly animating at long range.
* Casting Revive Pet while having an active hunter pet will immediately dismiss the pet.
Starting from the top:
Pets receive attribute scaling. For us the stats that scale are mainly resistances, armor, stamina, and attack power.
Resilience has been added to the game. This is Blizzard’s way to differentiate PvP and PvE gear. Changes all classes.
Crowd Control effects also received duration nerfs with this patch.
Weapon skills (this includes ranged) will now grant some static bonus per skill level, making it important to level weapon skills.
For Hunter changes, some of these changes last until present day, such as being able to set traps in combat and auto shot automatically starting after leaving melee range. Take note that traps now have an arming time.
Besides that, some of the other big changes that affect Hunters are that Feign Death won’t actually kill the Hunter and that pets won’t break crowd control if on passive. Both excellent changes.
Patch 2.0.3
General
* Pets will no longer attack targets that are under the influence of crowd control (polymorph, banish, etc.).
PvP
* The last pet a player had summoned will be resummoned outside the Arena upon leaving.
Hunters
* " Multi-Shot" has had its mana cost adjusted back to a value closer to its pre-2.0.1 version.
* If your pet has been recently revived by using " Call Pet", it will no longer reset back to full health.
* If a Hunter " Wyvern Stings" an enemy already asleep from "Wyvern Sting", the "Wyvern Sting" sleep will now be reapplied correctly.
Items
* "Renataki's Charm of Beasts" no longer resets the cooldown on Arcane Shot.
* "Devilsaur Tooth" now grants your pet crit rating instead of a guaranteed crit.
Professions
* Blacksmithing/Leatherworking specialization has changed with specialization providing recipes to make powerful items that only you can wear. You can now unlearn a blacksmithing or leatherworking specialization and learn a different one by finding the appropriate NPC, paying the fee to unlearn your old specialization, and then find the new specialist to learn a new one. Also, all of the old blacksmithing/leatherworking recipes that required specialization no longer require it and can be learned by any blacksmith/leatherworker.
Bug Fixes
* Pet statistics will now appear in green when being buffed by an outside source.
* The hunter spell "Volley" has had its tooltip updated to reflect that it is channeled.
* The hunter spell "Flare" will now properly reveal Mages that used "Invisibility".
* The hunter Marksmanship ability "Silencing Shot" is now triggering the "Auto-Shot" ability after using the ability.
* "Misdirection" will now redirect the threat from "Distracting Shot".
* "Serpent Sting's" initial, non-threatening application no longer consumes a charge of Misdirection.
* "Disengage" now reduces threat on the misdirected target and also consumes one charge of "Misdirection".
* Hunter Survival talent "Wyvern Sting" at Rank 4 will now cause the correct amount of damage as indicated in the tooltip.
* The hunter Survival Talent "Readiness" will now finish the cooldown of the ability "Wyvern Sting".
Blizzard chooses to give pets a completed AI to not break crowd control (doesn’t work 100% of the time, but heck it’s still better than nothing or being forced to place the pet on Passive like in 2.0.1 right?)
Besides that, Blizzard fixed several of the bugs they acknowledged in the “Known Issues” section in 2.0.1, such as Readiness can now reset Wyvern Sting’s cooldown (take note Readiness was the 41 point Survival Talent during Burning Crusade!).
Patch 2.0.4
Nothing of note.
Patch 2.0.5
Nothing of note.
Patch 2.0.6
Hunters
* Silencing Shot now does only 50% of weapon damage instead of 75%.
* The base damage for Arcane Shot has been reduced by about 9% and the bonus damage from ranged attack power reduced from 20% to 15%.
* The bonus damage for Barrage is now 4/8/12% for ranks 1/2/3.
* The bonus damage for Improved Barrage is now 4/8/12% for ranks 1/2/3.
Bug Fixes
* Pet icons will now properly update in the Stables window. Improved the robustness of the pet action bar display. It is now less likely to be accidentally blocked by addons.
These are just some basic run-of-the-mill buffs/nerfs for Hunters. What is nice to note is they “improved” the pet action bar somehow (not sure how, to be honest).
Patch 2.0.7
General
* The amount of haste granted by a point of haste rating has been increased by about 50%.
Undocumented Changes:
Professions
* Lots of crafted items got their stats changed (Leatherworking, Tailoring, Blacksmithing, etc...). Cant list them all, since there are too many.
Blah blah blah Haste buffs blah blah blah crafted gear changes.
In all seriousness, Haste got buffed. Can’t exactly analyze how that would affect Hunters too much though I know we had a cap based on our weapon’s speed (due to Steady Shot, and the fact Autoshots cannot be used while Steady Shotting during Burning Crusade).
Patch 2.0.8
Nothing of note.
Patch 2.0.10
Items
* Corrected the level of "Marksman's Bow" to be in line with other epic reputation rewards.
* The "Marksman's Bow" now has the proper damage range.
* "Hourglass of the Unraveller" will now properly increase ranged attack power.
Some basic fixes that involved Hunters.
Patch 2.0.12
Nothing of note.
Series 2.1
Patch 2.1.0
General
* The Black Temple is now available for play and Illidan awaits. Are you prepared?
* Chance to break crowd control from damage: The increased chance for a spell to break from taking a critical strike has been removed. Instead, all targets over level 60 have a slightly larger chance to break out of crowd-controlling effects when they take damage.
Hunters
* A new Avoidance ability can now be taught to hunter pets. This effect reduces the damage they take from area of effect spells and abilities.
* A new Cobra Reflexes ability can now be taught to hunter pets. This effect increases attack speed but reduces damage.
* Arcane Shot: Casting lower ranks of Arcane Shot than your maximum rank will now reduce the bonus you receive from attack power.
* Aspect of the Cheetah/Pack: Wand damage will again correctly daze players with this effect active.
* Clever Traps now affects Snake Trap. !
* Entrapment (Survival): Effect duration reduced to 4 seconds and is now subject to diminishing returns in PvP.
* Entrapment: The tooltip has been corrected to indicate it works on Snake Trap.
* Expose Weakness: The chance for this talent to trigger has increased to 33/66/100% chance at 1/2/3 talent points.
* Ferocious Inspiration: This ability will now trigger Kill Command correctly.
* Flare cooldown increased to 20 seconds, and duration reduced to 20 seconds.
* Frenzy: This talent can now trigger from Kill Command.
* Frost Trap: This trap no longer breaks stealth from its slowing effect.
* Go for the Throat no longer causes additional threat.
* Hunter's Mark: This ability now becomes stronger each time the target is struck by a ranged attack.
* Improved Hunter's Mark: Adjusted the tooltip to indicate this talent only grants melee attack power equal to the base ranged attack power on the Hunter's Mark.
* Kill Command has been removed from the global cooldown. The shout animation has been removed.
* Kill Command: This ability will now still work even when your pet is out of your line of sight.
* Readiness: Now resets the cooldown on Misdirection.
* Revive Pet: The tooltip has been adjusted to indicate the pet returns with a percentage of its base health. It will not get an increased percentage of the bonus health it receives from a percentage of its master's stamina.
* Scatter Shot: This ability will now trigger Kill Command when it critically strikes.
* Scorpid Poison: Ranks of this ability now appear in correct order in the pet training window.
* Survival Instincts now also increase attack power by 2/4%.
* The quest creature, Death Ravager, is no longer able to be tamed.
* The Razorfang Ravager can now be tamed.
Hunter Mend Pet/Improved Mend Pet Changes
* Replaced the current Mend Pet channel spell with an instant cast heal over time.
* No combat reset, resets global cooldown
* The mana cost has been reduced and the heal value increased.
* Duration on Heal Over Time increased to 15 seconds in 3 second increments.
* Changed the graphic to better represent the Heal Over Time effect on the pet.
* The Mend Pet heal over time buff is now able to be dispelled.
* Bonus healing gear will no longer effect Mend Pet.
* Added a 10% and 20% reduction to the mana cost of Mend Pet in Improved Mend Pet talent (Beast Mastery).
Pets
* Abilities and items that are triggered when you kill a target are also now triggered when your pet kills a target.
* Fixed the amount of happiness lost when you dismiss a Nether Ray pet.
* Voidwalkers will stop while they are consuming shadows.
* Warlock and Hunter pets will now be automatically dismissed when you summon a mount. These pets will return on dismount. This does not affect pet happiness for Hunters.
* Warlock and Hunter pets will now be automatically dismissed when you untalent.
Item
* Devilsaur Tooth: This item has been reverted to pre-Burning Crusade design, granting an automatic critical strike to your pet's next attack.
Professions:
Engineering
* 11 new epic goggles have been introduced at 350 engineering skill and are available from the trainer. They range from cloth to plate, and have a variety of stats to appeal to most talent specs.
Additional Profession Changes
* You can now unspecialize in tailoring and alchemy, and then select a new specialization. This is a repeatable choice, but costs gold each time.
User Interface
* Hunter Pets now display their spell damage bonus on the pet pane. The actual effect will nearly always be less than the bonus listed as it depends on the bonus coefficient of the spell the pet is using.
* Hunters now have a UI option Auto Attack/Auto Shot that if turned off means that the hunter will not automatically switch between ranged attack and melee attack difficulty when the range changes.
* Party members will no longer see a hunter who is feigning death as actually dead.
Bug Fixes
* Player pets can no longer attack PvP players while not being flagged for PvP.
* In battlegrounds, pets with a damage over time spell will no longer continue to attack the caster after Resurrection.
Undocumented Changes:
Hunter
* Concussive Shot has a very distinct look - now it looks like a shadowy arrow when shot instead of looking like arcane shot.
PvP
* A gear-matching system has been implemented to battlegrounds. When queuing up to a battleground, you are much less likely to meet opponents with largely inferior or superior gear than yours.
Bug Reports
* Pets sometimes die when you mount up on Netherwing Ledge while under the Dragonmaw illusion.
Starting from the top. You are not prepared! Now that we got that joke out of the way, crowd controls that have a chance to break on damage got nerfed a bit more. This is effectively a buff to our own crowd controls that break on damage no matter what, since the differentiation is becoming smaller.
Hunter pets are now harder to kill, which is excellent. The new avoidance ability was such a success it was given to virtually every permanent player-controlled pet imaginable in the end. Cobra Strikes is also an interesting new passive that increases pet attack speed at the cost of damage (dps increase) that eventually becomes staple for Hunter pets.
The bolding on Clever Traps is for my own reference, so just ignore that.
There’s also the rather infamous Flare nerf. Flares used to have a 30 second duration and a 10 second cooldown, but this simple change made it so only one Flare could be active at a given time.
The change to Kill Command ultimately resulted in a “one-button” rotation for all Beast Mastery Hunters everywhere and there are some other balance changes (though BM will be the only really viable spec for Hunters).
In this patch Mend Pet also got a revamp into the wonderful healing-over-time effect that it is today. Though it was changed to a hard number and it remained that way for quite awhile, it sure as heck beat channeling healing to the pet for a large amount of time to keep it alive (though Mend Pet no longer scaled with bonus healing as well).
Take note of the pet change where when a pet kills the target “on kill” procs will activate.
In addition, after many patches, Hunters have finally received the ability to make Auto Shot stop when switching targets – a much needed change.
Besides that, nothing else is really significant.
Patch 2.1.1
Nothing of note.
Patch 2.1.2
General
* Improved Mend Pet, Abolish Disease, and Abolish Poison no longer play sounds when there is nothing to dispel.
Hunters
* Fixed bug with Misdirection where sometimes only two attacks were redirected instead of three.
* Entrapment: This talent will no longer causes Hunter to stand up or stop eating and drinking when it procs.
* Improved Mend Pet: This ability will no longer cause Hunters to stand or to interrupt eating and drinking.
* Poison Spit: These abilities will now appear in the correct order in the pet training menu.
* Scatter Shot: This ability will now trigger Thrill of the Hunt.
* Thunderstomp: These abilities will now appear in the correct order in the pet training menu.
Items
* PvP Trinkets: , , Medallion of the Alliance, and Medallion of the Horde have all been redesigned. The trinkets for all classes now have the same effect: Dispels all movement impairing effects and all effects that cause loss of control of your character.
Nothing too significant to see here. Just a few bug fixes.
Patch 2.1.3
Undocumented Changes:
* Hunter pets got swimming animation (instead of walking\teleporting underwater).
It’s a minor change, but this is why pets swim.
Series 2.2
Patch 2.2.0
General
* Voice Chat - The new Voice Chat feature is now available in game. Players will need to go into the options menu under Sound & Voice to activate it. Volume sliders are available for the microphone, speakers, and game-audio fade (which automatically lowers the game audio when a voice communication is received), as is a “push-to-talk” setting. Right-clicking on a player’s name now includes the option to mute or unmute that player. Muting another player blocks all voice chat from him or her; the ignore feature now blocks both voice chat and text chat from that player.
* Haste: Haste has been rebalanced. It has returned to the ratios from the launch of Burning Crusade. Melee attacks and spell casts will now benefit at identical rates from haste. This change results in a reduction in the benefit of haste for melee attacks and an increase in the benefit for spellcasters.
* Power Regeneration: Any effect which triggers a change in your rate of power regeneration (Mana, Rage, Energy, Focus) will now cause an immediate reward of some power at the old rate of increase, and then begin new “ticks” of power at the new rate approximately 2 seconds later. This was done to improve functionality of abilities such as Evocation and Innervate so that they did not have wasted “ticks”.
* Pets are now affected by Paladin greater blessings.
* Kill Triggered Effects: Effects that trigger from killing your target will no longer trigger from killing your pet.
* Daze: Defense skill will no longer reduce the chance players have to receive the Daze effect when attacked from behind by enemies. "The Daze change was NOT implemented in this patch and was pulled."
Hunters:
* Aspect of the Cheetah: This ability will now cause Hunters to become dazed when struck while sitting.
* Aspect of the Pack: This ability will now cause party members to become dazed when struck while sitting.
* Aspect of the Viper: This ability has received a slight redesign. The amount of mana regained will increase as the Hunter’s percentage of mana remaining decreases. At about 60% mana, it is equivalent to the previous version of Aspect of the Viper. Below that margin, it is better (up to twice as much mana as the old version); while above that margin, it will be less effective. The mana regained never drops below 10% of intellect every 5 sec. or goes above 50% of intellect every 5 sec.
* Freezing Trap and Scare Beast duration against PvP targets has been reduced to 10 seconds.
* Hunter's Mark: The duration remaining graphic will now display properly for Hunter's Mark after it has been refreshed on a target, and will properly consume mana when recasting it to refresh its duration.
* Kill Command will not charge the hunter mana if their pet is on passive.
* Kill Command no longer affects the Hunter’s current target.
* Misdirection: Items used while Misdirection is active will now consume a charge correctly.
* Steady Shot: The tooltip stating the percentage of Attack Power gained by Steady Shot was inaccurate and has been corrected. The damage remains unchanged.
* Volley: This spell is now affected by area damage caps. Its bonus damage coefficients have also been increased. It also correctly consumes charges of Misdirection.
* Hunter pets Raptors can now learn Dash.
I put the voice chat implementation here so people can have a nice foothold on what patch this is.
Haste got changed back to its old scaling, but now works the same way for all classes.
The pets landing a killing blow will not longer trigger “killing blow” proc effects once again. I don’t know why they bothered to implement all this stuff when they revert it within a few patches (this happens quite a lot in general).
Aspect of the Viper got changed so that at lower levels of mana the regeneration is higher (it was passive mana regeneration back then). This allows Aspect twisting so that Aspect of the Hawk can be used at higher levels of mana and Aspect of the Viper is used to rapidly regenerate mana. However, from what I heard this didn’t work out so well. Fortunately, Blizzard does perfect this in the future, as you will see.
The “PvP duration” nerf took effect this patch, and so Hunter’s long duration crowd controls were also thus affected (reduced to 10 seconds from 12).
Area damage caps were also put into place on most AoE spells. This didn’t really affect Hunters too much because Explosive Trap was excluded, for one, and Volley had a 1 minute cooldown at this time anyways. Hunter AoE wasn’t exactly what I’d call effective until Wrath of the Lich King.
Patch 2.2.2
* ZOMG BREWFEST. Otherwise, nothing Hunter-related.
Patch 2.2.3
Nothing of note.
Series 2.3
Patch 2.3.0
General
* Zul'Aman is a 10-player, level 70 outdoor instance located in the Ghostlands. Players will be able to confront six new bosses including the Forest Troll Warlord Zul'jin.
* Guild Banks have been introduced. The Guild Bank will allow players with the appropriate permissions to store items and money for use by the rest of the guild.
* Healing reduction effects will now affect all health drain spells and abilities (e.g. will reduce health gained from ).
* Healing: Almost all items and enchantments that provide bonus healing now also provide a smaller number (approximately 1/3) of bonus spell damage. There are a few items and enchantments where this was not possible, such as random-stat items and Zul'Gurub enchantments, but this is now the case on virtually all other items.
* On Kill Effects: Items and abilities that trigger on killing an enemy will no longer trigger on using an ability that kills your pet.
* Weapon Skill: All items and abilities that granted weapon skill have been changed. In most cases, they were converted to expertise or expertise rating. Ranged attacks do not benefit from expertise, so ranged weapon skill has generally been replaced by critical strike bonuses or hit bonuses. In a few cases, talents have been changed to other effects to avoid granting players excessive amounts of expertise.
* Pets will try to get behind their targets when engaging in melee combat.
Racial Abilities
* Dwarf: Gun Specialization now increases chance to critically hit with Guns by 1% rather than increasing weapon skill.
* Gnome: Escape Artist cooldown increased to 1 min, 45 sec.
* Humans: Mace Skill now increases the critical strike chance with maces and two-handed maces by 1%.
* Humans: Sword Skill now increases the critical strike chance with swords and two-handed swords by 1%.
* Orcs: Axe Skill now increases the critical strike chance with axes and two-handed axes by 1%.
* Troll: Bow and Thrown Specialization now increases chance to critically hit with those weapons by 1% rather than increasing weapon skill.
Hunter
* Aimed Shot (Marksmanship) now reduces healing done to that target by 50% for 10 seconds, shot time reduced by 0.5 seconds.
* Arcane Shot (Ranks 6 and above) now dispel 1 Magic effect in addition to their normal damage.
* Explosive Trap: The initial damage dealt by this trap is now also increased by 10% of your ranged attack power.
* Expose Weakness: The triggered effect from this talent will no longer use up charges of Misdirection.
* Immolation Trap: The total damage dealt by this trap is now also increased by 10% of your ranged attack power.
* Misdirection: This spell will now always be removed correctly if multiple Hunters overwrite each other's Misdirection.
* Misdirection: If a Hunter attempts to use this ability on a target which already has an active Misdirection, the spell will fail to apply due to a more powerful spell already being in effect. This will not trigger the cooldown or cost any mana.
* Readiness (Survival): This talent now finishes the cooldown on Kill Command.
* Serpent Sting, Immolation Trap and Explosive Trap all gain additional damage based on ranged attack power.
* Serpent Sting: The total damage dealt by this sting is now also increased by 10% of your ranged attack power.
* Steady Shot: Tooltip clarified to indicate base weapon damage is used in the damage calculation.
* Trueshot Aura (Marksmanship) no longer costs mana to cast and will last until cancelled.
* Wyvern Sting (Survival) is now instant cast and has a maximum duration of 10 seconds in PvP.
* Wyvern Sting: This ability will no longer be overwritten by lower ranks of Wyvern Sting.
Items
* Black Bow of the Betrayer: The triggered effect from this item will no longer use up charges of . In addition, the triggered effect will no longer break crowd control effects.
* Gladiator's Chain Gauntlets: The bonus damage on these gloves has been increased from 4% to 5%.
User Interface
* All players now have a tracking bubble on their minimap. From that menu you can select a specific type of vendor or npc to look for or you can select a specific tracking type if your character has tracking. Yes this means that hunters can take all of those tracking buttons off of their action bars.
* There are now options for displaying health and mana values on your health/mana bars for you/your party/your target and to display that information either as percentages or as numbers.
* When you are possessing a target (Priest Mind Control, Eyes of the Beast, using a Steam Tonk, etc), you now get their action bar as your primary action bar rather than having a mini action bar above your normal action bar.
Undocumented Changes: Hunter
* Untalented firing range of 5-35 yards, eliminating the deadzone.
* It is no longer possible to keep 2 targets frozen at the same time.
* Viper Sting can no longer be applied to enemies who don't use mana.
* It is no longer possible to Feign Death to leave combat during raid boss encounters, it still wipes aggro to avoid death. Feign Death still works as before on Non-boss mobs.
There are a LOT of changes in favor of Hunters this patch. Let’s dive into them, shall we?
Firstly, however, we start with a pet change that helped and hurt pet-using classes. The reason it helped was because pet melee attacks wouldn’t get parried quite as often, as enemies cannot parry (players can’t dodge either) when attacked from behind. Unfortunately, some mobs also like to get behind the pet, which causes the pet and the monster to dance up to 40 yards from the original position of engagement because the pet is simply tanking the mob, but the AI is telling it to act “like a Rogue and do it from behind.”
With the implementation of Expertise, some racials were changed in favor of Hunters as well. For instance, Trolls get a crit bonus while using a Bow. These would last until present day (more or less).
Aimed Shot got a healing reduction effect! This was an amazing change for Hunters that gave them a bit more utility in the PvE and PvP (mostly PvP) fronts.
Arcane Shot got a rather asinine (in my opinion) buff. It now dispels magic effects and does damage. It’s essentially the Warrior’s Shield Slam ability, except it is done at range and not subject to physical damage reduction. You’ll see this doesn’t last too long. It was simply far too strong.
Explosive Trap and Immolation Trap also get a minor buff, making traps “more threatening.” I actually don’t know how much more threatening they got, but the buffs are always good. Apparently Serpent Sting was also affected.
Trueshot Aura finally becomes a permanent buff as well and becomes free to cast, like a Paladin Aura!
The “tracking bubble” was added into this patch as well. However, despite the fact it was intended to allow Hunters to free about 8 spells from their actionbars, the tracking bubble was rather awkward to use (from my PoV) and it was just more ideal to keep Track abilities on the actionbars or bind them to quickly switch between Track abilities, which is essential in both PvE and PvP. It was still nice to see they cared enough to give it to us. You’ll see Blizzard does try to make it more useful for Hunters later.
And now for the most gamebreaking change for Hunters. THEIR DEADZONE GOT REMOVED! Actually, this was quite amazing, as melee attacks did do a pretty decent amount back then, but Hunters had an area where anyone could stand and avoid all damage coming from the Hunter. This also caused Hunters to learn to jump out of the new deadzone (minimum range) and shoot people quickly before opponents caught up with them, among other things.
However, in exchange for this amazing change, Freezing Trap and Feign Death got “nerfed.” (Don’t worry, Freezing Trap can be used on multiple targets at present time.)
Patch 2.3.2
Hunter
* Arcane Shot: Ranks 1-5 will once again deal bonus damage based on attack power.
* Aspect of the Viper effect increased
* Freezing Trap is no longer limited to one target at a time.
* Pet leveling speed has been increased.
Warlock
* We're in your PTRs, bugging up Seed of Corruption.
Items
* Hearthstone: The cast time on this item is no longer affected by spell haste.
Aspect of the Viper’s effect got stronger, and Freezing Trap got unnerfed. Not much to mention besides that.
Click here for an explanation of the Warlock section joke =D.
Patch 2.3.3
Nothing of note.
2.4
Patch 2.4.0
General:
* Fury of the Sunwell: The glorious fount of arcane energy known as the Sunwell empowered the high elves for millennia, until the death knight Arthas laid siege to the elven kingdom and corrupted its sacred energies. Seeing no other alternative, a band of survivors led by Prince Kael'thas destroyed the ancient fount. Over time the surviving elves fell prey to a crippling magical withdrawal.
Now, promising salvation for his people, Kael'thas has returned. Soon the Sunwell will shine once again, but whether the sacred fount will usher in deliverance or destruction remains to be seen.
* In Memoriam: Gary Gygax
Blizzard Entertainment would like to dedicate the patch in memory of Gary Gygax. His work on D&D was an inspiration to us in many ways and helped spark our passion for creating games of our own. As avid D&D players and fellow game developers, we were all saddened by the news of his passing; we feel we’ve lost a true adventuring companion. Thanks for everything and farewell, Gary. You will be missed.
* Spell Haste: Spell haste now reduces the global cooldown on spells, down to a minimum of 1 second. This change does not apply to melee and ranged abilities.
* Resilience: Now reduces the magnitude of mana draining effects by the same amount that it reduces critical strike damage. The Tooltip has been revised to reflect this.
* Spirit-Based Mana Regeneration: This system has been adjusted so that as your intellect rises, you will regenerate more mana per point of spirit.
* Weapon Skill: Points will be gained faster in weapon skills for levels 1 through 59.
* Non-self % based haste spells will no longer stack with each other.
Hunter
* Equipping a thrown weapon while in the middle of an Auto-Shot will no longer cause animation issues.
* Casting Flare while in any way not visible, will no longer cause your flare to be invisible to other players.
* Hunter's Mark: Hunters with will now properly overwrite Hunter’s Mark cast by Hunters without the talent.
* Improved Mend Pet now has a 25/50 chance to remove one Curse, Disease, Magic, or Poison effect, up from 15/50%.
* The stamina tooltip for hunter pets will now display the proper health increase.
* Track spells will now persist after death.
* Hunters will no longer spin around if they cast Aimed Shot or Steady Shot while facing away from their target.
User Interface
* Spell haste and Armor Penetration will now display on the character sheet. (Armor Penetration displays in the hit rating section). Spell Penetration now displays under the spell hit section.
* There is now a UI option to display free bag space. When turned on, your backpack will display the total number of free spaces available in all your bags.
Bug Fixes
* Snake Trap will no longer affect non-combat flagged players.
* Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury will now display its bow animations correctly.
Starting from the top:
Sunwell got implemented. This was possibly one of the best raids ever implemented in World of Warcraft in my opinion.
Also, RIP Gary Gygax (I actually remember reading this part in the patch notes. It made me sad).
Anyways, on the main topic:
Spell Haste got changed. This doesn’t affect us, but it’s good to know when significant changes happen across the board like that (haste reduces global cooldown on casters).
Mana drains are affected by resilience. This hurts our Viper Sting a bit in PvP.
Not too many changes to note in the Hunters section, except that apparently Aimed Shot and Steady Shot don’t cause the Hunter to face the target (Steady Shot does at present time, so I’m not sure if this really went through) as well as the fact all tracking abilities persist through death, which is a good change (saves time =D).
Besides that, the legendary Snake Trap bug got fixed. This “Snake Trap bug” essentially was that a Hunter could flag for PvP and Snake Trap a target that is not flagged for PvP. This would cause the snakes to attack the target even though they were not flagged, which was quite a devastating bug that lasted quite a long time. Not sure why it was worded the way it was, but that’s what it fixed from my recollections. I’m probably describing the bug incorrectly, but the point is, Snake Trap had some sort of nasty bug that made it a powerful griefing tool.
Patch 2.4.1
Hunter
* Tranquilizing Shot no longer incorrectly restricts use of other Hunter abilities in specific situations.
Not sure what this means.
Patch 2.4.2
Hunter
* Aspect of the Viper: This ability now grants an additional amount of mana each 5 seconds equal to 35% of the hunter's level.
* Boar Charge: This ability will no longer make Growl cast immediately after it generates excessive threat.
* The pet ability Growl will no longer scale with pet Attack Power and now scales with the hunter’s Attack Power.
* Dire Ravens in Blade's Edge Mountains are now tameable.
* Scare Beast: The range on this spell has been increased to 30 yards. It still has a cast time of 1.5 seconds.
* Tamed Drywallow Snappers now will know Bite 5 (instead of Claw 5.)
Aspect of the Viper got buffed again. See the evolution it’s going through?
The reason I bolded the Scare Beast change is because at some point in PTR the cast time was Instant for some reason. Hunters believed it was intended to be this way but apparently it was not.
Patch 2.4.3
General
* Dispel effects will no longer attempt to remove effects that have 100% dispel resistance.
* Mounts at 30? Yes, it’s true: Apprentice Riding and mounts are now available at level 30. Training costs 35g .
Hunter
* Growl: Pets will no longer generate additional threat from this ability based on attack power buffs cast on them. Attack power buffs on their master will still indirectly increase the threat generated by the pet's Growl.
* Pet Aggro: Pets will no longer generate threat immediately from being summoned.
* Scare Beast: This spell will now be limited correctly to one target.
Items
* Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury is now Unique as intended.
User Interface
* Invisible players with Hunter's Mark can see the hunter that put the mark on them.
Bug Fixes
* Hunters: Using an instant ability after Steady Shot will no longer lock out auto shot.
* Hunter Snake Trap will no longer break players out of stealth if the snakes pass near the stealthed character.
* Hunters: Concussive Shot will now properly have a chance to proc Bow of Searing Arrows.
* Passive pets will no longer attack due to AoE taunt spells.
The final patch for Burning Crusade. Firstly, a general change regarding the riding skill. Some players believed riding skill gotten before 40 was implemented during Wrath, but in fact it was implemented in this patch (was changed to 20 later on for 60% riding, as you’ll see later).
Scare Beast got nerfed a bit and Growl got changed somehow.
Thori’dal is unique? But I wanted 3!
Besides that, just a few bug fixes.
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Wrath of the Lich King
Wrath of the Lich King Patches:
Patch 3.0.2
Patch 3.0.3
Patch 3.0.8
Patch 3.0.8a
Patch 3.0.9
Patch 3.1
Patch 3.1.2
Patch 3.1.3
Patch 3.2
Patch 3.2.2
Patch 3.3
Patch 3.3.3
Patch 3.3.5
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Series 3.0
Patch 3.0.2
General
* All players will have their talent points reimbursed and will have access to new talents throughout their trees; this includes the 51-point talents. Several new spells and abilities have been added for all classes. Players will need to visit their class trainer to learn new spells.
* Hit Rating, Critical Strike Rating, and Haste Rating now modify both melee attacks and spells.
* Spell casting and spell channeling pushback has been changed to the following:
__
* When casting a spell:
__
-The first and second hit will add .5 secs each to the cast time.
-All hits after the second will have no effect.
__
* When channeling a spell:
__
- The first and second hit reduces current duration by 25% of total duration each.
- All hits after the second will have no effect.
__
* Spell Power:
__
- All items and effects which grant bonuses to spell damage and spell healing are being consolidated into a single stat, Spell Power. This stat will appear with the same values found on items which grant "increased spell damage and healing" such as on typical Mage and Warlock itemization.
__
+ For classes which do not heal, they should see no change in the character sheet other than new tooltip wording.
__
- Healing characters will see their bonus healing numbers on the character sheet decrease, however, all healing spells have been modified to receive more benefit from Spell Power than they received from bonus healing, with a net effect of no change to the amount healed by their spells. Some talents have had to be rebalanced to accommodate this change, but the amount healed will remain roughly the same. In addition, some talents will provide only healing spell power.
Hunter
* All aspects now have a 1 second global cooldown, down from a 1.5 global cooldown.
* All pet families now have one unique ability. New abilities have been added for families such as bears and sporebats.
* Stablemasters can now accommodate two additional pets.
* Pets now have their own trees. These can be accessed via the talent panel.
* Aimed Shot mana cost has been reduced from 11% of base mana to 8%, casting time reduced from 2.5 sec to instant. Cooldown increased from 6 seconds to 10 seconds and damage reduced.
* Animal Handler (Beast Mastery): No longer increases speed while mounted, but now reduces the cooldown of your Master's Call ability by 5/10 sec.
* Arcane Shot: No longer dispels magic effects.
* Aspects now no longer cost mana.
* Aspect of the Beast: Now increases melee attack power by 10% for the hunter and the hunter's pet.The hunter can't be tracked while using this Aspect. Only one Aspect can be active at a time.
* Aspect of the Viper - The hunter takes on the aspect of the viper, causing ranged attacks to regenerate mana but reducing total damage done by 50%. Mana is gained based on ranged weapons speed. Only one Aspect can be active at a time.
* Aspect of the Wild (Rank 4) now increases Nature resistance by 130, (up from 70.)
* Avoidance, Dash / Dive and Cobra Reflexes are now pet talents instead of pet skills.
* Bestial Swiftness is now a pet talent tree talent, and has been removed from the Beast Mastery Hunter tree.
* Bite now has no cooldown, does the same damage and costs the same Focus as Claw, so works as a Focus dump.
* Clever Traps (Survival) has been renamed " Trap Mastery."
* Combat Experience (Marksmanship): Now grants 3/6% Agility, up from 1/2%.
* Concussive Barrage (Marksmanship): Can now proc from Volley and Multi-shot attacks.
* Counterattack: Damage increased by 20%, and now also scales with your Ranged Attack Power.
* Deterrence (Survival): Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, and now also increases your chance to resist spells by 60%. Now has a new spell effect.
* Disengage: This ability has been re-designed. Now leaps the Hunter backwards up to 13 yards. 30 second cooldown. Disengage now also only has one rank (rank 1).
* Distracting Shot: This shot now "taunts" the target onto the Hunter. The taunt effect will last 6 seconds. Distracting Shot now only has one rank (rank 1).
* Every hunter pet can learn Growl, Cower and either Bite or Claw (never both).
* Focused Aim no longer affects Aimed Shot and now increases chance to hit by 1/2/3 %.
* Focused Fire (Beast Mastery): Now increases the critical strike chance of your Kill Command by 10/20/30% while Kill Command is active. This effect can stack up to 3 times, but diminishes for each charge of Kill Command.
* Freezing Arrow now breaks on damage.
* Freezing Trap now breaks on damage.
* Hunter pets can now learn talents in one of three trees depending on family. Pets gain talent points starting at level 20 and earn an extra talent point every 4 levels.
* If a hunter tames a pet that is more than five levels beneath their own level, the pet will then have their level increased to five levels beneath the hunter's own level.
* Improved Arcane Shot (Marksmanship): Now increases the damage done by your Arcane Shot by 5/10/15%.
* Improved Feign Death (Survival): This talent has been replaced with Survival Tactics.
* Improved Hunter's Mark (Marksmanship): Now a 3-point talent, and now increases the amount of attack power granted by your Hunter's Mark ability by 10/20/30% and reduces the mana cost of your Hunter's Mark ability by 33/66/100%.
* Improved Stings (Marksmanship): Now a 3-point talent, down from 5-points.
* Kill Command: This ability now increases the damage done by your pet's special abilities by 60%. Each attack will reduce the damage bonus by 20%. 1 minute cooldown.
* Kill Shot damage slightly reduced.
* Kindred Spirits will no longer stack with other movement enhancing buffs.
* Lock and Load now has a chance to proc periodic damage by 2/4/6% (down from 5/10/15%.)
* Loyalty, Training Points and the hunter button no longer exist. Hunter pets can now learn all skills at their level. They will get new ranks automatically as they gain levels.
* Marked for Death now increases damage done by ranged and by pets special abilities by 4% on marked targets (down from 8%.)
* Master Tactician (Survival): Chance to proc increased to 10%, up from 6%.
* Mongoose Bite: No longer requires you to dodge in order to use this ability.
* Monster Slaying (Survival) and Humanoid Slaying (Survival) has been combined into "Improved Tracking".
* Multi-shot mana cost has been increased slightly to 9% base mana (up from 8%.)
* New Talent - Aspect Mastery (Beast Mastery)
* New Talent - Hunter vs. Wild (Survival): Increases you and your pet's attack power and ranged attack power equal to 10/20/30% of your total Stamina.
* New Talent - Improved Tracking (Survival): Increases all damage done to targets that are being tracked 1/2/3/4/5%.
* New Talent - Lock and Load (Survival): You have a 33/66/100% chance when you trap a target and a 10/20/30% chance when you sting a target to cause your next 3 Arcane Shot or Explosive Shot spells to trigger no cooldown, cost no mana and consume no ammo.
* New Talent - Survival Tactics (Survival): Reduces the chance your Feign Death ability and all trap spells will be resisted by 2/4%, and reduces the cooldown of your Disengage ability by 2/4 sec.
* New Talent - T.N.T. (Survival): Your Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap and Explosive Shot have a 5/10/15% to stun targets for 2 sec when they deal damage, and increases the critical strike chance of your Explosive Shot and Explosive Trap by 5/10/15%.
* Pathfinding (Beast Mastery): Now also increases the movement speed while mounted by 5/10%.
* Point of No Escape reduced to a 2 point talent and now affects Freezing Arrow. The critical strike chance has increased to 3/6% (up from 2/4/6%.)
* Rapid Killing (Marksmanship): This will now proc off Chimera Shot, but no longer works with auto-shot.
* Readiness (Marksmanship): Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, down from 5 minutes, and has been moved to Tier 5 of the Marksmanship Tree from the Survival Tree.
* Savage Strikes (Survival): Now includes Counterattack.
* Scatter Shot has been moved from the Marksmanship Tree to Tier 3 of the Survival Tree.
* Silencing Shot (Marksmanship): This spell will now interrupt the current spell being cast on the target and lock out that school for 3 sec if the target is immune to silence effects.
* Spirit Bond (Beast Mastery): Also increases healing done to you and your pet by 5/10%.
* Steady Shot now uses ammo. In result, its bonus damage has been slightly reduced. Players can notice a damage increase based upon what ammo they use.
* Steady Shot: Now has a 2.0 cast time, up from 1.5.
* Surefooted (Survival) now reduces the duration of movement impairing effects by 16/25/50% (instead of resist % chance). Moved from tier 4 to tier 2 and no longer increases hit chance.
* Survival Instincts (Survival): This has been moved to tier-2, up from tier 6.
* Survivalist (Survival): Now increases your total Stamina, instead of your total Health.
* The arming time has been reduced to 1 second, from 2 seconds for all traps.
* T.N.T. has been moved from Tier 2 to Tier 4.
* Tranquilizing Shot: Cooldown reduced to 15 seconds (down from 20), and now dispels Enrage and Magic effects.
* Trap Mastery (Survival) is now an 11-point talent and has been moved from tier 3 to tier 9 and increases the duration by 30% fo both Freezing Trap and Frost Trap.
* Trueshot Aura - This aura is now raid-wide and now increases all ranged and melee attack power by 10%. In addition, this spell now only has one rank. All other ranks have been removed.
* Wing Clip: No longer does damage.
User Interface
* A new Aggro Warning is now available and currently functioning in dungeons.
* Focus Frame is now available. Players will be able to right click on any unit frame and select "Set Focus". The focus frame will only display when the focus is set. Players may also set a "Focus Cast Key" in the options/combat panel that can be bound to shift, alt, or ctrl. When holding the focus cast key and triggering an action, the action will be performed on your focus and not on your target.
This patch produces some of the biggest changes for Hunters, revamping them heavily (other classes also received the revamp as well).
In General changes, ratings are now consolidated, allowing Blizzard to itemize gear more simplistically and reducing the amount of gear that needs to be made. The result is competition for gear pieces by multiple classes.
Spell pushback got changed. This affects Hunters because of Steady Shot and Volley (and Cobra Shot, later on, as this change carries through to present day). Now abilities won’t constantly be pushed back and has a maximum amount abilities can be pushed back.
In to Hunter changes, aspects trigger a 1 second global cooldown, allowing switching to not be quite as damaging to Hunter dps. Aspect twisting is something that is now commonplace for Hunters, whether it’s Hawk and Fox or Hawk and Viper, as you’ll soon see.
Pets become quite special for Hunters now. Not only do they receive talent trees with specific talents based on what “type” (Ferocity, Tenacity, Cunning) of pet it is, but each pet also receives a unique ability with a special effect. Some of these overlap, but overall, Hunter Pets get an amazing buff. In addition, the “Training Points” system is removed because of the Pet Talent Trees. To further encourage Hunters go far and wide to get more pets to expand their repertoire, the stable can now hold 4 pets. The pet abilities Bite and Claw also become one and the same: a Focus dump. The ability “Smack” also becomes a Focus dump used by some pets later on.
Aimed Shot becomes instant as opposed to having a cast time. The cooldown also is normalized to 10 seconds. This makes it much more deadly due to the potent healing reduction effect it has.
Arcane Shot, unfortunately, got a nerf here. Told you it wouldn’t last long. It no longer dispels magic. Instead, Tranquilizing Shot dispels magic and enrage (was previously “Frenzy”) effects. Old Frenzy effects that were dispelled by Tranquilizing Shot became Enrage effects as well.
Aspect of the Viper gets a revamp here to its “perfect” state. It now causes mana to be restored by attacking. It doesn’t last too long though, and gets changed slightly.
Deterrence gets an interesting change that allows the Hunter to resist magic for the duration it is active (a prolonged Cloak of Shadows that is a little weaker).
Disengage becomes very powerful and now allows the Hunter to jump back. It previously was a melee attack that reduced the threat level on the target. Theoretically, it also made the Hunter leave combat, but Feign Death was better for that. The old Disengage was a pretty poor ability in comparison to this new one.
Distracting Shot becomes a good support tool as well. It taunts the target rather than generating large amounts of threat. Unfortunately, as a result, Misdirection no longer works with it.
Regarding Freezing Trap and Freezing Arrow (Trap Launcher – Freezing Trap without using Freezing Trap) “breaking on damage:” In the PTR the traps had a chance to break on damage, but it was reverted, and that was noted here.
Hunter pets also became easier to train as tamed pets could be no lower than the Hunter’s level minus 5. It wasn’t perfect, and it still makes Hunters like Pokemon trainers, but it was better than training a level 3 Cat from scratch (lolpuns). Another nice bonus is due to pet talents, it's much easier to keep your pet happy with you and save on having to buy stacks of food just to feed your pet and keep its happiness up!
Kill Command got changed from an actual attack into a relatively short cooldown. It was pretty mediocre, to be honest. It was simply macroed and forgotten until Cataclysm.
Mongoose Bite no longer requires the Hunter to dodge. It is nice to have an extra bit of melee burst just in case.
Readiness became a 21-point Marksmanship talent as opposed to a 41-point Survival talent and Scatter Shot was moved to Survival.
Steady Shot uses ammo, which is a slight damage buff, even after the bonus damage nerf, as Steady Shot works off “weapon damage,” which ammo adds to. Unfortunately, the cast time is increased to 2.0 (this was probably to make Hunters stack a bit of haste).
Silencing Shot becomes an interrupting tool this patch.
Trueshot Aura becomes a generic 10% attack power buff in this patch. Fortunately, it still costs nothing to use but a global cooldown.
There’s a few more changes, and I know I missed some as this was the final iteration of the Wrath of the Lich King “pre-patch” but I’m only going to go off what was in the patch notes because if I didn’t, I’d probably use 20 posts worth of characters to go over everything Blizzard has done for Hunters in general.
Patch 3.0.3
General
* Resilience: The damage reduction component of resilience has been increased from 2 times the critical strike chance reduction to 2.2 times the critical strike chance reduction. In addition, the maximum damage reduction to a critical strike from resilience has been increased from 30% to 33%.
Racial
* Blood Fury: No longer triggers global cooldown.
* Shadowmeld: The cooldown will now start on use instead of on break.
Hunter
* Aimed Shot: Added to Barrage and Improved Barrage talent.
* Animal Handler: Now increases your pet's expertise by 5/10. (No longer increases the pet’s chance to hit.)
* Aspects now have a shared cooldown category of 1 sec and no longer have a start cooldown.
* Aspect of the Dragonhawk: New aspect added that combines the benefit of Aspect of the Monkey and Aspect of the Hawk, available at level 75 and 80.
* Aspect of the Monkey: The Dodge chance has been increased from 8% to 18%.
* Aspect of the Viper: The per attack mana regeneration has been reduced by 50% but this ability now generates 4% of maximum mana every 3 sec. In addition, the per attack regeneration now also works on melee attacks.
* Disengage now fails if you're rooted and is no longer on the global cooldown. Cooldown reduced to 25 seconds and no longer requires a target, though the hunter has to be in combat.
* Hunter vs. Wild: The attack power bonus from this talent now applies properly to Hunter pets. In addition, the bonus attack power will now be recalculated properly from equipping items.
* Improved Aspect of the Hawk: This talent no longer causes incorrect mana costs when interacting with the Rapid Recuperation and Improved Steady Shot talents.
* Mana cost of Disengage has been lowered to 5% of base mana, down from 14%.
* Pets
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- Rake (Cat), Scorpid Poison (Scorpid): Lowered damage of all ranks.
- Stampede (Rhino): Lowered the knockback to 10 yards.
- Raised the damage of exotic attacks: Spirit Strike, Lava Breath, Froststorm Breath, Acid Spit, and Stampede.
- Lowered the cost of pet specials from 25 to 20.
__
* Thrill of the Hunt: The mana gained from using this talent with Explosive Shot is now 1/3 of the normal amount per critical strike (but gets 3 opportunities per cast.)
* T.N.T.: Explosive Shot can now only trigger this talent when it is initially fired.
* Windfury Totem and Improved Icy Talons no longer affect ranged haste.
Bug Fixes
* Hunter: Ferocious Inspiration will now apply raid-wide, as intended.
* Hunter Pets
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- Sonic Blast (Bat): Will no longer ignore LoS.
- Bad Attitude (Crocolisk): Will no longer ignore the Longevity buff.
- Thunderstomp (Gorilla): Will no longer have a physical coefficient instead of a magical one.
- Gore (Boar): Fixed an issue where a wrong value was being applied.
- Savage Rend (Raptor): Corrected typos in the tooltip.
Items
* Glyph of Trueshot Aura: Now increases Aimed Shot crit chance instead of increasing attack power bonus.
Resilience gets improved a bit so that characters don’t kill each other instantly (my presumption).
A few racials get altered (Blood Fury off the global cooldown has heavy implications for PvE dps, for instance).
On Hunter changes, Aimed Shot gets a slight buff and Aspects get altered to not trigger the global cooldown (this actually failed to go through for some reason, as you’ll see later). Aspect of the Dragonhawk is also introduced to give Hunters a bit more melee survivability through insane amounts of dodge chance - a welcome implementation.
Aspect of the Viper has been nerfed a bit. Apparently it was too strong. It now has a passive regeneration component and attacks don’t regenerate mana quite as much. The good thing is melee attacks now cause mana regeneration.
Disengage gets changed a bit so it doesn’t work while rooted, but a lot of other restrictions got removed.
Some pet abilities got changed or nerfed. I remember that Cat Rake and Scorpid Poison were really powerful at the time so those nerfs make sense.
There’s not much to mention beyond that.
Patch 3.0.8
General
* Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped.
* All Silence spells now have diminishing returns. This includes: Arcane Torrent, Garrote silence effect, Improved Counterspell] effect, Improved Kick effect, Silence, Gag Order, Silencing Shot, Spell Lock, and Strangulate.
* The run speed in spirit form has been increased by 50%. Night Elves in Wisp form will now move at 75% increased speed.
* Reputation rewarded for killing mobs will no longer automatically deprecate. This means trivial mobs will continue to give out their full amounts of reputation on kill for the majority of cases in the game (level 70 creatures in Stratholme, for example, will continue to award the full amount of rep to level 80 players seeking to boost their Argent Dawn faction).
Hunter
* All Hunter pet abilities with a cooldown of 30 seconds or more are no longer on the global cooldown.
* Arcane Shot: Mana cost lowered to match the cost of Steady Shot.
* Aspect of the Wild - This aspect is now raid-wide.
* Call of the Wild: The benefit from this pet talent now applies to only the Hunter and their own pet.
* Deterrence: Design changed to grant 100% Parry and 100% chance to "deflect" spells coming from the front, but prevents the Hunter from attacking. Lasts 5 sec. 60 sec. cooldown.
* Explosive Shot: Damage increased substantially, and additional scaling added to compensate Survival Hunters for the decrease in power of Steady Shot. No longer deals damage to secondary targets.
* Improved Tracking (Survival): This talent has been slightly re-designed. Now reads: While tracking Beasts, Demons, Dragonkin, Elementals, Giants, Humanoids and Undead, all ranged damage done to those types is increased by 1/2/3/4/5%.
* Kill Shot – Cooldown reduced to 15 seconds, down from 35 sec.
* Kindred Spirits: This talent now grants only 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
* The coefficient of Rake(Cat) and Scorpid Poison (Scorpid) has been lowered.
* Readiness: No longer resets the cooldown on Bestial Wrath.
* Steady Shot: Now gains 10% of attack power as damage instead of 20%.
* Serpent's Swiftness: This talent now grants only 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet. The hunter attack speed bonus is unchanged.
* Tranquilizing Shot has had its cooldown reduced to 6 seconds, down from 15.
* Unleashed Fury: This talent now grants only 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
* Viper Sting: Now drains a percentage of maximum mana.
* Volley: The damage has been reduced on all ranks by approximately 30% (including attack power scaling).
Items
* Glyph of Deterrence: Now -10 seconds instead of -20.
Bug Fixes
Hunter
* Aspects: All aspects now have a 1 second global cooldown.
* Aspect of the Beast: Will now increase Hunter pet attack power by the correct amount.
* Aspect of the Viper: Beast Lore, Scare Beast, and Tame Beast will no longer trigger mana regeneration from this ability.
* Call of the Wild: Now only works on the pet and their own master.
* Carrion Feeder: No longer causes extremely large amounts of threat when the pet gains happiness.
* Chimera Shot: The secondary effects of this shot will now still be triggered even when the target dies from the ability's damage.
* Cower: Now longer shares a cooldown with Growl, but has its own separate cooldown.
* Dust Cloud: This pet ability will now be cast by the pet at the target instead of while they are moving toward the target.
* Marked for Death: Now works properly for Steady Shot and Glyph of Steady Shot.
* Master's Call: Now makes the pet immune to roots and snares for the duration as well, allowing the pet to break roots on the target even when the pet is rooted.
* Nether Shock: Pets will now correctly use this ability on all targets, not just mana users.
* Noxious Stings: When this talent triggers Wyvern Sting, the Wyvern Sting will now last the proper duration.
* Owl's Focus: Free abilities will no longer consume this effect.
* Prowl: This ability will no longer sometimes turn autocast on by itself.
* Sniper Training: Now increases the damage of Aimed Shot by the correct amount.
* Spirit Strike: This pet ability's duration and period have both been reduced to 6 seconds.
* Spore Cloud: This ability will now work properly.
* Swipe: The tooltip has been adjusted.
* Tracking: Entering an arena no longer disables tracking types.
* Fixed a bug that allowed Viper's Sting to target death knights. They are now invalid targets.
Okay, first we have to get something out of the way. No, I am not going to express my anger over this patch. I know I often complain about this specific patch and call it the “Great BM nerf” and some other Hunters show similar sentiment, but that is not what is supposed to be shown here. I will analyze this normally, but will point out a bit why this “nerf” was a bit over the top without slinging mud.
Starting from the general changes, “tapping,” or essentially tagging a mob, is now caused by using virtually anything on a mob that would normally aggro it to you. However, for some reason, some abilities that freeze do not seem to tag mobs like this at present day. Freezing Trap is included in this “does not tag” list (other CCs do tag mobs).
Silencing abilities are now on diminishing returns. This does affect Hunters because one could time Silencing Shot (now off the global cooldown), then use Readiness and fire another Silencing Shot for 6 seconds of silence. That is quite powerful. However, with this change it’s reduced to 4.5 seconds.
Now on to Hunter changes: A good number of pet abilities are put off the global cooldown (of the pet) to allow the pet to use its focus dump more without being forced to use a multitude of other abilities.
Aspect of the Wild becomes raid wide. To be honest, though, I don’t think there were too many fights (in Wrath of the Lich King) involving nature damage, but it’s good to have that option.
The Call of the Wild nerf actually just nerfs raid-wide damage, but doesn’t affect the Hunter or pet.
Deterrence gets redesigned to “deflect” attacks coming in from the front (spells and melee attacks, but not other ranged attacks). This is an attempt for Blizzard to give us a stronger defensive cooldown I think, but it doesn’t work out so well, as you’ll see.
Explosive Shot gets a giant buff (Survival tree). Instead of doing AoE damage all that damage is instead front-loaded onto the primary target, making Explosive Shot a powerful shot for single target dps and greatly increasing the viability of Survival in PvE, to the point where Survival Hunter is a pretty steady damage dealing spec for the entire expansion.
Improved Tracking has been improved. While tracking, damage dealt to anything the Hunter can normally track gets hit harder by the Hunter. It’s a nice damage buff against virtually everything without having to toggle the Tracking abilities constantly like before (though mechanicals in Ulduar do hurt Hunter dps a bit).
Kill Shot gets a buff (I think at this point it was also put on the global cooldown) by a heavy cooldown reduction. It also saves Hunter having to toss it into macros.
Kindred Spirits got nerfed a bit, reducing pet damage. Unleashed Fury also received the same treatment. Serpent’s Swiftness also gets nerfed so pets have a 10% attack speed bonus as opposed to 20% when fully talented.
Rake and Scorpid Sting suffer further nerfs. Apparently the previous nerfs weren’t enough I guess.
Readiness cannot reset the cooldown on Bestial Wrath. This was a very justified nerf. 36 seconds of Bestial Wrath is pretty overpowered.
Steady Shot suffers a bit hard nerf, reducing the attack power scaling by half. This particularly hurts Beast Mastery because they have the simplest rotation, and as a result, use Steady Shot more. However, on the other hand, it was pretty retarded to spam Steady Shot (like almost all of Burning Crusade). This probably could have been nerfed and Beast Mastery could have been left alone more or less (except the Rake/Scorpid Sting nerf and Readiness nerf) to be honest. The other two specializations are also passively nerfed, but since both Survival and Marksmanship later on work just fine, the Steady Shot nerf clearly didn’t affect them as much.
Tranquilizing Shot got buffed (cooldown reduction), but Volley got nerfed by a good amount. Keep in mind Volley was changed in Wrath of the Lich King to have no cooldown and even critically hit, by the way.
Besides that, Hunters (and everything else) get a large slew of bug fixes I won’t be bothering to sieve through.
Patch 3.0.8a
Hunters
* All Hunter aspects are no longer on the global cooldown that is shared with other Hunter abilities. All hunter aspects are now on a separate 1 second cooldown.
Finally got fixed to present day standards. Excellent.
Patch 3.0.9
Hunters
* Kindred Spirits (Beast Mastery): This talent now grants 20% pet damage at max rank.
* Serpent's Swiftness (Beast Mastery): This talent now grants 20% pet attack speed at max rank.
Pets
* Lava Breath now reduces the target's casting speed by 25%, down from 50%.
* Poison Spit now reduces the target's casting speed by 25%, down from 50%.
As you can see here, even Blizzard realized they swung the nerf bat too hard on Beast Mastery and rescind a couple changes they made to the talents (this patch also introduced the “cast speed reduction nerf” which reduced cast speed reduction debuffs done by players to 30% or some lower amount.)
Series 3.1
Patch 3.1.0
General
* Due to significant talent tree revisions, all players will have their talent points reimbursed. Several new spells and abilities have been added for select classes. Players will need to visit their class trainer to learn new spells.
* All Ground Mounts may now swim without dismounting the rider. Flying Mounts still may NOT, and will dismount the rider upon entering water.
* Players level 40 and higher will now be able to visit their trainer to pay a one-time fee (of 1,000g ) and access the dual talent specialization feature.
* Applying a glyph no longer requires a Lexicon of Power. The same rules for switching between dual talent specializations now apply to switching glyphs and cannot be performed while in combat, Battlegrounds (except when Preparation is up), or Arenas (no exceptions).
PvP
Arenas
* Enemy Unit Frames: This feature is only available while in Arenas, with several options in the Interface Options.
Racial
* Command (Orc Racial): Applies to shaman pets, and now correctly applies to death knight pets.
* Gift of the Naaru (Draenei Racial): The heal has been changed to an instant-cast heal-over-time.
* Stoneform (Dwarf Racial): No longer makes you immune to poison, disease and bleed effects for 8 seconds. Instead, using Stoneform will clear those effects when cast. Cooldown reduced to 2 minutes from 3 minutes.
Classes: General
* Armor Penetration Rating: All classes now receive 25% more benefit from Armor Penetration Rating.
* Taunts: All player or pet-generated taunts now have a shared diminish category. In addition, Taunt-type effects from pets and from classes other than death knight, druid, paladin, and warrior have been set such that bosses can be made immune to them while still affected by death knight, druid, paladin, and warrior taunts.
* Hysteria, Tricks of the Trade, Enrage, Death Wish, Arcane Power, Owlkin Frenzy, The Beast Within, and Avenging Wrath damage bonuses no longer stack together.
Hunter
* 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 into the hunter's Auto Shot.
* 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-minute cooldown.
* 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 seconds.
* Frost Trap: If the target who triggers Frost Trap is immune to its effect, the Frost Trap area effect will no longer be triggered. Now reduces speed by 50% (previously 60%).
* 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.
* Viper Sting redesigned: Stings the target, draining 4% of mana over 8 seconds (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.
Beast Mastery
* Animal Handler: No longer reduces the cooldown of Master's Call, but instead increases the duration of the Master's Call effect by 3/6 seconds.
* Improved Aspect of the Hawk now has a new spell effect.
Marksmanship
* Chimera Shot: Mana cost reduced from 16% to 12%.
* Concussive Barrage redesigned: 2-point talent. Now causes your and to have a 50/100% chance to daze the target for 4 seconds.
* Efficiency: Increased to 3/6/9/12/15% up from 2/4/6/8/10%.
* Piercing Shots redesigned: Your critical Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20/30% of the damage dealt over 8 seconds. 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 redesigned: You gain 2/4% of your mana every 3 seconds while under the effect of Rapid Fire, and you gain 1/2% of your mana every 2 seconds for 6 seconds when you gain Rapid Killing.
* Silencing Shot: No longer on the global cooldown.
* Wild Quiver: Chance increased to 4/8/12%, up from 4/7/10%. Damage increased from 50% of an Auto Shot to 80%.
Survival
* Entrapment redesigned: When your Frost Trap, Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap and Snake Trap are triggered, you entrap all afflicted targets, preventing them from moving for 2/4/6 seconds.
* 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 redesigned: You now have a 33/66/100% chance when you trap a target with , or Frost Trap and a 2/4/6% chance when you deal periodic damage with your Immolation Trap or 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 seconds. 30-second cooldown. Shares a cooldown with all other traps.
* T.N.T.: Increases damage done by Explosive Shot, Immolation Trap, and Explosive Trap by 2/4/6%.
* Trap Mastery: This talent has been moved up to tier-2, up from tier-9, and is now a 3-point talent.
* Trap Mastery, Resourcefulness and T.N.T. now all affect Black Arrow.
* Improved Wing Clip: This talent has been removed.
* Wyvern Sting: Duration increased from 12 seconds to 30 seconds. PvP duration reduced from 10 seconds to 6 seconds.
Pets
* Bullheaded now adds 20% damage reduction for 12 seconds along with its current CC-removal effect.
* Cornered: The critical strike reduction when this ability is active has been increased.
* Feeding Frenzy increased to 8/16% damage up from 6/12%.
* 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 minutes, down from 6 minutes.
* 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.
* Roar of Sacrifice can be used on the hunter only.
* Pummel 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 2-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%.
* 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.
* 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.
Glyphs: Hunter
* Glyph of Aimed Shot: Now reduces cooldown by 2 seconds.
* Glyph of Chimera Shot: Reduces the cooldown of Chimera Shot by 1 second.
* 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 seconds.
* Glyph of the Monkey: This glyph has been converted to Glyph of Mending, which increases the healing done by Mend Pet by 40%.
* 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.
* Glyph of Snake Trap: Now reduces damage taken by snakes from area damage by 90%.
* Glyph of Wyvern Sting: Now reduces the cooldown by 6 seconds, down from 15 seconds. No longer reduces the damage done by Wyvern Sting’s effect.
Bug Fixes: Hunter
* Cower: This pet ability will now display its cooldown correctly.
* Disengage: This ability can no longer be used while riding any type of vehicle.
* Froststorm Breath: This pet ability will now display its cooldown correctly.
* Heart of the Phoenix: Can no longer be set to autocast (which did not work).
* Hunter traps will no longer be able to be set off by totems.
* Rake: This pet ability will now always refresh when used by the pet.
* Savage Rend (raptor special ability): Fixed a tooltip error to correctly note this ability boosts damage rather than attack power.
* Spirit Strike: This pet ability now has its damage increased by Prowl as intended.
* Spore Cloud: This pet ability will now autocast properly at all ranks.
* Steady Shot: Now does correct damage with heirloom weapons.
Dual specs are introduced this patch. This is a massive change that alters the versatility of every class greatly (mainly hybrids) and probably saves massive amounts of respec gold =D. The point is, this was one of the best features Blizzard put in. Bravo.
Armor penetration gets a nice buff, “reducing” the “armor penetration cap” and making specializations like Marksmanship much more viable. In fact, in late Ulduar (3.1 introduces Ulduar), Marksmanship was very competitive.
Taunts got nerfed so that they have diminishing returns. I’m almost 75% sure this was because 3 Hunters kited Instructor Razuvious around using Distracting Shot until the boss died. Can’t be sure though (yes Distracting Shot was affected).
Damage buffs don’t stack anymore (Beast Within can’t stack with Hysteria, for instance). I assume the best buff trumps.
On Hunter changes: the move to remove ammunition begins. With this patch, ammunition stacks to 1000 (up from 200) and quivers and ammo pouches become obsolete. The haste bonus (15%) is now baked into Hunter Auto Shot (and Steady Shot iirc) and unless for some reason you needed to hold 16000-28000 arrows at a time, it was easy to allocate some normal bag slots for ammunition.
Aspect of the Pack gets a buff (yay more dazing =D).
Call Stabled Pet gets implemented into the game. This was a really handy ability that essentially gave the Hunter the ability to call whatever pet it wanted. The best part was switching between specializations by having Dual Specialization reset the cooldown!
Pets get a bit more normalized as bonuses for each family are now the same.
Take note of the Disengage cooldown increase.
Frost Trap gets two nerfs. The slow is reduced to 50% and no longer triggers if the target is immune to it. Don’t worry, the latter nerf doesn’t last long. (The latter nerf was actually to prevent cheap “Lock and Load” procs.)
Viper Sting’s redesign is excellent. It gives Hunters yet another mana regeneration tool, as going into Aspect of the Viper is indeed a “dps loss” (better than being oom).
Efficiency gets a small buff.
Piercing Shots gets changed to have that novelty bleeding effect (that works in a similar way to Ignite) and increases the value of critical strike rating further (as if “Mortal Shots wasn’t enough. Mortal Shots increases critical strike damage bonuses from shots by 30%.)
Marksmanship also gets some other general buffs.
Survival suffers some nerfs and gets a new ability: Black Arrow. The ability was originally supposed to be Trap Launcher, but it was too difficult to implement and as a result Survival Hunters instead got a new damage-over-time effect that also increased damage done to that target.
Lots of changes to pets, but I would like to point to a couple major ones:
Firstly, pets receive a new tier of talents that include pet talents like Shark Attack and Wild Hunt. This was Blizzard’s attempt to make Beast Mastery a little more viable and give Hunters more options.
Secondly, Furious Howl gets revamped and Wolves suddenly become the pet of choice for all Hunters due to the powerful attack power buff (which now stacks with all other buffs) that they grant.
Roar of Sacrifice gets nerfed to only be usable on the Hunter (Tenacity Pets were often brought on raids to Roar of Sacrifice the tank, as Roar of Sacrifice used to cause the pet to take 20% of the damage the target normally did =D).
Hunters also get some nice new glyphs, including the amazing Glyph of Mending, which is great for soloing (and Mend Pet was pretty subpar up until then, to be honest).
Patch 3.1.1
Nothing of note.
Patch 3.1.1a
Nothing of note (Bug Fix).
Patch 3.1.2
General
Equipment Manager: When enabled from the Interface Options menu, this feature will allow players to store sets of equipment, easily swap between saved sets using hotkeys, and pull items directly from backpacks or bank slots (must be at the bank to equip inventory from the bank).
Hunter
* Disengage: Cooldown reduced by 5 seconds.
Bug Fixes: Hunters
* Go For The Throat: Explosive Shot critical strikes now trigger this talent.
* Lock and Load: The tooltip has been corrected to display its actual chance to occur.
* Rabid: This Hunter pet talent no longer lists a percentage chance to be triggered, as that chance varies by the attack speed of the pet.
Blizzard reduces Disengage’s cooldown by 5 seconds. Make up your mind lol. Also Explosive Shot can trigger Go For The Throat, which is great!
Patch 3.1.3
Hunter
* Hunter's Mark: The ranged attack power bonus from this ability has been increased from 300 to 500.
* Master Marksman: This talent now also decreases the cost of Aimed Shot and Chimera Shot by 5/10/15/20/25%.
Some minor buffs for Hunters. =D
FML I hit the character cap. This will continue in the next post.
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Wrath of the Lich King Continued
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Series 3.2
Patch 3.2.0
General
* Construction of the Crusaders' Coliseum is complete. New raid normal and heroic modes for the Crusaders' Coliseum can be toggled using the Dungeon Difficulty setting. This applies to 10 and 25 player versions. 10 player (normal), 25 player (normal), 10 player (heroic) and 25 player (heroic) all share separate raid lockout timers.
* New Dungeon Loot Feature: Players will now be able to trade soulbound items with other raid or group members that were eligible for the loot. This system will work like the Item Buy Back system and allow 2 hours for players to trade an item after it has been looted. Players who choose to enchant or add gems to the item will get one last confirmation before losing the ability to trade the item.
Dungeons and Raids
* Dungeon and Raid ID Extensions
* Emblem System Changes
Items: General
* Agility: The amount of agility required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This change required recalibrating the amount of dodge a player has with 0 agility by a slight amount as well, so all players will see their dodge percentage vary a small amount.
* Mount Changes:
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- The cast time for summoning any ground mount is now 1.5 seconds, down from 3 seconds.
- Apprentice Riding (Skill 75): Can now be learned at level 20 for 4 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 20 directing them to the riding trainer.
- Journeyman Riding (Skill 150): Can now be learned at level 40 for 50 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 40 directing them back to the riding trainer.
- Expert Riding (Skill 225): Can now be learned at level 60 for 600 gold from trainers in Honor Hold or Thrallmar. Faction discounts now apply (Honor Hold for Alliance; Thrallmar for Horde). Flight speed at this skill level has been increased to 150% of run speed, up from 60%.
- Artisan Riding (Skill 300): Faction discounts now apply (Honor Hold or Valiance Expedition for Alliance; Thrallmar or Warsong Offensive for Horde).
- In order to further equalize the number of purchasable mounts available to each race, a new 60% speed ground mount has been added for night elves, and a new 100% speed ground mount has been added for the undead.
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Classes: General
* 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.
* Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target's maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).
* Silence, Strangulate, Silencing Shot, and Arcane Torrent: These abilities will also apply a 3 second interrupt effect against non-player controlled targets, making them more versatile against creatures immune to silencing effects.
Hunter
* Aspect of the Cheetah: Can now be learned at level 16.
* Deterrence: This ability now allows the hunter to parry spells and attacks from behind as well as in front. Now has a new visual spell effect.
* The time that traps will exist in the world after being put down has been reduced to 30 seconds, down from 1 minute.
* Frost Trap: Will no longer "fizzle" on targets immune to snare effects, however Lock and Load will not succeed when using Frost Trap if the target is immune to snare effects.
* Snake Trap: The Mind-numbing Poison effect has been reduced to a 30% increase in casting time, down from 50% to match similar effects.
* 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.
Beast Mastery
* Catlike Reflexes now also reduces the cooldown of your Kill Command ability by 10/20/30 seconds.
Survival
* Entrapment: This talent no longer works with Immolation Trap or Explosive Trap.
* 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.
Pets
* 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 is now 1 minute, up from 30 seconds.
User Interface
* Casting bars under the target frame, focus frame and nameplates will now display as shielded if the cast cannot be interrupted.
* Item Comparisons: Holding the shift key while hovering over an item will now display the stat differences with the item currently equipped in the relevant slot.
* Item level: A new option has been added under Display in the Interface Options to show the item level on item tooltips.
Bug Fixes: Hunter
* All ranks of Sonic Blast now properly have an 80 Focus cost.
* Black Arrow Ranks 5 and 6 training costs have been lowered significantly.
* Furious Howl: Ranks 1-5 will no longer give slightly more attack power than is listed in their tooltips.
* Lock and Load: The tooltip for this talent has been updated to indicate that it also works with Explosive Trap.
* Roar of Sacrifice: Damage transferred to pet is now considered Nature damage.
* The tooltip for has been slightly re-written to indicate that it only works on the hunter, and works on melee damage as well.
* T.N.T. (Rank 3): Now indicates that the talent works with Black Arrow.
Tier 9 is now implemented. This was when I did some raiding. Lots of new features that make it easier for dungeon and raid groups are implemented with this patch, such as being allowed to extend raid (and heroic dungeon) lockouts.
Agility got nerfed in terms of increasing dodge chance. I think this is due to classes that use agility dodging too frequently, as well as motivating tanks to favor dodge rating as opposed to Agility for equipment itemization.
The mount changes are implemented in this patch! The riding training players now receive equate to present-day standards in terms of what level they are gotten (costs are tweaked a bit).
In terms of general class changes, pet now receive some benefit from resilience and spell penetration. This is to help with their PvP survivability and viability (the spell penetration changes mainly apply to Warlocks and I think Frost Mages). Replenishment also gets nerfed.
Regarding the Silencing Shot interrupting targets. I thought that was already implemented several patches ago, so I’m a little confused by that.
On Hunter changes:
Deterrence has been improved to block attacks from behind as well.
Traps have been nerfed a bit. They lasted 1 minute on the game world prior to the patch, but now they only last 30 seconds (this gets reverted later on. Don’t worry). Blizzard also changes Frost Trap to always “work” but Lock and Load will not proc if Frost Trap activates on a target immune to the slowing effect, which was the intent originally anyways.
Snake Trap poisons are now brought in line with other similar effects (unfortunately, it wasn’t scaled up to level 80 standards).
Traps also got a buff. No longer do they share cooldowns, but have specific trap cooldown categories based on what type of trap they are. This change was groundbreaking, and lasted until present day.
Beast Mastery gets another minor buff with an attempt to bring Kill Command back (it stays macroed, but it can at least be used more frequently.)
Survival gets some nerfs, such as Lock and Load receiving an internal cooldown.
Roar of Sacrifice gets changed, mostly for PvP use to be honest.
Besides that, there were some bug fixes and so on.
Patch 3.2.0a
Nothing of note. (Bug fix patch)
Patch 3.2.2
General
* The Broodmother has returned
Hunter
Beast Mastery
* The Beast Within: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds. In addition, hunters with this talent will do 10% additional damage at all times.
* Bestial Wrath: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds.
Bug Fixes: Hunter
* Master's Call: This ability now correctly removes the snaring component of Infected Wounds, Frostfire Bolt, and Slow.
* Trap Mastery's (Survival) tooltip now states the correct amount of snakes summoned.
Undocumented Changes: Hunter
* Volley: The attack power coefficient has been increased from 0.0586 to 0.0837. Base points did not change.
* Kill Shot: Minimum range re-added.
Beast Mastery receives another change. This time, it’s a PvP nerf and a PvE buff.
Master’s Call now works with slowing debuffs that have additional components to it, which is always good.
Regarding the Trap Mastery fix, the tooltip used to state that 90 extra snakes were summoned at rank 3 (it was actually 9. I wish it would summon 90 extra snakes because that would kick ass =D).
Volley gets a minor rebuff and Kill Shot has a minimum range again (it was removed in 3.2 or something for some odd reason).
Series 3.3
Patch 3.3.0
General
* Icecrown Citadel released!
* Dungeon Finder released!
* Many of the tail sweeps with knockback effects will no longer hit players' pets.
Classes: General
* Area-of-Effect Damage Caps: We've redesigned the way area damage is capped when hitting many targets. Instead of a hard cap on total damage done, the game now caps the total damage done at a value equal to the damage the spell would do if it hit 10 targets. In other words, if a spell does 1000 damage to each target, it would hit up to 10 targets for 1000 each, but with more than 10 targets, each target would take 10,000 damage divided by the number of targets. 20 targets would be hit for 500 damage each in that example.
* Pet Resilience: All player pets now get 100% of their master's resilience.
* Taunt Diminishing Returns: We've revised the system for diminishing returns on Taunt so that creatures do not become immune to Taunt until after 5 Taunts have landed. The duration of the Taunt effect will be reduced by 35% instead of 50% for each taunt landed. In addition, most creatures in the world will not be affected by Taunt diminishing returns at all. Creatures will only have Taunt diminishing returns if they have been specifically flagged for that behavior based on the design of a given encounter.
Hunter
* Call Stabled Pet: Cooldown reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes. Cannot be used in arenas.
* Deterrence: Now also increases the chance for ranged attacks to miss the hunter by 100% while under its effect.
* Misdirection: Redesigned. Instead of having finite charges, it now begins a 4-second timer when the hunter using Misdirection performs a threat-generating attack, during which all threat generated by the hunter goes to the friendly target. In addition, multiple hunters can now misdirect threat to the same friendly target simultaneously.
Beast Mastery
* Intimidation: If the hunter's pet is in melee range of its target, the stun from Intimidation will now be applied immediately instead of on the pet's next swing or attack.
Pets
* Avoidance: This talent has been replaced by Culling the Herd. Hunter pets now innately take 90% less damage from area-of-effect abilities like all other class pets. This does not apply to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
* Cower: Redesigned. This ability no longer affects threat, and instead reduces damage taken by the pet by 40% for 6 seconds with a 45-second cooldown. While cowering, the pet's movement speed is 50% of normal speed. Cower now only has a single rank and is available at pet level 20.
* Culling the Herd: This pet talent has replaced the Avoidance talent in the pet trees (Hunter pets now gain that benefit automatically without expenditure of talent points). Culling the Herd increases pet and hunter damage by 1/2/3% for 10 seconds each time the pet deals a critical strike with Claw, Bite, or Smack.
* Demoralizing Screech: The attack power reduction from this ability has been increased by 40%, equaling the maximum possible attack power reduction from the abilities of other classes.
* Improved Cower: Redesigned. This talent now reduces the movement penalty of Cower by 50%/100%.
* Pet Leveling: Hunter pets now need only 5% of the experience a player needs to level, down from 10%.
* Venom Web Spray: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards.
* Web: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards.
* Wolverine Bite: This talent is now enabled when the pet lands a critical strike rather than from the target dodging the pet's attacks. In addition, this talent no longer has a prerequisite.
Items
* Arena Set Bonuses: The two-piece set bonus for all Wrath of the Lich King Arena sets now provides 100 resilience and 29 spell power or 50 attack power. The current four-piece bonus will remain, however it also now provides 88 spell power or 150 attack power.
Bug Fixes: Hunter
* Concussive Barrage: This ability is no longer subject to spell reflects.
* Explosive Trap: The damage from this trap will now scale properly with the hunter's attack power.
* Glyph of Immolation Trap: Now properly increases damage by 100%. In addition, this glyph will now modify the tooltip of Immolation Trap correctly.
* Glyph of Mending: This glyph will now modify the amount healed in the tooltip on Mend Pet.
* Point of No Escape: It is no longer possible to gain benefit from this talent multiple times by having a target affected by multiple of the same hunter's traps. In addition, Freezing Arrow will no longer incorrectly provide a critical strike bonus to players beyond the hunter with this talent.
* Roar of Sacrifice: Corrected tooltip error.
* Silencing Shot: Updated tooltip to include the functionality that this ability also interrupts spellcasting on NPCs.
* Volley: The tooltip for this ability will now update properly from haste.
Starting with general class changes, area damage caps have been hard nerfed so that area of effect attacks that are affected by it do a pretty fixed amount of damage. Obviously, area of effect attacks that aren’t affected by the cap are now very powerful.
Pets now receive 100% scaling from resilience. I suppose they just didn’t last long enough in PvP.
Taunt diminishing returns get relieved somewhat (mostly to make bosses like Deathbringer Saurfang possible).
On Hunter changes:
Call Stabled Pet get buffed in terms of cooldown. This doesn’t matter too much, to be honest, since people were resetting the cooldown by switching specializations anyways.
Deterrence gets buffed once again. This time it affects ranged attacks, effectively making Hunters impervious to most direct damage attacks.
Misdirection gets a good revamp, becoming a Tricks of the Trade without granting the damage buff. It’s great that finite charges are done away with, at least.
Intimidation gets changed (it still has some delay) so that there’s no real swing timer-related delay.
Pets receive Avoidance by default (and Culling the Herd replaces that talent), helping pet survivability in PvE and allowing players to have an easier time killing pets in PvP with area of effect attacks. Pet leveling is also made a bit easier.
Other than that, the changes are mostly minor.
Patch 3.3.0a
Nothing of note.
Patch 3.3.2
Nothing of note.
Patch 3.3.3
General
* The amount of Honor awarded for an Honorable Kill has been increased by 100% for characters of all levels. Since all Honor is awarded based on a conversion rate from Honorable Kills, this change will effectively double the amount of Honor received from Honorable Kills, or for completing Battleground and Wintergrasp objectives; however, the amount of experience gained from completing Battleground objectives and the amount of Honor rewarded for completing each Wintergrasp quest remain unchanged.
* Random Battlegrounds added!
Classes: General
* Several raid buffs have had their ranges increased to 100 yards, up from 45 yards, to prevent select buffs from repeatedly getting applied and removed during highly mobile encounters. Some buffs, such as paladin auras, totems, shouts and Blood Pact are intentionally meant to have shorter ranges and remain unchanged.
Hunter
Beast Mastery
* Ferocious Inspiration: This ability is now an aura and provides 1/2/3% damage to all party or raid members within 100 yards and boosts the damage of Steady Shot by 3/6/9%.
Pet Talents
* Heart of the Phoenix: Cooldown reduced to 8 minutes, down from 10 minutes.
Bug Fixes: Hunter
* Explosive Trap: Low ranks of this ability were receiving no bonus damage from attack power. That has been corrected.
* Immolation Trap: Tooltips for lower ranks should now display more accurate damage.
* Rapid Fire: Now triggers the global cooldown correctly.
* Sniper Training: Reduced the time it takes to gain this effect so with lag it will feel more consistent with the 6 seconds stated in the tooltip.
* Lock and Load: Fixed a bug where Lock and Load always proc'd 100% of the time from the first tick of Explosive Trap and never from additional ticks. It should now be 6% as advertised.
* Master's Call: This ability will now function correctly when the pet is affected by one of a death knight's diseases.
* Mortal Shots: This talent was not correctly buffing Serpent Sting by the full amount.
For Hunters: There’s yet another attempt to buff Beast Mastery (yes it’s still dragging in PvE dps and hasn’t fully recovered from the nerfs, among other things.)
Besides that, this patch mostly fixed bugs and made most raid buffs have 100 yard ranges.
Patch 3.3.3a
Nothing of note.
Patch 3.3.5
General
* The Ruby Sanctum, an all-new 10- and 25-player raid dungeon featuring normal and Heroic difficulties, has been added! Players will find the dungeon entrance below Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight. Please note due to the way this patch is being applied in all regions, this dungeon will not immediately be available in North America. Stay tuned to our General Discussion forum for an official announcement on the opening of the Ruby Sanctum.
* The functionality of the Vote Kick feature in the Dungeon Finder will now behave differently according to a player's history with the system. Players using the Dungeon Finder who rarely vote to kick players from a group, or rarely abandon groups before a dungeon is complete, will find that the Vote Kick option will have no cooldown. For players who frequently abandon groups or vote to kick other players, the Vote Kick option will be kept on a cooldown. This functionality will adjust itself as a player's behavior while using the Dungeon Finder changes.
* Real ID added.
* Nothing of real note involving Hunters.
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Cataclysm
These patch notes will include hotfixes as well if possible as these patches are quite recent.
Cataclysm Patch Notes:
Patch 4.0.1
Patch 4.0.3
Patch 4.0.3a
Patch 4.0.6
Patch 4.1
Patch 4.2
Patch 4.3
Patch 4.3.2
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Series 4.0
Patch 4.0.1
General
* Reforging added: Players can now visit special Reforging NPCs in capital cities located near Enchanting trainers. 40% of any one secondary stat on an item can be allocated to add a new secondary stat to the item. The stat being added cannot already exist on the item. An item cannot have more than one reforged stat at a time, though the Reforging of an item can be undone and changed.
Dungeons and Raids
* Flexible Raid Lock System: Icecrown Citadel and Ruby Sanctum now use the new Flexible Raid Lock system. This system provides the opportunity for a character to defeat each raid zone’s encounters once a week. A character may now complete the encounters during the week with different raids of either 10 or 25 players.
Class Changes
* Many class talents, spells, and abilities have been overhauled, added, or removed.
* All spell and ability tooltips will now display damage averages rather than minimum and maximum damage potential. This feature is on by default but can be changed via the Display settings under User Interface options.
* Ammo has been removed from the game.
* The character levels at which classes gain new spells and abilities have changed.
* Many item and class stats have been changed or removed.
* Mastery rating has been added as a new stat which provides unique benefits for characters based on class and talent specialization. Mastery rating does not currently exist on items in the game, however, Reforging can be used to add Mastery rating as a secondary stat to existing items.
* Spells and abilities no longer have multiple ranks and now scale with character level.
* Talent trees have been altered. All player talent specializations have been reset, allowing for free re-specialization.
____
* Each specialization has been reduced to a 31-point talent tree.
* Players will now get a total of 41 talent points to spend at level 85.
* Players will be asked to choose a specialization at level 10. Doing so will result in the unlocking of a spell or ability unique to that specialization, as well as one or more passive bonuses.
* Once a talent specialization has been chosen, players may only place points in the primary tree until at least 31 points have been spent there.
____
Hunter
* Up to five pets can now be stored with the hunter at all times (depending on how many "ranks" of the Call Pet ability have been trained). Any one of these five pets can be summoned via the Call Pet ability.
* Focus has replaced mana as a new resource.
* Hunters now start with a pet at level 1.
* The Stable will now store 20 pets. If a pet is moved into the Stable, its talents are wiped.
Items
* Resilience no longer reduces the chance a player will be critically hit by an opponent.
* Durability: cloth, leather, and mail now have as many points of durability as plate, making the repair cost on death much closer to equal for all classes.
Class Changes: Undocumented
* The price of dual specialization is reduced from 1000 gold to 100 gold.
* Health regeneration uses a new formula. Outside of combat, all classes seem to regenerate 0.75% of their maximum health per second before the effects of abilities.
* Class buffs can no longer be applied to player-controlled pets.
* Dispel abilities will no longer be prevented from casting when the target does not have a valid debuff to dispel. It will consume the mana cost of the ability and global cooldown despite doing nothing.
Hunter
* Kill Command triggers the pet's GCD. This may be a bug; however, it is not listed in the known issues thread.
* Many pet abilities have been replaced or altered.
* Low-level pets now auto-level to within 3 levels of the hunter instead of 5.
* Arcane Shot requires level 1, down from level 6. It is a starting spell.
* Steady Shot requires level 3, down from level 50. It now replenishes Focus.
* Aspects are now aura icons above the main action bar.
Beast Mastery
Primary Spells
* Intimidation - Command your pet to intimidate the target, causing a high amount of threat and stunning the target for 3 sec. Lasts 15 sec. / 100 yd range, Instant, 1 min cooldown
* Animal Handler (Passive) - Attack Power increased by 15%.
* Master of Beasts (Mastery) - Increases the damage done by your pets by 13.6%. Each point of Mastery increases pet damage by an additional 1.7%.
Skills
* Aspect of the Dragonhawk is gone. (Aspect of the Hawk replaces it at high levels)
* Kill Command has been revamped - Give the command to kill, causing your pet to instantly inflict damage to its target. Your Pet's happiness increases the damage done. The pet must be in combat and within 5 yards of the target to Kill Command. 40 Focus, Instant, 6 sec cooldown
* Aspect of the Wild now increases Nature resistance by
* Scare Beast now costs 25 Focus.
* Mend Pet is now free to cast. Heals your pet for 25% of its total health over 10 sec.
* Tame Beast no longer reduces your armor while taming.
* Revive Pet now costs 35 Focus.
* Master's Call is now a baseline skill - Your pet attempts to remove all root and movement impairing effects from itself and its target, and causes your pet and its target to be immune to all such effects for 4 sec. 25 yd range, Instant, 1 min cooldown
* Widow Venom *New* - A venemous shot that reduces the effectiveness of any healing taken by 25% for 30 sec.
Talent Changes
* Beast Mastery is now a Tier 7 talent, down from Tier 11.
* Kindred Spirits is now a Tier 6 and 2 Ranks talent, down from Tier 10 and 5 Ranks. Revamped - Increases you and your pets maximum focus by 5/10.
* Longevity is now a Tier 4 talent, down from Tier 9.
* The Beast Within is now a Tier 6 talent, down from Tier 9. Crowd control immunity removed.
* Cobra Strikes is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 9. You have a 5/10/15% chance when you hit with Arcane Shot to cause your pet's next 2 Basic Attacks to critically hit.
* Invigoration is now a Tier 6 talent, down from Tier 8. Now regenerates 3/6 focus when your pet scores a critical hit with a Basic Attack.
* Ferocious Inspiration is now a Tier 5 and 1 Rank talent, down from Tier 7 and 3 Ranks and no longer increases the damage dealt by Arcane Shot and Steady shot - All party and raid members have all damage increased by 3% within 100 yards of your pet.
* Bestial Wrath now causes 20% additional damage, down from 50%. No longer has a Mana/Focus cost.
No longer grants the Hunter immunity to Crowd Control but will continue to remove Crowd Control.
(* Thanks, Cialbi)
* Frenzy is now a Tier 2 and 3 Points talent, down from Tier 6 and 5 Points. Changed to a stacking effect - Your pet gains 6% attack speed after attacking with a Basic Attack, lasting for 10 sec and stacking up to 5 times.
* Spirit Bond is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 5.
* Intimidation is now a primary spell of the Beast Mastery tree.
* Bestial Discipline is now a Tier 1 talent and 3 Ranks, down from Tier 5 and 2 Ranks. Now increases the Focus regeneration of your pets by 10/20/30%. (Down from 50/100%)
* Improved Mend Pet is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 4. No longer reduces the cost of your Mend Pet spell (it's free now).
* Pathfinding is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 3.
New Talents
* Improved Kill Command - Increases the critical strike chance of your Kill Command by 5/10%.
* Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera - Whenever you are hit by a melee attack, the cooldown of your Disengage is instantly reduced by 2/4 sec. Whenever you are hit by a ranged attack or spell, the cooldown of your Deterrence is instantly reduced by 4/8 sec. These effects have a 2 sec cooldown.
* Killing Streak - When you score two Kill Command critical hits in a row, your third will deal 10/20% more damage and have its cost reduced by 10 focus.
* Fervor - Instantly restores 50 Focus to you and your pet. / Instant, 2 min cooldown
* Focus Fire - Consumes your Pets Frenzy effect, restoring 4 Focus to your pet and increasing your ranged haste by 3% for each Frenzy stack consumed. Lasts for 15 sec. / Instant, 15 sec cooldown
* One with Nature - Increases the attack power bonus of your Aspect of the Hawk by 10/20/30%, and increases the amount of focus restored by your Aspect of the Fox by 1/2/3.
Removed Talents
* Aspect of the Monkey
* Aspect of the Beast
* Aspect of the Viper
* Serpent's Swiftness
* Catlike Reflexes
* Animal Handler
* Ferocity
* Aspect Mastery
* Unleashed Fury
* Focused Fire
* Improved Aspect of the Monkey
* Thick Hide
* Improved Revive Pet
* Improved Aspect of the Hawk
* Endurance Training
Marksmanship
Primary Spells
* Aimed Shot now deals damage. No longer reduces healing. Now has a 3 sec cast time. 50 Focus, 40 yd range.
* Artisan Quiver (Passive) - Ranged auto-attack damage increased by 15%.
* Wild Quiver (Mastery) - Grants a 14.4% chance for your ranged attacks to also instantly fire an additional ranged shot for 100% normal damage. Each point of Mastery increases the chance by an additional 1.8%.
Skills
* Kill Shot now deals 150% weapon damage plus , down from 200% weapon damage plus . No longer has a Mana/Focus cost. Cooldown reduced from 15 sec to 10 sec.
* Volley is gone.
* Tranquilizing Shot now costs 35 Focus and no longer has a cooldown.
* Steady Shot no longer causes additional damage against Dazed targets. Now generates 9 Focus. Max range increased to 40 yards, up from 35 yards.
* Flare now has a 40 yards range, up from 30 yards.
* Rapid Fire no longer has a Mana/Focus cost.
* Multi-Shot has been revamped - Fires several missiles, hitting your current target and all enemies within 8 yards of that target for 55% of weapon damage. 40 Focus, 5-35 yd range, Instant
* Distracting Shot no longer has a Mana/Focus cost.
* Concussive Shot no longer has a Mana/Focus cost. Now has a 40 yards range, up from 35 yards. Now has a 5 sec cooldown.
* Arcane Shot now causes weapon damage plus arcane damage, up from Arcane damage. Now costs 25 Focus, range increased to 40 yards, up from 35 yards. Cooldown removed.
* Hunter's Mark no longer has a Mana/Focus cost.
* Auto Shot now has a 40 yards range, up from 35 yards. No longer increases ranged attack speed by 15%.
* Serpent Sting is now a Survival skill.
* Viper Sting is gone.
Talent Changes
* Chimera Shot is now a Tier 7 talent, down from Tier 11. No longer affects Viper Sting or Scorpid Sting (removed from the game). Now deals weapon damage plus , up from 125% of weapon damage. Now refreshes the duration of Serpent Sting and heal you for 5% of your total health. 50 Focus, 40 yd range, Instant, 10 sec cooldown
* Marked for Death is now a Tier 6 and 2 Ranks talent, down from Tier 10 and 5 Ranks. Revamped - Your Arcane Shot and Chimera Shot have a 50/100% chance to automatically apply the Marked for Death effect. Marked for Death is the same as Hunter's Mark, but undispellable, does not restrict stealth or invisibility and lasts 15 sec.
* Silencing Shot is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 9. No longer deals damage. No longer has a Mana/Focus cost.
* Improved Steady Shot is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 9. Revamped - When you Steady Shot twice in a row, your ranged attack speed will be increased by 5/10/15% for 8 sec.
* Master Marksman is now a Tier 5 and 3 Ranks talent, down from Tier 8 and 5 Ranks. Revamped - You have a 20/40/60% chance when you Steady Shot to gain the Master Marksman effect, lasting 30 sec. After reaching 5 stacks, your next Aimed Shot's cast time and focus cost are reduced by 100% for 10 sec.
* Rapid Recuperation is now a Tier 5 talent, down from Tier 8. Updated for Focus - You gain 12 focus every 3 sec while under the effect of Rapid Fire, and you gain 50 focus instantly when you gain Rapid Killing.
* Piercing Shots is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 7.
* Trueshot Aura is now a Tier 4 talent, down from Tier 7.
* Concussive Barrage is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 5.
* Readiness now also affects Bestial Wrath.
* Efficiency is now a Tier 1 and 3 Ranks talent, down from Tier 4 and 5 Ranks. Now educes the focus cost of your Arcane Shot by 1/2/3, and your Explosive Shot and Chimera Shot by 2/4/6.
* Go for the Throat now procs from auto-shot critical hits, and generates 5/10 Focus. (Down from 25/50 Focus)
* Rapid Killing now affects Steady Shot and Cobra Shot. No longer affects Arcane Shot or Chimera Shot.
* Careful Aim is now a 2 Ranks talent, down from 3 Ranks. No longer increases AP from Intellect and has been revamped - Increases the critical strike chance of your Steady Shot, Cobra Shot and Aimed Shot by 30/60% on targets who are above 80% health.
New Talents
* Bombardment - When you critically hit with your Multi-Shot your next Multi-Shot's focus cost will be reduced by 25/50%.
* Posthaste - Reduces the cooldown of your Rapid Fire by 1/2 min, and your movement speed is increased by 15/30% for 4 sec after you use Disengage.
* Termination - Your Steady Shot and Cobra Shot abilities grant an additional 3/6 Focus when dealt on targets at or below 25% health.
* Resistance is Futile - When your marked target attempts to run, flee or move, you have a 4/8% chance to cause your next Kill Command on the marked target within 8 sec to refund the focus cost.
* Sic 'Em! - When you critically hit with your Arcane Shot, Aimed Shot or Explosive Shot the focus cost of your Pet's next basic attack is reduced by 50/100% for 12 sec.
Removed Talents
* Scorpid Sting
* Wild Quiver is gone. (Reintroduced as Mastery)
* Improved Barrage
* Combat Experience
* Ranged Weapon Specialization
* Barrage
* Improved Stings
* Improved Arcane Shot
* Improved Hunter's Mark is gone
* Mortal Shots
* Improved Concussive Shot
* Focused Aim
* Lethal Shots
Survival
Primary Spells
* Explosive Shot - You fire an explosive charge into the enemy target, dealing - Fire damage. The charge will blast the target every second for an additional 2 sec. / 50 Focus, 40 yd range, Instant, 6 sec cooldown
* Into the Wilderness (Passive) - Agility increased by 15%.
* Essence of the Viper (Mastery) - Increases all elemental damage you deal by 8%. Each point of Mastery increases elemental damage by an additional 1%.
Skills
* Misdirection is no longer permanent, and fades after 30 sec. No longer has a Mana/Focus cost.
* Snake Trap, Ice Trap, Explosive Trap now lasts 1 min, up from 30 sec.
* Freezing Trap now prevents all action for up to 20 sec (up from 10 sec). No longer has a Mana/Focus cost.
* Feign Death no longer has a Mana/Focus cost.
* Wing Clip no longer has a Mana/Focus cost.
* Raptor Strike is now Instant instead of Next Melee. No longer has a Mana/Focus cost. Now has a 6 sec cooldown.
* Trap Launcher is now a baseline skill. When used, your next Trap can be launched to a target location within 40 yards. Lasts for 15 sec. 20 Focus, Instant
* Deterrence now has a 2 min cooldown, up from 1.5 min.
* Scatter Shot is now a baseline skill.
* Serpent Sting has been moved to Survival. Now scales from 40% of your Ranged Attack Power, up from 20%.
Talent Changes
* Hunting Party is now a Tier 5 and 1 Rank talent, down from Tier 10 and 3 Ranks. Replenishment effect removed. Now Increases your total Agility by an additional 10%, and increases the Ranged and Melee Attack Speed of all party and raid members by 10%.
* Point of No Escape is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 9.
* Black Arrow is now a Tier 7 talent, down from Tier 9. No longer increases all damage done by you to the target. Now scales from 12% of Ranged Attack Power, up from 10%. Now shares a cooldown with Fire trap spells only. Range increased from 35 to 40 yards. Costs 35 Focus.
* Sniper Training is now a Tier 6 talent, down from Tier 9. No longer affects Aimed Shot, Black Arrow, or Explosive Shot. Now affects Cobra Shot.
* Noxious Stings is now a Tier 5 and 2 Ranks talent, down from Tier 8 and 3 Ranks. Increases your damage done on targets afflicted by your Serpent Sting by 5/10% (up from 1/2%). Increases your damage done on targets afflicted by your Serpent Sting by 5%. If Wyvern Sting is dispelled, the dispeller is also afflicted by Wyvern Sting lasting 25/50% (up from 16/25/50%) of the duration remaining.
* Wyvern Sting now costs 10 Focus.
* Thrill of the Hunt is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 7. You have a 5/10/15% chance when you Arcane Shot, Explosive Shot or Black Arrow you instantly regain 40% of the base focus cost of the shot.
* Resourcefulness is now a Tier 4 talent, down from Tier 6. No longer reduces the mana cost of all traps, melee abilities and Black Arrow.
* Hunter vs. Wild is now a Tier 1 talent, down from Tier 5. No longer increases you and your pet's attack power. Now increases stamina by 4/7/10%.
* Counterattack is now a Tier 3 talent, down from Tier 5. No longer has a Mana/Focus cost.
* T.N.T. is now a 2 Ranks talent, down from 3 Ranks. Revamped - When you deal periodic damage with your Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap or Black Arrow you have a 6/12% chance to trigger Lock and Load.
* Lock and Load is now a Tier 3 and 2 Ranks talent, down from Tier 4 and 3 Ranks. Now procs from Freezing Trap and Ice Trap only. Now has a 50/100% chance to cause your next 2 Arcane Shot or Explosive shot to cost no focus and trigger no cooldown.
* Survival Tactics is now a Tier 2 talent, down from Tier 3.
* Entrapment is now a 2 Ranks talent, down from 3 Ranks. Now entraps the targets for 2/4 sec, up from 2/3/4 sec.
New Talents
* Pathing - Increases ranged haste by 1/2/3%.
* Serpent Spread - Targets hit by your Multi-Shot are also afflicted by your Serpent Sting equal to 6/9 sec of its total duration.
* Toxicology - Increases the periodic critical damage of your Serpent Sting and Black Arrow by 50/100%.
* Mirrored Blades - When attacked by a spell while in Deterrence, you have a 50/100% chance to reflect it back at the attacker.
* Improved Serpent Sting - Your Serpent Sting also does instant damage equal to 15/30% of its total periodic effect.
Removed Talents
* Mongoose Bite
* Master Tactician
* Expose Weakness
* Lightning Reflexes
* Killer Instinct
* Survivalist
* Scatter Shot is gone. Now a baseline skill.
* Deflection
* Surefooted
* Survival Instincts
* Improved Tracking
* Hawk Eye
* Savage Strikes
Stat Changes
* Stamina — Due to the assigning of Strength, Agility, and Intellect, non-plate wearers have more Stamina than before. Health pools are now much closer between plate-wearers and other classes. Health per point of stamina has been increased from 10 to 14.
* Haste — Haste should now be more attractive for melee classes by allowing them to recover resources such as rage, energy, and runes more quickly. Our intention is for Haste to let you "do stuff" more often.
* Mastery — This is a new stat that will allow players to become better at whatever makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. It's directly tied to talents, so what you gain from improving this stat is entirely dependent upon your class and the talent specialization you choose. We’ll talk more about specific Mastery benefits in the future.
* Resilience — This now only affects damage done by players and their pets. It will not impact crit chance, crit damage, mana drains, or other such effects.
"Removed" From Items
* Attack Power — This stat is rarely present on items, although it is derived from other stats. Strength and Agility, which are present on items, grant the appropriate amount of Attack Power (generally 2 Attack Power per point of Strength or Agility) depending upon which stat a particular class favors.
* Armor Penetration — This stat is no longer present on items. Armor Penetration still exists in talents and abilities.
Additional Stuff
* Combat ratings — Ratings are much harder to "cap out" at maximum gear levels. Ratings are steeper in Cataclysm, and creatures in later tiers of content will be harder to hit or crit, similar to how level-83 mobs are harder to hit or crit than level-80 mobs.
* Reforging — This new itemization customization feature allows you to partially change the stats on an item. You can reduce the value of an existing stat on an item, and add an equivalent amount of another stat that was not already present on the item. This makes it far easier to reach important thresholds like the Hit Rating and Expertise Rating caps.
Talents
* A total of 36 points at level 80 (down from 71).
* Each tree only requires 31 points to reach the last tier (down from 41).
* You must now select only one tree. Once you do, you are given a primary ability for that spec, and two or three attributes specific for that spec. At level 80, you are given a Mastery trait also specific for the spec you chose, learned at your trainer.
* You cannot put points into any other tree until you have put 31 into your first tree.
Whew. This is one of the big ones. Let’s begin, shall we?
Starting at General:
Reforging has been introduced into the game, allowing players to exchange itemization stats that are unfavorable for other itemization stats (a certain amount). This allows players to customize their gear further.
Regarding Hunter-related changes:
Ammo has been removed from the game. No longer do we have to craft Iceblade Arrows and stuff.
Hunters can now bring 5 pets around with them at a time that can be called and dismissed at will. In addition, the stable can now hold 20 pets (feels like Pokemon, to be honest). This is an awesome change as you’ll soon see.
Hunters now use Focus as opposed to mana. This means they have a completely new resource system to manage and abilities have been revamped to match this new system. The Focus system essentially works like this:
Most instant shots, like Arcane Shot and Chimera Shot, use up Focus (Arcane Shot is considered the “Focus Dump” as it has no cooldown).
Other abilities, like Steady Shot, regenerate Focus.
Dispels have been “nerfed.” They will now be wasted even if the target has nothing to dispel on them. This is essentially a revert to the change many, many patches ago in Vanilla WoW.
Pets now automatically are within 3 levels of the Hunter as opposed to 5. Again, you still have to train them, but it’s better than training up a level 75 cat as opposed to a level 77 one.
Hunters finally receive an Aspect bar! Now we can remove those from the actionbar (though they will remain hotkeyed).
On Beast Mastery:
Intimidation is the specialized ability.
Aspect of the Dragonhawk (and Aspect of the Beast and Aspect of the Monkey) are now gone. The dodge bonuses go away with it.
Aspect of the Viper is replaced by Aspect of the Fox, as there’s no mana to regenerate. Aspect of the Fox allows Cobra Shot and Steady Shot to be usable while moving and focus to be generated when damaged by melee attacks.
Kill Command returns to being a truly integral part of the Beast Mastery rotation. However, this time it is a cast ability that actually deals damage and triggers the Hunter’s global cooldown. Many talents affect it in Beast Mastery, emphasizing its use in that talent tree.
Mend Pet gets a serious buff. It now heals based on a percentage of the pet’s health. This is truly amazing! It also costs absolutely no Focus to cast to boot.
Widow Venom is now the healing reduction effect Hunters can afflict (Aimed Shot loses this property). It also costs a pretty large amount of Focus.
On Marksmanship:
Aimed Shot is returning to a cast ability. To be honest though, the damage is rather pitiful for a cast ability as opposed to the amount it did in Burning Crusade. It is now the ability Hunters get for specializing Marksmanship.
Kill Shot gets a pretty large nerf (it needed one to be honest). It also has a glyph that effectively allows two Kill Shots per cooldown if the target fails to die. It doesn’t always work though…
Volley is removed, but Multishot takes its place as the aoe damage dealing ability (Multishot now hits infinite targets).
Tranquilizing Shot has 35 Focus cost. Take note of that.
Hunter’s Mark costs nothing.
All shots in general (except a few like Multishot and Silencing Shot, for some odd reason) are now 40 yards in range. Not sure why some of the shots were left out. Maybe it’s just negligence or something.
Viper Sting is removed. That makes sense, considering we don’t use mana. Scorpid Sting was also removed (as well as all other “hit chance reduction effects” which is what it was for all of Wrath of the Lich King. It used to reduce Strength and Agility prior to Wrath of the Lich King.)
On Survival:
Explosive Shot becomes the specialized ability.
Misdirection has no cost.
Traps have had their duration on the world increased back to 1 minute (i.e. if you lay a trap it lasts for 1 minute before disappearing). In addition, they are also invisible to other players again!
Scatter Shot becomes a baseline ability.
Trap Launcher finally gets implemented. It allowed Hunters to launch traps at any location within 40 yards that was in line of sight. (It’s rather clunky to use, unfortunately.)
Stats get changed. The major ones to note for Hunter are that Agility now grants 2 points of Ranged Attack Power as opposed to 1, and that pets now scale with combat ratings like Haste and Critical Strike.
I would analyze more, but I’d be rambling all day, so I urge you to look at the patch notes above and other resources, as this hardly does the Cataclysm class changes justice.
I will point out pets got changed in the sense they now bring some sort of major buff or debuff that doesn’t affect the Hunter and pet’s damage output significantly. These buffs/debuffs are “group buffs” that other classes can also provide, after all.
4.0.1a
Nothing of note.
4.0.3
User Interface
* Players may now adjust the local "Lag Tolerance" time for better precision of spell timing. This is an advanced-users-only feature found in the Interface Options (Combat) panel. (Must be turned on before able to adjust the slider).
Bug Fixes
* Macros now handle spell variant transitions better. For example, Trap Launcher causes a different version of Frost Trap to be cast. Previously the macro system was not handling this transition properly.
The “lag tolerance” thing essentially was a cast queue. It’s really hard to describe and it’s quite awkward. It’s good that Blizzard gave us the option to turn it off (the “cast queue” was implemented in Cataclysm, by the way).
Trap Launcher is now a little easier to use. Unfortunately, not by much.
4.0.3a (The Shattering)
General:
* The Shattering has happened.
* New Race/Class combinations: In the wake of a world on the brink of destruction, members of the Horde and Alliance have taken to new cultures and studies, mastering crafts previously foreign to them. Many existing playable races now have new class combinations.
Classes: General
* Mortal Strike, Furious Attacks, Wound Poison, Widow Venom, Permafrost, Improved Mind Blast, Monstrous Bite, and Legion Strike now reduce healing by 10%, down from 25%.
Hunter
* All special attacks based on weapon damage (except Scatter Shot) are now normalized.
* Scare Beast is now available at level 36, up from level 14, and has had its training cost updated.
* Deterrence is now available at level 78, up from level 36, and has had its training cost updated.
* Disengage is now available at level 14, down from level 78, and has had its training cost updated.
Glyphs
* The level requirements for glyphs that affect Scare Beast, Deterrence, and Disengage have been altered to correspond with the level changes of these abilities.
Bug Fixes
* The Core Hound pet ability Ancient Hysteria now places its own unique debuff on affected players that has the same effect as Sated and Exhaustion.
* Certain pets should no longer forget how to Dash.
Healing reduction effects get nerfed further (from 50% to 25% in 4.0.1 to 25% to 10% in this patch).
Apparently our shots were normalized again. I’m not sure what this really means. I guess it’s something to do with slower weapons not being quite as strong as opposed to faster weapons due to their weapon damages, which Hunter shots primarily scale off of.
Patch 4.0.6
Hunter
* Aimed Shot weapon damage has been increased to 200%, up from 150%. In addition, the base cast time has been reduced to 2.4 seconds, down from 3.
* Arcane Shot damage has been increased by 15%.
* Aspect of the Wild, Aspect of the Hawk, and Aspect of the Fox can now be cast while mounted.
* Hunters can now use Auto Shot while moving.
* Casting Trap Launcher, Distracting Shot, and Scare Beast now cancel Auto Shot when cast. This is to make it easier to crowd control creatures with Auto Shot while moving enabled.
* Concussive Shot duration has been increased to 6 seconds, up from 4.
* Deterrence now provides 100% chance for melee attacks to miss instead of 100% parry chance. This means that attacks that cannot be parried, notably some rogue abilities, can now be prevented by Deterrence, and the hunter will gain the benefit of Deterrence even if disarmed.
* Dust Cloud's cooldown and duration have been modified to make it closer aligned with Tailspin (same effect, different pet).
* Freezing Trap now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.
* Kill Command's damage has been increased by 20%.
* Kill Shot's attack power scaling has been increased by 50%.
* Master's Call now has a 35-second cooldown, down from 1 minute, and its range has been increased to 40 yards, up from 25. In addition, the visual effect is more obvious.
Hotfix: Cooldown has been increased to 45 seconds and it is now dispellable
* Wing Clip now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.
Beast Mastery
* Animal Handler now provides a passive 25% bonus to attack power, up from 15%.
Marksmanship
* Chimera Shot's overall damage has been increased by roughly 50%.
* Wild Quiver (Mastery): Chance for this to trigger per mastery has been increased by approximately 17%.
Survival
* Black Arrow damage has been reduced by 15%.
* Explosive Shot damage has been reduced by 15%.
* Hunter vs. Wild has been increased to 5/10/15% Stamina, up from 4/8/12%.
* Into the Wilderness (passive) has been reduced to a 10% Agility increase, down from 15%.
Pets
* Pets now have 70% of the master's armor, rather than a different value based on which type of pet they are.
* Shale Spiders now correctly have a special ability (Web Wrap).
* Bad Manner (monkey) now properly breaks from damage.
Glyphs
* Glyph of Concussive Shot redesigned. It now limits the maximum run speed of the target while Concussive Shot is active.
Bug Fixes
* Aimed Shot no longer ignores the Fire! buff when cast by macro.
* Camouflage is now breaking when the hunter's traps deal damage to a target.
* Chimera Shot's particle effect animations should now display correctly.
* Cobra Shot now properly increases the duration of the Serpent Spread Serpent Sting.
* The Focus Fire spell effect is now cooler than your best collection of green rectangles.
* Wild Quiver's effect per point of mastery value should now be consistent.
* Before shooting, male undead hunters will no longer look away from their targets.
Pet Fixes
* Pet families added in Cataclysm should not be missing talents.
* Pets should fight all underwater creatures, even if the hunter is out of melee range.
* Ancient Hysteria should not able to affect low-level characters.
* Ancient Hysteria now correctly affects pets.
* Embrace of the Shale Spider now provides resistances so that those resistances are not lost if this buff overwrites Blessing of Forgotten Kings.
* Ferocity-category pets in the dog and fox families now have access to the pet talent Charge.
* Mobility can correctly be learned by land-based hunter pets.
* Ravage no longer counts toward stun diminishing returns.
* Undead hunters now start with Revive Pet on the action bar.
* Shale Spiders are no longer missing a special ability.
* The Shell Shield (Terrorpene) visual has been enlarged and should now be seen when cast.
* The tooltip for the armor value in the Character pane should now be showing the correct amount of armor granted to pets.
Items
* PvP trinkets will now clear disarm and silence effects.
* Weapon Chains now reduce disarm duration by 60%, up from 50%.
* The PvE hunter 4-piece set bonus has been redesigned. It now reduces the cast time of Steady Shot and Cobra Shot by .2 seconds.
* All PvP 4-piece bonuses have had their flat stat values cut in half. Primary stats are very powerful in Cataclysm, so much so that players were considering using PvP gear in PvE just because of these primary stat bonuses.
Professions
Alchemy
* Alchemist's Stones for Agility, Strength, and Intellect have been added.
Enchanting
* Three new bracer enchants are available. They increase Agility by 50, Strength by 50, or Intellect by 50 respectively. Item level 300 or higher required. These new recipes are rare world drops.
Engineering
* Mystic Cogwheel is a new Engineering Cogwheel gem which provides resilience rating and can be purchased from the Engineering vendor for 55 Honor Points.
* Synapse Springs now increase Agility, Strength, or Intellect (whichever is highest for the character). In addition, the effect now lasts 10 seconds, down from 12.
Jewelcrafting
* New meta gems have been added: Agile Shadowspirit Diamond (Agility/3% critical damage), Reverberating Shadowspirit Diamond (Strength/3% critical damage), and Burning Shadowspirit Diamond (Intellect/3% critical damage). These new recipes are unbound and can drop from any Cataclysm creature. The new meta gems have a requirement of 3 red gems equipped.
* Meta gems with the Chaotic and Relentless prefixes now have a requirement of 3 red gems.
Racials:
* The draenei racial trait Gift of the Naaru now heals 20% of the target's health over 15 seconds, rather than a scaling value.
* The dwarven racial trait Stoneform now reduces all damage taken by 10%, rather than increasing armor by 10%. It also increases the dwarf's size when used.
* The gnomish racial trait Escape Artist now has a 1.5-minute cooldown, down from 1.75. In addition, it is now possible to use and waste this ability when not snared or rooted. This is consistent with other dispels.
* The human racial trait Every Man for Himself has been reverted back to a 2-minute cooldown, down from 3 minutes.
* The worgen racial trait Darkflight now has a 2-minute cooldown, down from 3, and is no longer on the global cooldown. In addition, the movement speed bonus now stacks with existing bonuses, but cannot be activated while Sprint or Dash is active (and they cannot be activated while Darkflight is active).
Undocumented Changes: Hunter
* Freezing Trap can no longer affect more than one target at the same time.
Hotfixes: Hunter (2/11):
* Auto Shot was not firing while the hunter was moving under certain conditions. Auto Shot should now always function correctly while the hunter is moving.
* Having a melee weapon equipped no longer causes the tooltips for Cobra Shot and Steady Shot to incorrectly display extra benefit from haste.
* The Warp Stalker ability Time Warp can no longer be used on paladins with the Divine Shield buff active.
Hotfixes: Hunter (2/22)
* Aspect of the Hawk gives roughly 2000 additional attack power, up to 2600 attack power total.
* Aimed Shot's weapon damage is now 160%, down from 200%.
Based on the changes here, Blizzard was clearly addressing issues of Marksmanship and Beast Mastery Hunter dps. As a result, most of the abilities involved in the Marksmanship and Beast Mastery rotation were buffed. Survival was also nerfed, although the Black Arrow nerf was rather unnecessary as it is now a really horrendous, inferior 31-point talent (outpaced by Explosive Trap).
The cast time reduction on Aimed Shot is not really correct, it's actually 3.0 to 2.9 because Aimed Shot has an invisible 0.5 second bonus cast time attached to it. Despite this, Aimed Shot was ultimately hotfix-nerfed. This was because it became the primary way of dumping Focus, as opposed to Arcane Shot (which is the intended Focus dump). The nerf actually resulted in a fantastic net buff for Hunters through Aspect of the Hawk's attack power bonus, which greatly increased Hunter dps in general. In addition, the balancing of Aimed Shot blurs the line between Arcane Shot and Aimed Shot as the Marksmanship Focus dump, which, in my opinion, is okay (it's better to have more playstyle options).
Auto Shotting while moving is a big change. Now we can pretty much do 100% of our dps while moving. The buff to Aspect of the Hawk creates a differentiation that may be a bit too large, forcing the use of Aspect dancing to maximize output in PvE and PvP, even though Blizzard, if I recall correctly, was trying to remove Aspect dancing.
I can understand why Blizzard tried to make some abilities cancel Auto Shot to stop CC breaking. However, making Trap Launcher stop Auto Shot isn't helpful because Hunters may launch other traps besides Freezing Trap to deal more damage. This is especially detrimental to Survival DPS, which uses Explosive Trap (via Trap Launcher) sometimes.
The Concussive Shot buff is solid. No complaints there.
Deterrence now pretty much actually works. No complaints there. It's still not the best defensive cooldown in the world, but it definitely is an improvement. Regarding "working while disarmed:" This refers to simultaneous impossibilities, such as when a Hunter uses Deterrence at the same time he is disarmed, as opposed to allowing Hunters to use Deterrence while disarmed.
The Kill Shot buff is great. Not a fan of the glyph design still.
PvP crowd controls in general got a blanket duration nerf. It's not just for hunters.
Master's Call got a somewhat questionable buff. I think what we can all agree on is the range increase to 40 yards is amazing. However, making it dispellable (while reducing cooldown, then increasing it for a net total of 25% cooldown reduction as opposed to before 4.0.6) turns it into a Hand of Freedom with a longer cooldown and more, unnecessary requirements. I'm hoping Blizzard rethinks this design.
The pet change (for scaling) is a buff. I will not go further into it.
Shale Spiders having an ability is great. (It's a stun apparently, by the way.) To be honest, it should've been in game to begin with, but better late than never.
The Bad Manner change is a bug fix.
Glyph of Concussive Shot is actually glitched. Concussive Shot apparently applies the effect of the glyph whether you have it or not (only on the tooltip). The problem is the entire thing doesn't seem to work...
The PvP trinket change makes me happy, as does the Weapon Chain change to reduce disarm durations even further.
The best change, in my opinion, is the 4-piece PvE set effect change. Reducing the cast time of Steady/Cobra Shot by 0.2 seconds is BIG. That means Hunters can regenerate a lot more Focus than usual. The only downside is that we'll eventually have to abandon the set effect.
The profession changes in general are all solid. They address a lot of issues for many classes, giving damage dealers a lot more choices for enchanting and the like (the Synapse Springs change is awesome, by the way).
The racial changes in general, especially the Draenei ones, are pretty good (except that Human one lol. Yes, I am biased against the Human racial a bit).
Freezing Trap not affecting two targets at once is okay,
BUT they should have mentioned it somewhere.
It's not fun to discover this partway through a Heroic dungeon and wipe your group on accident.
Patch 4.1.0
General:
*Resilience scaling has been modified for linear returns, as opposed to increasing returns. Under the new formula, going from 30 resilience to 40 resilience gives players the same increase to survivability as going from 0 to 10. Resilience now scales in the same way armor and magic resistances do. A player with 32.5% damage reduction from resilience in 4.0.6 should see their damage reduction unchanged in 4.1. Those with less than 32.5% will gain slightly. Those with more will lose some damage reduction, increasingly so as their resilience climbs.
Classes:
*General: All non-damaging interrupts off the global cooldown will now always hit the target. This includes Pummel, Kick, Mind Freeze, Rebuke, Skull Bash, Counterspell, Wind Shear, Solar Beam, Silencing Shot, and related player pet abilities.
Hunter:
*Deterrence no longer requires a melee weapon to be equipped.
*Explosive Trap now has a new spell effect.
*Master's Call now has a new spell effect.
*Multi-Shot damage has been increased by 250%.
*Tame Beast now tames pets to match the hunter's level, rather than 3 levels below.
Pets
*The Feed Pet ability now instantly heals 50% of the pet's health. Cannot be used in combat. Requires diet-appropriate food.
*The Happiness/Pet Loyalty System has been removed. Hunters will no longer have to manage Happiness for their pets, and the previous damage bonus for pets being happy will now be baseline for all tamed pets.
*Bloodthirsty no longer generates Happiness.
*Carrion Feeder no longer restores Happiness.
*Guard Dog no longer causes Growl to generate additional Happiness.
*Summoned pets now start with 100 focus, up from 0.
Glyphs
*Glyph of Mend Pet is now Glyph of
Greater
Lesser Proportion, which
increases
decreases the size of the pet slightly.
Hunter Bug Fixes
*Hunters will automatically acquire a new target if the current target dies in the middle of a cast.
*Aimed Shot and Steady Shot should no longer start casting Auto Shot on a new target when the "Stop Auto Attack" option enabled.
*Auto Shot now automatically turns off until reactivated once Freezing Trap is cast on an enemy player.
*Deterrence: The area damage of the paladin ability Hammer of the Righteous will no longer hit hunters with Deterrence active.
*Distracting Shot and Multi-Shot are now properly 40-yard range.
*Multi-Shot now properly has a 1-second global cooldown.
*Scatter Shot's disorient effect should no longer sometimes be broken by the hunter's Auto Shot.
Hotfixes: 4/27/2011:
Hunters
*Marked for Death is now applied properly to the target of Arcane Shot or Chimera Shot, allowing for focus macros (i.e. /cast Chimera Shot) to apply Marked for Death to the focused target and not the primary target.
*The Recluse Hatchling can correctly be targeted, attacked, and killed by players and NPCs after being tamed.
*Serpent Spread was only affecting targets closer than 38 yards to the hunter. It now affects all targets hit by Multi-Shot.
Hotfixes: 4/29/2011
Professions: Engineering
*Nitro Boosts now do 80% of the engineer’s health in damage over 8 seconds when they fail due to a Rocket Fuel Leak, down from 120%.
The resilience change is a big one. Now one doesn't have to mindlessly stack resilience to do well, but instead could build up other stats (such as using a PvE trinket as opposed to two Resilience PvP trinkets). The impact on Hunters is reasonably strong in that regard, although less damage reduction will hurt the Hunter a bit.
The interrupt change causing them to always hit is helpful, although not really a big deal in PvP - the hit cap is pretty easy to get. Still, it'll help against those pesky Night Elves and when players are gearing up.
Deterrence having no weapon requirement is a big change. It is not admittedly a reasonably good cooldown. It would be nice to have some sort of way to deal with DoTs, but I'll take what I can get.
Multi-Shot change is huge. It really helps out Hunter AoE damage, which was absolutely abysmal when Cataclysm first came out.
I liked the pet revamps this patch - it removed a lot of annoying clunk such as having to deal with happiness mechanics other pet owners didn't deal with and now all pets automatically level up to the same as your own level. The playing field
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Patch 4.2.0
General:
*All healing critical strikes now heal for 2 times a normal heal (+100%), up from 1.5 times a normal heal (+50%).
*All class abilities which place a buff on friendly targets no longer generate any threat. This goes for raid-wide buffs like and , as well as triggered effects such as or , and single-target buffs like and . The exception is buffs which directly cause healing or damage, such as or . Abilities such as these still generate normal threat.
Hunter:
* damage has been reduced. It now deals 120% weapon damage at level 80 or higher, down from 137%.
*Traps now scale with hunter stats such as hit, expertise, spell penetration and attack power as intended.
Marksmanship
* now grants additional critical strike chance against targets over 90% health, up from 80% health.
Survival
* damage done has been increased by roughly 40%.
Pets:
*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.
*The Defensive pet stance will now only cause the player's pet to attack enemies which attack the pet or the master.
*10 new rare tamable beasts have been added, each of which provides a unique taming challenge. Will you be the first hunter to tame Deth'tilac, the rarest and most powerful of them all? Players will need to progress through the Hyjal Regrowth and Molten Front daily questing areas in order to unlock access to the full gamut of taming challenges.
* (Tenacity) has been redesigned. The pet runs at high speed toward a group member, reducing the damage done by the next melee or ranged attack made against them equal to 50% of the pet's total health.
There's not too many big changes for Hunters, but even the few that happened in this patch impacted the class quite a bit. The only really notable change from General is the doubled healing from healing crits. This means that heals like Spirit Mend and the Chimera Shot heal have the potential to be even stronger (the clutch Chimera Shot crit heals are a godsend). It also makes it harder to kill enemy healers, though.
The Multi-Shot change is more or less a number balancing change. It's hardly surprising because the last major patch saw a buff of over 200% to Multi-Shot damage.
The trap scaling change (especially with Magic Penetration) is another godsend. It should've happened awhile ago, but at least traps won't be resisted for half the expansion now.
The Careful Aim change is in response to how powerful the talent is overall. I'd be more inclined to have flat bonus crit chance anyways, but oh well.
The Black Arrow buff is quite helpful. It doesn't resolve PvP issues related to it, but it's just one more step to making Survival stronger.
The pet changes are both a blessing and a curse. I do understand the removal of Aggressive stance, since one could mindlessly turn it on to mess with stealth players in PvP, but Assist isn't necessarily the best idea since if you want the pet to stick to a target you don't want to attack, you're going to have to toggle stances a lot more (as opposed to just keeping the pet in Defensive stance). It's just a major PITA more than anything else.
The new tameable pets are awesome. However, the fact that some are kill-able (in fact some are really EASY to kill, even on accident) is still a cause for worry. It means that Hunters have an additional avenue of griefing and there is enough Hunter hate among the community to justify it. I have already seen instances of such occurrences.
Patch 4.3.0
Hunter
* now reduces the target’s healing received by 25%, up from 10%.
Beast Mastery
* now increases Attack Power by 30%, up from 25%.
* now reduces the target’s healing received by 25%, up from 10%.
* now does approximately 20% more damage, and has an increased area of effect.
* now does approximately 20% more damage, and has an increased area of effect.
Marksmanship
* now only affects the next Multi-shot cast.
* is now activated by targets affected by .
Survival
* damage has been increased by 15%.
Bug Fixes
* no longer affects melee abilities.
*The casting bar for should now always indicate the correct cast duration at high values of haste.
Items
*
Tier 13
released.
Lots of buffs for Hunters this patch. Let's begin from the top.
The changes to Monstrous Bite and Widow Venom are part of a change to all healing reduction effects to account for how strong Healers got/are getting (especially due to 4.2). It doesn't really make Widow Venom much better, to be honest, but it's still nice to have the utility.
The Beast Mastery buffs are pretty nice as well. It doesn't make the spec viable by any means, but it does make it a little stronger and usable.
The Bombardment change got reverted in a hotfix. It was pretty dumb to begin with since that was what Bombardment was essentially doing for awhile anyways.
The Resistance Is Futile change overall doesn't mean all that much since the talent itself is pretty terrible and in the wrong talent tree.
The Explosive Shot damage change is absolutely definitive, in my opinion. This, along with a few other changes (including those in 4.3.2) made Survival the top Hunter damage spec.
I also noted the Tier 13 release due to the Focus regeneration aspects of the 2-piece set effect, which is virtually mandatory in PvP.
Patch 4.3.2
Hunters
*Aspect of the Hawk now grants roughly 35% more attack power.
*Deterrence now also reduces damage taken by 30% while active.
*Black Arrow now ticks every 2 seconds for 20 seconds, as opposed to every 3 seconds for 15 seconds. The total damage dealt by the ability is unchanged.
*Lock and Load no longer benefits Arcane Shot, nor is it consumed by Arcane Shot.
(Repost from my blog)
Hunters get an overall damage increase. Personally, I’m more of a fan of a scaling Aspect effect as opposed to the constant increase to a static value that could have severe repercussions, making Hunters too strong leveling up and in the early endgame. 2700 AP is just a bit silly...
The Deterrence buff was rather unexpected. I never thought they would add a damage reduction effect to help with damage-over-time effects (and other effects that ignore Deterrence), something that’s been a rather bothersome issue for Hunters.
The Black Arrow change is definitely a buff, bringing the ability in line with Explosive Trap in terms of how often it ticks. This increases the overall chance of Black Arrow proccing Lock and Load.
On that note, Lock and Load got a change too. The fact that the buff now excludes Arcane Shot is actually very beneficial, making Explosive Shot weaving much easier without Focus capping much easier (and Kill Command-less!).
Overall, while statistically, Hunters aren’t exactly common in endgame progression and some changes (such as to Lock and Load and to Black Arrow) were completely necessary, I am rather concerned Hunters are receiving a buff despite the fact Tier 13 introduced strong set effects and Hunters were already buffed in 4.3.
Post by
Interest
3. Dungeons
Dungeons are pretty good.
Don't get me wrong. I just feel there are a couple improvements it could use. These, however, are not quite as important as the rest of the suggestions and is quite brief so if you so desire you can skip this suggestion.
A New Idea:
In short, there should be some dungeons that can accept a larger variety of players based on role.
For instance, make some encounters that involve significant amounts of healing as opposed to damage dealing and adjust the role requirements (i.e. 1 tank, 2 damage dealers, 2 healers) to add some versatility as opposed to the standard "3-1-1" dungeons.
Also, some dungeons should be heavily vehicle based and accept any role. This helps to speed up the queue and add a little flavor to something where you'll just be using your class abilities by introducing new abilities. Perhaps make an Oculus-like instance where you only ride the "drakes."
I understand that implementing these suggestions would take quite a bit of time, as they are a bit different from the standard setup and would require some pretty significant balance analysis to properly design.
A New Difficulty Level:
This isn't really my suggestion, but possibilities of a new "difficulty" level would be excellent.
For instance, there could be content more difficult than Heroics for 5-mans. These ideas can also apply towards raids (actually so can the above idea, but then again, that's already been put into play anyways).
I will probably expand on this more but so far I really don't have anything. If you wish you can watch some of Totalhalibut's "
Azeroth Daily
" and find the episode(s) where such suggestions are made.
Additional Suggestions:
Suggested by
Hyperspacerebel of Wowhead
The best solution, imo, is to give the option of declining an in-progress invite while keeping your place in line (and then the next person in line will get the invite, and he can accept or decline and keep his place, and so on). That way, everyone's happy: the people who want a full run can wait it out until one is available, and those who just want a quick run for the extra points will get in faster.
The intention of this suggestion is pretty obvious. Some people simply don't like joining dungeons that are in progress for a variety of reasons. Because of this and the fact some people actually like going into dungeons in progress to quickly get some Valor Points, this compromise works both ways. It may somewhat harm a group's chances of continuing the dungeon, but at least players will have the option to join a fresh dungeon group or a dungeon group in progress.
4. More Sunwell
Patch 2.4, Fury of the Sunwell, introduced a lot of content I found to be quite excellent. Class balance aside, I found very few issues with that patch. This was primarily due to a couple reasons:
The first reason was the fact a new 5-man was introduced. It was quite difficult in comparison to other Burning Crusade 5-mans of the time. Blizzard repeated this idea in Patch 3.3 by adding 3 new 5-man instances. Also, more 5-mans are definitely on the horizon. Blizzard clearly wants to keep using this idea. Can you blame them? It's good to have some fresh new 5-man content on a regular basis (even if it's a recycled instance, such as Zul'Gurub in Patch 4.1). Because of this, this isn't the main focal point of this suggestion.
The second reason was the daily quest hub on the Isle of Quel'danas. I really liked how the server as a whole was caught up in an effort to take it back by doing dailies. Only one other such event is like this, and that was the event involving the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj (had to turn in supplies, etc). Since then I have not seen it at all, which is quite a shame. It felt like people were accomplishing something and changing the world for everyone. Blizzard tried to replace this with phasing, and it's not that bad, but it would be cool to bring back that concept where the actions of some change it for everyone (even though Blizzard did say something about making less world events like that).
The Isle of Quel'danas: Part 2:
It's pretty simple. Just make a quest hub like the Isle of Quel'danas. This means that there are only a few dailies to begin with. However, as people do the dailies over a period of time, the quest hub changes in steps, like taking the Inn and Sanctum areas back on the Isle of Quel'danas. Adding in 5-mans and a raid instance associated with the quest hub is purely optional.
Perhaps there will be one with the release of Firelands. I wouldn't know, to be honest. However, if there is not, that would be an excellent place to put such a concept in. A harrowing war against the elemental plane of Fire where players and NPCs alike battle to gradually take a foothold and strike out at Ragnaros would be cool.
I don't really know what other places to use as examples at this time, but definitely consider creating a quest hub like Isle of Quel'danas (many more times).
5. Real ID: Social Connections:
Criticism from many people aside, this feature isn't really all that bad when used properly. However, at the moment it only allows communications across realms and factions. There is no option to communicate across regions (a feature that should be implemented) and there's no other real benefit of doing so. Despite the fact this feature in itself is currently a breakthrough, it is obvious that Blizzard is quite capable of linking every realm in a region for battleground matchmaking. Therefore, why shouldn't players be allowed to do activities together across servers if they are Real ID friends. Obviously, it would have to be limited to prevent significant deprecation of the Paid Character Move, but other games offer features where players can communicate across servers and even do stuff with them (though in some cases they just switch servers, which is completely free in that case).
So what can be done to enhance Real ID? Read on...
Partying Through Real ID:
Using similar functionality to merge battlegroups together for Battleground queuing, also use similar functionality to allow players who are Real ID friends of each other to invite each other while on different servers. While grouped, these players can queue for Dungeons and Battlegrounds, and can communicate as if they were in a party normally. They cannot really do anything more, as that would heavily damage some of the realm-specific functions (Arenas, the new solo content above if it's implemented, and the like). Because this functionality would render conversations obsolete, conversations would be removed. In addition, because of this, Dungeon Finder would also have to be extended across regions for matchmaking just like Battlegrounds.
This will still be faction restricted to adhere to the rules, but I feel this would allow players who truly are friends of each other to be segregated by realms.
I understand that problems I outlined above would be prevalent and people may even go so far as to openly give out information for the sake of reliable grouping. However, unless this gets so bad to the point 5-man dungeons and premades are being made solely through Real ID and solo queuing is impossible, I doubt people will be forced into using Real ID just to do their daily dungeon or battleground. This idea is to primarily allow Real ID friends to actually do something together without resorting to other measures like rolling new characters or paying out money. Talking is nice and all, and I know WoW is a social game, but friendships are a bit "distanced" when you can't even do stuff together without leaving a place you're attached to.
I forgot to mention it should be possible to create a raid group through Real ID if this goes through, for obvious reasons.
Call me crazy, but I believe it's a decent idea. I know I'll get a lot of flame for this, but if you don't like it or have a better idea, please say so. Don't just insult me over it or something - constructive feedback is what I'll focus on. (I'll put this at the end of the suggestion list, but I feel I should also post it here too).
6. Player Owned Houses:
Yes I stole this idea from Runescape. Don't need to say it.
The Idea:
Essentially, players will be allowed to purchase a plot of land for a small sum of gold. They can then buy a house of their choice. Houses will use the building models currently ingame, such as an Alliance Inn or small Horde hut. Obviously, the larger and more extravagant the building is, the more it will cost. You can choose to upgrade later for the difference in amount, but you can never actually sell your house for a refund (to prevent gold sellers from doing so to boost their gold stocks).
But where will this land be? Well, when you purchase the plot, you can choose which capital city to tie it to (of your faction). You can then access your land by going through portals located in each capital city (should be at least two per capital to prevent heavy crowding). These portals go to a special area that is phased for each player (location is your choice. For instance, it can be placed in the middle of nowhere like some of the "unreachable" spots.)
When on the land, you can choose to enter a building mode by talking to the NPC that is present there and add stuff, such as your house. You can add some of the larger doodads this way. Water can also be added and land can be raised and lowered and the land tileset can also be changed. All of these will have specific costs. This UI will work in a similar way as the Warcraft 3 World Editor or the like, allowing players to at least have fun creating a special plot of land for themselves. It would also add a special feature that World of Warcraft really lacks: the ability to change the actual world in some significant way.
Through this UI you can add trees, waterfalls, rocks, shiny pools in the water (like a fishing pool, but keep in mind the water cannot be fished), schools of fish, birds, some shrubbery, and so on. These can be removed, but you receive no refund if you do so. You can also enter a "sandbox mode" where you pay no money but can add plenty of terrain based features (to a limit, obviously, to save server space). You can then set that as the player housing area you want, and pay the cost, locking it in forever like the Talent Tree Preview function.
Some NPCs can also be added too. Most would be quite expensive. However, there shouldn't be significant vendors (except maybe for extremely large amounts of gold). Perhaps there will be bankers, possibly a guild vault, and maybe even a mailbox. They're already in the capital you're teleporting from so it's not really a big deal. I understand Blizzard wants players in the "hub city" but isn't that effectively what the player owned house a part of anyways? Also, you can even get an Innkeeper and bind yourself to your actual home (this should probably be pretty cheap, maybe). By default, there will always be a portal back to the capital city you come from. No other portals can be put in.
Furniture and the like can also be added. However, most if not all should be purchased items through special currencies or other methods. These include:
The Justice Point, Valor Point, Honor Point, and Conquest Point vendors.
Guild Reputation Vendor
Other Reputation Vendors
Professions (Leather sofas, cloth curtains, metal railings, the list goes on).
Achievements
Rare drops?
Completing specific quests.
For instance, if you complete the quest to turn in Onyxia's Head, it can be placed in your home. If you have a Feat of Strength for a legendary, you can place a copy of the legendary for display somewhere in your home. The list goes on for what can be done here. A lot of these special furniture and minor perks should cost varying amounts of gold, depending on the quality of the item.
A few of these items can be salvaged and are unbound, even after using them, but a good number are Bind on Account.
This is because your player house is actually bound to your account as well
(based on realm, unless Blizzard can somehow extend the functionality to region like they're attempting to with Bind on Account items) to significantly save server space (50 houses per account is just plain ridiculous). You'll see why I thought it would be better this way soon.
I'll keep adding ideas as they come, but I feel this will sufficiently give you an idea of what could or should be done. Obviously, as it is, Blizzard would be hard pressed to implement this at all. Therefore, I should probably say you shouldn't get your hopes up unless five million+ people suddenly cry out to put in player housing.
Additional Stuff:
Not too much to put here, but obviously it would be nice to allow some functionality to allow players into each others' houses. This can be done by inviting a player to your group, then toggling an option to allow players into your house (even if you're not in it). This can be toggled by the NPC selling houses or the NPC who allows you to build in the housing area. It can also be toggled in your UI or by right clicking your own character portrait and selecting the option to allow players in. When entering the portal, a player can then enter the house of the party leader. It's possible other functions can be put in, such as the portal being interactive and allowing you to enter the house of any player in your party.
For cross realm you can enter the houses of your Real ID friends only. This is an extension of the Real ID suggestion above.
For obvious reasons, players on ignore cannot enter the houses of the player ignoring them.
In addition, you cannot enter build mode while players are in the house (you can eject all players then do so) and players cannot enter a house in build mode.
7. A New Way To Twink:
For a long time coming Blizzard nerfed twinking over and over again. I can agree a good amount of the changes were justified. After all, people shouldn't be walking around with level 70 enchants at level 19. However, Blizzard finally put an effective end to twinking by putting in the concept of battleground experience. This made it so players would level up, no matter what. Blizzard also put in an experience lock system. The issue with this was that it changed the set of battlegrounds the player could enter.
Now don't get me wrong. I understand that Blizzard destroyed twinking to prevent people on the lower level end of the battleground from having not just a disadvantage, but a nightmarish disadvantage again their opponents.
But it didn't stop there. People did find a way around this by "locking" their experience through the method of simply not purchasing expansion packs. For instance, if a player wanted a level 60 twink, they could do it by transferring that character to an account with Vanilla WoW. The same went for level 70 having up to Burning Crusade. People often then did Alterac Valley, as the ceiling end of the level range was 60, 70, and 80.
But then Blizzard changed the battleground brackets so that it always is X4 or X9 (i.e. 10-14, 15-19, and the like) with Cataclysm. This put the final nail in the coffin of twinking. It may be possible to organize such battles (maybe through War Games), but blindly doing so cross realm is near impossible. In addition, the prevalence of twink guilds is dying out due to all the previous implementations. It's also harder to beat on people within 4 levels of you as opposed to 9 levels.
My Suggestion To "Lock" Experience
I think it's time to bring "twinking" back. This can be done by doing either of the following:
-Allow battleground queuing to no longer differentiate between experience locked and experience unlocked characters, allowing both to enter the same battlegrounds.
-Allow an experience bar reset function. This service can be purchased for 10 silver * character level each time. It will completely reset the experience to zero for that level.
Why would I bring back twinking though? Well, the main reason is because of the new brackets, which have a much smaller level difference. In addition, with the nerfs to enchantments and the changes to leveling and quest rewards which have players more prepared, twinks won't outgear their opponents as much as before. Finally, progression of abilities has changed so that everyone will have their signature abilities from the start and a few more as they level. I do know some of these talented abilities can be gotten at twink levels, but because you get talents every two levels as opposed to every level, the advantage won't be quite as ridiculous (once again, repeating the above about smaller difference brackets).
This would also allow Blizzard to not have to fix their zone progression too much in terms of experience gains for all sorts of playstyles. Instead, players can reset their experience and continue leveling in the zone long after they should've out-leveled it and left due to doing an instance or the like. This doesn't mean Blizzard should not change zones where you can normally out-level the zone by just doing the quests, however.
I do understand there will still be some amount of unbalance in battlegrounds and does ruin the purpose of endgame at level cap. However, not everyone has Cataclysm or they wish to access a different expansion of endgame at that level to break up the monotony of level cap (for instance, not everyone will like the suggestions I put above for solo content and are tired of doing whatever they are doing at level 85).
Obviously, for the new feature of resetting experience, there has to be some way to point new players to that feature.
That concludes my list of suggestions. As always, constructive feedback is appreciated. I highly doubt any of this will even be enter the minds of Blizzard's developers or be implemented. However, if the feedback is good and enough users want it, then I will repost this to the Official Forums and see the responses there.
Also, additional suggestions are accepted. I would appreciate if suggestions were readable so that I can edit them into the post without significant trouble.
What I will ignore or not take seriously is insults without reason and the like. If you think these suggestions are stupid, give a reason, but please refrain from personally attacking me or other posters in the thread. I would prefer civil discussion and so on and will report offensive posts as soon as possible.
These suggestions were written in Patch 4.0.6 by Interest.
These suggestions were last edited in Patch 4.0.6 (March 20th)
Post by
matheus314
O
M
G
Brilliant! Outstanding. You are my new hero. Thanks Interest.
Post by
offendead
You've done a staggering amount of work here. Thanks.
Reading it all... took a while... but certainly does give you perspective.
I'd forgotten about mend pet being channelled --though the annoyance of running out of food hadn't left me.
Playing my hunter now is definately better/easier than when I first dabbled, but then most of these patches occurred in between.
I hope this gets added to the "helpful posts" sticky.
Post by
Interest
Reformatted it so that it's a bit easier to navigate.
Post by
Reallyape
Great post. Skipped a lot of it, but that was very interesting, especially the early ones since I wasn't playing hunter at that time. Had a good laugh at that "feign death no longer actually kills the hunter" line.
Post by
Interest
Great post. Skipped a lot of it, but that was very interesting, especially the early ones since I wasn't playing hunter at that time. Had a good laugh at that "feign death no longer actually kills the hunter" line.
Yeah. I was surprised that feign death actually did kill the Hunter.
Post by
291094
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
jaffy
This... this is amazing.
I had completely forgotten about Mend Pet being channeled!
And Aspect of the Beast! How I miss it! I remember feeling like a complete badass in Warsong Gulch while sneaking into the flag room, knowing that I couldn't be tracked.
This should be stickied. Immediately.
Post by
Interest
Thank you for this.
I asked for a briefing of this kind when I played paladin, didn't really meet great resplies, but as stated above me it really gives you perspective and makes you appreciate the work.
Thank you.
I'm taking requests to do other classes..
Soon.
I'm a bit overloaded and need to finish current projects before taking on more.
Post by
Interest
I hate to double post, but can you delete the post right after the Cataclysm patch notes Cialbi? I might need it for upcoming patch notes. Would be nice to actually delete two posts so I can have two extra posts for future.
Post by
Interest
...What posts? :D
Har har. Thanks. I was running low on character space for the Cataclysm post.
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190432
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534388
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6550
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