Hilarious! The dead zone is back!

I’m sure that’s just a bug when they tried to re-implement the minimum range after accidentally removing it. But goddamn. Seriously?

My pets do not seem to have any new abilities. Here are the changes we see…

Beast Mastery

• Viper Venom and Scorpid Venom seems to be gone.
• Focus Fire now has a 15 sec cooldown. Down from 30 sec.
• Improved Kill Command now Increases the critical strike chance of your Kill Command by 5/10% instead of reducing its cooldown.
• Kill Command now triggers the global cooldown.
  

Marksmanship

• Kill Shot now deals 150% weapon damage (down from 200%) and scales with 30% of your Attack Power (down from 40%). Base damage reduced by 50%. Cooldown increased from 6 sec to 10 sec. Focus cost removed.
• Multi-Shot – Fires several missiles, hitting your current target and all enemies within yards of that target for x% of weapon damage. / 40 Focus, 5-35 yd range, Instant
• Aimed Shot no longer deals 300% of weapon damage, now deals [ 40% of RAP + 681 ] damage. Cast time increased from 2.5 sec to 3.5 sec.
• Arcane Shot base damage reduced by 60%, now scales from 19% of Attack Power, up from 17%.
• Chimera Shot no longer deals 190% weapon damage, now deals [ 24% of RAP + 401 ].
• Artisan Quiver (specialization): instead of giving 25% attack power boost as both BM and SV specializations do, this now increases auto-shot damage by 15%.
  

Survival

• Serpent Spread – Targets hit by your Multi-Shot are also afflicted by your Serpent Sting equal to 12/15  sec of its total duration.
• Scatter Shot – now has a minimum range of 5 yards. (Mistake when fixing the minimum range on other stuff?)
  

Base focus regen rates look untouched. Interesting to see a change to Artisan Quiver for MM — I wonder if this means we can expect either the BM or SV “25% AP” one to chance in the near future?

The loss of viper and scorpid venom is odd. I kinda understand viper venom, which has only situational (pvp) uses, but scorpid venom? I guess we shall no longer be one of the classes bringing the armor debuff.

The big news on the BM front is that the Imp Kill Command talent has gone back to boosting the crit chance of Kill Command. This means that the talent no longer removes the cooldown on Kill Command — thus BM now will need to use arcane (more on that in a bit) as a focus dump and kill command on cooldown. Boosting the crit chance on kill command is also great, as it combos with sic ‘em and cobra strikes. This is the start of an actual rotation for BM! Add to that Kill Command now triggers the global cooldown, and at the very least we’ve removed the one-button rotation macro. Whew!

Focus Fire now has a cooldown equal to its duration, of 15 seconds. This is a… odd change. You’ll still want to hit it every time it’s available (except, possibly, during big red pet) and it still doesn’t trigger the global cooldown. This is still looking like an ability that requires no thought and will just be macro’d into all the other shots.

Shot Damage Adjustments

Many shots have had their damage adjusted so that they are less dependent on weapon damage and scale more with attack power. We’ll have to do testing to see how this actually works out, but I figure it’ll be a wash, and I totally agree with this move. We’re still scaling with weapon damage, just not as strongly.

Kill Shot looks like it got weaker overall, with a reduction both in base damage and in attack power coefficient and its cooldown increased. It is also now free, not costing any focus.

Aimed Shot is far weaker. In fact it’s only a bit better than arcane shot seems to be. Gone are the days of the 20k aimed shot crits. Now the average crits for me at level 83 seem to be around 11-12k.

Arcane shot had it’s base damage reduced a touch, but had its attack power coefficient increased. Is this the predicted tweak to make arcane worth using again? Will it go back to being better than steady/cobra and thus go back to being our focus dump? Initial testing suggests that arcane is indeed a *bit* better than cobra shot for BM, and certainly better than steady for MM. The numbers are close enough however that I should really do some good long target dummy tests.

Multi-Shot AoE

So multi-shot has been changed to be pretty much exactly what I thought it’d be — except instead of a conical attack, it’s sort of an exploding attack. You shoot one guy, and everyone within a certain number of yards (we don’t know how far yet) also gets hit. Still costs us 40 focus, meaning at best we can only fire 2 or 3 in a row before going back to steady/cobra. It still has a minimum range.

This does indeed feel like their intent for a more huntery feeling aoe. By which they maintain our minimum range mechanic, and we go back to having a weak aoe (but we still have an aoe). It is true, however, that we have fewer aoe situations than we do in Wrath, and that everyone’s aoe has been weakened.

Ultimately I suspect I’ll be fine with this version of our aoe. The big disappointment is that we can only fire it twice and then work on recharging. Also, MM has a talent that makes it cheaper so can fire more; SV has a talent that makes it land much harder (serpent sting applied on every single target? OMG) and BM… is screwed? Let’s get them something to make our sucky aoe a little less sucky.