Gaah! Hide!! Patch 3.0.8 Live!

So it’s finally happened, patch 3.0.8 is live and ready to kick the ass of hunters all over the world (of Warcraft). WHU member Twocows reports the patch notes (the hunter ones anyway) as follows:

* Hunter Aspects are now off the Global Cooldown again. They still have a shared 1 second cooldown.
* 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 seconds and has a 90 second 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.
* Ferocious Inspiration: This talent now also increase the damage the Hunter does with Arcane Shot by 3/6/9%.
* 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.
* Lock and Load: Now has a 30 second cooldown.
* 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 (Hunter): Cooldown increased to 8 sec, up from 6. Mana cost reduced to 8%, down from 12%.
* 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).
* Pets
o All Hunter pet abilities with a cooldown of 30 seconds or more are no longer on the global cooldown.
o The coefficient of Rake (Cat) and Scorpid Poison (Scorpid) has been lowered.
o Rake: This hunter pet ability has had its damage adjusted to prevent unreasonable scaling with attack power.
o Scorpid Poison: No longer stacks. The damage has been adjusted to prevent unreasonable scaling with attack power.
o Spirit Strike (hunter pet ability) now has an initial attack (which can crit) and then a single dot. Damage overall is higher.

Here’s the biggies:

Steady shot getting 10% of attack power. In the neighborhood of a 20% nerf to BM. Hurts MM hunters only a bit, since they don’t use Steady Shot as much as BM.

Spirit Bond -5% pet damage, Unleashed Fury -5% pet damage, and Serpent Swiftenss -10% pet attack speed, which is close to -10% pet damage. I’m thinking, just looking at things, that BM is looking at about a 20% dps reduction. Ow!

However, we will be doing some testing tonight. We have a raid tonight, but we’re gonna try our darndest to hit that target dummy before the raid, and maybe even stay up after our bedtime to hit it some more. We’ve budgeted a few hundred gold to spend on respecs to get a feel of how everything stands nowadays.

As always, we’ll be sure to report our results here!