There’s No Love Like Hunter Love

You know, as horrible as it was to get super nerfed, then nerfed again, then stealth nerfed, then nerfed again — it’s now paying off. After dreading every blue post and patch note, we hunters are finally in a place where Blizz has aknowledged that we’re a bit too weak and scale poorly with gear.

Now every time we hear something about hunters it’s good news. Here is the latest good news:

Ammo is too expensive
We agree with the comments that ammo costs have gotten too high. It was acceptable when hunters realistically did not die as often, and thus didn’t have high repair bills. But it has gotten too high now.

Pet scaling
Pets need to scale better. As soon as you have a hunter choosing say AP over crit because one helps the pet and the other doesn’t then that’s a problem.

Traps in PvP
I’m not sure if the healer can out-heal your damage or not. That’s a longer discussion about how much damage a healer should have to heal through and if the only healer counter should be CC. But we did design the hunter around having potent CC, and we don’t think their CC feels scary any longer. Traps are probably in most need of some attention here. We’ll try and go into more detail in the class Q&A if it isn’t too far away.

So for the first topic, ammo… I have no idea what this means. Is this a hint that they’re finally going to implement the “non-consumable” ammo idea that they wanted for patch 3.1, or are they just going to lower the cost of vendor ammo? Or will they make the engineering ammo much cheaper to make? Or maybe put in a new vendor who sells the engineering ammo for a silver a stack? (I can hear engineers everywhere weep at the thought of losing their only way to make money).

Pet scaling is, without question, the thing that we hunters are most excited about. If you’ll recall from the last time that Blizz talked about it, they said they were going to make pets scale with resilience, and could conceivably add any other stat to the scaling. So at that time they were clearly looking at PVP, and it’s really nice to see them now clearly implementing this across the board!

What really interests me about pet scaling is what stats they’ll have crossover. It seems crit for certain, we already get AP and Hit — but we’ll probably also see haste and armor pen. But will we get any more defensive stats? Specifically I’m thinking Dodge, which could allow for some new levels of extreme soloing. But what if they also had the Defense stat transfer in part to your pet? Then you could legitimately collect a set of avoidance gear for your pet tanking (though you dps would be total garbage).

Now that would be cool.

I should also point out that in Patch 3.2 Blizz will be giving professions a bit of an update, mostly to scale their unique profession enchants to keep pace with gear, it seems. Mining gets more stamina, skinning gets more crit, etc. etc. You can see the full list of what they’re doing Here.