Hunter news:
Beast Mastery
- Animal Handler now increases your pet’s attack power by 5/10% instead of increasing its expertise by 5/10.
Survival
- Deterrence now deflect all spells. (Old – Only spells cast by targets in front of you)
Pets
- Rake (Cat) now deals 47 to 67 bleed damage and an additional 19 to 25 damage every 3 seconds at max rank. (Up from 19 to 25 additional damage over 9 sec)
- Roar of Sacrifice cooldown has been reduced from 2 min to 1 min.
- Wild Hunt now increases the contribution your pet gets from your Stamina by 20% and attack power by 15%. (Up from 10%)
Glyphs
- Glyph of Arcane Shot – Restores mana equal to 20% of your Arcane Shot’s mana cost.
- Glyph of Freezing Trap – When your Freezing Trap breaks, the victim’s movement speed is reduced by 30% for 4 sec.
I think the most interesting bit of news here is the very first one. Animal Handler is being changed to boost your pets attack power, rather than provide expertise. To me this means that Blizz is indeed going ahead with the plan to make your pet’s expertise scale with your hit rating. Thus if you’re at the hit cap, then your pet is at the expertise cap and will not be able to be dodged or parried.
This is an exciting little confirmation. Having your pets expertise scale with your hit is a pretty substantial little boost to pet dps. For your typical raid, your pet is attacking from behind and cannot be parried; however, it still has a 5% chance to be dodged. Meaning this change alone will increase your pets damage by 5% (assuming you’re hit capped, of course).
And to make life even better, you’ll be able to keep your points in Animal Handler and get a nice little attack power boost out of it.
The expertise change will give a nice little boost bump to hunter dps, and a much larger bump to BM hunter dps (not enough to be competitive, but it’s a start). I gotta say I was half thinking that they wouldn’t implement the expertise cap on live, and this is just a very exciting indication that they’re still moving in that direction!
You guys sound pretty much like us…..random Snafu’s…….I think raids or instances are the perfect environment for Murphy’s Law
I bet it will be the expertise dps cap which is only for dodge (6.50%). parry is typically around twice that of dodge on most bosses so it would be way overpowered to give that much expertise to your pets as most tanks never reach that without sacrificing advoidance/sta gemming/enchants for expertise.
This is Hawtsauce. Anything done in BM just got a lot easier.
It also might be cause to re-test the cat compared to a wolf for raid dps. Either way, thanks for the update.
Looks like extremely solo is looking up after patch 3.2 also might give me a better chance to pet tank heroics. Yes it will be interesting to see if the cat out does the wolf once the new patch has started, looks like i might be leveling another pet . Thanks for the heads up Frost
Will these changes, perhaps, mean a new pet talents guide?
After every major patch *all* of the guides are reviewed and updated
Fradin, pet tanking heroics is already possible, but not without a fair amount of prep work. I don’t want to play spoiler on Frost’s site, but you can expect more on this in the coming weeks.
Wowhead has a list up of all the new gear for 3.2, and to me it looks really MM heavy.