Whoah — it’s here, Patch 3.2 was released today. You can see the full patch notes Here. Let’s take a look at the hunter-specific portion:
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. Talents
- 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.
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.
Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage-over-time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion.
Okay, we finally have a major patch that doesn’t completely re-work our entire class, which is a nice change of pace. However, let’s briefly highlight the big changes here, and the ones that will affect things:
- Deterrence working from behind: awesomesauce. It’s about frickin’ time.
- Traps on separate cooldowns: awesomesauce again! I suspect there are a lot of creative ways of making use of this new ability that I haven’t even thought of yet. Even in raids this will be situational, but very nice.
- Lock & Load: small nerf for SV, but probably not enough to swing the SV/MM balance at all.
- All pets gaining expertise along with hunter hit rating: massively huge deal. This is the big change of the patch and wants for some explanation.
When attacking in raids, our pets have a 5% chance to be dodged. Now being hit capped will reduce that chance to be dodged completely — effecivelyincreasing pet dps by 5%. Now for MM or SV hunters, that may mean an overall 0.5% increase in our dps (which is nice) but for BM hunters that’s going to be closer to a 2.4% dps increase!
Now, I should stress that this isn’t enough to make BM do as much damage as SV or MM; however, it’s an improvement, certainly. Now to be more specific, expertise actually reduces your pet’s chance to be dodged and parried; however, since our pets attack from behind, they can’t be parried. But – for pet tanking or extreme soloing, this will greatly increase your pet’s damage (and threat) even more! Woo!
Finally, BM currently has a pet talent that gives your pet some expertise: Animal Handler. I did not see in the patch notes that this talent had changed; however, I assume that it must have. On the test realm notes they had changed it to make it still a worthwhile talent.
So — big news for today! New dungeons to group and raid! Badges of Conquest available from all old raids and heroics! New loot! Raid lockouts can be extended so you can raid the same place for multiple weeks without a reset!
I can’t wait to log on!
Yippeeeee!!!!
About time too!
You missed a part in the bugs fixed section,
-Lock and Load: The tooltip for this talent has been updated to indicate that it also works with Explosive Trap.
has this always been the case???
Yeah! Keep fixing BM! Lets get it back up to raid capabilities!
I run heroics and raid in MM spec, but outside of that I quest, solo, and help lowbies in BM with my trusty pig (or sometimes a turtle)…..I love the changes to BM
Frost I was wondering, as a Survival Hunter would it now increase my dps to drop an Immolation/Explosive trap on whatever I’m fighting (assuming they aren’t grouped in with the Black Arrow CD) then jumping back and starting my regular rotation?
I was just assuming Black Arrow would fall under some sort of “shadow” category with Imo/Exp being in a “fire” category, allowing both to be down at once.
But I might be wrong
Do you foresee any changes to your recommended SV hunter build, due to the change in Hunting Party going from .25% over 15 seconds to 1% over 5 seconds?
Imolation trap, explosive trap, and black arrow are all on the same cooldown.
I don’t think I’ll be changing the SV build just because of the replenishment nerf — that’s a global nerf affecting all replenishment classes — so ours didn’t get worse in comparison to others. And we are still going to want replenishment available in all raids.
Witwicky is a happy crocalisk. I’m off to attempt to coerce guildies into chain-running heroics with me as tank.
Alright so the trap categories are more like “movement impairing”, “damage causing”, and um… “amphibians”?
In other news looks like we just got a nice 4 hour addition to the wait time, least they’re not going hour by hour this time and giving me false hopes.
CRAP!
I wanted to be the first person to get an Obsidian Raptor baby. Man those lil fellas have huge heads.
You wanna hear pain?
I’m the highest geared and most experienced player in my guild. Yeah, we’re fairly new, and I’m basically runnin the show. Well. I’m going on 10 day vacation tomorrow, and won’t be able to play the whole time.
When I get back in, everyone’s gonna have conquest items and emblems, and I’ll be sittin here on my nonsense. I could cry.
Oh, and they’ll be flying. Fast. Cheaply. Bass turds.
/sigh. Its the little things I suppose.
Looks like i was wrong , good to see the patch has finally landed but with only 4 hours of notice before the servers went down i just hope its all still working fine by the time i get to log on tonight after work .
During BC, the hunter was more than a cannon. Traps were very important. I can remember shattered halls heroic, when you were just gearing up.. You needed two CC and the tank would hold the other (two). With WotlK hunters became pure cannons. Sometimes mobile canons, but CC isn’t asked of us. The fact that tanks have now much better agro management options allowing them to keep 3 or 4 targets at once enforces this even further.
Blizzard said they wanted to bring traps back. Nice, but I don’t see how this patch does that. Now, we get to use 3 traps. But the cooldown is now 30 secs, so its going to be tricky. But ok, that’s the challenge. IIf Blizzards adds mobs that require us to use traps that will be interesting. But Bizzard isn’t doing that …
So I don’t see us CC’ing again. I do see options for PvP where we can put down 3 traps near the flag, or in melee where we have now more emergency damage. But that is al rare niche work.
So I fear, in terms of traps the old days of BC arn’t comming back. But we’ll see if I’m proven wrong
Hee hee “the old days of BC”
Back in the old days — in vanilla — we couldn’t even drop traps during combat!
I am thinking that perhaps my Snake Trap will get more use now, with a little trap dancing in raid situations. I agree with Armin that I was missing CC in raids, but I I get a little taste of chain Freeze Trapping each week while we clear the trash in General Vezax’ room. Good stuff!
Finally got the patch download and (as a lowly level 60something) upgraded to my fast mount and flying mount with change out of 600g – which greatly annoyed my level 80 friends.
Anyhow, I noticed that my wolf has changed colour with the new patch (from a silver grey to a jet black). Anyone else notice their pets change colour or is it just a bug on my account? Either that or Mojo has made a quick visit to the barbers without telling me.
SV tree got refunded 1 talen point! Any one know where it came from and what should we spend it on now?
Nobody mentioned the minor wolf nerf: “Furious Howl: Ranks 1-5 will no longer give slightly more attack power than is listed in their tooltips.”
Do not forget Skoll the new Spirit Wolf Pet from Storm Peaks
Was flying over first night of Patch and there is was Awesome
Hehehe. I know you folks don’t pvp, but some jerk warlock was trying to set up his portal in wintergrasp so he could have an easy escape after killing some alliance folks who were trying to spend their shards. Needless to say there was an explosive trap, a snake trap and a frost trap waiting for him, after he teleported back when he realized he was being shot to hell from behind. I’m liking this 3.2 patch.