MMO Champion reports Patch 3.3 going live tomorrow 
It’s going to be downright biblical: new raid, new bosses, new emblems named after me, loot falling like rain, dogs and cats living together.
/happy dance
/glee
Woooooooooooooooooo!
Hunter Patch Notes:
- Many of the tail sweeps with knockback effects will no longer hit players’ pets.
- Pet Resilience: All player pets now get 100% of their master’s resilience.
- Call Stabled Pet: Cooldown reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
- Deterrence: Now also increases the chance for ranged attacks to miss the hunter by 100% while under its effect.
- Misdirection: Redesigned. Instead of having finite charges, it now begins a 4-second timer when the hunter using Misdirection performs a threat-generating attack, during which all threat generated by the hunter goes to the friendly target. In addition, multiple hunters can now misdirect threat to the same friendly target simultaneously.
- Talents
- Beast Mastery
- Intimidation: If the hunter’s pet is in melee range of its target, the stun from Intimidation will now be applied immediately instead of on the pet’s next swing or attack.
- Beast Mastery
- Pets
- Avoidance: This talent has been replaced by Culling the Herd. Hunter pets now innately take 90% less damage from area-of-effect abilities like all other class pets. This does not apply to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
- Cower: Redesigned. This ability no longer affects threat, and instead reduces damage taken by the pet by 40% for 6 seconds with a 45-second cooldown. While cowering, the pet’s movement speed is 50% of normal speed. Cower now only has a single rank and is available at pet level 20.
- Culling the Herd: This pet talent has replaced the Avoidance talent in the pet trees (Hunter pets now gain that benefit automatically without expenditure of talent points).  Culling the Herd increases pet and hunter damage by 1/2/3% for 10 seconds each time the pet deals a critical strike with Claw, Bite, or Smack.
- Demoralizing Screech: The attack power reduction from this ability has been increased by 40%, equaling the maximum possible attack power reduction from the abilities of other classes.
- Improved Cower: Redesigned. This ability now reduces the movement penalty of Cower by 50%/100%.
- Pet Leveling: Hunter pets now need only 5% of the experience a player needs to level, down from 10%.
- Venom Web Spray: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards.
- Web: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards.
- Wolverine Bite: This talent is now enabled when the pet lands a critical strike rather than from the target dodging the pet’s attacks. In addition, this talent no longer has a prerequisite.
first!
and COME ON!!!!! im buzzing! got enough eternal earths to have my ammo pouch full for teh rest of the year ! 
The only sad note about 3.3 is that no more lvl 1 hunter raids. Have to be at least a lvl 10 raid from here on out.
Oh, there will be more. Also note that we can’t fit everyone in a single raid anyway
However, I was thinking of slightly upping the level on the next raid to 10 (optional, 1s still welcome) so that we can all be charging across azeroth with pets!
Will this patch have any effect on the current best spec?
Probably, yes. Talent/spell changes affect all spec equally; however, gear is a different issue. The t10 2-piece set bonus favors BM. It won’t put them on top, but will help prop them to make them less pathetic.
However, armor pen is ALL over – crazy, crazy amounts of it. So the awesome ICC gear is probably going to make MM the clear winning spec.
So i should start getting those ArP gems, would you still recommend staying SV until reaching a certain amount of ArP. I’ve been SV since ive dinged 80 and im quite excited on trying out a new spec.
The biggest news for me is the Culling the Herd thing. That is, does it have a cooldown? If not this is HUGE. With 1,25 GCD for pets, and only a few of those for rake/howl this means you’re getting (with a cat, a few more with a wolf) 38 shots per minute at triggering this, which means a low pet crit of 16% average ( 100% / [38/6] ) is already enough to give it a average 100% uptime.
However, thinking about it, this would be way to cool, so it probably only allows retrigerring after it has completed 10 secs … But still you’d get a ballpark 50% average uptime easily giving us 1,5% total dps increase. And a scaling increase!
Of course unless there will be bugs … PTR testing already reports it doesn’tscale with BM talents and retribution aura. Question is then which of them falls of …
Or, back to the original quesdtion, does it have a cooldown. It must have, as I don’t believe we’ll get this lucky.
By the look of the gear, you will not need armor pen gems. You’ll get all the armor pen you need from your gear
Does anyone really know were the new shatter shot pattern will drop or be learned from ? this will be my 1st must then Frost emblems then heroic farming lol it christmas early
sweet, full of useful information as allways! The new epic ammo is learned by engineers, you can buy it when you reach a certain standard of rep with the new faction the Ashen Verdict but im not to sure myself if you have to be honored, revered or exalted. I would like to know tho.
You need to be honored to learn the ammo schematic. Goblin eng for the bullets, gnomish eng for the arrows. AV rep looks like it will progress fairly slowly (also a ring to be had for free that upgrades with rep level) but we’ll see how much trash there is.
You can level your reputation with the Ashen Verdict by killing monsters in the Icecrown Citadel raid instance.
•Non-elite monsters gives 1 reputation
•Elite trash gives 10 reputation
•Named trash gives 20 reputation
•Bosses give 50 reputation in normal mode, 100 in heroic mode
Need Honoured didnt see the gnoish and goblin thing just honoured and dam my alt hunter is the engineer not my raider this will be hard.
Yeah, i was just looking on MMO. Theres me stacking all my eternal earths and shadows, just to realise its going to take a fair bit longer than i originally thaught but what the heck, there awesome! Bring on IceCrown!
am i high? i thought explosive trap was getting bumped but a good margin?
I never post I just read your little rants Frost, but the ‘dogs and cats living together’ line killed me.
Yay for ghostbusters references.
WOOT more armor pen, no more begging for my gm to bring the warrior in for 25 mans. No more begging the other hunter to go marks so I can use SV.
I am super siked for this! i cant wait to get in there and tear up the Lich Kings throw pillows!
even tho I’m a tank i have a hunter that i play and i love your site. Hell you even made me like dwarves a little bit >.<
level 80 Orc Warrior
Executus Server
Quivering, on the patch notes, the explosive trap buff is listed under bugs as:
Explosive Trap: The damage from this trap will now scale properly with the hunter’s attack power.
most of the rest of the bugs are tooltip fixes, a fix to Immolation trap, and something about Concussive Barrage and Point of no Escape.
im stoked on misdirect! goodbye aggro! besides the pet resil increase, its the best part!
No WOW for us Aussie’s tonight…down for server maintenance from 7 pm /sigh…assuming they are implementing Patch 3.3. By about midday PST all realms should be up with 3.3 live…so that is around 7 am Brisbane time…pity I have to work tomorrow. 12 hr shift. Guess I’ll have to hearth and get to Icecrown. Dal is going to be a bitch.
Guessing MMO-Champ headline won’t be 3.3 still under development
“The t10 2-piece set bonus favors BM”
Frost: what gear? The windrunners set bonus?
thanks
Oh my bad you probably mean this bonus?
Your Auto Shots have a 5% chance to cause you and your pet to deal 15% additional damage for 10 sec.
whew… that misdirection change is awesome! BTW, there is a change in the patch for mages that will help hunters… Ok, it helps everyone, but it will increase your damage by 3% virtually all the time. Figured you would want to know.
Arcane Empowerment: This talent now also grants 1/2/3% increased damage done by the mage’s party or raid for 10 seconds after the mage gets a critical strike with Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage, or Arcane Blast. This effect is exclusive with Ferocious Inspiration and Sanctified Retribution.
I guarantee that I am critting with one of those spells at least every 10 seconds.
Some update on the Culling of Tghe Herd. This puppy is awsome. I forgot one thing in my math which I noticed when I tested it yesterday: our pets have very low crit (ballpark 10%).
But still you can get 30% ballpark uptime with one point in GftT and 45% uptime with two points. That is almost 2% *scaling* OVERALL dps improvement by just three points in your pet tree you were having there anyway. Who needs pet scaling