We got a handful of surprises in the 3.3.3 patch notes. Here’s what we have…
Beast Mastery
- Ferocious Inspiration: This ability is now an aura and provides 1/2/3% damage to all party or raid members within 100 yards and boosts the damage of Steady Shot by 3/6/9%. [Note: the in-game tooltip still shows that arcane shot buff at 9% as well -- this is a patch notes error -- FI buffs both arcane shot and steady shot by 9% now]
Pet Talents
- Heart of the Phoenix: Cooldown reduced to 8 minutes, down from 10 minutes.
- Explosive Trap: Low ranks of this ability were receiving no bonus damage from attack power. That has been corrected.
- Immolation Trap: Tooltips for lower ranks should now display more accurate damage.
- Rapid Fire: Now triggers the global cooldown correctly.
- Sniper Training: Reduced the time it takes to gain this effect so with lag it will feel more consistent with the 6 seconds stated in the tooltip.
- Lock and Load: Fixed a bug where Lock and Load always proc’d 100% of the time from the first tick of Explosive Trap and never from additional ticks. It should now be 6% as advertised.
- Master’s Call: This ability will now function correctly when the pet is affected by one of a death knight’s diseases.
- Mortal Shots: This talent was not correctly buffing Serpent Sting by the full amount.
Couple of interesting thing here, but first of all:
Rapid Fire: I just tested this on the target dumies and it does *not* trigger the global cooldown. Which is good, but I don’t understand the point of the patch notes then.
Lock & Load: I’m guessing this is mostly a pvp nerf, since in pve it’s rarely worth it for us to close in to melee range to drop a trap when we’re single target shooting anyway.
Mortal Shots: Woo! This is fantastic news, and this makes the T9 set bonus even stronger for us, since now those serpent crits will be larger. I’ll need to get into an actual fully buffed raid to really be able to compare parses of serpent sting before and after. Alas I don’t have any data laying around of unbuffed serpent sting ticks.
my serpent sting crits were popping for about 1.6-1.8k. i’ll check and see what they’re up to now
The Mortal Shots change is great news!
I’ll be very curious to see how the Mortal Shots change will affect the point at which switching to the T10 4pc will be an advantage over 2pc T9.
On an unrelated subject, pets seem to be bugged so that they always have the ICC damage buff regardless of being in ICC or not.
In the patch notes I read that there was a bug fix for the Needle-Encrusted Scorpion, that it will not be properly triggered by Volley and Explosive shot. Will this be significant for SV hunters?
wait, so you’re saying that you tested Rapid Fire *post* patch and it is not triggering the GCD, despite the notes saying that it will trigger the GCD? I saw that and was pretty bummed since it means a loss of 10% of our rapid fire up-time.. but if it is NOT triggering the GCD now after the patch, then I am happy, though confused as to the point of the patch note….
Correct, tested post-patch. I suspect the only difference is you can now use rapid fire *during* the global cooldown (like silencing shot) and the tooltip is just written badly.
Ninja Fix: Hunters now display range weapon on log in screen
Yeah finally I can show my ranged weapon on the log in screen. NiceFix. And that 5% buff to pets..maybe Blizzard did a stealth buff to pets for PVP.. LOL, I can dream.but didn’t stealth it so well, like a bad rogue, (which as a hunter, they all are, bad no skill mo’fos ( cough ), Wheres My Pills?
Are you sure it is a error about Ferocious Inspiration? In PTR 3.3.3 Build 11623 The notes said it also increases Steady Shot meaning that BMs get the SS increase and keep the Arcane boost that was originally on it. Did this change to just SS again?
Ferocious Inspiration now has *everything* it had before *plus* the steady shot buff.
The patch notes don’t list the arcane shot boost in the new FI — that lack is the error.
Frost.. I’m very surprised you didn’t comment on:
Needle-Encrusted Scorpion: Volley and Explosive Shot can now properly trigger this trinket.
The fix to Rapid Fire is pretty big. I have Call of the Wild macroed in with Rapid Fire.. and I always have to wait until a GCD is over before hitting that button or it screws up and I don’t get RF. Based on what you’re saying it may be possible that in the middle of a GCD I can fire this off no problems? I hope that is true, but I didn’t notice it last night.. then again I wasn’t looking for it specifically.
Heart of the Phoenix still showing 10mins as of Wed. night.
I heard about the Rapid fire change and took it out of all my macros. Made a huge, bad difference…
It’s back in my shots now and a huge dps pump. Thanks for checking!