Latest Beta Patch Updates 7/30

Okay, here’s the patch notes/datamined changes for the latest beta buil 12644:

Beast Mastery

• Cobra Shot now generates 9 focus. Up from 1 focus.
• Mend Pet no longer costs Focus.
• The Beast Within is now a Tier 6 talent. up from Tier 5.
• Animal Handler is gone.
• Improved Mend Pet is now a Tier 2 talent. Down from Tier 4.
• Envenomation is now a Tier 4 talent. Down from Tier 3.
• Improved Kill Command is now a Tier 1 talent. Down from Tier 2.
• One with Nature now increases the AP bonus of Aspect of the Hawk by 10/20/30% (Up from 5/10/15%) and increases the amount of focus restored by Aspect of the Fox by 5/10/15%. (Up from 2/4/6%)
• Bestial Discipline is now a 3 ranks talent (Down from 4 Ranks). Increases the Focus regeneration of your pets by 10/20/30%. (Up from 6/12/18/24%)

Marksmanship

• Concussive Shot no longer costs Focus. Now has a 5 sec cooldown.
• Steady Shot now generates 9 Focus. (Tooltip fix)
• Arcane Shot now costs 25 focus, down from 50 focus. Additional damage halved, AP scaling remains the same.
• Resistance is Futile now gives you a chance that your next Kill Command will refund its focus cost. (Old – Gives a chance to critically hit)
• Careful Aim – Increases the critical strike chance of your Steady Shot, Cobra Shot and Aimed Shot by 20/60% on targets at or above 60% health.
• Efficiency now only reduces the cost of your Arcane Shot by 1/2/3 (Down from 2/4/6). Reduction on Explosive Shot and Chimera Shot remains unchanged.

Survival

• Serpent Sting now costs 25 Focus. Down from 45.
• Aspect of the Monkey (Talent) is gone.
• Expose Weakness is gone.
• Hunting Party is now a Tier 5 1-Rank talent. Down from Tier 6 2-Ranks.
• Sniper Training is now a Tier 6 talent. Up from Tier 5.

We have a lot of tweaking around with the talent trees, but there are 3 big things that jump out to me. The first is that a lot of time seems to have been spent working on the BM talent tree, which is excellent. We finally got a bunch of the talents adjusted the way we thought they’d be with the fewer ranks. Seeing no focus cost for Mend Pet is also a particularly nice little quality of life improvement.

Secondly, I feel like we’re seeing a handful of changes designed to help hunters while kiting: concussive shot has its cost removed (as it should, as a cooldown ability, I think), serpent sting is *much* cheaper. Of course the flip side of this is it means they are probably trying to maintain the hunter utility abilities on the move because they are happy with the hunter dps on the move. In other words, the fact that they’re adjusting these things rather than increasing our focus regen on the move means we probably aren’t going to see a significant change there (though small tweaks are possible).

Finally we have the whopping change to arcane shot. The cost has been halved from 50 focus down to 25 focus (yikes!) but the base damage has been cut in half as well. The AP scaling should be the same and, honestly, that’s the majority of the damage. Just looking at the change I figure this’ll knock off maybe a thousand to 1,500 damage from our arcane crits — which will leave them still quite nice. Basically for the same focus we can now fire 2 arcanes for much more damage than we could get from one arcane before.

Of course since every spec but SV uses arcane shot a lot, this is a very significant change to rotations, and one that I like a lot. Not only are you basically getting twice as many arcane shots in your rotation, but you now have the ability to adjust your focus by a smaller amount. Rather than ditching a third of your focus bar, you can dump significantly less, giving you better control over your focus management.

In Practice However…

It looks like the implementation is a bit… buggy, at the moment

• My Arcane Shot tooltip says it only costs 9 focus (waay too low), but in practice it only uses 4 focus, so I can fire it forever.
• Concussive Shot does indeed say it’s free, but it still costs me focus to fire.
• Serpent Sting also is still costing 45 focus.

So it looks like they still need to massage the code a little bit to get those changing working as intended. And until they do so, we can’t really test it out to see how it changes our rotations.

[Note: mastery still doesn't seem to be in the game]