The quintissential BM hunter ability — bestial wrath/beast within — has changed a bit in the current version of the Cataclysm beta. When you (or your pet) are big and red, you are no longer immune to crowd control. For the time being, big red pet still breaks you out of crowd control.
Certainly the ability to completely ignore anything your opponent did to stop you for 10 seconds was one of the great pvp strengths of BM that made it such a popular and strong member of beast cleave arena teams. But before everyone predicts doom and gloom, it’s not all bad news.
Big red pet is now massively increasing your dps for the duration — in Wrath all you got was the 10% damage boost, but in Cataclysm you’re able to fire off twice as many shots due to the shot cost reduction. This translates into huge burst damage.
Of course, the new strategy when seeing big and red is going to be to immediately stun/root/fear/cc you in any way possible, meaning that you’re probably better off using it to break out of a cc to unlead furry red death.
very nice video frost. seems like the beast within has been decently balanced for both pvp and pve. acts as a 2nd pvp trinket, and lets you barrage your target with arcane death and kill commands (hopefully they fix it soon).
I personaly think this is great news.
IMHO , TBW was the major thing holding back the devs from being able to boost BM’s raid dps with out making OP in in arena.
it will be far easier to tweek the dps now with out making it to OP in arena.
personaly i would like to see BW less powerfull , and used more often, i would also like it to be a decision to use it , not the no brainer it is now.
It is still prety good the way it is now , forcing you to plan and change gears when you do use it , stacking procs and such.
thnx again frost for the informative vid.
just a note , it looks like from the cata tool tip that TBW also lost its 10 % pasive on all the time dmg bonus.
IN wrath you get 10 % all the time , then + 10 % more while in BW .
Pretty crappy change if you ask me. So what if it breaks CC. You get CC’d, you use TBW to break it, you’re immediately CC’d again, TBW completely wasted………
Not a whole lot of DPS going on in that scenario now is there?
Obnxs, that’s kind of the same situation by using a PvP trinket in arena. You can break one CC, but then still become CC’d again afterward. So of course, just like a PvP trinket, your timing on using it is key, and on which CC.
DPS boost is nice……but I like to use a trinket and then have BW in reserve. It screws up the rogues day
its not just big red pet’s cc immunity thats going away in cata. blizz said they are nerfing pretty much all abilities that let you run around punting ppl while having total cc immunity, purely because of imbalanced pvp aspect that brought about comps like beast cleave.
im sad to see a really fun part of the class get nerfed purely due to a very small minority of players exploting it for pvp.
then again that might get them to get off their arses and do something about making hunters more viable for arena now that beast cleave is getting the nerf.
Why are they (we) worrying about making something OP in arena? I thought the focus was going to be on BGs for cata.
I wonder if it unbreaks all types of movement impairing abilities, or things like stun are excluded.
A warriors blade storm, or whatever, also says “cannot be stopped unless killed”. I wonder if that would be getting the same treatment?
/Sadface
But good to know that big red pet is still awesome
Wow, its easy to see that a vast majority of the people who read this blog don’t pvp at all
I can’t complain about the new bonus to damage output from the retooling of Big Red Pet, but as I happen to like to enjoy soloing some of the older content the loss of a fear-breaker is a set back. The number of times that stopping both my hunter as well as my bear from running around like goofs with some angry dragon trying to gnaw on my butt has certainly proved to be a lifesaver.
I guess we will see how things progress both in PVE as well as PVP while Cata is developed and released. Who knows, the may add that component back in at a later time if it proved to be something that just needs to stay.
Wait a minute… traps are invisible to other people? I could have sworn that I have seen enemy traps in battlegrounds in the past. Is this new or was I just seeing things?
Burst increase ok yeah, nice. But overall for pvp this is a huge loss. A good example is running D in the Gulch flag room. You are jammed with like 3-4 diff. cc’s and no matter what you are stalled, mobbed, and dead. Even nerfing the duration while SUCK would’ve still allowed an opportunity to maneuver do some LOS stuff, or whatever, as it stands, it is just another trinket, and will now be used just to set up Master’s Call (if they don’t screw that up) as the only form of free action. They could remove or increase the range on Master’s Call to help with this, as it has no damage increase attached to it.
My only hope is that with rated BG’s maybe the cohesion and team setup will lend itself to allowing us to remain mostly “ranged damage” instead of the cluster that most BG’s revert to in about 2 minutes where it is basically every dwarf for himself, where minus big red pet your survivability drops like a rock if it gets thick.
As an aside, I am wondering about this affecting extreme soloing, the burst increase will undoubtedly be great for burning down baddies, but ignoring fears, and stuns is also great. My concern there is both keeping Mend up, as well as T5 passive heals if you’re standing there staggering in a stun, or running around crapless feared you can’t spam mend or do any dps as your little furry buddy is getting slammed to death.