Also in the latest beta build, masteries are implemented! Hunter actually have specializations! (kinda). And we have 5 different versions of call pet! Yes we do, and it’s on purpose!
Hunter Specializations and Mastery
- Beast mastery
- Animal Handler: Attack Power increased by 25%
- Focused Aim: pushback reduced by 70%
- Mastery: Master of Beasts: pet damage increased by 20%. Each point of Mastery increases pet damage by an additional 2.5%
- Marksman
- Focused Aim: pushback reduced by 70%
- Artisan Quiver: Attack Power increased by 25%
- Mastery: Wild Quiver: 16% chance on all ranged attacks to proc a 50% normal damage shot (ie: half auto-shot damage). Each point of Mastery increases the chance by an additional 2%.
- Survival
- Into the Wilderness: Attack Power increased by 25%
- Focused Aim: pushback reduced by 70%
- Mastery: Extreme Survival: elemental damage increased by 20%. Each point of Mastery increases pet damage by an additional 2.5% [Note: I think we can safely assume this is a typo from BM, and master points will boost elemental damage further : )]
Currently at level 83, one point of mastery rating translates into about 0.009 mastery points. Thus you’d need around 111 mastery rating to get one mastery point, which gives you your first step up. With no mastery rating gear on, I have 8 mastery rating (which makes sense — 8 * scaling = the base ability for each mastery).
Call pet
When I went to train the mastery skill, I also discovered I could train Call Pet 2, Call pet 3, Call Pet 4, and Call Pet 5. It sounds odd and complicated, I’ll grant you, but in practice it makes sense.
See, you have 5 “active” pets, in addition to your 20 stable slots. So when you call pet, you get the first pet of your 5 active slots. But if you dismiss it, you can Call Pet 2 to get the 2nd pet slot. Happily, despite this being 5 separate abilities (as far as I can tell this was just done so you can’t get access to all 5 slots until higher levels) you can get to them all from just the one call pet.
I have only 3 pets in my stable at the moment (cursed pet wipe last patch) so when I click on my call pet button I see this:
Or if I have it down in my action bar it scales vertically like this:
So a much easier way of accessing all those pets than the old “Call Stabled Pet” interface. I do have to say though, that the old Call Stabled Pet interface was more intuitive.
Kind of disappointed in the loss of Armor Penatratoin for MM hunters. It really was a staple in there damage. I know this is just beta, but it seems like things are progressing more and more. It could all change I know but I was hoping that with the re-implemation of masteries we would see Armor Pen back in the MM tree.
Maybe it still will. To me it seems kind of weird that the first two bonuses for each spec are the same thing just in different orders.
Do we know if Beast Mastery’s Animal Handler gives +25% AP for both the hunter & pet, the hunter with pet’s bonus scaled, or the pet alone?
I suspect it will be just for the hunter. Relatedly, one of the things that was said a while back was that pets would no longer benefit from raid buffs at all — the idea being that if pet scaling works properly, they’ll get their share of the hunters buffed stats and then be properly balanced.
i agree with sharaya. AP is kinda a generic stat that all hunters will want, having it as a mastery makes each tree less unique. same goes with the focused aim. saddens me that with all the work they are doing, they couldnt come up with anything better than what they have (the intimidation BM starter thing comes to mind) its nice to see that wild quiver will be a much beefier version of what we have now if it truly does proc off all ranged attacks (not just auto) will make haste an even more attractive stat with focus regen and more attacks going in. danke for the info frost
Hmm.. stabled pet is a bit a disappointment. End functionality for active pets is pretty much as now, i.e. you can call one of 5 pets every 5 minutes .(assuming cooldown still 5 mins?) so effectively one per boss fight (except we dont because for most fights we got a choice of using exactly 1)
What is nice is being able to have a larger stable so you dont have the heart wrench of abandoning a hard earned exotic to free up a space for a more utilitarian one.
But why make things complicated? Why not just be able to select any one of 25 pets to call like you can your companion pets and use same mechanism as companions to call them? Like many I have macros to call favoured companions plus one that summons one up at random and this would work fine for pets as well with a combat macro to summon up fight appropriate pets plus another to call a blind date to strut round Dalaran with.
PS please please say that Dismiss Pet is becoming instant. If its not then the mechanism is worse than it is now where you can swap pets in a second or two. And in any case the cast time on dismiss is a real “huntard!!!!” inducing pita delay when we need to lose Fido cos of tracking problems when running instances.
I’m disappointed that Focused Aim is just knockback resistance. Has knockback ever been an issue for Hunters, it’s not like we’re shooting in melee.
With FA just being knockback resistance, we have no Hit talents or abilities at all, so we’re going to be forced into selecting gear just for Hit or using Hit gems, and I don’t like that at all.
If the expectation is that we will get Hit from our gear, and with no recourse to talent for it, it’s quite likely that we’ll end up seriously over Hit capped and thus have a lot of wasted itemisation points. Reforging could alleviate this somewhat, but Reforging still gets you less than what you take away.
Would it kill balance to put some Hit into FA?
I agree Ananal about FA +Hit. Bosses will now have a 4% chance to Block ranged attacks. Either we stack gear with hit or we stand behind the boss.
Anansi: Reforging does not take away more than it gives. It just lets you swap 40% of one stat for the same amount of another. You still keep the other 60% of the original stat.
e.g. an item with 40 hit could be reforged to have 24 hit and 16 crit.
I like the new call pet. Personally I think it’s at least as intuitive as the old one, probably more so to a new player who isn’t already used to the old system. Adding the pet’s name to the spell is very nice. You can’t really tell as the pets used for the screeenshot were unnamed, but if your pet is called “Bob” the spell to summon him will be called “Call Bob”
This is just a guess, but I think the 25% AP mastery will change to something more interesting. It has a different name for each spec, which suggests they should have different effects.
I have to agree that I’m somewhat disappointed about the loss of hit bonus from Focused Aim as well. In raiding, unless there is constant unavoidable AoE damage, pushback is a minor issue at best. In PvP, it can be a bit more of an issue, but still not a considerable one. Additionally, we only have 2 (or 3 if MM, but even then, we’ll only be using 2 of them) shots that have a cast time to begin with: Steady Shot, Cobra Shot, and Aimed Shot. Well, we’ll be using Steady or Cobra, depending on spec, and MM hunters will be using Aimed as an opener (no pushback worries there) or as an instant shot when Master Marksman procs our 5 stacks. So that means that we really only have one shot that would normally benefit from this is a rather uninspired Mastery bonus. That said, keep in mind that they *just* re-implemented the mastery talents, and that means hopefully there’s still plenty of time for adjustments and improvements.
I also agree on the point that has been made about our first and second mastery abilities feeling rather bland. However, consider these points:
1. Focused Aim, if it had its hit bonus restored, would be acceptable for all 3 specs, DEPENDING on how they plan on itemizing gear in Cata. Consider being able to reforge hit off your gear for other stats. It could work…
2. Why have 3 different names for the other secondary mastery bonus, if they all do the same thing ? That doesn’t make sense to me. I suspect/hope that Blizzard may yet still have more planned for us in that department.
Call pet looks pretty cool, but I wonder… Consider the implications in combat of being able to summon another pet. My pet dies. I start casting rez, then abort it, causing my pet’s body and control bar to disappear. Mind you now we’re still in combat. I can see 2 possible outcomes at this point:
?
1. We can now summon one of our other pets.
2. We can’t summon any pets till we resurrect the one that died.
Number one would be nice, especially for PvP. After all, Locks can summon alternate pets in combat, granted with a cast time, so why shouldn’t we
So, I guess the question is, can we summon alternate pets in combat if we dismiss our pet, and can we summon them if our first slot pet is dead ?
Either way, its nice to see them getting some benefit out of the work they did in creating the shaman totem bars. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the action bar interface seems quite reminiscent of it.
@Bahzob
I vaguely remember from either hunter movies of something Frost wrote, that they’ve completely removed the cool-down on Call Stabled Pet. It just can’t be used in combat. I’m sure the others here can back me up or correct me if I’m wrong
Dismiss pet has, I think, a 2 second cast now — so it’s shorter, but still with a cast time. There is no cooldown on call pet — you can swap pets as often as you like, as long as you’re not in combat.
25% attack power is about the most useless master bonus I can think of…other than 70% reduced pushback…I mean we are getting 2 AP for every agi and I’m guessing we’ll be gemming agility after we reach our haste soft cap for focus regen…and since attack power like almost every other stat becomes less valuable the more you have of it I have a feeling that this 25% attack power will result in very little gain once we hit level 85 and start getting gear.
And I am still confused as to why kill command should be the BM signature shot and not Beastial Wrath, I don’t think of KC when I think of bm, I think of my old buddy who used to level with me and our tank friend annoying the crap out of the tank by pushing Big Red Pet and saying “Giant kitty…Giant kitty…” My point being that big red pet should be the signature shot of BM and if it was my say the ability you get at level 10…not kill command and intimidation…
i imagine the reason they made kill command the signature is that it doesnt have a cooldown and can be used more often if they fix it and make it more viable to use.
@gzr: i think the reason they gave bosses a block chance against ranged attacks it that we are the only class that’s physical attacks dont have any sort of glancing blows. and if bosses blocks work similarly to ours, its a 30% dmg mitigation. 4% isnt that big a deal, especially when you consider melee classes white swings have around 12% of all their attacks are glancing blows.
on a side note, we also get away with only needing 5% hit if you take focused aim…less than any other class. and since there will be no arp, hit wont really be hard to get since most icc geared hunters that arent stacking arpen dont even take 3/3 focused aim since they get enough on their gear.
@ FS-hit – Blizz is removing all it talents IIRC, so it’s not just hunters.
@call pet – I love this new call pet. It looks like it works exactly like how totem timers works for selecting totems, and I love that.
@ Masteries – I am a little confused here. From what I have seen of the professions so far, Fractured gems are becoming mastery, I am currently getting almost 400 arpen from gems. If that translates to almost 400 mastery that’s quite a significant increase in wild quiver procs, unless I am misunderstanding the mastery.
– Unless mastery rating is very expensive to get whole points out of…
Aye, mastery rating vs mastery. At level 83 it takes around 112 mastery rating to get one mastery. At level 85 it will surely be significantly more : )
However, MM mastery scales on haste.. so this will probably become any theorycrafter’s wet dream. Either you will want to get lots of mastery, or lots of haste. Only change is that haste also affects focus regen – so we’ll likely gem and forge for haste. That gives us more mastery procs and more focus regen so we can use more non-steady attacks.
At the same time, maxing out haste to 1s or lower steady’s means a maximum output on special attacks for yet again more mastery procs.
Once that steady’s cast fast enough (soft cap) we’ll probably switch haste and mastery arround breaking points cause every mastery point makes haste more usefull untill you want more haste again.
Seems this scaling can go terribly bad, like warriors used to, when gear improves due to reforging allowing us to focus out a single stat to the extreme.
Think i said this before, BM +20% AP, SV +20% Damage, but MM only gets a 16% chance to fire a half power shot. So this is how they are going to knock MM down to be more inline with the other 2. Sorry but this just sucks for MM. and Pushback really, if a hunter needs this then they are failing as it is, why buff something that should NEVER be needed. (well unless they want all of us to PVP)
@alittledrunk, And it was explained before, +20% of PET damage is NOT the same as 20% damage. Nor is 20% of ELEMENTAL damage the same as 20% damage. Plus Blizzard will be using these mastery to tune specs.
Im sure blizzard is still tuning the mastery talents well at least i hope so , remember that mastery talents have only just been opened up again . The call pet idea sounds good nice to be able to call up a choice of 1 in 5 pets giving us a much better selection to choose from.
i am sad and super mega dissapointed about the final MM mastery talent, i love the MM tree almost as much as i loved big red pet while leveling to 80! MM is my favorite out of all the trees but the 50% shot for MM mastery sounds like they got lazy looked at wild quiver and said ” lets just put this there and call it good who cares about MM and hunters now how can we make the AFK rogues more super powerful?… Muhahahaha the hunters will never see it coming” thats what im seeing haha, blizz out to kill my poor MM tree, and that is not ok with me i will NOT NOT go back to SV for raid i HATE it! so please blizz make Mastery for ALL the trees more unique and exotic not stuff we already have in wrath that your just gonna junk and give back to us!
I have to say that I like the way that the hunter masteries are shaping up. A little suprised at first glance that the Wild Quiver (WQ) is looking really clutch. It doesn’t specifically state that it can’t proc itself so at high haste and high mastery it would be conceivable of getting (assuming RNG gods are on your side) WQ shots proccing off of WQ shots, on top of the 2 shots you’d be getting each second (1 auto + 1 special). Maybe I am just being overly hopeful, but it could happen. And that would be awesome.
If all threat management tools are getting reductions the way that was posted earlier (MD, etc only postpone the hunter’s threat for X seconds) it makes sense to get a 70% pushback reduction so we can still do damage to another target while waiting for the one gnawing on us to be re-aquired by the tank. Target swapping will once again become important since kiting a mob will make it that much harder for a tank to gain control over it thanks to diminshing returns. No longer will dps be able to facemash keyboard on a single target without the threat that since all their aggro is condensed on one target, they may just pull it and the tank(s) may not be able to take it back.
With regards to the +25% AP mastery, definitely the easiest way to finetune the damage each spec will be able to do relative to the other trees. BM laggs behind? *bam* they are now bumped up to 30% AP (which the pet would also be getting thanks to scaling). MM doing too much damage once people break the WQ mastery? *nerf* drop the AP bonus to 15-20% rather then adjusting the proc %. Blizzard is just making things (at least from what I can see so far) easier to tweak the classes/specs without needing to spend months on a new patch and large downloads. Tuseday morning server maintainance or maybe even a rolling restart is all that is really needed to make a server-side change which would mean more things getting fixed in a shorter timeframe. Very smart on their part.
Lastly, a stable that can hold 20 pets and also have 5 ‘actives’?! Wow. I just had to lose the wasp I had through all of BC in order to keep my soloing bear, raid wolf, and 3 spirit beast I lucked out in finding. Nice to be able to keep all the ones I like without fear of abandoning them to make room. Here’s hoping that Blizzard pass around a bunch of new skins and abilities (& famillies too) for the Cata hunter to run out and catch.
Still early in the beta and pretty much everything is subject to change. Thanks Frost (and all other contributing Beta scouts) for keeping us in the loop on the impending Cataclysm.
On MD, don’t forget what this ability was originally designed to do. As much as it gets compared to Tricks of the Trade, MD was not designed to give the tanks your threat, it was designed to let the original puller of vanilla raids do so more fluidly. Back in the yore of vanilla wow, warriors and the like (the “Tank” support classes) had no range ability to speak of, so a hunter could yank something, run past the tank, and FD. The tank would pick it up, and life went on. In BC, the continuing plague of huntardation left a grand number of raids dead to bad hunter pulls, so MD was added to streamline the process, simplifying it to “MD to tank and shoot boss”. It wasn’t until the advent of “every tank is now his own puller” (i.e. heroic throw, avengers shield, ect.) and tricks of the trade that MD was reduced to a mere threat boost for tanks. The new implementation really supports the original thrust of MD. Pull, help the tank pick up adds ect, but the tank is ultimately responsible for this own threat. Given that hunters have the most powerful threat control of any class in the game, this is largely someone else’s problem.
OH BOY! I can’t wait for cataclysm so I can stack mastery to get a minor increase to attack power AND a reduction in pushback! But wait! That’s not all. If I’m playing a MM hunter, and I am really lucky, I can proc a shot that does 50% weapon damage! Now I feel epic! Great job blizzard.
On the serious side, if we’re going to be getting butt loads of haste to help our regen how long is our steady shot cast time going to be? like 1 second? good thing we’ve got that pushback reduction for when we decide to volley in the middle of a pack of mobs…?
@ highstrunghunter The 25% AP and 70% pushback reduction are technically “specializations” and we only have one “mastery” so the mastery stat will not actually affect them at all.
On the subject of mastery, why do they need to play this whole name game with mastery. It gets kinda confusing. We get mastery rating on our gear which converts into mastery points which increase our Beast Mastery mastery bonus. Change one of the names. But this is probably just me making mountains out of molehills. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the system.
Okay folks, realistically, all these mastery bonuses are placeholders for the real things. All the funky names for the same abilities = suspicious. I’m predicting we’ll get back to hit and ArP in there somewhere. The wild quiver thing is a disapointment but none of this is in stone.
In the end we get what we’re given and week after week Bliz has switched these up radically in the beta. Expect this snapshot of mastery to be gone in two weeks after some testing and the pet design pass.
@Dorianchika- I agree that its probable that Animal Handler, Artisan Quiver and Into the Wilderness are placeholders atm. Three different names for the same mastery is a bit off; also looking through MMO at other classes I found that Demo and Destro locks also had pushback reduction and +hit as part of their mastery (prior to patch where mastery was implemented- I can’t find the current versions of their mastery on MMO/EJ/Lock blogs)
I doubt that MM will get ArP unless it replaces Wild Quiver so it can scale with mastery. Could it happen based on the name of “Artisan Quiver”?…or it could be a boost the the base attack speed/haste that used to be on quivers.
@Bindura – heh, Artisan Quiver sounds more like the LW special coming up in Cata. The max size quiver will be a special bag only LW can use thats absurdly big like the classic wow quivers. It holds items like any other bag thank goodness, not just ammo =P
Anyhow, yeah, its a odd name, your speed/haste guess is as good as any, only time will tell. Might actually be appropriate for the new “Wild Quiver” function at the top of the Mastery tree too, now that I think on it. Good Luck folks, gonna be a bumpy ride this beta =)
I have to say, I, like many MM hunters I am going to be a little nostalgic for ArP when 4.0 launches. However you have to admit, whether we wind up stacking mastery for ArP or stacking mastery for Wild Quiver is a pretty subtle distinction. I can see why Blizz would lean towards WQ instead of ArP. Given the way damage has scaled up in WotLK I can see ArP creating more hard to predict issues later on that would force uncomfortable changes. WQ seems like something that will be a lot easier to tune as it will naturally provide more PvE DPS than PvP (i.e. they are less likely to have to impose awkward tweaks to stop us from getting 100k Aimed crits on mages in 4.4
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More significantly, I am really disappointed that Hawk Eye and Improved Barrage are gone from our tree. Those are the two talents I have always really wanted to take but (at least for Hawk Eye) could never justify. IMO any one of the first tier survival tallents would be better replaced with Hawk Eye. This is especially true of Hunter vs. Wild, if they want to make talents more interesting rather than just adding stats why on earth would they suggest dropping 3 points into a non-DPS *stat* that doesn’t even have the DPS synergy talent to back it up anymore?