3.3 has just dropped and the servers are just coming back up. While they are coming up I am going to take some time and go over the patch notes for Hunters. Although there are not a lot of changes for us. There a few interesting changes we can look at.
Call Stabled Pet
I never really got why this was on a 30 minute cool down. But I don’t think it makes that much of a difference. Although it will be nice to be able to call out a different spirit beast every 5 minutes. For raiding on the other hand, well it means nothing at all. For min, maxing you have to use a wolf, no matter what spec you are. This is something I don’t like and is a whole post in it’s self. The wolf is the new cat of BC.
Misdirection
Can you say wow! Its about time they fixed it. Now it no longer has charges, when you preform a threat-generating attack it will begin a 4 second timer. In that time all threat the hunter does will go to the friendly target. Also more than one hunter can misdirect at a time. No more having to work out what shot uses more than one charge, or having to have a rotation between all your hunters. Just cast it and unload everything you have.
Now casts as soon as you hit the button and your pet is in melee range. I haven’t really found this to be a problem but I’m sure this is a good change to all those who were having issues with it.
Pets
There is one big change for pets and a lot of smaller ones that I will let you read for yourself. That is the change to pet Avoidance. It is no longer a pet talent, this has been replaced and is now part of the base affect for your pets. Now we have Culling the Herd as our new pet talent. Which “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”. More damage for hunters is always good. This is going to go along way to help us catch up to those warlocks and feral druids in damage.
Pet leveling has non also been increased. It is now up from 10% to 5%. So this will half the amount of experience your pet needs to level. Pets leveled pretty fast to me, but hey I was use to BC leveling for pets. Now is the time to get all those pets you ever wanted. You can now also changed your pets often and not care about how long it takes to level because it will be very fast.
I was a bit sad that there were no BM buffs to bring them in line with MM and SV. So I still can’t raid with my spirit beasts. The lost of just under 1000 dps is to much for me. Maybe one day I’ll be able to. But I’m guessing that is not going to be until the next expansion.
Good luck to all those heading into Ice Crown in the coming weeks. This is the final battle for Northernd. I hope you are up to challenge.