Do we know if the change to Crit and Hit Ratings are going to be retrospectively applied to pre-level 60 items or is it only lvl 60 gear and onwards that will be effected?

I could be completely wrong here, but while weapons close to 1.5 and 3.0 speed would be optimal for weaving in Steady Shots, they'd be less optimal for making use of global cooldowns.

Something close to 2.25 actually would seem best to me, allowing a cycle like this:

0.00s Auto Shot
0.00s Start Steady Shot
1.50s Steady Shot
1.50s Something using the global cooldown
2.25s Auto Shot
3.00s Start Steady Shot
4.50s Steady Shot
4.50s Auto Shot
4.50s Start Steady Shot
6.00s Steady Shot
6.00s Something using the global cooldown
6.75s Auto Shot
7.50s Start Steady Shot
9.00s Steady Shot
[Repeat]

Obviously you'd want a slightly slower weapon due to lag and the like, but this just feels optimal. But I'm probably completely wrong.

I dunno, pets are basically going to be last in line for heals, and mend pet just doesn't cut it in a Raid senario because we have to stop dpsing to us it. An instant cast Hot would increase pet survivabiliity dramatically, with out sacrificing any dps potential, besides the mp.

I guess most raid unitframes don't even display pets. I'd bet if they were visible by default my pet would be getting a ton more heals just from healers trying to push their rank in the meters.

Anyone else thinking what absurd amounts of dodge we'll be able to have in the expansion? Well geared Survival Hunters, raid buffed, can easily be approaching 700 agility currently - that's 35% dodge. Throw in Imp. AoTM and you're looking at nearly 50% dodge. That'll be some crazy damage mitigation in melee and absolute hell for stunlocking rogues.

For the 19th time you aren't going to be able to get much above those levels at lvl 70 with the itemization changes.

But even using current gear, at level 60, after they reitemize hunter sets, you're going to have between 50% & 66% of the agility you have right now.

Seems reasonble, what is interesting is that you will see a difference in weapons between hunters like sword and dagger rogues. Some weapons will have the right speed for MM builds and some for BM builds, 3.4 is going to be god for BM.

Also I think with the buffing and greater importance of pets, it will be a matter of time before we get some raid frames for pets so they're easier to target. Current interface does not really support the healing of pets, none that I've seen anyways.

Their reitemization is very interesting, basically it goes against their previous stat distribution philosophies in my opinion. Agi and AP on the same items will allow for some very powerful gear because of the spread stats, it just makes me wonder if they're going to start avoiding +crit on gear. Otherwise hunters will have optimized gear, something that no other class generally has.

I don't know if you've seen, but some of the leaked TBC items appear to be new green items of the "of the monkey/hawk/wolf/bear/boar/falcon" variety, entitled "of the bandit", which have both +AP and +agi.

The fact that those are available in leather makes me think that rogues are certainly also going to benefit from this change, at very least.

Now that you mention it I seem to remember having seen them, I wonder why they are doing this. Hopefully we'll start to see thoroughly thought out itemization :)

My friend in the alpha said that pets do automatically get whatever buff you get in TBC. Including mongoose pots, blessing of might, etc.

Feel free to correct me if wrong, anecdotal evidence is just that.

If you have 30% crit at level 50, 60% at level 60, and 90% at level 70, then you're going to be crit-capped well before you hit level 80. Crit can't really go up as your level increases, or things start to break. However, they don't want us to be using blackhand's breadth for the rest of the game, so the add crit scaling.

If your AP doubles every level, nothing breaks. The DPS increase would be a bit extreme, but everything would still work. No reason to make AP per dps scale with level.

Yeah keeping your mobility while dropping traps is a very nice change.

One thing I fear is that playing a hunter will take *less* skill, because any mong can press buttons in a particular order, it's a wee bit less evident to weave those aimed shots between your autos now.

The mana-devouring aspect of spamming shots worries me as well, but we'll see how this turns out at 70.

I get the feeling from the wording of the changes "this allows us to create more interesting item changes for hunters" that it may well be possible to still stack agility with some BC gear in order to run a heavy survival agi/crit build.
Admittedly they have shown what the changes are to the CURRENT gear but looking at what they have done with the survival tree, i'd be surprised if they didn't introduce heavily agility stacked items later in the expansion to maximise the usefulness of a raid Expose Weakness build, at the moment, given the changes to the tier 1/2/3 sets, the agility numbers you'd reach just wouldn't make running such a build in any way viable.

Thank goodness! Do heals transmit to our pet too? That'd help a lot in environmental damage fights.

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No skill required, we're entirely limited by the Univeral/Global Cooldown, which is why Steady shot is 1.5 sec casting. Get a weapon that ends up close to 1.5 seconds or 3.0 seconds, and you just gotta spam your abilities in the most Damage Per Mana efficient way most of the time, and switch to a second bar with maximum DPS abilities for the ever popular Enrage.

As Chicken posted, a more sophisticated hunter can use a 2.25 weapon to alternate between Steady shot and Instants, so we have 3 good weapon speeds!

Hmm... it'll be nice not having to zoom in on my character to watch the animation and optimize my Aimed shot to start casting before the Autoshot fires w/o stopping the Auto.

didn't think it was worth its own thread, but wanted to check if anyone had any info before i use mine :-P does anyone know if the might of the scourge shoulder enchant gives RAP yet instead of just AP?

No followup from this post so I don't think so.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...322800&sid=1#0

I would really like to know if this is the case because it would be pretty huge since our pets often get overlooked on buffs, plus taking potion buffs would be huge.

I would doubt rank 1 Arcane will get a full AP bonus for much the same reason that Eviscerating or Rupturing with less than 5 CP doesn't net you full AP bonus. I'd pretty much figure it'll get hit with something similar to heals; <40, less than full, >40, full.

No, pets don't automatically get whatever buffs are put on you. They do, however, scale off any appropriate (resist, attack power, armor) buffs that are put on you.

Right now in the beta all ranks of arcane shot receives 30% of your rap directly to damage. This means that if you have around 1500 rap rank 1 arcane shot will do around 300 damage. Theese numbers are from what Ive read from various posts and my own testing(my rank 1 arcane deals 300 damage in the beta, bm specced). This might change for the final release probably.

Hunters deals ALOT more damage as well. in a 5man group doing the Furnace the rogue had hardtime keeping up with damage.

Then you have the different "group buff" talents. 5% extra damage for your group etc. Those are nice as well.

Then you can go on the new outland pets. I tamed an outland buzzard which had around 6k armor, 5k health at loyalty level 1 and lvl 59. Huge difference. Pets gain some percentage of your gears stats as well.

I haven't tried kill command yet, its lvl 64 if I remember right and it takes some time to level :) though Ive seen reports of people that have done 1300 crits with it and it does affect the global cooldown, just not for autoshot.

Ive just read the posts here very quickly so I hope I dont say anything that people already knew/posted about. Ill edit this later for some more answers.

I am BM specced now in the beta, will try out MM later.