Well, it is debatable. On the one hand, it doesn't say "special" abilities, but I don't see why they'd need to reword it as it was worded fine before. However, recently our "Auto Shot" was changed to "ranged shot" in the combat log, so I don't know if it's considered an ability or not. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

After all, ranged weapon specialization retains a similar description to what Mortal Shots used to read.

I'm still trying to take note of all the changes. Quite a few changes have been made for pets.

Many, many pet abilities and talents have been moved from a "cooldown" to a "global cooldown," which seems to mean they won't be affected by Longevity...I don't know why this would happen, but it seems to be the case. Certainly makes the talent a lot more lackluster.

Spider's Bite changed from +30% critical damage to +9% critical strike chance. The new arrangement of the Cunning Tree is solid, as are the buffs to Feeding Frenzy and Roar of Recovery (though changing Roar of Recovery so it no longer benefits from Longevity upsets me). Grace of the Mantis has been changed to reduce a pet's chance to be crit by 2/4%, which is very nice for pet tanking.

There's also a new Ferocity Exotic Pet called the "Spirit Beast," which has Prowl and Spirit Strike as abilities: Spirit Beast - Pet - World of Warcraft I don't even know what a Spirit Beast could be.

Explosive Shot's damage was reduced, but its mana cost was as well (from 10% base mana to 7% base mana).

The Naxxramas set bonuses are pretty awful.

There are other things that need to be noted I'm sure.

The biggest whines are on the official forums and forums like mmo-champion. Personally i understand most of these changes and i expected them to happen. Our PVE dps is very good on 80 and we scaled insanely nice with all the AP/agi/int talents. So i guessed we scaled to fast and they changed the AP/AGI talents into CRIT which won't scale that good with higher ilevel gear.

I got no experience on PVP yet on level 80 except the fact my pet got raped very fast by alot of classes.

It is interesting to note they have basically removed ALL talents which scale your AP up by % (except True-shot Aura) and changed them into fixed bonuses. Include the Hunter's Mark change from previous patches and our total AP is suddenly a lot lower.

My guess is this is part of flattening out our scaling, since our pets benefit so much from high AP.

The Spider's Bite change is more a buff for non-BM specs (since a BM pet will have generally very high crit rates with Cobra Strikes already). I'm busy incorporating all the changes into the spreadsheet, but it looks like BM pet dps stays about the same despite the change. SV and MM pets do see a little boost because of it.

I'm a bit worried about mana efficiency though. It seems MM gets an even bigger hit now because Replenishment from all sources is cut in half. SV should have it even easier now with Explosive Shot becoming cheaper. BM has it slightly tougher since such a big portion of its DPS is from Steady Shots.

It is time to hit the beta when its up again and see how viper works now for each build. My first thought of changes like

was that BM would become the better DPS tree. However steady shot got nerfed without telling us numbers just yet. Interesting development.

Just one question about Marked for Death: The Talent Calc's (&Wowhead) say its 2/4/6/8/5(?)% damage from pet's specials and your shots on marked targets. So, it is 1/2/3/4/5%, or 2 -10%...
Sorry if i missed this, but just looked weird :/

New: Steady Shot Rank 4 5% of base mana

Old: Steady Shot Rank 4 4% of base mana

3.0.2 and long sunwell fights(brutalus) are worrying me a bit.

Ok i need to get something clear.
Everywhere (eg. TKA, EJ, BRK) i try to get facts about haste lowering the gcd i read contradictory information.

Some people say haste is lowering the gcd and some state it's not.
I know that the charscreen is buggy and therefore not showing the correct attackspeed.
So could someone who has testet this with a shout timer like quartz tell me
if haste DOES lower the gcd with steadyshto or NOT.

Thanks in advance

// sry for my bad english

Okay, some of my concerns were alleviated. It seems that Longevity still affects all the pet abilities as normal that it did before, and Heart of the Phoenix isn't auto-cooldown'ed when the pet is summoned.

Furious Howl works now, and it stacks with Blessing of Might (so I presume it will also stack with Battle Shout).

Also, I think my pet gained about 2000 health. They may have changed scaling or base pet health somehow.

Separation Anxiety is fixed to 20% damage instead of 10%.

Something seems to be wrong with Rabid though...my pet doesn't seem to always get the buff when it casts it.

Also, THANK YOU BLIZZARD. Saronite Arrow Maker = 15 Saronite bars, 10 charges of Saronite Razorheads. Mammoth Cutters are 6 Saronite Bars and 6 Volatile Blasting Powders for 10 charges of bullets. They still require an anvil to make, but at least it cuts down on bag space and material cost/make time.

Is Furious Howl a 'on next attack' Bonus only or is it a true 10 sec buff now?

EDIT:
If you could try to determine your pet's base stats at level 70/80? Might give a hint if they changed them (or possibly pet scaling with Stamina).

I can confirm that Furious Howl is no longer "on next attack" (that's what I meant by it's working properly now).

Also, engineering got a nice BoE epic gun. Sun scopes actually have a use now since 3 are required to make it. It is 129.6 dps, 78 attack power, 21 crit rating, 2.8 speed, with a yellow socket and a socket bonus of +8 attack power.

As I can´t log in and test it myself - both mmo-champ and wowhead list steady shot as having a 1.5s cast time. I assume both sites never got around to change it in first place and it´s still 2.0s right?

Since today? Im asking because i finally got on PTR yesterday and FH got removed after first hit.

Yes, as of today.

Regarding Steady Shot, it says 2.0 cast time but mine is still being affected by haste down to around 1.5s.

My Quartz said yesterday that my steady shot cast time was 1,7 seconds, which is consistant with the 15% from my quiver - then again, my staggering 53 haste might not do much else.

So it has a special that does extra damage after 10s on a 10s cooldown? What if you have Longevity? Does it reduce the time down to its cooldown or do you just lose half your damage?

I finally managed to get on PTR last night to test my hunter out. With my haste + trinkets all working I could get my steady shot down to 1 second cast time (That's what Quartz displayed).

I'd find out, but it seems at the moment no one can figure out just what a Spirit Beast is.

I also noticed my pet's base crit chance is up to 8.18%. That means that a ferocity BM pet with +19% crit can reach a pet crit rate of ~27%. This is a change, right? I believe a level 70 pet had ~5% crit, though I didn't think to check on my level 80 pet before the patch. Just to be sure, I checked, but the pet doesn't seem to be receiving any of my Agility.

A bit of testing shows that my pet seems to be receiving about one-half of my gear's Stamina.

Interesting changes.

I would say "Blizzard giveth and Blizzard taketh away again, as well as ignores others."

We have seen a fair few logical and good changes, and we have seen some nerfs that might be logical. The Steady nerf is not something I like, but seeing as our DPS was pretty high I think it was perhaps needed. Problem is that now they have nerfed a core ability we still have to struggle with Haste on gear (and MM getting inherent Haste?). But on the other hand I see a lot of rep gear with really nice stats and no Haste. We might be able to kit ourselves out nicely with that (and heroic as well as non-set gear) and then wave our goodbyes to T7/7.5.

BM getting no attention at all. That disturbs me. Invigoration is hardly that cool after the nerf (they talked about undoing stuff but this wasnt?), and with the change to Spider's Bite that is a chunk out of Cobra Strikes too (but it should be made up for by regular swings). These talents now look to be rather 'meh'. Coulpled with the Haste issues and Steady nerf (move towards making Imp Arcane more attractive?) it might hurt BM beyond Naxx. The Hunter himself doesn't look to be in good shape. And still no mention of FI going raidwide. Until that happens I can't see BM having a chance compared to the raidbuffs the others bring (even nerfed Replenishment).

Wolves will be popular, no doubt, and I think I will use one, well I already planned on it... As BM. So many points to get to BM the talent? For what gain? I think buffing me with 6 points somewhere else will do more than buffing a slightly better pet with the same amount of points. As a point of interest, a single point in Longevity will drop Furious Howl to 9 seconds, perfect for pet GCD etc. As well as giving a 100% uptime. Further if we expect Glyph of Bestial Wrath then that one point will drop BW to 1.5 minutes, which seems to fit a lot of trinkets. And even if we are talking a 2 min trinket it won't be that bad.

The AP nerf seems... I don't know if it is good or bad. But I guess Blizzard was concerned at the massive AP scaling MM had, and I understand that. 12+10+4% AP is hard to beat when most other classes get around 5% AP. And that AP would make the MM pet unnaturally powerful, especially now with the scaling specials. The move to crit removes the pet (with no 50 focus ability our pets should mostly be maxed with GftT alone, or for BMs with one BD and one GftT) but brings Mortal Shots closer. We'll see how this pans out.

Mana seems to be a prime resource, but with so little information about JoW and totems, or Replenishment itself, it is hard to judge. But I think it is clear that Blizzard want us to stay with our Int-giving Mail and not dabble with non-Int Leather just because it doesn't have Haste. On the other hand the new Viper looks to be fairly well buffed, I don't know if cast attacks might be worth it if it still causes the 50% damage (pop Rapid on change to Viper and gain ooc Mp5 to boot). Further, Viper still favours slow slow weapons over fast ones. True, Autos will be correspondingly slower, but specials will pop at equal rate (if it is worth it), so the faster weapon will lose manaregen over time. Especially if things like stings and Explosive trap continue to work with this. That can't be right.

Kill Shot and Freezing Arrow. Kill Shot needed that buff. I think it is now moving closer to the old numbers, and at the same time scale. Adn more ranks will mean it should bring some pain to the table. And it should be interesting to use in raids too.
Freezing Arrow, personally I don't know how to use this effectively. Yes we can place a trap out of our range, but it will still be visible when we do so. I guess if a healer is standing still then it would be useful, but how many pvp healers stand still? But if it doesn't share CD with Freezing Trap then we might be rocking. Trap on CD? Drop the arrow on your pursuer. And it might just be quite useful in dungeons too. However I think they will share CD.

Phiew that was a lot. Overall I'm undecided on these changes, but I will for the moment trust Blizzard that this is a move in the right direction.

[edit: invalid test due to metagem]

Spirit Beasts screams "ghost cats" to me. Ferocity pet with Prowl, an arcane version of Rake (kind of), eats fish, and the icon is just a cat with glowing eyes. Maybe that will help with the search? Maybe I'm just jumping to conclusions.

Warp's change is nice, but does it still trigger Charge's cooldown and vice-versa?

Poison Spit makes serpents a good PvP pet finally.

Freezing Arrow seems to me like a message that we're not getting Camo, though I hope I'm wrong.

Raptors were going to be the de-facto pet already. Blizzard hasn't been especially great on making pet variety a priority in PvE. At least in PvP you'll be seeing a lot more than just Scorpids now.

The uncategorized Camouflage spell reads as follows (on wowhead):
Camouflage
16% of base mana
Instant cast 5 min cooldown
You camouflage, cuasing you and your Pet to blend into your surroundings. After 3 sec., you will enter a stealthed state. While stealthed, you and your pet's movement speed is reduced by 30%, but the damage done by your next attack is increased by 50%. You can lay traps while under the effect, but any damage done by you or your pet will cancel the effect. Cannot be cast while in combat.

Honestly a skill on a 5 minutes cooldown is not that appealing, no matter from which angle I look at it. It used to have a listed duration of 20 seconds, which is now apparently gone and that at least makes it a bit more interesting.

P.S.: "Cuasing" is a spell error in wowhead tooltip, I just copied it.