You say "TBC all over again" like it's a bad thing. Yes, Blizzard has shown time and time again that they don't understand our concerns. Yes our PvP viability is questionable at best. However, we're the highest DPS class in the game on Live, and honestly aside from swapping to Surv from BM, that doesn't look to change anytime soon. I do fully expect BM's DPS to be buffed, MM's longevity to be buffed, and Survival's DPS to be nerfed slightly.

Settling for "TBC all over again" would be damning the rest of the hunter player-base that want a competative, complete, and well-oiled class.

I doubt the 2000 or so HP increase pets recieved is going to help them survive much better in PvP considering they were getting killed within seconds before.

Our level 80 ability screams "cop-out." I know a few players have suggested throwable traps, but the mechanics to Freezing Arrow are unwiedly and dare I say useless for PvP where traps are already suffering.

Pets representation in raids is going to be no better now than it was in TBC, with the inherent problem being that so many pet abilities do not stack with common raid buffs and debuffs, rendering them useless unless they also do damage, in which case they're just inferior to the likes of Rake, Savage Rend, and Monstrous Bite (which for some reason people want nerfed so the others seem less horrible in comparison).

We have issues that must be addressed before WotLK goes live. I don't believe the class is in such a dire state that Soulbeast's rampant doom and gloom rant is acceptable, but saying "'TBC all over again' isn't such a bad" thing is not acceptable either.

Just to clarify the debate on the issue, it's about making the other *ten* ferocity pets worth using more than it is about arbitrarily nerfing the devilsaur. That's a lot of design work down the drain if there's no point to any of the other dps pets. They could accomplish the same thing by increasing the other pet specials to close the gap a little bit, which isn't a nerf to the Devilsaur. I can't think of a reason why it's bad for the game if one person uses a devilsaur and another uses a wolf, unless I'm missing something.

MMO-Champion is already working on getting out the changes in tonight's build. Here's what they found so far pertaining to hunters.

I want pet parity as much as anyone else. I'd just rather they make them all as strong as the Devilsaur than have them nerf Monstrous Bite. As it stands I think buffing the abilities is a better choice, though it may be more work. Especially since, even though pet abilities scale now, they still don't out perform pet auto attacks in most cases.

My comment about why people would want it nerfed wasn't supposed to be serious. I have a tendancy to throw about facetious remarks willy-nilly.

And this:
So we're left with just Unleashed Rage not affecting ranged attack power now? Actually, why do we have ranged and melee attack power? Seems to me they should be merged like healing and spell damage into 'attack power'.

EDIT:
Also this:

Where'd you see that they removed haste?

Kraxis was referring to the change to Master Marksman in the latest (8970) PTR/Beta build. Last build, it was 5% crit and 5% haste. It's now 5% crit and 25% less mana on Steady Shot.

On the MM talent. Formerly +5% crit +5% haste, currently +5% crit and 25% less mana on steady shots. Which is nice and all, but its still a drastic damage decrease from the current +10% ap...

They are serious about tweaking BM downwards it seems. Yes, it affects all three builds obviously, but BM more as their pets get more benefit from AP, as well as Longevity having the impact that it could nearly maintain it. Now there will be at least 11.5 seconds downtime. Up from 1.5.

Btw, am I the only one to have noticed that we are the only class with no level 75 ability? I noticed this when I was comparing the level 80 abilities. I browsed the various trees and noticed that a rankless or rank 1 ability tended to happen at 75, so I specifically looked for it after I was finished with the level 80 abilities.

Death Knights get Empowered Runic Weapon. An unkown entity in regards to power. At least to me.
Druids get Savage Roar. A Cat DPS finisher along the lines of SnD for Rogues (only this grants 40% AP).
Hunters get ???
Mages get Frostfire Bolt. Too much has changed for me to know about the worth of it, in any case Mages aren't my speciality.
Paladings get Shield of Righteousness. Shield Slam for pallies.
Priests get Mind Sear. AoE targeted channeled spell.
Rogues get Tricks of the Trade. No explaination needed I suppose.
Shamans get Lava Burst. Fire spell that acts a little like Conflagrate.
Warlocks get Shadowflame. Cone of shadowdamage with fire DoT component that can be burned with Conflagrate. Quite bursty.
Warriors get Enraged Regeneration. 30% health regen over 10 secs at the cost of 15 rage and all enrages.

Could mean they are far from finished with Hunters... or, might the cynics say, they simply forgot to add something to Hunters. Hope for the first, fear the second, and don't know what to expect.

Our level 75 ability was Bear Trap, which was later sort of merged with Freezing Trap, and our level 80 ability used to be Kill Shot (which is now learned at level 71).

The way I see it, Blizzard has been working steadily on our scaling. From a purely PvE view:
a) They have removed (nearly) all passive talents that increase AP by %. It's all fixed bonuses (to crit or AP, etc..)
b) Practically all our abilities scale with a % of AP now
c) Unlinking auto-shot means shot rotations are no problem any more and it's purely a matter of controlling how much 'Oomph' a shot has (through our AP)
d) haste only affects auto-shot and is fairly linear (most people will reach GCD with steady shot quick enough with buffs)
e) Pet DPS scales very heavily with its AP now as well

Because of this, they can scale us much more easily than they could in TBC, where certain amounts of haste would make or break a rotation. Weapon upgrades also provide an actual linear increase in DPS now.

This does address one of the biggest gripes we had in TBC: proper scaling with gear.

Now they just have to work on our mana efficiency, but let's hope they don't decide that having us 'evocate' every minute is the solution.

EDIT:
Noticed a change to my pet. It now has a base 54 agility and has 5% tooltip crit rate unbuffed/untalented.

Applying a Scroll of Agility V (which is now 15 agility instead of 20) gave him 5.5%.

So, the pet has a 3.2% base crit chance, gains 1.8% from 54 agility and needs 30 agility/crit%. At level 70 at least. Someone will have to check at higher levels.

Tell that to beta forums lurkers. I saw a few ppl whining about Devilsaur making too much dmg. Is there a thing like too much dmg for hunter? I deeply believe that Exotic pets should be better than regular pets, or there is no real point to pick that last BM talent at all.
And you wont use wolf because his AP buff does not stack with other AP buffs usually available in raid.

This is a blow to BM specially, and BM is both lowest dps build (at least that is rumored by beta testers) and lowest utility build (FI is not a raid wide buff yet). I cannot see how devs are thinking of making all 3 specs equal.

Why would survival be nerfed? Don't think you can use Explosive Shot anyway near CCed targets, can you? And they are not buffing BM either, they are actually nerfing it. Change to Master Marksman is really nice, and I would like to hear if anyone can say how it affects MMs oom time.

And PvP wise, we are crappiest class of all. It's not only mana what is our problem, but LoS as well. I would like to get a clear arena, without any pillars and other possible LoS crap.

As pets previously have appeared to share some mechanics with Warriors, I think it's an educated guess to assume that pets have the same Agility scaling as Warriors. Your 30 agi per crit value matches with the level 70 value of warriors.
From the http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t29453-c...gs_level_80_a/ thread.

Regarding Longevity & Glyph of Bestial wrath: Currenty on the PTR those two together get BW to a 1.17 minute cooldown. This means only waiting 10 seconds for your second trinket + BW pop.

I've personally got BW, Trinket and KC all in the same CD macro since I want to do SOMETHING to make KC less bad. -_-
I'm still not sure where Rapid Fire is best used, especially with a level 70 build to get the exotic pet not having Rapid Killing. Not sure if RF is best used with BW/Trinkets or used during Viper to reduce the amount of time spent in Viper. :/

I've just got back onto the PTR after the last patch and I've noticed that I'm missing a lot.
A. Lot.

As far as I was aware the hitcap was in the region of 130-140, and I have 152.

I was levelling my dino underneath Kara when i noticed it, the mobs being lvls 68-69 and thought I had a run of bad luck with a miss or two, something I'm not at all used to. So to try and get away from the HORRENDOUS lag I ported back to Shatt to find a less populated place and while flying over the bone wastes i noticed I hadn't done the Vengeful Harbinger quest, so went at did that. Fighting lvls 64-65 I was missing an INSANE amount, literally missing at least one shot per mob. The final straw was when all three multi-shots missed all three targets...

Could we suddenly start needing the same hit as casters? Surely that's a bug? I don't have enough hit gear to force myself way up to 17% hit to test sadly :<

That would be that then -.-

Also, The Beast Within isn't working (pet gets BW, hunter doesn't)

This is me trying to convince the powers that be that Freezing Arrow is not a proper level 80 skill:

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> [Feedback] Freezing Arrow

This is me hoping Blizzard listens to something in that thread:

No, if I remember correctly from what I have read, it does not stack any new procs over writes previous procs. I'm not in Beta or able to verify the source atm though.

However, if that is correct and if I understand it right, since the buff only buffs 10 persons, the calculation of which ten persons it will effect will be redone everytime it procs. So that one proc can/will buff different persons than a previous proc of replenishment.

Can confirm that myself. BM is completely lackluster and lags behind the other specs pretty hard. Right now you are gimping yourself badly if you plan to spec as BM and raid. There's absolutely no reason to spec it. The entire bottom of the tree is more or less horrible and needs reworked, the 51 pointer is extremely sad, and it needs a lot of work in general.

All three specs should be relatively close to each other, but BM is not at all in the same ballpark as Marks and Survival.

I don't know, from what I've seen and heard Beta side, in the Naxx raids BM played correctly (right specc, right glyphs, right pet) is top dps still.... by such a small number (believe it was 8dps) that it seemed the Survival Hunter must be a fraction less gear wise, specc wise (as in he missed something in his specc) or talent (player talent/skill) wise. Marksman seems to lag behind atm. but honestly, Marksman seems to me as the new survival, TSA isn't the same as EW was, but its a raid wide AP buff they bring in order to do a little less dps than the other hunters... I imagine any raid with 3 or more Hunters will have at least 1 of each, but pure dps wise I'm still thinking BM will be king, and if not I say FI should be raid wide!

Like I said, the people posting about the devilsaur aren't "whining" that it does too much damage because they don't want devilsaurs to be any good. They are pointing out that if Blizzard doesn't want hunters using one pet above all others (which Ghostcrawler specifically said they didn't want to happen), then they probably should try making the other pets a bit better. Even if you believe that exotic pets should always be better than non-exotics, that still wouldn't justify a large discrepancy between the devilsaur and the two other exotic ferocity pets. At the very least, all three of those should be in the same ballpark.

And that's only if you concede that speccing 51 points into BM means you're stuck using exotics. Blizzard said they were designing the talent so that taming an exotic pet is an option, but even if you don't use one then your non-exotic pet is still supposed to be considerably more powerful than it would be if you didn't spec into that talent (because of the additional talents). Right now people aren't seeing that kind of benefit (the additional 4 points in ferocity only go toward "extra" talents that don't affect dps), so the talent needs some work or the differences between pets needs work. Two 51-point BM hunters using ferocity pets (either exotic or not) should be putting out similar damage via pets, and it goes without saying that either of those pets should do considerably more damage than MM/SV pets.

It just doesn't follow that the only way to make the 51-point BM talent worthwhile is to boost exotics to the point where they are the only pets that make sense using. It actually creates a weird design/spec conundrum -- if we go the "exotics or gtfo" route, then all the design work that went into the various pet families ends up only benefiting MM/SV hunters or BM hunters who skip the last talent, because they would be the only ones to use those pets. It's almost completely backwards to spec all the way into the "pet-centric spec" and end up with fewer pet choices than the specs that presumably have less invested in them.

As for the wolf, it was just an example, but people aren't always in raids, and raids aren't only 25-man anymore. It's pretty easy to have a 10-man raid without a paladin or warrior in it, and those are the two classes whose raid buffs don't stack with furious howl at the moment (it stacks with the percentage-based buffs, which seems intended).