They want to reduce our percentage of damage from "filler" abilities (for lack of a better word) like Steady Shot and Auto Shot. GC during beta even said that they think the damage contribution from autoshot is still too high (~30% in some instances).

I think they are intentionally trying to tone down steady shot to help make each hunter spec more specific to its bread and butter damage source. For BM it is pets, for MM Chimera Shot, and ES for SV hunters. I would guess they'd like the bread and butter damage sources to equal 30-40% of your total DPS, while making sure steady and auto contribute no more than 20-25% of your damage each.

I think MM is probably the best balanced tree in that aspect. SV hunters don't get enough damage contribution from ES, and BM hunters get too much from their pets. When the PTR is released and testing starts, don't be surprised to see significant ES buffs (to offset the ~8% DPS loss from steady and to help close the gap), and further pet tuning based on how the PTR evolves.

Except GC has also stated he dislikes pets being as high on the damage charts as they are currently. More, again, the only damage boost pets will see is trickle-down from Hunter AP improvements: essentially, pets scale very poorly and without changing them to lower base values and better scaling from Hunter attibutes, their damage will fall off at higher gear levels.

If they want steady to be used less, then they need to boost the other abilities we have (aside from serpent sting, which is now worthwhile to use as things stand) so we'll be able to use them without bleeding DPS. Mana is, as things stand, a direct DPS stat for Hunters.

I think he is referring to pets doing 50%+ of a BM hunter's DPS. I would guess he would be OK with a BM hunter's pet doing 30-40% of their total DPS, assuming this is the range they want to keep the bread and butter damage sources. MM and SV pets will probably do closer to 20% of their total DPS if this is the case.

Ah thanks, good point. Just looking at the tooltips, are they meant to do the same damage and have the same scaling, minus talents?

Perhaps one tweak would be to allow Aimed/Multi to proc Cobra Strikes, and/or add a talent to the BM tree that reduces the mana cost of one or both. Scaling would still be an issue, but I think it would be fun to have one of them in our rotation. Making some of the talents for boosting Aimed/Multi accessible for BM would also open up more spec options.

I agree that current Patchwerk-25 is not a good gauge of anything given how short and stationary it is; I never have to use Viper at all. I do think we should be balanced around longer fights and the use of Viper as a DPS-throttle even in stand-and-nuke situations, otherwise the mana management mechanic is uninteresting, like it was on my old Mage main pre-WOTLK.

Well, he's done a terrible job of that, frankly. Yes, Hunter pets are over 40% right now. But as gear improves, they will fall off quite sharply. Less sharply now they've nerfed one the only two other significant sources of Hunter damage, steady. And as you note GC is not in favour of autoshot damage contribution increasing (except as a result of these changes, it will since its untouched). And without buffing to make the special shots worthwhile, that simply leaves BM...scaling very badly.

Zwaineroth, yes, aimed/multi scale identically. However, there's the issue with your idea that multi-shot is sometimes unusable due to CC (and as GC notes, he dosn't expect the current AoE fest to last into future raids), and that leaves BM hunters dependent on taking a MM talent so they can do their "intended" rotation.

So quick points of contention for future specs we probably need to address:

1. 3/3 Longevity and 3/5 Improved Tracking vs 1/3 Longevity and 5/5 Improved Tracking
2. 2/2 Invigoration and 3/5 Improved Tracking vs 0/2 Invigoration and 5/5 Improved Tracking
3. With Arcane Shot scaling significantly better than steady we are forced into a more mana intensive rotation, evaluate the benefits of mana efficiency from invigoration vs more raw damage from improved arcane shot. (Similar argument to above questions)
   

Quickly compiled excuse my errors.

To say it's a much larger nerf is an understatement. It all but ruins the BM spec -- among other things, it makes every pet-enhancing point worth 22%of what it was before (edit: this isn't exactly true, but it makes the general point easier to digest), because the only way pets will improve is through hunter gear/buff scaling at a 22% ratio, and only then for certain stats. You also make pets much squishier. Pets double dip and still lag well behind players in health -- if you remove the ability for other classes to buff them, then they become largely irrelevant in large group situations, which just encourages people to adopt specs and tactics that don't rely on them in raids.

We had a regime where pets barely benefited during raids -- WoW 1.0. It was not pretty.

Once again, saying "it does not add any raid dps to my ferocity pet" is not the same as saying "it doesn't add anything concrete." The tenacity tree sees significant, concrete benefits from having 4 extra points. We cannot make the argument that a 16-point gorilla is just as good at doing its job as a 20-point gorilla. It isn't. Even with 20 points to spend, if you try to get all three "end" talents for tenacity, each of which is useful for a tanking pet, you end up making sacrifices. Doing that gives you only two points to spend on cobra reflexes, charge, Natural Armor, Pet Barding or Intervene. Even Boar's Speed can be a dps increase for a tenacity pet, because they don't have dash and therefore lose dps uptime in any situation where they move from target to target, and charge doesn't last 16 seconds like dash does. And that's if you have 20 points to spend. If you only have 16 then the picture is even worse.

The same is true of cunning pets. If you want to use one for PvP (putting aside the fact that people are using tenacity pets for PvP atm) then you can't get all the dps talents and the PvP ones with 16 points. You can't max mobility (basically gives pet perma-dash/dive) and still get feeding frenzy, cornered and wolverine bite, for example. 51-point BM gives access to the chimera, which arguably is the best pvp pet for keeping melees off of you because of its ranged snare. If you skip the last point you're stuck with the hyena, which isn't as good for that purpose. And again, that leaves out any survivability stuff that you might find useful in PvP.

Even the 16-point ferocity pet can be lacking during raids. You can't get all the dps talents plus heart of the phoenix, for example. Last night while learning heroic Sartharion my pet died several times. I'm sure that will happen less often as I get used to the fight, but I nonetheless definitely benefited from having the extra talent points. Having a free rez every 10 minutes, where the pet returns with 100% health is "concrete". In pvp it means people having to kill your pet twice, effectively doubling its unbuffed health. I agree that the argument for the extra points isn't nearly as compelling as it is for tenacity, but that can be fixed by making the ferocity choices better ones. Lick Your Wounds, for example, is pretty stupid. If they changed that talent to, "2-piece Tier 5 bonus" then that would make it a lot harder to only get by with 16 points.

Even if the 51-point BM talent adds zero raid dps (arguable, as mentioned above) it is not the only one that adds questionable amounts of raid dps. 51-point frost does nothing to unstunnable raid bosses. 51-point Subtlety doesn't do much during raids either (unstealthed Ambush every 2 mins! Yay!). We cannot use raid dps as the barometer for usefulness overall, and once we disavow ourselves of that approach then we essentially have to stop pretending like 51-BM doesn't do anything.

Finally, whatever Blizzard's comments may have been about the Demonic Sacrifice spec (I'm not familiar with those comments so I'll take your word on it), that is not the same as saying that every 51-pointer has to be the most powerful ability in the tree, which is what I was getting at. GC (or one of the other designers) specifically said that they do not want 51-pointers to be so good that there is no point in investing in a tree without them. They want to preserve the option for people to go 50/21 if they want. It's not inherently wrong. We have to remember that the design documents for WoW, or the "vision" to coin a phrase from another MMORPG, is that talent trees are to help customize people's characters. We aren't supposed to just theorycraft our way to one spec that gets copied by a million players.

People are seeing that people are opting to go 50/21 or 51+/xx non-final talent and somehow concluding that means 51-BM final talent is useless or undesirable. That doesn't just turn logic on its head; it takes it out to the woodshed and beats the stuffing out of it. Why do we keep ignoring the fact that people actually are using devilsaurs and core hounds and camping spirit beasts and what have you? And it's not just a couple people doing this. How can we suggest, with a straight face, that no one wants a talent that a metric butt-ton of people are actually speccing into, when they clearly have the option not to (because it's not a prerequisite for other talents)?

As I've tried to show above, I absolutely disagree that all the 51-pointer adds is "flavor," (sorry for leaving out the 'u' -- I'm American) but even if that were true, apparently that's enough for a lot of people. At some point we should get over ourselves and let them enjoy the game too, instead of trying to armchair design talents so that there is only one reasonable spec for any given tree.

GC specifically said that they thought SV dps might be too low and would probably make up for the difference by buffing explosive shot, but that they hadn't fully decided.

And in a 10-man environment, it matters a lot what you bring. And, unfortunately for BM (and even moreso SV) Hunters there's quite likely going to be a Ret Pally in the raid, since they bring a lot of buffs and have a high personal DPS.

"Bring the player, not the class" breaks down in 10 mans, where chosing between two players of roughly equal skill is likely to be based on class, and the raid stacking it brings. The annoying Boomkin will help the raid more than the nice BM Hunter, post-nerf.

Luck? If you recall, cats were basically useless, then they added rake in. They had every opportunity to balance rake, and they decided to make it a high-damage skill.

In any case, I don't think returning EW is a good idea, but there are other raid buffs they could add - see my previous post where I suggested that SV should get a talent which added the 2% physical vulnrability debuff.


TrevvyTrev - And how often do you see non-ferocity pets in raiding? It's raiding I'm largely concerned about...

Again, I'm thinking that the entire top end of the BM tree is looking expendible.

Saladin, it would absolutely bring us back to one token survival hunter per raid. No one else provides that type of debuff, and in fact it is a impossible to mirror in another fashion too, since it scales with agility. You aren't going to see a buff/debuff that doesn't have any overlap in the game anymore, which is why it was revised, and also why Call of the Wild is being revised.

I would agree that survival doesn't compare with the other replinishers in raid utility, which they could address in one of 2 ways. Either A. provide superior DPS (after all, the other 2 are hybrid classes and the ~+5%DPS average would make sense) or B. add additional Utility. Some sort of buff/debuff that is in limited supply tied to Expose Weakness would make sense in my mind. I will resist starting into "awesome new talent ideas" around here, but it is a fair point.

The maths is correct, but maths only gives answers, not truth

Blizzard isn't nerfing Steady Shot just to reduce our damage, they're also doing it to make Steady spam a last resort, not a first choice. The Steady nerf may result in about an 8% DPS nerf for the old rotations... but we won't be using the old rotations, will we?

Something does concern me are that even Glyphed, Aimed and Arcane seem a little too mana-hungry. Our mana-management is hypersensitive to shot-costs. A few percent either way can make a huge difference to how much time we spend in Viper. I'm hoping that Blizzard reassesses shot costs in the light of the new rotations they encouraging us towards.

The good news is that Aimed, Chimera and Arcane/Explosive can all be weaved into a 12-shot cycle, so there's no messy aliasing involved.

That depends way too much on player preferences. There's still a bias against ret paladins by a lot of people too. 10-man raid makeups vary greatly, and they seem to depend more on who your friends are as a general rule. I have yet to run a 10-man with a ret paladin -- not because we don't like them, but because we don't have a ton of them, and the one that we do have got saved to a different instance.

This is only my personal experience of course, but "bring the player" seems to be working for our 10-mans. The raid leaders grab tanks, healers, and whatever dps is available instead of trying to wait for the shadow priest or ret paladin or enhancement shaman or whatever to show up. In theory a ret paladin may bring more than I do, but no one has suggested that I reroll or sit out for one.

Ret paladins really do have a major advantage in 10 mans because paladins still have several unique buffs in the form of blessings which can't all be provided by one paladin. Running a 10 man raid with less than 2 paladins puts the group at a significant disadvantage because casters will have to give up either kings or wisdom (and might also is a factor for hybrids, especially if there is a need to put up CS over BS or no warrior is present). Not to mention the fact that ret paladins have a large amount of utility even compared to most other hybrid classes. In general the "bring the player not the class" logic has failed in 10 mans because 10 mans are tuned more tightly than 25 mans and less buffs are likely to be available so bringing players who bring a lot of utility as well as doing solid dps is a bonus. This matters less now since Naxx is pretty easy, but as the difficulty scales with later 10 mans it's going to be a much bigger concern.

Survival definitely can't be penalized for having replenishment. It has to be able to compete on an equal damage field with the other two hunter specs.

Scorpids.

My point is not that the 51-point talent or non-ferocity pets are going to appeal to every person that is concerned mostly with raiding. My point is that people are projecting their own somewhat subjective assessments onto the talent, and making excessive claims that confuse our search for answers about what happens when you do what. This would not be the first time where people decided that the max-raid-dps-spec didn't include the final talent in the tree, even in WotLK. Boomkins are raiding without Starfall. Shamans are raiding without Thunderstorm. Mages are raiding without Deep Freeze. Rogues are raiding without Shadow Dance. Some people may be raiding with these things too, and they have their reasons. These forums are helpful if we can discuss exactly what those reasons may be and the resulting tradeoffs instead of harping about how a 21-point talent is worth more than a 51-point talent to a person doing x or y, which must be a design flaw because smaller numbers should never be better than larger ones.

In short, if you think that the 51-point talent is not worth it because you only use a ferocity pet for raiding and raiding is all you need a pet for and you don't have a need for any survivability talents, then say that. You don't need to say something like, "the 51 point BM talent doesn't add anything worthwhile, unlike every other 51-point talent in the game" (I'm not saying you said that), because that isn't remotely accurate or even useful.

What could happen and what does happen are two different things. Saying that having a paladin in your group is helpful is accurate, if not particularly controversial. Saying that you can't do something without one is both less accurate and more controversial. We ran two Naxx groups last week. Because of timing issues and some other internal politics (they didn't want all the guild officers in one group), the second group (mine) did not have a paladin. Our group did better than the other group did. We killed faster, wiped less, generally rocked. Your mileage may vary.

This is exactly what my thoughts were on the subject. Seems like they're trying to de-emphasize Steady spam, with a possible eye towards buffing or at least cheapening the instants. (I think they'd have to drop the mana costs on Arcane/Explosive/Multi/Aimed a bit to make their damage:mana ratio improve.)

It may also lead to justification for giving us more mobile damage, possibly with an eye to alleviating that issue in Arenas. Maybe. That's just wild speculation on my part.

It's really not others suggesting I reroll. It's that I feel I am not sufficiently contributing as a Hunter. I bring very little of the quite important synergy to the raid, and after this nerf based on our WWS and the expected nerf I'd not be bringing DPS sufficient to compensate either. That's why I'm pushing suggestions to rectify the issue.

And true, you see scorpids - but especially in 25 mans it's an issue that only one scorpid poison stack damages (unless that's been fixed, but I've seen no references to it). In raiding, I'm looking to do maximum DPS. The entire top end of the BM tree is looking like an albatross to me, and sorry but I see that as an issue!


Saladin - I'm not a "cat person", if I can help it. I had a Carrion Bird for solo'ing in BC, and a Ravager for raiding. But currently I'm using a Gorilla for solo'ing and a Cat for raiding because they're clearly the best choices. I'd prefer to bring a Raptor if I had a free choice among the Ferocity pets (i.e. they did identical damage).

At the start of the LK beta, Cats became virtually worthless. They "fixed" this by making them overpowered again :/


In any case: I've posted my change on the Blizz boards here.

I do think there are multiple ways to reach the goal of steady being a filler talent, but using Shandara's spreadsheet shows I do indeed drop DPS when I use arcane shot at the present time. Okay, numbers:

Rapid Fire / TBW / Serpent / Steady - 3109 DPS
Rapid Fire / TBW / Serpent / Arcane / Steady - 3092 DPS
Rapid Fire / TBW / Serpent / Multi / Steady - 3101 DPS
Rapid Fire / TBW / Serpent / Multi / Arcane / Steady - 3091 DPS

(10 man raiding, our current group is badly sub-optimal for buffs)

It wouldn't take much - the suggestions I've made for dropping base mana or boosting damage slightly for steady to be a filler. I'd prefer a soloution more like my previously posted radical one, but right now (unless someone can suggest something I'd doing radically wrong) I add complexity and slightly reduce my DPS by adding additional shots into the rotation.

posted this analysis in the damage dealing general forum - somewhat regurgitates my original post here, but has a little more thought on a few things:

It has been clear to anyone who has done significant raiding in WotLK that hunter damage was too high compared to other DPS classes – particularly BM hunter damage (and even more particularly Orc BM hunter damage, but this is the only bitterness about Blood Fury and Command I’ll tarnish this thread with!). That changes are coming should really surprise no one. The purpose of this thread is to evaluate the proposed changes and their impact on hunters overall (primarily in PVE, but also in PVP)

1) Steady Shot – Attack power contribution to damage reduced to 10% (was 20%).

This is the most impactful of all the changes to hunters of all specs, since Steady Shot is a core ability that is currently the foundation of all raid “rotations”. I put quotation marks around rotations because the nature of hunter DPS currently is that Steady Shot is virtually the only attack hunters ever use. MM hunters open with Serpent Sting and spam Steady between Chimera Shot cooldowns - BM hunters do the same, except refreshing Serpent Sting instead of casting Chimera Shot. Survival hunters have the most variance from this with Lock and Load procs, but otherwise Steady until Explosive Shot is off cooldown or the sting falls off.

My initial reaction to this change was that I was concerned about the impact it will have on hunter damage scaling with gear upgrades, and I still have that concern, but I’ve come around to liking this change in principle if the result is that using Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, or Multi-Shot become viable options. Currently Steady Shot’s damage is comparatively high enough and its mana cost low enough that it simply doesn’t make sense to use anything else, which makes hunter DPS very uninteresting.

What I’d really like to see is a slight increase to the scaling of hunter instant shots with this change. From a PVE perspective, consistently using Aimed Shot or Arcane Shot in a longer fight requires the use of Aspect of the Viper for periods, which means the impact of increased damage from these higher mana cost shots likely wouldn’t be a significant overall DPS gain. This change would also potentially serve to help hunters in PVP, in which one of our biggest issues is LOS and having those instant attacks we can land hit harder would help mitigate that issue.

I’m not necessarily sold on the Steady Shot scaling nerf without an improvement to scaling elsewhere. Hunters have historically scaled fairly poorly compared to other DPS classes, in part because of the % of our damage that comes from our pets and how these scale less well with gear than player DPS. A base damage reduction to Steady Shot rather than a scaling hit or a slight scaling increase to our other instant attacks to go along with the Steady nerf (my current preferred change because of its PVP implications) seem like better options than what’s on the table.

2) Volley damage decreased by 30%

Solid change. Volley’s damage was incredibly high, with 1-3 on our full clear parses of Naxx *always* being taken up by the 3 hunters in the raid as a result. While the damage is changed, however, it would be nice if a look could be taken at Volley’s impact on weapon durability. Currently its seems like it counts every creature hit or every “tick” as an attack for dura loss, which has multiple times lead to my weapon breaking in the middle of a fight when it was at something like 5 durability when the fight started. A minor issue, but very annoying when it comes up.

3) Readiness no longer resets the cooldown of Bestial Wrath

A good change, because the double Bestial Wrath synch with Heroism/Bloodlust was generating simply unreal damage. With Heroism/Bloodlust being raidwide, the nature of dps cooldowns that synch with those vs. those that don’t should possibly be re-evaluated somewhat. The nature of damage multiplying effects, like Bestial Wrath or Arcane Power, are magnified with these, while cooldowns like Rapid Fire or Adrenaline Rush don’t have the same synching effect, and in the case of the former have diminishing returns because of the nature of haste and hunters not getting a GCD reduction like other classes with cast time attacks.

While you’re looking at Readiness - *please* remove it from the GCD. This change is most important for PVP, where the difference between it being on the GCD is the difference between having it as a “backup” interrupt or not – many classes have interrupt effects off the GCD now, while not only do hunters have interrupts on the GCD *and* with travel times, our version of Preparation is GCD locked as well

4) Deterrence changed to deflect 100% of incoming melee or spell damage for 5 seconds, but prevents you from attacking while active. You still must be facing the attacker to deflect the damage (this is a limitation we are trying and might end up removing). 60 sec cooldown.

Since this is a comprehensive changes post, I don’t want to delve too deeply into some of the root issues of hunter PVP difficulties, but Deterrence in this version does not solve them. With the facing requirement on this, I’d venture to say that it is virtually useless against melee, especially against rogues. The old Deterrence suffered a similar problem – stuns made it useless. (http://i9.photobucket.com/albums/a60...deterrance.jpg) for a reference from lvl 60) With the facing requirement here and no avoidance, a hunter will simply get stunned and the melee will move behind them to deal full damage for the duration. Additionally, the inability to attack during the duration of the effect prevents the hunter from being able to use any sort of interrupts to assist teammates if he is swapped off of, which will result in the need for really annoying CancelAura macros for a class that is already swamped in necessary keybinds to compete in arena.

I obviously have not had the chance to test this, but it seems like something more akin to a highly increased chance to be missed (not damage reduction, so it applies to CC/stun effects as well) and perhaps a damage penalty while it’s active to still allow for utility like Scatter Shot or Silencing Shot to be used would be more appropriate. It would also avoid the abuse of the 100% damage reduction in PVE situations like avoiding dying to certain-death type effects like Sapphiron’s deep breath.

5) Kill Shot cooldown decreased to 15 seconds

Good change. Not much else to say here.


6) Kindred Spirits – now only grants 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
7) Serpent’s Swiftness – now only grants 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet.

Pet damage was too high and this helps reduce it. I did say I wouldn’t complain about Command again, but it is worth noting that % increases to pet DPS like 2pT7 and such are going to be at their most dangerous early in the expansion cycle, when static values like buff AP and pet base damage are contributing. As pets scale more slowly than player DPS, the relative value of these buffs are going to decrease. Again, something of a scaling concern. It’s worth noting that – much like Steady Shot - in general pet DPS is a good place to consider damage reductions that won’t have as big of an impact on PVP.

8) All hunter pet abilities with a cooldown longer than 30 sec have been moved off the global cooldown.
9) Growl Threat increased 20%

Good changes for convenience.

10) Call of the Wild

Good change to avoid group/raid stacking issues.

11) Rake and Scorpid Poison – slightly nerfed to bring them into line with other pet abilities.
12) Spirit Strike – reduced the period on the dot so it will work better with Longevity.

Good changes to balance pet choices.

13) Improved Tracking – now benefits damage to all included creature types as long as you are tracking one of them. You don’t have to swap around what you are tracking as much

This is about a 5% dps buff to anyone who is absentminded! Seriously, though, good change to remove logistical annoyances, though I’m sure I’ll still end up in a raid with “Track Repair” on and lose out on the extra damage

14) Aspect of the Wild now raidwide

Just synching up with other aura-type effects. Good change.



I have other comments, particularly focused on PVP as mentioned in my Deterrence comments, but this is mostly to address the specific posted changes, so I’ll end things there.

I'm wondering how Deterrance will work with locationbased AoE like Blizzard. Face up? Not a major issue in PvP, but the effects an Ice mage can proc with Blizzard can mean a fair few things if he happens to catch a few enemies clustered.

Before folks get too concerned about the sky falling, I'd like to share the insights I got from several hours of modelling using Shandara's excellent spreadsheet while killing time on a plane today. My motivation was specifically to see if the SS nerf was going to be the high-end hit people think it will.

Using the 79a version of shandara's spreadsheet (the latest pre-nerf version) I tried to create the most powerful build I could, using full raid buffs and manually capping hit (by hand adjusting it) so that the gear planner would maximise damage. With the orc racial, inscription & LW as professions, the following 54/11/6 build, a scorpid pet, glyphs of bestial wrath, arcane shot & steady shot,and a SpS/KS/AS/SS rotation I got a total dps of 6652. Taking that exact configuration to the latest spreadsheet gives a dps of 6213, at 6.5% reduction. Time to OOM for the first build 378; time to OOM for the second build 352.

Before everyone describes that as unrealistic, I then build a gear set without the hit manually capped, same build, rotation, glyphs and pet. Pre-nerf dps comes to 6398; post nerf dps of 5961, 6.8% drop. Time to OOM pref-nerf 250; post-nerf 241 so mana consumption isn't ridiculously off scale.

While this is obviously not real-life testing, I certainly think it should give those folks thinking our class is dissolving something to think about. Of course, it could mean that Blizzard will think we need further nerfing, but I'd like to be more positive than that.

Thoughts?

The upcoming nerfs do seem to to be a bit overdue, considering that they were aware of some of the issues even since the beta, but I'd like to see all the things they have in mind for us before a final judgment. However, the Growl buff is a really nice surprise as far as I'm concerned.

Steady shot doesn't seem as bad as it's made, considering that Blizz probably already has the next tier of items in their spreadsheets, but I am slightly concerned that will hit survival a bit too hard. They're aware of Survival's drawbacks, but somehow I doubt that aside from tweaking Explosive shot again they could do much without massive talent overhauls. Still, time will tell, I suppose.

Remember too back when they moved Trap Mastery to our "awesome" deep-tree talent. Blizzard communication specifically stated that they felt it was really "meh" and would probably give survival hunters a few more goodies, but not until after launch.

The obvious solution, is to make every pet you tame an exotic pet, if you have the 51 point BM talent. Certainly the "new exotic" pets such as the devilsaur, spirit beast, chimera and core hound will continue to be un-tameable by non-51 point BM spec hunters. However, for the BM hunter that is 51 points deep in their tree, I suggest any pet they tame take on the dps characteristics of the exotic pets (+10% proposed dps buff), along with perhaps a 10% size increase to differentiate them from "normal" pets.

The talent remains fundamentally unchanged, no-one is pigeon holed into using a specific pet (as all pets essentially become "exotic" when tamed or summoned with the 51 pt BM talent), and blizzard gets to wash their hands of it once hunter dps is brought within an acceptable range.

I'm looking forward to the PTR, as I am genuinely interested in MM raid performance vs. BM raid performance with the proposed changes. With a heavy melee dps centric raid and no MM hunters, I believe a switch would be warranted if the dps output between the two specs is comparable. As of right now, even with my mediocre gear, I am still pulling top dps over everyone else in my guild. That said, the disparity between our top mage and myself is not very large. He is usually only about 50-100 dps behind me (although he does out-gear me).

If there is anything I am hesitant about in terms of the upcoming changes, it is the steady shot nerf, and how it will affect hunters in the long run in terms of scaleability with gear and AP as progression moves forward in comparison to how other classes will scale with gear improvements.

Is there any chance that, due to the incoming changes to Steady Shot, that agility gems will become the better gems again when forced with a decsion between agi or AP?