Having arthas drop an 8th "Undying Bullet of Sindragosa" would be pretty annoying though.

Also if ammo is still split between bullets and arrows, you'd have to match up a new weapon drop with a new ammo drop as well to get full use out of it - best bow in the game, but stuck with a Naxx level arrow since you only got bullets from Ulduar? Sucks to be you.

I suspect that unless they merge ammo types, it'll remain as a vendor item, or possibly a craftable or quest one (token based would work - add in a relic token drop, which each of the relic using classes can use, and hunters can use for an ammo relic).

Right now, the only real limit on Ammo availability is Reputation. I don't consider crafted/vendor-bought to be a real limit since both are plain buyable. I wouldn't be too keen on Ammo being a drop; it's not based on RNG now, it really shouldn't be in the future. Purchasable from badges may be alright I guess but I'm thinking something along the lines of a Quest to kill XXX Boss in whatever Raid would also be ok.

Yea, I was thinking what Catalept said. When they said they will "preserve" the 15% haste bonus from quivers, I'm assuming it would be on the bullet/arrow item they give us. Then it would be equipped in the ammo slot. Sounds like the best plan to me. It will be interesting to see the progression of ammo. As to how it would be attained, they will probably do what they always do, reputation.

I love the sniper training change. Range checking was annoying.

New mortal shots sounds very interesting. I think it would make marks the new DPS spec, seeing as explosive shot doesn't benefit from it. Saw some ballparking earlier, 30% damage + 30% mangle buff + 10k chimera shot = ~4.5k damage over 8 seconds, and I'd imagine it working like deep wounds so stacking would become crazy. I have a feeling it will be changed and tweaked many times on the PTR, then nerfed when it goes live.

Slightly uninterested in the BM changes, still doesn't seem appealing. But I dislike BM in general.

As for trap functionality, chuckable Immo traps anyone?

I think in a similar fashion to how thrown weapons are now, ammo may just be a drop from lesser bosses (e.g. not KT, Malygos or +2/3 drakes). It had occurred to me that they might try to make the ammo a shareable item by putting stats on it, but then we'd have to start worrying about warriors/rogues rolling on both the ammo and ranged weapons for the stats. So if they did that they'd have to buff thrown items accordingly (or something like that).

Reputation is also an interesting possiblity, like the mysterious and timeless ammo.

But one of the more interesting questions for me is how will durability work? Will ammo have it like thrown weapons, or will I be able to freely farm/PvP with the best ammo available?

Also from the changes to FF and Sunder armor I think they'll probably change Acid spit, Spore Cloud, and Sting, to a % armor decrease instead of the static decreases that they are now. I'm not quite sure if this changes the power of those pets greatly, but it would certainly be different.

Piercing Shots almost has to work like Deep Wounds, given Blizzard's tendency to reuse ideas, and the fact that the talent was changed from ArP makes me wonder if the supposed Potency stat (combination of current haste and ArP) in the "3.1 patch notes" might be possible. If so, it'd be well worth getting haste capped again.

I'm thinking that maybe only one type of ammo will provide the haste bonus, and that we might see a slowing arrow/shot, maybe a fire arrow, etc. That way you would lose the haste if you chose another ammo type, but you would get another bonus (for PvP, high armor targets or whatever). This is just based on the icons that MMO-Champion put up a while back. I don't think we will start seeing things like +agility on bullets. But however the system changes, I do wonder if ammo with more specialized effects will be restricted to hunters. A rogue or warrior with a slowing shot could be annoying.

What they SHOULD do with quivers is just turn them into 20 and 22 slot bags, so leatherworking will have a way to produce bags as well. The mats for the 28 slot quivers aren't really any less difficult to farm than those for the 20 slot frostweave bag.

You're absolutely spot on. The 30+ range limitation for ST will be removed and as stated replaced with an effect that only comes into use after standing still for 6+ seconds.

I don't think that would be such a good idea and thus it is doubtful Blizzard will implement it. It brings a lot of balancing issues like switching different ammo type for different shots. (In BC there were macros that let you use level 1 ammo for steady shot). And that king micromanagement is frowned upon, by both Blizzard and players

I pretty much expect something more in line of throwing weapons, where we equip one ammo item with durability that slowly decreases when we fire shots and can be repaired. Additionally that ammo item be upgraded by purchasing a better one from rep vendors and can be crafted by engineers. This will work well also for warriors as they'll have fewer things to manage.

Warlocks are still keeping their shards so I doubt we'll get free ammo. But one of the concerns was that we are still the only class that pays to PvP (yes, party buffs require reagents as well). So additionally we can see arena-sanctioned ammo, bought when you reach a high arena rank. Or lower quality PvP ammo that doesn't have durability.


As for the other changes I'm really excited in the next tier pet talents. For the ferocity pets it will certainly be the expected DPS buff. But maybe we can see something more interesting for the cunning and tenacity pets?

On the topic of the ammunition changes, another option would be having our weapons conjure ammo, similar to both Thori'dal and Netherstrand Longbow. That would reduce the need for both arrow and bullet upgrades from each reputation linked to a raid (and possibly even the need for said reputations) and there would be no RNG issues aside from the weapon drop itself. Get the weapon, it conjures a bundle of equal-level ammunition, then have at it.

That pretty much kills the point of getting rid of ammo in the first place.

Though I'd love to see how much it would cost to repair 5600 dura.

Well, no, the point of getting rid of ammo isn't necessarily to save hunters money, I think it's to:

- save hunters the hassle of buying and carrying 25-35 stacks of consumables
- save the server having to manage an extra 6000 items on each hunter being bought, carried, moved and destroyed

If those 2 are achieved, I don't think blizzard would care about whether hunters are still spending 100g a night on repairing their ammo instead of spam-clicking it off a vendor

These are broad strokes.

+ Ammo seems like marketing and the design team throwing us a bone.
+ The bleed effect for MM is hopeful.
+ The change to sniper seems to indicate:
- Limited use in PvP
- Reduce trap-dancing except when you have perfect position (i.e.- can trap without moving)
- Let you receive melee aura buffs easier (i.e.- boss at 31 yards, but feral at less than 30 yards)
- It "feels right" for "Sniper Training" which is something Blizz always shoots for. Then again, they've tried to make it work with Steady Shot and Aimed Shot before.
+ BM gets to dps a little more, but not through collaboration with their hunter's talents.

That said, I'm sure they'll screw around with almost every talent, talent location, and spell coefficient. And ammo damage is in every formula.

I suspect there will be a few nerfs thrown in too (not just for hunters of course, there's just not much for them to gain by listing potential nerfs along with the potential buffs/changes right now).

I wonder if there's any hope of PTR feedback to convince them to make the new Sniper Training a stacking buff, so 2% after 2 seconds of motionlessness, 4% after 4, and finally 6% after 6 - that'd alleviate the penalty on movement heavy fights a bit.

Also, if Ulduar features a lot of Mechanical mobs, that's a straight 3-5% DPS reduction to SV and MM specs from the loss of Imp Tracking, I hope they'd consider that when rebalancing 3.1 dps based on pre-3.1 testing.

I have to wonder if the Piercing Shots will really buff the tree. I mean, no one really takes it now, so you'd have to juggle points elsewhere to get it. Obviously we don't have the math, but I'm not sure this would be a huge boost to MM DPS. Just means we have more choices to make in the tree. BM is getting a buff in the 51 point talent, so that could bring up the DPS to MM level. Survival may have gotten a stealth nerf in the form of Sniper Trainer if Ulduar has a lot of moving fights. So these announcements may bring the trees closer together damage-wise.

/shrug

They need to take sniper training down to atleast 3 seconds in my opinion.

Unless they are gonna make every fight a patchwerk, in that case it's fine. If you check say sartharion 3 drakes you don't stand still for more than 10 seconds (rough estimate) at a time, so that only gives 4 seconds for that bonus to apply, which will be quiet bad.

The problem with this is that different quivers give different speeds, though this is really only an issue while levelling up. This would have to scale with level if this was the case, and I can't think of any other passive ability that does that without having to train it.

For a really early look at what piercing shots would be like (I can't imagine those numbers NOT being tweaked) I took a look at a WWS from a couple of weeks ago when I was MM. Chimera+Aimed+Steady did about 27% of my damage, not including the serpent sting effect of Chimera. If we get 30% of that, that's almost a 7% damage boost from three talents. This is more than twice the general rule of 1% dps per talent point and way ahead of ISS or Wild Quiver (this talent name makes me laugh with the proposed quiver changes :p).

I also wanted to take a look at armor penetration, with the sunder armor changes. The spreadsheet has it for me as 0.465 as survival with BiS gear. The boss had 33.14% reduction from armor. I took out sunder armor from the debuffs, put 20% pen in the hand adjust field (308 rating), and adjusted the boss stats to get back to 33.14% (11250 armor, down from 13083). This brought the value of armor pen up to 0.786. Does this method seem flawed to anyone? My initial guess was that ArP value would go up but only by a little since aimed/auto/steady make up maybe 40% of MM/SV damage, but this is a substantial jump.

Some nice changes here, albeit with some confusion. I'm liking the sniper training improvement but that MM buff is also looking nice. I wonder how much of a dps increase BM hunters will get because its interesting the way pets were nerfed in 3.08 and seem to be gettin buffed again in 3.1. I have never really looked into trap dancing but this sniper trainig change is forcing me away from it more i think.

Why not just give the full 15% right from level 1? I mean really you're only talking about 1-5% haste on auto-shots, which isn't much of a buff for leveling or pvp. By the time you can train steady shot, you already have access to 14% quivers, and 15% ones at 55/60.

If they were concerned about that 1-5% haste at low levels, they could just add trainable ranks, or just make them passively learned like gathering profession abilities or pet skills. Either way, it makes more sense than adding haste to every piece of ammo ever.

I don't quite get why that change would force you away from trap dancing. Right now sniper training does nothing if you trap dance but with the change you will profit from it about 2/3 of the time. So if anything that change makes trap dancing more viable, not less.