Incoming Hunter Love  

06Feb09 08:33 CST
I've had enough time to mull this over, and am hard pressed to find fault with any of these changes.

The ammunition change is long overdue. Hunters are the only range class in the game with an ongoing expense simply to do damage, I think it will be interesting to see what mechanic they use to compensate for quiver haste. Could hunters finally have that extra bag space?

A new tier of pet talents you say? Talents likely to only be reachable with the extra points attained with the 51 point BM talent? I like it on the surface. I think the true test is if non exotic pets will be competitive DPS, or if we'll all still need to pick up a Spirit Beast.

The hunting party change only makes sense. Nobody takes 5 points in it, so why should it be a 5 point talent? Coupled with the changes to make Sniper Training more friendly to trap dancers, this is a nice little buff to compensate for the recent stealth nerf to explosive shot.

The change to piercing shots is also good, as once a warrior put 5 stacks of sunder armor up on a boss, the points in Piercing Shots didn't seem a very good buy. Besides, who doesn't love having another DoT effect up?

"Additional Trapping functionality for survival hunters". I'd like to see some sort of ranged trapping functionality beyond that of freezing arrow, to be able to proc lock and load from outside of melee range.

I like these changes overall, but I'm not going to get too excited. It's pretty likely that Bliz will monkey with these further before 3.1 hits the PTR.