Wednesday

3.2.2 - Crush BM some more, why dont ya?

o Beast Mastery
The Beast Within: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds. In addition, hunters with this talent will do 10% additional damage at all times.
Bestial Wrath: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds.

hmm I wonder why Blizzard dicided to do this as really no hunters are BM any more and BM has the least dmg of all three build atm so why nerf it again?

I've been a big advocate for all the specs in raid but after 3 months now ive sen few to none Beast master hunters in Raids or Heroic pugs and i can fully understand why as Beast Mastery no matter how good you are as a player take so much effort to play and you do so little damage compared to Survival / Marksmanship, why beat yourself over the head to stay Beast Mastery. It is such a shame that Blizard continue to crush this spec.


Master's Call: This ability now correctly removes the snaring component of Infected Wounds, Frostfire Bolt, and Slow.

Trap Mastery's (Survival) tooltip now states the correct amount of snakes summoned.

Glyph of Freezing Trap: The effect from this glyph will now log properly.

All ranks of Sonic Blast now properly have an 80 Focus cost.
Black Arrow Ranks 5 and 6 training costs have been lowered significantly.
Furious Howl: Ranks 1-5 will no longer give slightly more attack power than is listed in their tooltips.
Lock and Load: The tooltip for this talent has been updated to indicate that it also works with Explosive Trap.
Roar of Sacrifice: Damage transferred to pet is now considered Nature damage.
The tooltip for Improved Tracking has been slightly re-written to indicate that it only works on the hunter, and works on melee damage as well.
T.N.T. (Rank 3): Now indicates that the talent works with Black Arrow.

Hunter Tier-9 2-Piece Set Bonus: Critical damage from Serpent Sting will now work properly with the Mortal Shots and Expose Weakness talents.

These are all the changes to hunters that I can find in the patch notes.

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New 3 part Marksmanship guide

I have made a 3 part hunter guide for those wanting to know more about Marksmanship

Part one is about stats, armour penetration and chimera shot specifically


Part 2 is about shot rotation and pets


Part 3 is about the Marksmanship build



References
WWS report http://wowwebstats.com/w6qrixw1wmuea
Petopia
Hit Rating / Focused Aim numbers

On a side note: I am really sorry about the sound quaility for these video my mic hisses alot even tho its noise reducion is switched on and its supposed to be a noise reduction mic.
So again sorry for the sound.

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Armor Penetration Nerf in 3.2.2

There is rarely an ideal time to announce a nerf. In the case of e.g. the Prot paladin healing nerf, we had already decided we were going to fix it and how we were going to fix it so we announced it relatively early. The armor pen decision included more debate. I am sorry if the timing was bad for any of you personally, but we certainly can't promise that future nerfs or buffs won't necessitate gear changes.

I wouldn't focus too much on the issue of using too many of the same kind of gem. There are plenty of situations where that has been the case since BC (though it's not ideal in a perfect world). Rather the case was that classes that had been using Agi or Str or whatever were now switching almost exclusively to armor pen and being greatly rewarded for it. Gear without armor pen was being passed over. Specs that benefited a lot from armor pen were outstripping specs in the same class. As many other players have concluded, it was just too good.

That said, we don't think it will be a trash stat if we make this change. If you could beat plate-wearers in PvP before we don't think that will suddenly flip overnight. We don't think you'll feel the need to shard your items with armor pen.

We also think the change is good for both PvE and PvP. My earlier comment was to try and discourage players from thinking their PvE got nerfed for PvP reasons, though that absolutely happens sometimes when we can't avoid it. Some players have been concerned about the power of melee classes in Arenas. While this change alone isn't likely to sway their opinions, chilling out melee damage in PvP probably isn't a bad thing.

Yes, armor pen is gone in Cataclysm, at least as a rating on gear. Until then we want it to be a good stat but not one that trumps every other gear consideration.

The nerf to armor pen in 3.2.2 is intentional. Compared to the recent buff where we increased the value of armor rating to 125%, this nerf would take it back down to 110%. While we are still evaluating the effects of this change in the 3.2.2 build, we did want to let you know of the possibility in case you were about to spend a lot on armor pen gems.

In fact, this was really the point. Several melee specs (and Marksman hunters) had begun to focus on armor pen at the expense of all other stats. Gear without armor pen was being passed over and gem sockets were increasingly being filled with just this one stat. While every spec has stats that are more valuable than others, this one felt like it was starting to trump everything. Not coincidentally, characters stacking lots of armor pen were starting to do more damage than their peers and more damage than we were comfortable with.

This change is largely for PvE reasons, though we won't cry at all if melee damage in PvP drops a little as a result.

We're letting you know now so that this doesn't feel like a stealth nerf, assuming it goes live. While you might disagree or be frustrated by the change (though I also suspect it won't come as a surprise to many players), we ask that you try and keep your response to something appropriate for these forums.

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