BC Hunter Talents Released

[Luminon]

/delurks
I see noone's posted the mechanics changes yet.

Below is a copy of a forum post made by game designer Kalgan regarding Hunter mechanics in the Burning Crusade:
1. Attack Power and Crit related changes:
Hunters now get 1 AP per Agility rather than 2. This change helps us provide more interesting stat distributions on hunter items. Previously, Hunters valued Agi significantly above any other stat, such that it was extremely difficult for us to create variety among Hunter items. For example, before this change, we could have spent 1 stat point on an item to give you either 2 AP or 1 Agi (which gave 2 AP along with a small bonus to crit and a small bonus to dodge... clearly the better choice). However, several changes have been made along with this change in order to offset the AP loss.
Hunters now get significantly more crit per point of Agility than before (about 33agi/crit at level 60).
Hunters now get more dodge per point of Agility than before (about 20agi/dodge at lvl 60).
Ranged weapons have had their damage values significantly increased (and consequently the weapon's dps)... this also helps make weapon upgrades feel more meaningful for Hunters than it did previously (along with the other changes, this change is retroactive).
Most Hunter equipment has been updated to have a better distribution between +Attack Power bonuses and Agility.

2. Traps are now on a 30 sec cooldown, but can be used in combat (you no longer need to feign/trap).

3. When feign death is resisted, you are still reduced to 0 threat for any targets that did not resist feign death (although if any creature resists the feign, you won't be taken completely out of combat, you'll still be on the creature group's target list).

4. Aimed Shot related changes:
Aimed Shot now resets the Hunter's shot timer. This talent was always intended to be an "opening" shot, and not something that would be woven between shots. However, since Aimed Shot became such a core element for Hunter DPS, we didn't want to make this change until we were prepared to make several other changes to increase hunter DPS to offset it. Fortunately, this means that some of the odd side effects of the old Aimed Shot are no longer relevant, such as requiring hunters to use extremely slow weapons to maximize their DPS (weapons slow enough to be able to use Aimed Shot in between auto shots)
Arcane Shot now does substantially more damage than it did before, and scales with AP.
Steady Shot has been introduced as a core ability in the expansion, and provides much the same kind of gameplay as Aimed Shot did in the past (a shot you weave in between your normal shots), but to a much more managable degree (since it's a 1.5 sec shot, it doesn't require as slow of a weapon to take advantage of, and doesn't require to stand still for as long).

5. Other note: Wyvern Sting may now be used in combat.

For pvp it seems like the increased trap cooldowns and wyvern sting and traps no longer requiring out-of-combat will have quite an impact. I'd have to see it in action to know how that would work out though.

As for pve, it looks like the new shot rotation will exclude aimed shot in favour of arcane- and steady shot. IAotH and rapid killing may become must-have talents because of this.

Also note that it will be possible to get +4% stamina (or 6% damage reduction), +15% health and +10% armor through talents in the expansion, considering the abundance of dodge and mail's decent armor value won't this overdo hunter survivability?

Oh, and weapon skill still doesn't seem to play a role for hunters.

From looking over the trees, it appears that Survival is now the raid friendly tree with the advent of Expose Weakness. Survival Hunters were already getting close to 600 Agi buffed and with the increase in gear coming in tBC, a Survival Hunter is going to have the highest critical chance of any of the Hunter specs out there.

Doing a quick build, I was able to maximize Agi with a Survival/Markman build. This means that an unbuffed Hunter with top end gear seen at level 70 will probably be hitting 520 Agi and with the inclusion of Grace of Air (presently 77 Agi), Blessing of Kings (+10% all stats), Mark of the Wild (presently 12 Agi), Elixir of the Mongoose (25 Agi and +2% crit, presently) you would be looking at a Hunter with upwards of 720 Agi!!!:o This means that the base crit chance for a Hunter fully raid buffed would be around 21.8% on Agi alone, 29.8 just including Talents, 31.8 including the effects from Mongoose, and probably a further 8 to 9% effective from blue level 70 gear giving the Hunter a 40% chance of crit meaning 1 in 8 shots will proc Expose Weakness raiding overall raid AP by 180 for physical DPS. Simply put, the Survival Hunter is the new Raid build for maximizing physical raid DPS.

I disagree, blizzard seems to have added enough raid utility to each of the trees to warrant bringing a hunter of each spec along. One survival for the expose weakness proc, one beastmastery for the ferocious inspiration proc, and a marksman spec for improved hunter's mark and trueshot aura.

My BC spec, note the amount of attack speed increase and burst damage potential through BW+rapid fire.