2.1.0 Patch Notes

[Kevin]

Closest thing we get is the Mend Pet change, which, frankly, should've been a HoT practically from the start.

And hunters mark will add 440 more ranged AP after about 15 seconds with 3 hunters around. Even if I'm the only hunter I'll get that 440 bonus (11 per ranged hit) in That's only about 30 DPS right there. Pets will only take 50% damage from AoE effects + all the 360 degree cleaves are gone, so pet longevity goes way up. Kill command not being on the global cooldown doesn't really matter in a mana limited fight, but on fights (like everything before the Curator in Kara and every 5 man) that is another DPS boost for all hunters since you can fire it off without messing with a steady, arcane, or multi. For a beast hunter it already better damage per mana than other skills. My last Kara run I was getting 5.21 damage per mana on steady, 3.03 on multi shot, 2.56 on arcane, and 2.21 on serpent sting (small sample size on that on 64 ticks the whole night as I was mostly keeping up scorpid) . Kill Command was 5.564. Again I'm a beast hunter so Kill Command will hit hard and have a higher crit rate I also don't have efficiency (went 12 deep in survival for EZ-mode trapping, 26s traps, 26s cooldown with 2 pc beast lord set for heroics and all the trapping I do in Kara as well) which ups the damage per mana of all the other shots. That talent would have pushed steady (should have pushed it to 5.73) ahead of kill command for me but not the other shots. Of course I was in a group with all casters to give them the ferocious buff. Had the pet had a battle shout or strength of earth totem, Kill Command would have been pushed up to around 6-7 damage per mana (depends on if I had both SoE and BS or just one of them).

I'm not sure what the mana efficiency for it on marks or survival hunter will be, my guess is that kill command will still be better mana to damage than arcane on most mobs, depending on talents, multi for a Marks should be much more efficient than it is for me as mortal shots, barrage, ranged spec, and master marksman will up the damage to mana ratio of those skills. But when mana management is a concern paying attention to the mana efficiency of all your skills is something that hunters should do.

The change to expose weakness being a 100% chance for 3 points I don't really count as a hunter buff since that is a raid buff. Same with the kill command being able to proc ferocious inspiration (which is about a 15% uptime increase for that skill if the hunter has 20% and Focused Fire to up the crit rate on kill command for me it should go from about 65% uptime to about an 80% uptime) that is a bigger buff to the party than the beast hunter is in, than it is a buff to the hunter themselves.

I still think most of the hunter issues are still in itemization and I would like to see more done with that. But I'm still pretty excited about the other changes that were announced and implemented before.