New Hunter talent trees

[Kevin]

The Beast Mastery and Survival trees have been re-worked

Hooo boy, Hunters are going to be really good against flag carriers now!

http://wow-europe.com/en/info/basics/talen...er/talents.html
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See I wanted to make a melee hunter, just because, always have. That of course is not what they did with survival. Removing counter attack, which was one of the few nice melee skills, and adding all this stuff that supliments ranged attacks isn't really the best way to go for what I want. The final survival talent is just nuts. Hunters now have two forms of CC that work on anything. Sure they are 12 and 26 (trap with new talent) seconds but that is still a big deal. The hunter was one of the best solo classes in the game already, they just got better. They made it so that you can do even more ranged damage and basically said, yeah we don't want variant scum melee hunters, we want cookie cutter 31/20 survival marksman with a few beatmaster hunters.

I like the beast mastery changes and I don't think they are out of whack. It's still a variant build as the 31/20 survival marksman is the cookie cutter now, but it won't be as gimpy. I have a beast master hunter at L43 and he is quite happy about these changes. When I saw that spirit bond would only require 21 points I got exicted that a survival/beast hybrid could do the melee hunter (that pet healing you really ups your melee viability 20 health every second, because of frenzy being active pretty much all the time and the attack speed of a well chosen pet then getting to 1.0 or faster, it's even more since claw and bite make it go off as well). But they went for what more customers do. They upped PvP skills a lot and upped ranged and solo survivability even more. Don't get me wrong the melee hunter variant scum is more viable now, but they didn't really help melee DPS that much. A 6 second cooldown with 20% crit chance raptor strike and weak mongoose bite that is mainly used to get back in ranged, and some better crit chances (that look to work for ranged as well) don't really help the melee side of things that much. But I really do understand why it didn't happen. Hunters are designed as a ranged attacker, making them even more hybrid wasn't what they were looking for.

I personally never thought the hunter was that broken. Pets weren't fully implemented and survival was a pointless tree except for some PvP stuff. They didn't really change beast mastery that much. Moved some of the nicer pet buffs up, increased the usefulness of some (15% v 10% on the damage talent, the focus talent will acutally do something though it's deeper in now), front loaded pathfindig, gave you more dodge chance (5 points to monkey instead of just 3 now), made intimidation do something, moved a top tier talent to where it should have been with Spirit Bond. The new top talent is very nice DPS add though. From my experience with my L43 hunter who was beast before, the pet will under frenzy and in beastial wrath most of the time. If people will allow hunters to have pets out in instances a beast hunter when considered with their pets should still do some damn good DPS since they can still get most of the damage adding marksman talents.