There out.

Hunter Talents

Bad link for anyone else?

Bad link for anyone else?

Works for me.

Bad link for anyone else?

Bad link for anyone else?

Finally!

*Reads*

That said, I'm hardly experienced with WoW, but there's some good stuff here to me.

My only worry is that I'll constantly be using Misdirection on the party Blood Elf squishie. While laughing.

BC Closed Beta starts this Wednesday after the weekly maintenance, methinks

But that's not why this is the coolest new skill for hunters. It's the coolest because it's really a buff to non-warrior tanks. Give misdirection to a protection paladin or bear druid and pull with 3 high aggro abilities; now the tank has a solid lead on threat, even without high DPS abilities.

But that's not why this is the coolest new skill for hunters. It's the coolest because it's really a buff to non-warrior tanks. Give misdirection to a protection paladin or bear druid and pull with 3 high aggro abilities; now the tank has a solid lead on threat, even without high DPS abilities.

That'll allow more fights with unusual threat rules.

you would be looking at a Hunter with upwards of 720 Agi!!! 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

...which is one of the reasons they're changing to crit rating rather than crit percent. ;-)

Your crit rating will scale no matter what level you are based on your Agi

But base crit rating from base stat and base talents will scale and a Hunter with the spec I listed is looking at almost 30% effective crit without considering the crit rating coming from items and consumables.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. While it may be true, it's also been said that actual amount of +crit% that crit rating gives you goes down as your level goes up. So it does scale, but in a way counter to your apparent argument, unless you're saying that hunters still gain enough agility per level up to effectively increase their crit% despite the scale.

And then you have to factor in the target's resilience rating, and any points they have in the talents that are popping up that reduce your chance to be critically hit. And all the additional +stamina on items. The sky isn't falling in just yet.

Heck I could see both of those already having a use in Razorgore phase 1 if you use a kiting strat. Lego spawns, hunter sends it to his kiting warrior. Lego gets on priest, paladin that is kiting as well does righteous defense to get the mobs on him.

This stuff looks like fun. I'm very interested to see the pet stuff. They have shot down the stuff that leaked earlier, which was way overpowered.
2 min cooldown on misdirection.

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.

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!!! 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.

So? Phase one is at least 3.5 minutes long, and you'll have more than one hunter and you won't need it for Vael so who cares if it's in cooldown. Sure you only get to snag one or two per hunter to add them to a kiter

and to make sure if you want your pet to keep aggro that it keeps aggro.

Won't help raise aggro much, but it does allow for more aggro generation by the tanks.

I guess we used shamans (we kill all now) where getting one daze could be fatal - warriors with enough defense don't get dazed, do they?

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

The 30 second cooldown isn't too bad IMHO. When I'm running defense I tend to overtrap, so this means I'll be running out of my hidey-hole half as often, and thus being exposed half as often. Being able to drop a Freezing or Frost Trap in the middle of combat though... The way traps work now (You just click the skill and it activates - no need to even run through the placing animation) means that my survivability increases drastically. I tend to die in CC, and the times I manage to avoid that fate (after getting in melee combat in the first place) is to slow the rogue hitting me down as quickly as possible and then limp away. Before, this meant things like Wing Clip and Intimidation (Which I hate to use in close combat, since it means I can't stop a runner dead in their tracks for a minute), but dropping a trap... wow, that would give me plenty of time to limp away and prepare my attack.

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.

A Hunter that goes for Expose Weakness can still get Imp HM. And two Hunters with EW > one Hunter with EW and one Hunter with TSA. Even with the new skill level of TSA, the amount of +AP that TSA gives compared to having EW up at all times is lightyears difference in physical DPS. TSA will given a maximum of 750 AP while EW could easily give 2000+ AP to all physical DPS in the raid. Sadly, it looks more like Marksman top end now is ment more for solo play while high end Survival is ment more for raid play.

1. Yes, snakes are mobs that can be targeted. There are 6 to 10 snakes that come out of the trap (oh $h1%, we've got Snakes on a Trap!) and attack random targets within 10 yards of the trap.

2. The snakes do physical damage and apply random poisons (ie: mind numbing, crippling, and a deadly poison).

3. They don't do a lot of damage individually, but in total the damage is meaningful.

4. The snakes will chase the same distance mobs normally chase.

5. The snakes move at normal mob speed (although their victims may be affected by crippling poison).

Steady Shot does not have a cooldown. The AP scaling on Arcane Shot is 20% of AP.

Essentially steady shot works similarly to the way Aimed Shot works in today's game. If you're in the middle of a Steady Shot when your shot timer comes up, it won't fire until your Steady Shot is finished. So, it's to your advantage to get your steady shots in nicely in-between your normal shots.

Also, since Arcane Shot does a bit more damage than Steady Shot (unless the target is dazed), you'll generally favor Arcane Shot over Steady Shot when it's available.

This has already been posted by Brista: datamined pet skills.

1. The pet abilities that have been "leaked" are pet abilities that have been in the database for at least 3 years now, but never went live because they were considerably overpowered. So, ignore those. More information on new pet types/abilities will come at a later time.

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

Arguing about Hunter changes somewhere else, but I'll keep this simple here: This is a myth, propagated by the misapplying of known information to places it doesn't belong.

Weapon Skill affect to ranged:
+.04% Hit
+.24% Crit

+4 Weapon skill gives almost gives you 1% crit, in addition to the hit bonus. Ranged gets an additional crit bonus from weapon skill because they don't benefit from decreases in dodge/parry/glancing.

You've got them reversed. It's + 0.24% to hit and +0.04% crit for ranged. this thread shows much of the testing for that.

Bah, your right, apparantly I'm still not awake. Oh well, point still holds that it's not "useless" like people keep claiming.