A new alpha build was released tonight. Not a lot of changes for Hunters, but don’t fear, according to Celestalon this build doesn’t capture all the class changes that are in the pipeline.
New build is going up was taken in the middle of making a large wave of changes; will appear unfair to some classes. It’s just not done.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) June 10, 2014
While Hunters did not get the War and Peace notes that Druids did, there were a couple of interesting changes.
- Beast Mastery: Mastery Attunement -You gain 5% more of the Mastery stat from all sources.
- Marksmanship: Critical Strike Attunement – You gain 5% more Critical Strike stat from all sources.
- Survival: Multistrike Attunement – You gain 5% more Multistrike from all sources.
While it makes it clear which stats are desirable for which spec, I wonder if this means specs will want to avoid gear with those secondary stats, as they’ll get enough from the attunement bonuses? It’s possible that I’m reading too much into it and that it’s just a 5% increase to that stat period, and not say 5% based on an amount of other stats you have.
I’ve expressed concern about Hunters needing multiple gear sets in Warlords, and now that each spec has different stat preferences I worry about that more. I also wonder what the stats will look like on our Tier gear and if it will favor one spec over another. The tier 17 set bonuses were revealed in this build and are as follows.
- Beast Mastery 2P Bonus: Increases the damage of Kill Shot by 10%.
- Beast Mastery 4P Bonus: Increases the duration of Bestial Wrath by 2 sec.
- Marksmanship 2P Bonus: Increases the damage of Kill Shot by 10%.
- Marksmanship 4P Bonus: Activating Rapid Fire also grants you Deadly Aim. Deadly Aim increases your critical strike damage by 10%.
- Survival 2P Bonus: Increases the Focus restored from Viper Venom by 2.
- Survival 4P Bonus: Increases the damage of Explosive Shot by 10%.
My first thought was that these set bonuses look pretty bland compared to what we’ve seen in the past. They are inline with what the other classes got, but Celestalon tweeted that they are not yet final and we might see some more interesting bonuses before Warlords goes live.
Also, a note regarding set bonuses getting datamined. Most of those are temporary while we make more ‘creative’ ones. — Celestalon (@Celestalon) June 11, 2014
Not a lot of changes for Hunters, but that’s just because they didn’t make it into this build, which means the next build could be a Samuel L. Jackson, “hang onto your butts” kind of build.
I’m not too worried about having to collect multiple sets of gear. I’ll finally be able to do offspec rolls!
There goes all that newly freed up bag space, but at least we can shout out once again that it’s all Hunter loot!
I’m thinking this is just to give “replay” value. Go run and get a nice belt, but I’m BM and this is a Crit/Haste belt. So I want to keep running until I get a mastery + (most other desirable stat) belt. I get an upgrade, so I feel good, but I keep running content to pursue the perfect.
I think it’s also a nice spec flavor enhancer as well (we can call them MSG bonuses!) Get an extra boost to our companion’s damage, even bigger hits with our shots, or really show that we hit once and our damage keeps coming.