There was another Warlords of Draenor beta build last night, and like the two previous builds there wasn’t much in it for Hunters. If you’re expecting major changes to talents, abilities, and rotations I don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s all about numbers tuning now.
Beast Mastery has been in a good place since almost the start, and Celestalon has more or less stated that Marksmanship and Surivival are done too.
@RBryant_8 No plans, currently. We find that the added rotational complexity that you can opt into via talents works well. — Celestalon (@Celestalon) August 1, 2014
@reesigaming @Aniroel Not beyond what’s in the talent tree and effectively available through ES pooling. — Celestalon (@Celestalon) July 23, 2014
Cloak and Quiver host Solar agrees with this sentiment as well.
@TheBrewHall @TheSlickrock @BendakWoW Yep all numbers now. BM is ahead by a bit, MM and SV need a sizable boost in damage.
— Solarflair (@the_solarflair) August 5, 2014
There may be lots of work left in order to get Warlords ready for launch, but it looks like Hunters are down to tuning now.
Speaking of launch, Blizzard announced a special livestream event for Thursday August 14th, where they will unveil the Warlords of Draenor cinematic, and reveal the launch date for the expansion.
I’m betting it will go live right after Blizzcon. At this point it makes the most sense, but you never know. One thing I hope is that they also announce a release date for the 6.0 pre-patch, assuming they’re planning a pre-expansion release.
That is as important date as any. When 6.0 drop Siege of Orgimmar will be updated with the new raid changes. That means 20-man Mythic. Any 10-man raid teams will need to find 10 more people or plan to halt progress get ready for Warlords.
Based on the September 30th cut-off date to receive the Horde Chopper, that seems like as good a date as any for the pre-patch.
Each beta build is cleaner than that last and there are definite signs of progress. Even though there were no major changes for Hunters, there were a number of new tameable pets added in this build.
Bendak has been on a tear feretting them all out. I can’t wait to get a first hand look myself.
Since MM gets the most complaints it will probably end up doing the most theoretical dps. That way the most people will play it which means the MM changes were a success as far as Blizzard is concerned.
The same always happens with new races which get overpowered racials compared to the older races so that people will play them.