Upcoming Hunter Changes in the WotLK Beta

All of this looks like great news for Hunters. I’m still not sold on the 51pt Beast Mastery talent, but then again I can only assume that all my BM hunters out there are doing backflips over taming a Devilsaur.

Stable slots are getting expanded, on the fly stables slots as well perhaps?

Master’s Call will be useable while stunned

Able to use while stunned? Consider it done. (src)

Bigger stables are coming

But c’mon blizz… please!! give us bigger stables already! even just 5 slots would be so nice! Make pets summonable like mounts/vanity pets.. something
Okay. (src)

Kill Shot has not been removed

mmo-champion is showing it gone, but my talents say it’s still there.

Nope… should still be there. Do you see it on the trainer? It’s a level 80 ability. (src)

Beast Mastery and Respecs

The exotic pets will be different from normal pets. Ideally they might even be a little bit better, but we’re very hesitant to make them too good lest we see every hunter stampede over to the BM tree. Pets are supposed to be something important to all kinds of hunters, and the BM tree already offers some amazing pet buffs and synergy. We just don’t want to overdo it with this talent.

At the very least, the exotic pets will have a new family ability that will ideally be really useful in some situations. I’m making this one up, but imagine that since normal crabs have Pin, an exotic pet might have a Pin-like ability that did fire damage. Or imagine that you could tame a drake (you can’t, because they aren’t beasts) and that instead of lightning or fire breath, it had frost breath that could freeze an enemy, death knight style. Would this be useful? Probably. Does it make the 51-point talent mandatory? Ideally not. Though those 5 talent points aren’t bad….

As far as what happens if you have an exotic pet and respec, most likely the pet’s talents will just reset. Yeah you get a free pet respec out of the deal, but it’s not as if it’s free since the hunter has to respec. Any exotic pets in the stable won’t be lost, but you wouldn’t be able to get them out of the stable either. If you have an exotic pet at the moment you respec, then it will probably be dismissed (but not abandoned) and you won’t be able to summon it again, forcing you to go swap it into the stable. (Or abandon it if you’re THAT kind of hunter.) (src)

Feedback & Pet Talents

Because the pet talents are such a new feature, all of this feedback is really useful. A couple of things to keep in mind:

~The bottom talents in particular need to have some pretty stringent pre-reqs so that hunters can’t just cherry pick all of the active abilities. We can and will iterate on what those pre-req talents are though.

~Active pet abilities in general represent some interesting design challenges. On the one hand, if the hunter just programs the pet and puts it on autopilot, then having unique abilities just sort of blends into a generic +dps for the pet. On the other hand, it would be sad if hunters never took the active abilities because the pet has trouble using the expensive ones and the hunter feels like he already has too many of his own abilities to hit. This is something on which we’ll try to hit a reasonable balance. Warlocks seem to have a pretty decent mix of demon abilities that can be used by the demon AI and some that the warlock specifically needs to use. (src)