[Hunter Buffs] They should have sent a poet…

I present to you, the great hunter buffing of 2014:

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Official Forums)

General

  • Arcane Shot’s damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Cobra Shot’s damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Explosive Trap’s damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Kill Shot’s damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Multi-Shot’s damage has been increased by 30%.
  • Steady Shot’s damage has been increased by 15%.

Marksmanship

  • Aimed Shot’s damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Chimaera Shot’s damage has been increased by 15%.

Survival

  • Black Arrow’s damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Explosive Shot’s damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Serpent Sting’s damage has been increased by 15%.

Hunter Pets

  • Hunter Pets now inherit 60% of the Hunter’s Attack Power (up from 33%).

Talents

  • A Murder of Crows’ damage has been increased by 80%.
  • Barrage’s damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Dire Beast’s damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Exotic Munitions’ damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Focusing Shot’s damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Glaive Toss’ damage has been increased by 15%.
  • Powershot’s damage has been increased by 15%.

Can I get a ‘hell yeah’? It’s also worth noting the overpowered specs from other classes also received nerfs. This will hopefully bring everyone closer together.

The bad news? Requires realm restarts to take effect. Can we get someone to trip on the power cord or something? Please? Or do we really have to wait until Tuesday? 😛

omgbuffs
OMG

Let’s talk buffs

OK, I should probably calm myself. All this will probably do is make us competitive (which is good). Why should I get so excited about being middle of the pack? I don’t know, it’s just awesome to see that many buffs lined up one after another. But to be realistic here, this is not Blizzard making hunters overpowered. It’s their attempt to bring us up to par. It looks quick and dirty, and some of this could very well be reverted, reduced, or even buffed more in the future.

What stands out to me right now is that A Murder of Crows buff. 80%? Whoa! Who would EVER take Stampede now? Oh, wait, pet scaling was buffed! That will buff Stampede, and that’s why AMoC saw such a huge buff.  Took me a minute. 😛

No Kill Command buff? Maybe Blizzard thought the increased pet scaling and Arcane Shot buff was enough for Beast Mastery. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

My main question is whether or not the Survival specific buffs are on top of the previous 12% hotfix (which I’m fairly sure didn’t even make it to live servers?) or if it’s just switching 12% to 15%.

Back to the pet scaling, it actually makes sense. Aspect of the Hawk was giving us a huge load of attack power (which also transferred to our pets). When they took out Hawk, they could compensate us with our shots and talents, but there was no compensation for the pet. At least that’s my theory.

Enjoy the buffs, when they eventually make it to your realm.

Update: Preliminary simulations are in

simcbuffs

These are preliminary Simulation Craft numbers (on a patchwerk fight) after the recent round of class balance changes. If they’re accurate, I expect MM and BM to be brought down closer to survival, or (less likely) survival brought up to BM/MM. I expect MM to stay top for patchwerk type simulations and fights, but at least BM isn’t trailing behind it so much now. This is looking at lot better than the old sims, where SV and BM were at the very bottom, and at the bottom by a significant margin. The spread is a lot less than it used to be, but there still needs to be some tuning on many of the classes. Except the ones in the middle, they are probably the new benchmark — 36k-38k — but that’s just pure speculation on my part.

Also keep in mind these are numbers with full Mythic tier 17 gear equipped. Our level 90 numbers still look pretty bad, but we only have to put up with that for a few more weeks. I’m not really worried about those.

For those who don’t get the reference in the title.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

16 thoughts on “[Hunter Buffs] They should have sent a poet…”

  1. Im on Feathermoon and its 2054 server time and my damage still seems low. No idea if the restart was done or not.

  2. I don’t think that is what they mean by realm restarts hehe. If we had to wait for the weekly maintenance then it would suck. But they’ve been doing realm restarts every day around 8am eastern. Is normally all hotfixes like that need to be implemented.

  3. Aren’t realm restarts activated by bringing a lot of hunters together and using Stampede ?

    I’m hoping the buffs to pets and focusing shot/exotic ammo means Lone Wolf won’t be mandatory anymore for MM/SV.

  4. So the pet attack power buff is a welcome and needed change. But I wonder if this changes the choice of level 100 talents. Lone Wolf was impressive because the loss of a pet was not a big deal.

    I wonder if it’s still the go to talent because getting rid of a 33% damage of AP pet as the tradeoff for Lone Wolf was a huge factor. Now however, we’re giving up a little more.

  5. I don’t mind waiting for these buffs. Given the amount of bugs I have been experiencing I feel the next realm restart will be sooner rather than later.

    p.s. Can someone please tell me the fate of my favorite glyph, [Glyph of Animal Bond]? People are saying it is now an automatically learned glyph but it isn’t on any of the lists and it seems it can no longer be made by scribes.

  6. mercy sakes alive we got ourselves some buffs. Anymore kill shot buffs and we’ll be competing with shadow burn

  7. Gotta say I love waking up to a round of buffs on my day off. The multishot buff should help MM AoE be a bit more competitive when paired with Lone Wolf.

    Wonder how lone wolf vs exotic ammo will play out at 100.

  8. Looks good! I feel like I will have a chance to pug my smash and grab now! But as a SV hunter, there seems to be one thing missing from making this the perfect buff patch notes:

    Survival
    • Kill shot added to Survival spec

    I think I could live with SV if I at least had an execute or a cool down or something.

    1. Survival is definitely missing something. Give it Kill Shot and it could Compete, or buff the serpent sting which barely matters.

  9. Ooh. How I hate monday mornings, yet how reading this news on one makes it seem a bit less gloomy! Pretty buffs, hmmm. It probably won’t change the fact that I will drop survival, even if bm is scaled down a bit. I need BM, I must tame all pets. And MM will probably remain the go-to spec for when you don’t have to move. Oh yeah, and SV just felt dull.
    But meh, if we end up with 2 competitive specs for solid dps rankings, then I guess we can’t really really complain.
    Ok, you COULD complain, but I think warlocks(going from top to middle of the pack at best, yay), priests, shamans(both melee and rdps are low-ish, hehe) and don’t forget those poor balance druids (oh we changed your spec so it will be easier to understand and play! ps it’s also such crappy dps that you really should not want to play it), well,. all these classes will likely go ‘STFU’ if we do:).
    But I guess they still got a bit to change things again. I don’t care much about what dps I do know, I’ll only truly start caring once I hit 100 and gathered the gear I need to step into a raid and resume the ever switching competition with our guild’s melee shammy!

  10. I will remain true to my SV which I love even more in 6.0 than in 5.4 due to mechanics. So happy to see those changes. At 90 didn’t experience any problems in PvE, only noticeable in instances where I looked at damage meters and thought “wow. i could’ve been doing way more damage”. Want to see how it will all scale up till 100.

  11. Is A murder of Crow working as intended ? I am only ilvl 550 and i am farming iron orc with my new one button rotation.

  12. I do wonder, these buffs surely wont be reverted on launch will they?

    It would suck royally if they did, even if they were toned down a small bit.

  13. Omg – Contact! Loved that movie. Also love these buffs! Hoping they don’t expect Survival to languish as the unplayed spec by raiders this expansion they way they did with MM during MoP.

  14. Heh…hate to be a pessimist, ok not really, but looks like I’m still not coming back. Once again the pattern repeats. Had a hunter since lat vanilla and its always the same, big promises not put in effect.

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