A new alpha build hit the servers today. There’s a couple of hunter changes to report, mainly in the self-healing category.
- Kill Shot You attempt to finish the wounded target off, firing a long range attack dealing 550% weapon damage. Kill Shot can only be used on enemies that have 20% or less health. If the target dies, the Hunter will regain 15% of maximum health. If Kill Shot fails to kill the target, the cooldown is instantly reset, but cannot be reset more often than once every 6 sec. Requires Ranged Weapon. Hunter – Beast Mastery & Marksmanship Spec. 45 yd range. 10 sec cooldown.
- Survivalist (New) After killing a target, you gain 15% health over 10 sec. (Survival Spec)
Marksmanship and Beast Mastery hunters will get a heal if the killing blow is made with Kill Shot, whereas it sounds like Survival hunters will get a HoT on every killing blow (since survival does not have Kill Shot anymore). If I had to guess, I would say the HoT won’t stack and if you get another killing blow, it simply resets the HoT. More self-healing is always good. This seems like a PvP buff more than anything, but it would also be helpful for leveling. Also remember that at level 100, Kill Shot can be used on targets with 35% or less health instead of 20%.
It also looks like the Glyph of Distracting Shot was added back into the build (Distracting Shot was put back in the build prior). Anything else being datamined so far looks like tooltip bug fixes.
Nothing much else huntery to report, but Wowhead has a nice summary of the patch, including a list of all the items (so far) that are going to be added to the Toybox.
Gotta say, not a huge fan of no execute for SV, but as strong as MM is looking, it may become irrelevant anyways…
I’d speculate that survival’s damage outside of execute range would be every so slightly higher to compensate. Celestalon seemed to think there were pros to a spec not having an execute, but some people (like you) will definitely miss the mechanic.
Yeah, it will be difficult to balance I would imagine. We often see heroism used in execute range, along with plenty of cool down stacking to rush that last X%. Heroic Nazgrim for example, it’s sort of irrelevant if my damage through the add phases is higher if I can’t contribute meaningfully to the rush at the end…
Perhaps that is where something like an expose weakness raid utility ability could really shine. Sure. SV wouldn’t have an execute, but could buff the raid/debuff the boss to increase the efficacy of those merrily executing away…