Talent Revamp (Beta)Follow

New Talent Trees:

This isn't even in the beta yet, but for some reason blizzard decided to post the future talent tree's for hunters take a look:

Hunter Talent Trees

Quite a lot of changes... not sure where to begin really.

Well I like the SV Tree, so I'll start there.


Survival Revamp

T.N.T. - Odd yet interesting talent for a PVP spec especially.

Survival Instincts - Moved up into the tree making this spec a little top heavy honestly.

Survivalist - Changed to Stamina, instead of Health, also a pre-req for Hunter VS Wild

Trap Mastery - Awesome... not yet implemented.

Deflection - 3 Talent points for a total of 6% Parry, now the pre-req for Counterattack

Surefooted - Changed to 50% Less duration like every other classes talent regarding movement impairing duration

Lock And Load - Awesome talent imo, especially for those of us who love to trap. Not to mention the affect can even trigger at a 15% rate with normal stings.

Hunter VS Wild - AP added to your pet and more RAP added to you based on 30% of your stamina, rather nice for a little extra boost in damage

Noxious Stings - Awesome new affect added that basically puts the dispeller to sleep if they attempt to remove this from the target for up to 50% of the duration remaining.

Hunting Party - Now applies to Explosive Shot crits and no longer has a cooldown, I loved this talent before and it's just gotten better.



Marksman Revamp

Improved Stings - Now only costs 3 total talent points instead of 5.

Concussive Barrage - Now affects Volley... woopdy doo

Rapid Recuperation - Now adds the affect of gaining back mana equal to 150% of the damage you dealt while the Rapid Killing Buff is active (not to be confused with Rapid Fire). Reduced Mana cost of skills/talents while in the affect of Rapid Fire remains the same.

Improved Steady Shot - Added a new affect to reduce mana cost of your other special shots.

Marked For Death - Now has a 10% increase to pets special attacks while your target is affected by Hunter's Mark, yet another talent to add to our pet's DPS... kinda low in the tree though.

Chimera Shot - by far the biggest change made, now REFRESHES your current sting on the target and deals an additional affect, very nice talent imo.



Beast Mastery Revamp

Focused Fire - changed to compensate for the new change made to Kill Command

Pathfinding - Now adds 10% mounted speed (moved away from the Animal Handler talent) in addition to the extra cheetah speed.

Aspect Mastery - Reduced to one talent and taken from the bottom of the tree to the 3rd tier, huge upgrade on this, people may actually invest into it now.

Spirit Bond - Now increases the healing done to you and your pet by 10%. I'm curious if this gives you an extra 10% on the 2% of your health you regen due to this talent, so maybe an extra 20 HP assuming you have 10K HP?

Animal Handler - Extra Mounted speed taken away and replaced by lowering the cooldown of your Master's Call ability by 10 seconds.

Seperation Anxiety - Completely new talent, very interesting from a pvp point of view, allowing you just a little extra movement speed while you're close to each other, and just a smidgen of extra dps from your pet while he's farther away.



Thoughts
It appears that blizzard is trying to add just a little bit of each tree to the other. Although MM still seems like the better choice for PVP specs, it almost seems as if they're trying to make SV a reliable spec for PVP as well. BM pretty much stays the same except for the new talent, and the fact that Aspect Mastery is much easier to get to, and only requires 1 point. Some talents make it a little easier for pvp, but the better choice would appear to be Marksman.

Survival is now to top heavy, making it very difficult to spec into for the much needed pvp side of the spec when you've already invested a full 51 points into Marksman (possibly more). Not to mention we don't know how "Trap Mastery" was changed. Very interesting changes though...

*Edit*
Missed a few things.

Edited, Aug 15th 2008 2:13am by Joobishwun

This is so powerful its incredible.
Imagine a typical SV hunter with 40-50% crit raid buffed, with no internal cooldown hunting party gives you 2% mana every ~2-2.5 seconds. Thats a lot of MP5 or rage or energy :)
If the target is below 30% kill shot has additional 15% crit chance (and the end of the fight is where additional mana/energy/... will help the most).
I don't believe this talent will stay very long before it is weakend a lot.

Unlikely. You're giving up 2 points for Improved Arcane when you could be dumping them into SV and getting a 2% damage boost across the board on tracked targets.

I think once all the chips settle, we'll see more 3 tree hybrids. It's possible the 51 point talents won't even be used by some folks in order to provide more points for other trees low hanging fruit. Some of the revamps put some good talents pretty low in the trees now.

I can't really see doing any serious work on specs until they settle down a bit more. I'm liking what I see but other classes are getting some really good buffs as well.

I'm not sure the changes for PvP will be enough to make hunters 'wanted' in Arena. They will still rock in BG's and world PvP though from what I can tell.

Yet another change made that I just noticed in the beta forums... the "Trap Mastery" seems to be pretty nice from what this dev is saying:

Source

We definitely do want to make traps more usable. We've discussed a lot of different options over the years (including throwing your traps, having them turn into shots etc.) but in the end we feel we'd like to retain the unique gameplay of traps, and improve them without re-designing what traps really are.

Some changes we are working on:

- Distracting Shot will now be a "Mocking Blow"-esque taunt (so it will taunt the mob onto the Hunter for 6 sec). This will allow you to "peel" monsters to you (and thus to a trap) a lot easier than it is now.
- Freezing Trap will no longer break on damage 100% of the time. It will still break on damage, but on x amount. So if the mob has a DoT on them, or the mob gets cleaved while in Freezing Trap, it won't just immediately break. Because of this, we're canning Bear Trap (since Freezing Trap will accomplish what Bear Trap was intended for, plus you guys have enough keybinds as it is). Note that we don't intend Freezing Trap to be a stun, so the tuning on how much damage will break it will be important.
- Camouflage - We'll be introducing this new spell at level 80. It will give you limited stealth capabilities. A bonus with it is that you can lay your traps while Camouflaged and it won't break the stealth, allowing you to setup your traps before a pull if desired.
- Trap Mastery - This talent will be a 1-point talent now, we've condensed a lot of the trap talents in the Survival tree. It will do stuff like increase damage of Immolate, root the dispeller of your Freezing Trap in ice, increase the number of snakes from your snake trap, etc.

*****

Interesting changes to say the least, so long bear trap we knew thee well (not that well). We'll have to wait and see how everything else pans out.

Edited, Aug 15th 2008 2:56pm by Joobishwun