Hunters can't leave combat to swap gear, trinkets, drink, etc, but because they have zero aggro at the end of the fight, the boss will not attack them and kill them. They aren't "out of combat" and free to perform any action, but they won't be killed if they're feigned. I can confirm 100% (I did it twice last night) that you can escape death in a wipe, though my thoughts are on saving our raid a run-back with my cables first with the side-benefit of preserving my buffs, consumables and repair bill. I make up for that "unfair advantage" by using expensive ammunition and offering repair bots for the rest of the raid with red gear. I'm not a cheap jerk and I do buy flasks, elixers and mana oil and I farm buff food and scrolls.

Double trapping was a rare and expert trick, most often used by Survival hunters, but it was still doable (though not always a good idea) for other builds. Here are my thoughts...

Chain trapping is the same as ever. It's really not a big deal for any hunter to be able to chain trap four or more times. You lay a trap, wait 30 seconds for the cooldown (traps last 1 minute) and pull/peel the mob (or delay your party's pull until your cooldown is reasonably short... use concussive shot on the peel to offset your cooldown if necessary). As soon as the mob is trapped, travel a short distance away and lay another trap quickly. As long as you don't feign and drop aggro on the trapped mob, when it breaks it will run at you and trip the 2nd trap. After the mob is in the 2nd ice block, you wait a short time for the cooldown to finish and lay a 3rd trap between it and yourself. At that point, your cooldown will likely not expire before the 3rd trap breaks and you will likely need to kite for short time until you can trap a 4th time.

Double trapping, however, means that you lay one trap down and wait 30 seconds. Then you pull a mob to that trap and lay a 2nd trap quickly thereafter. You used to be able to pull a 2nd mob into that new trap. Then you'll likely wait a few seconds, lay your 3rd trap on the ground and whichever mob breaks first will hit it. The problem with this method is that, yes you will chain trap 1 mob 2 times, but the other mob will only get trapped once before you have to kite it. You may have time to drop a 4th trap, but shortly afterwards the other mob will break and you'll be kiting again. I never really employed this method because I like to save my trap cooldowns for resists and chain trapping _reliably_.

For a survival hunter, this was very feasible. Your traps last longer, so your cooldown is less of a problem, your traps are resisted less, and you can use an ability that gets rid of your cooldowns. So you could chain trap two mobs reliably if you were good.

I never really volunteered to double trap as a BM hunter, I don't feel it was reliable enough with my spec for more than one mob, though I am very confident that I can keep one mob trapped for a couple of minutes before I'm preoccupied with kiting instead of DPSing the kill target.

This will anger many survival hunters and hurt the viability of the build in PvE, especially in heroics where this was clutch in instances like Shattered Halls with 9+ mobs in a pull. However, as many hunters as there are complaining about this, I really don't think so many Hunters were pulling this off, being an expert skill and something that was highly trustworthy only for Survival Hunters, easily the least populous spec.

I lament the loss of that possibility, but as iffy as traps can be, it will probably prevent the hubris of overconfident Hunters from wiping encounters. Does anybody know if hit rating effects trap resists? I thought I read something about that in the patch notes. In that case, any Hunter with under 8% hit (130-ish hit rating) should have been avoiding double trapping all along.

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