Good old Tranquilizing Shot seems to be getting a lot of attention in the beta world yesterday. Ever since it was bought back to prominence when it inherited Arcane Shot's old dispel mechanic and the ability to dispel PvP enrage mechanics, people have been wondering what exactly it will be able to do in PvE.

Lead encounter designer Daelo clarified the other day with some information on how enrage type effects will work in Wrath:

• Enrage attacks will be all those that Tranquilizing Shot has always been able to dispel, the temporary buffs used by bosses such as Huhuran and Magmadar.
• Frenzy attack are those that are triggered by low health or certain other specific triggers, such as Curator's 15% health enrage. These are meant to be part of the encounter to be strategized around, and will not be dispellable.
• Berserk attacks are those "after 10 minutes" megabuffs on bosses that almost always herald a wipe. These are meant to set a time limit on certain fights, and will not be dispellable.

It's a pretty straightforward description that should be an easy rule of thumb for Hunters and raid groups to follow. Hopefully all the in-game wording and documentation is changed to match so everything is nice and understandable.

In other Hunter news, pets are getting some more much needed love in the next Beta build. It's still not the resilience scaling we really need, but it should be handy. The focus system will be revamped.

To start with, most talented abilities and abilities with more than a 30 second cooldown will be focus free. This is a definite good move that will make pet abilities such as Call of the Wild viable. It would have been far too much micromanaging to expect us to turn off all our pet autocasts and wait to save up energy for sure.

In addition, Growl will go down to 15 focus, and family abilities with short cooldowns or useful debuffs such as Demoralizing Screech will go down to 20 focus. Bite, Claw, Smack, and all high damage family abilities with instant cooldowns or a good DPS boost will go down to 25 focus. Cower will be free, which should hopefully make certain tanks hate your pets a little bit less.

Overall, we got some nice clarification and an awesome pet buff from the blues today. Now if we could just get them to deal with the PvP problem, we'd really be sitting pretty.

Tags: arcane-shot, berserk, bite, call-of-the-wild, claw, curator, daelo, demoralizing-screech, dispel, enrage, focus, focus-costs, frenzy, ghostcrawler, gore, huhuran, hunter-pets, magmadar, pet-talents, pets, resilience, smack, tranquilizing-shot

Filed under: Hunter, Analysis / Opinion, News items, Instances, Expansions, Raiding, Buffs, Wrath of the Lich King