It's been a busy day on the Hunter Beta boards, with Koraa delivering tidbit after tidbit of great news for Hunters. Here's the breakdown:

• Deterrence and Master's Call will become baseline.
• Animal Handler will be getting an overhaul.
• Serpent Sting will get a mana cost reduction and a coefficient buff with the aim of making it worth casting in your basic shot rotation.
• Silencing Shot will become a proper interrupt for PvE usage, and Trueshot Aura will go raid wide.
• Hunters will be getting a big push with lots of changes in the beta build after next.

These are definitely welcome changes. In PvP, being able to stand up to focus fire or get back to range have long been weaknesses of the class. Having a non-talent way to break out of snares or add a bit of extra defense attacks will go a long way to making a bit tougher. It's not trainable Scatter Shot or pet resilience, exactly, but it's nearly as good as either, and may be better for us in the long run than the former option. Finally, we'll have a dependable way to get away from Hamstring or Crippling Poison that does not involve Beastmastery or being a Dwarf.

Animal Handler has been looking more and more lackluster lately in the face of other mount speed talents that provide more speed and better benefits, especially now that pets will share our hit percentage, so hopefully this revamp makes it desirable again. Similarly, the state of Silencing Shot and its inability to interrupt silence-immune mobs has long been a sticking point with PvE-focused Marksmanship Hunters. So so far, all of the announced changes are definitely welcome news that should hopefully be nothing but useful to Hunters.

We'll definitely be looking forward to this build after next to see the final state of Animal Handler, whether Serpent Sting will be useful for damage purposes again, and whatever other changes -- such as the promised counters to LOS -- Blizzard tests out.

Tags: animal-handler, crippling-poison, deterrence, hamstring, LOS, masters-call, on-a-pale-horse, pet-resilience, pursuit-of-justice, scatter-shot, serpent-sting, silencing-shot, stoneform, the-beast-within, trueshot-aura, wotlk-beta, wrath-beta

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