Scattered Shots: Hunters and patch 4.1
by Brian Wood 
Apr 28th 2011 at 7:00PM
Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.
Patch 4.1 was a pleasant one for hunters, a relaxing change of pace from the insanity of nerfs and buffs and more nerfs of 4.0.6. The patch brought us a nice wave of quality of life improvements and a very welcome AoE buff.
But in addition to everything listed in the patch notes, there have also been a couple of undocumented hunter changes. Even the undocumented changes are wee hunter improvements. Clearly, Blizzard feels bad about the (admittedly somewhat necessary) trauma we endured in the last patch, and it wants this patch to be a nice, therapeutic massage of tranquil ease for hunters.
Join me after the cut as we go through the patch 4.1 hunter changes -- the official notes, as well as the undocumented things that crept in there.
Hunter patch notes
To start things off, here is the hunter-specific part of the patch notes:
Hunters
- Deterrence no longer requires a melee weapon to be equipped.
- Explosive Trap now has a new spell effect.
- Master's Call now has a new spell effect.
- Multi-Shot damage has been increased by 250%.
- Tame Beast now tames pets to match the hunter's level, rather than 3 levels below.
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Pets
- The Feed Pet ability now instantly heals 50% of the pet's health. Cannot be used in combat. Requires diet-appropriate food.
- The Happiness/Pet Loyalty System has been removed. Hunters will no longer have to manage Happiness for their pets, and the previous damage bonus for pets being happy will now be baseline for all tamed pets.
- Bloodthirsty no longer generates Happiness.
- Carrion Feeder no longer restores Happiness.
- Guard Dog no longer causes Growl to generate additional Happiness.
- Summoned pets now start with 100 focus, up from 0.
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Glyphs
- Glyph of Mend Pet is now Glyph of Lesser Proportion, which decreases the size of the pet slightly.
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Hunter Bug Fixes
- Hunters will no longer automatically acquire a new target if the current target dies in the middle of a cast.
- Aimed Shot and Steady Shot should no longer start casting Auto Shot on a new target when the "Stop Auto Attack" option enabled.
- Auto Shot now automatically turns off until reactivated once Freezing Trap is cast on an enemy player.
- Deterrence: The area damage of the paladin ability Hammer of the Righteous will no longer hit hunters with Deterrence active.
- Distracting Shot and Multi-Shot are now properly 40-yard range.
- Intervene (Tenacity pet ability) range has been increased so that the pet will properly intercept attacks.
- Multi-Shot now properly has a 1-second global cooldown.
- Scatter Shot's disorient effect should no longer sometimes be broken by the hunter's Auto Shot.
To my mind, there are three really noteworthy things here. First, Multi-Shot got a big giant DPS boost, a full 250%. This is great for all hunter specs but certainly helps MM and BM the most and SV the least. MM is able to fire Multi-Shot the most often due to Bombardment's reducing the focus cost by half, and BM gets darned close if using Beast Within during AoE phases to get half-price Multi-Shots as well. Without a Multi-Shot discount, SV just doesn't fire Multi-Shot as often and thus doesn't gain as much from this buff, but that's okay. SV still gets a boost and is still going to be the AoE spec -- though BM's burst AoE potential is now fantastic in the hands of a skilled player.
The second significant change is the total removal of the pet happiness system, which I think is a fantastic and long overdue thing. I've talked about pet happiness before, so I won't go into detail here. But what you need to know is that old Glyph of Mend Pet that you had so that you could ignore the happiness system before has now turned into a glyph that shrinks the size of your pet. So if you don't want your pet around 10% smaller, you'll want to get rid of that glyph.
Finally, our third change of significance is that Deterrence will now work when we're disarmed -- no longer will disarming a hunter completely eliminate our ability to defend ourselves as well as totally removing all ability to DPS (and heck, you can do that latter just by standing next to us).
In addition to this, we got other quality of life improvements and a host of bug fixes. Pets leveling instantly to our level is fantastic, and it's great to see the Steady/Cobra auto-target bug squashed. We still have a handful of hunter bugs out there, most of them involving pets, but hopefully Blizzard will keep picking away at them.
Hydra pet family
One of the undocumented changes was the introduction of the hydra pet family. The hydra is a ferocity pet with the special ability Bellowing Roar, which provides the 5% crit buff. Sadly, to my current knowledge, there are no tamable hydras anywhere in the game.
The Wrath daily quest for the Oracles faction, A Cleansing Song, allowed you to briefly summon a ghost hydra (and a slime), and for a while both of those could be tamed -- and both were members of the crocolisk family.
Blizzard removed the ability to tame them but left them in the stables of hunters who had already tamed them. So those few hunters who had tamed a ghost hydra in that window of time now have a new family for their hydras.
We can only assume, however, that tamable hydras will be put in the game in the very near future.
Sockets added to craftable gear
There was much talk about this happening back before patch 4.0.6, and it never came to pass. But with patch 4.1, we finally got our craftable 359 gear upgraded! The Corded Viper Belt, craftable by leatherworkers, has had a red socket added that comes with a +10 agility socket bonus. This is a fantastic upgrade and makes this craftable item the best in slot for ilvl 359 waist items for hunters.
The Dragonkiller Tunic also got a red gem socket (but just one) with a +10 agility bonus. Alas, this chest piece, with just one socket and haste/mastery secondary stats, will not compete with our other ilvl 359 chest.
Scattered Shots is dedicated to helping you learn everything it takes to be a hunter. From leveling your hunter through optimizing for heroics, pre-heroic loot and pre-raid loot, then on to choosing the right spec for the right job and how to "aspect dance" to maximize your DPS, we've got you covered.
Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Rob Apr 28th 2011 7:10PM
Not sure why people like the idea of removing interesting mechanics. To each their own, but my self and my friends/family who i talked to are against the loss of pet happiness. Its not like it was hard, it was another little fun thing about being a hunter and having a pet. Now i feel we just have very ordinary pets. Really at this point they could be cubes with stats for all the interest that they are now.
RuzGofDI Apr 28th 2011 7:24PM
"The Hunter Trainer's Association reminds you that the Pet Cube cannot speak. In the event that the Pet Cube does speak, the Hunter Trainer's Association urges you to disregard its advice."
jorSbalZla Apr 28th 2011 7:36PM
Fun thing? I think not, used to frustrate me to the extreme just standing around spamming my mend pet button just cause my pet felt like being unhappy. There was no point to the happiness system as it was, besides reducing the dps of the hunter that didn't spam his mend pet.
neocloud61 Apr 28th 2011 7:32PM
I have to disagree completely. Having to worry about happiness all the time was one of the major reasons I never leveled a hunter. Ammo was the other.
With the ongoing overhaul that Cataclysm is giving to classes, I'm starting to enjoy all of them a great deal more.
Interesting mechanics aren't necessarily fun for everyone and changing things up a bit is a good way to keep Warcraft relevant and competitive as it ages and goes up against more and more promising newcomers.
MusedMoose Apr 28th 2011 7:34PM
Look at it this way: melee fighters never have to feed their weapons, nor do spell-slingers have to feed their spellbooks. If a hunter fails to keep an eye on their pet's happiness, that happiness could drop in the middle of a battle, putting the hunter at a lower DPS for that fight's duration. I'm aware that this sort of thing didn't happen much since they added the glyph of Mend Pet, but I hope you get the idea.
Yes, I liked feeding my pet and seeing it be happy too. But I'm guessing that hunter DPS was based around our pets being happy all the time, so it didn't really give us an advantage - it just gave us one more thing to keep track of with no actual reward.
Also, this:
http://wow.joystiq.com/2011/03/17/scattered-shots-grandpappy-frostheim-on-pet-happiness/
Drakkenfyre Apr 28th 2011 7:43PM
Not happy with the removal of small things like this either.
Keeping Happiness up was no problem. A Glyph, and maybe tossing some food you had left over occasionally. But it was a nice little addition that made the pet feel less like an NPC.
Ammo was hit or miss. It costed money, and you had to keep track of it in the middle of a fight to make sure you didn't run out, but Mend Pet was free.
Dumbguy Apr 29th 2011 9:22AM
Yeah, it was one of those things that "made sense" from a flavor and immersion perspective but was, at the same time, annoying from a gameplay one. If you hadn't noticed already, the game has been moving farther and farther in favor of gameplay over immersion for a long time.
xiani Apr 28th 2011 7:55PM
I disagree.
My many 'cubes with stats' have always been part of what makes being a hunter so interesting, and now I get to choose between spheres and dodecahedrons and other random 3-D shapes as well, it is all good!
I love that I can get max level pets of a new type, and can experiment with new abilities, without having to grind out levels just to make them viable.
Feeding pets for 'happiness' was never fun. Finding new pets is though, and now I don't have to worry about the level loss + grind for replacing an old standard with something better looking that fills the same role...and I can tactically swap them on the fly...almost like an aspect!
That said, I actually quite like the idea a 'grey cube' pet, at least if if was made to look like the old D&D gelatinous cubes, which was done very well in the Neverwinter Nights games.
Wulfhound Apr 28th 2011 10:46PM
And this change has freed up so much bag space that was taking up buy pet food. Only thing that is a waist is that mend pet glyph, no self respecting Hunter will ever use a glyph that makes your pet 10% smaller, if anything it should make them 10% larger. What a waist of a glyph. If I was a glyph craftier I would be crying foul on blizz changing something that use to make me moneys into something that will never sell. Waist of glyph space I say.
Hulder Apr 29th 2011 3:39AM
You didn't need any bag space for food, you just needed the glyph which was a minor glyph (and there are none of those that increase dps so it was well affordable).
The need to feed - or "mend" - your pet added flavour that was unique to hunters. As someone said above, no other class needs to feed their weapons etc. I say, EXACTLY. It's one of the things unique to the hunter class.
Much as I love the changes in Cataclysm and the direction the game is going altogether, these little things make me a little sad. It's like the game is getting reduced to "functual" things only. In the same category is the removal of class-specific quests. In my opinion it should MEAN something if I choose to be a hunter, or any other class. It should bring about flavour that is unique to that class. Otherwise it comes to choosing a class solely for its dps potential.
That's my 0.02$ - it's no biggie and I'm not going to cry "evil Blizzard, I'm cancelling my subscription", lol, I just preferred it the way it was before :-)
Hrothgar Apr 29th 2011 5:40PM
I have a solution for you there Rob... Cast mend pet and feed your pet anyway.
There fixed that for you.
Schadenfreude Apr 28th 2011 7:26PM
I've been surprised by the reaction to the removal of pet happiness, especially since with things like glyph of mend pet and that ferocity talent, happiness was pretty much a non-issue anyway. Personally I'm ridiculously happy that they got rid of pet leveling and loyalty and so on; it was way too much of a hassle, especially with 25 pets.
hooper Apr 28th 2011 7:31PM
I've noticed that my stings no longer auto target a mob. Forces me to change my whole rotation.
Allison-knight Apr 28th 2011 7:54PM
None of the shots automatically pick a target anymore. You will have to manually target via clicking the mob or using tab. This is what fixes the bug where mobs were being automatically targeted if your current target died midway through a cobra or steady shot cast.
The hunter community on the forums has been pretty divided over this, with lots of QQ and name calling on both sides. I personally don't like the change as I nearly never had issues before, and found manually targeting mobs during an all out aoe phase to be a pain. There are macros that you can make that will allow you to emulate the old targeting system. I'm using this one:
#showtooltip Shot Name
/targetenemy [noexists, noharm,dead]
/stopmacro [noexists, noharm, dead]
/startattack
/cast Shot Name
Works like magic. If you have a cast sequence macro for aspect switching, you can put it in as the second to last line. At least that's where I have mine, it might be better someplace else.
Twill Apr 29th 2011 5:39AM
Can you tell me the macro for aspect switching?
I have one that swaps between hawk and fox with steady/cobra shot (if I queue the spell before next cast it doesn't swap, but if not it swaps).
What I need is one that puts me into aspect of the hawk when I cast anything else, but doesn't take me out.
Allison-knight Apr 29th 2011 10:31AM
@Twill
This is the macro I have for my instant-cast shots:
#showtooltip Arcane Shot
/targetenemy [noexists, noharm, dead]
/stopmacro [noexists, noharm, dead]
/startattack
/castsequence reset=1 !Aspect of the Hawk, null
/cast Arcane Shot
The "/castsequence reset=1 !Aspect of the Hawk, null" is the part that ensures i'm in aspect of the hawk for all my instant shots. My cobra shot/fox macro is now:
#showtooltip Cobra Shot
/targetenemy [noexists, noharm, dead]
/stopmacro [noexists, noharm, dead]
/startattack
/castsequence reset=1 !Aspect of the Fox, null
/cast Cobra Shot
I have my "castsequence" shots on the #2 bar (the one you get when you click the down arrow of your main bar). My #1 bar has cobra shot without the cast sequence modifier. I primarily use the shot without the modifier and flip aspects when i need to manually, but in movement heavy fights, if i'm learning a new fight, or for pvp, i find the cast sequence macro to be invaluable.
Hope that helps!
PS - i'm pretty sure the exclamation point before the Aspect of the ______ is what keeps it from turning the aspect off once its on. I'm not a macro writing expert, i mostly just cobble them together with stuff i find on the internet.
Twill May 2nd 2011 4:26AM
I LOVE THIS.
Thanks!
dumaal May 3rd 2011 6:57AM
Indeed the new targeting system in 4.1 feels like a significant nerf to hunter AoE due to the fact that having to select a target (which by the way may be already dead before you fire next shot) make hunters miss one or possibly more Multishots per AoE session.
I think the option Blizzard adopted is worse than any automatic targeting for hunter PvE content due to the fact that hunter cc involved(freezing trap mostly) is 1% of the action (0% on boss encounters) and DPS is 99% of the action. Unfortunately the later is dismissed to support the 1st. Considering the hunter's presence in PvP I would dare to say that even considering the issue overall, it is still a poor decision.
I do sincerily hope that in patch 4.2 they will implement a smart autotargeting system. something which upon death of current target selects closest target to the dead mob(not closest in front of the hunter) with priority on mobs with same name/type, uncced, in range of the hunter, and having autoshot stopped until next attack. If such a system still raises problems(PVP wise or for other reason), i think at least Multishot should aquire a target automatically if the previous one died.
mannic1 Apr 28th 2011 7:40PM
A Rival of mine plays SV and I'm mm last night in BoT we had a aoe race on some trash as i pulled 48,567 dps and he pulled 49,128 dps we had cheers from the other 8 members of our raid. Long Live The Mighty Hunters!
James G Bentley Apr 28th 2011 8:53PM
Indeed the AoE buff has been nice. It's a shame we still can't touch some classes ridiculous AoE abilities *cough* fire mages *cough* but it's great to actually consider pressing the button as opposed to just single targeting packs of AoE mobs.
Also 5k multi-shot crits were just depressing to look at.