A new build is being deployed on the MoP beta and it holds many significant changes for hunters. The patch is quite large (about 16 gigabytes).
Aspects
Aspects now have a one second cooldown.
Baseline Abilities
- Readiness Is now baseline instead of being a lvl 60 talent. 5 minute cooldown (up from 3). Requires level 60. Can be cast while stealthed. When activated, this ability immediately finishes the cooldown on all Hunter abilities with a base cooldown less than 5 minutes (down from 6 minutes).
- Stampede Now Instant (down from 3 second cast time). Cooldown 5 minutes (down from 10 min.). Summons all of your pets to fight your current target for 20 sec (up from 10). Your pets deal 25% of their normal damage while summoned this way. [Note: the tooltip appears to be bugged to display 175% at the moment. In-game testers report the correct value is 25%, which makes sense because the cooldown was halved and the duration was doubled].
Talents
- Binding Shot Level 30, 20 focus, 30 yard range, instant, 45 sec cooldown (down from 60). You fire a magical projectile, tethering the enemy and any other enemies within 5 yards of the landing arrow for 10 sec. If targets move 5 yards from the arrow they are stunned for 5 sec (3 sec PvP) and will be immune to the effects of Binding Shot for 10 sec.
- Blink Strike (New) Level 75, Instant, 30 yard range, 20 sec cooldown.Causes your pet to instantly teleport behind an enemy target and inflict 200% normal damage.
- Dire Beast Level
60 (was level 75). Summons a powerful wild beast to attack your target for 15 sec. Each time the beast deals damage, you will gain 5 focus. - Thrill of the Hunt Level 60. You have a 15% chance when you fire a ranged attack that costs Focus or Kill Command to cause your next Arcane Shot or Multi-Shot to be free (changed from “causing your next ranged attack that costs Focus or Kill Command to be free).”
- Wyvern Sting Level 30. A stinging shot that puts the target to sleep for 30 sec. Any damage will cancel the effect. Only one Sting per Hunter can be active on the target at a time (No longer includes “When the target wakes up, the Sting causes 3,033 Nature damage over 6 sec).”
Pets
- Roar of Courage (Cats) The beast lets out a roar of courage, increasing the mastery of all party and raid members by 3000 (down from 3500) within 100 yards.
Major Glyphs
- Glyph of No Escape Increases the ranged critical strike chance of all of your attacks on targets affected by your Freezing Trap by 20% (up from 6%)
Racials
- Night Elf
- Elusiveness Reduces the chance enemies have to detect you while Shadowmelded. (No longer increases your speed while stealthed by 5%.)
- Elusiveness Reduces the chance enemies have to detect you while Shadowmelded. (No longer increases your speed while stealthed by 5%.)
Gear
- New hunter gear will be listed in a separate post.
For a complete list of changes datamined in this build see MMO Champion: Mists of Pandaria Beta – Build 15851
“Readiness Is now baseline instead of being a lvl 60 talent. 5 minute cooldown (up from 3). Requires level 60. Can be cast while stealthed. When activated, this ability immediately finishes the cooldown on all Hunter abilities with a base cooldown less than 5 minutes (down from 6 minutes).”
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/199/693/disgusted-mother-of-god.png?1321272571
So Stampede now is summed up as a 25% damage increase to pet for 20 sec., just that this damage is divided to 5 pets. sounds pretty boring und will surely crash my oldish computer…
I would sum it up by saying that basically you get the equivalent damage of having an extra pet for 20 seconds every 5 minutes. That damage is divided amongst 4 summoned pets. The buffs the extra pets bring might increase the value of the ability further if your group does not have them.
There seems to be some confusion about the difference in damage between Stampede before and now. To try and help clarify:
At 0:00 We do our first stampede and the damage done is half what it would have been.
At 5:00 we can do our 2nd Stampede and the total damage done is now the same as it was before.
At 10:00 we can do our 3rd Stampede and the damage done is now at 3/4 of what it was before.
At 15:00 We can do our 4th Stampede and the total damage done from the ability is now once again the same as it was before.
As far as how often we will get to use Stampede per boss fight, you could say that we’ll be able to use it with the same frequency that non-MM hunters now use our Rapid Fire/CoTW macros. In my group, I often get to use it twice the first few times we do a boss fight but once we get better gear and the boss is on farm I only get to use it once. Therefore, if boss fights in MoP are similar in length to what they have been in other expansions then we can expect to use Stampede twice per fight in the beginning but only one time per fight once the boss is on farm.