WotLK Hunter Talents and Speculation

If you haven’t already heard, WoWHead has posted their hunter talent calculator for WotLK which includes the new talents mentioned in the Beta patch notes. Go check out the WotLK hunter talent calculator if you haven’t already. There are a lot of neat new talents to be seen, and each tree (the MM tree in particular) has been shuffled around a bit.

I’ve been playing with the new talents myself, off and on, and I’ve been trying to decide which ones I like, which ones I don’t, and which ones I think look better on paper than they’ll probably be in practice.

So far its pretty unclear which spec will be the “top dog” in Wrath, particularly since we haven’t seen much in the way of itemization from quests and dungeons/raids yet (though MMO-Champion has shared some tidbits). In old Azeroth, the Marksmanship hunter was king. In Outland, Beast Mastery hunters had their time in the spotlight. Will Wrath be the dawning of the Survival era? (Not that I’m biased or anything…) Just looking at the new talents will only give you part of the picture, but the internet thrives on speculation, so lets indulge ourselves for a bit, shall we?

New Talents

Each hunter tree gets some love in Wrath (at least as it stands now), and there are a few unfamiliar faces in our talent calculator.

Survival

This talent will be replacing the “Slaying” talents currently seen in the Survival tree that improve damage against humanoids, beasts, giants, and dragonkin (depending which, if any, of the two talents you take).

One problem I can immediately see with this talent is that it will interfere with tracking your gathering profession(s). I often like to keep tracking my gathering professions in dungeons because nodes have been known to pop up in instances (in fact, gathering from instances can be quite lucrative). Not to mention the fact that I frequently forget to track the particular types of mobs I’m fighting in a given instance (unless its my job to scout for pats, etc). Also, tracking the type of mobs you’re fighting can sometimes be annoying. A perfect example: walk into Karazhan and track undead. And then try to tell where your other party members are. Yeah, right. Good luck with that, folks. Having my minimap swamped with little red dots is extremely irritating, and I don’t want to be forced into it just to get an additional 5% damage.

While this talent looks kinda cool on paper, I think in practice it’ll likely just end up being a nuisance.

My first impression: bleh.

This is one that I would have to see in practice to really be able to form an opinion about it. Who knows? Maybe stings won’t be so useless anymore. Despite the fact that I’m Survival, rarely do I include Wyvern Sting in my spec (the couple times I did, it collected dust on my action bars for the most part, so I just never bothered with it after that), and I almost never use Serpent Sting.

I think this talent will probably have some interesting PvP applications, but I doubt it will end up being very useful for PvE. I am, however, quite willing to be proven wrong.

Okay, first of all… what the heck is Bear Trap?!

Thanks, WoWHead! That answers that!

Okay, so…

Seems to me like this might be another snazzy PvP talent. Good news for all you PvP hunters out there (Shifttusk, I’m looking at you here), but for us PvE hunters…. meh.

Again… wtf is Explosive Shot?! More on that in a few. What about Kill Shot?

Strikes me as the hunter version of Execute, which is kinda cool. In Wrath, when they call “Execute range!” on boss fights, now hunters will have something special to add to the mix. But enough about that (for now), back to Sniper Training!

I think I would have to see concrete math on this one. It sounds like it might be kind of bad ass… More deliberation is clearly required.

Step aside, Shadow Priests. Let the hunters show you how its done!

The average SV hunter in at least T4 or equivalent gear boasts about a 30% crit chance. That means that roughly 30% of your time spent in groups will be spent returning 2% of your party members’ mana, etc. passively. You could be Auto Shotting and be returning mana/etc to your party members. Shadow Priests have to burn their mana to return mana to others, and they can only return mana, not rage, energy or for Death Knights: Runic Power.

This will make at least one SV hunter a must-have for every raiding guild (pfft, like we weren’t already). Although, it does raise some questions… what will this do to raid group composition? Will hunters miss out on damage group buffs so they can provide mana to healers, for example?

Neat. Hunters get more AoE than just Multi-Shot, Volley and our traps. (You can sense my excitement, can’t you?)

I’m thinking that this one’s going to be another nod to PvP hunters…

Marksmanship

I honestly don’t think this talent is going to be all that useful. However, because of its placement in the tree (first tier), I think its going to end up being one of those talents you take a point or two in just to progress further down the tree.

This talent is one that I would really like to see some WWS on. I would also be interested in seeing armor values for Wrath bosses to determine just how effective this talent would be.

In short: I think this talent has a lot of potential. But I want specific examples before I pass judgment.

I actually use Rapid Fire on boss fights pretty frequently (in which case, Rapid Killing doesn’t really come into play), so I have a feeling this talent might be useful.

The reason is this: I most commonly use Rapid Fire when I’m in “mana regen mode”. What I do is: pop Rapid Fire, switch to Aspect of the Viper, and then mostly Auto Shot with a few Steady Shots (instead of Arcane Shot because 1-to-1 Steady uses less mana) interspersed while I regen. I think this talent would help with that process.

Nice graphic. Am I going to have to change the name of my blog?

Yet another reason for MM hunters to swear by Hunter’s Mark, looks like. On paper it sounds like a pretty nice buff, both for PvP and PvE. I’d definitely like to see it in action.

Another talent to potentially make stings more useful? Looks like Blizzard may have been paying attention to the theorycrafting hunter community’s general disdain for Stings. Again, this is a talent I’d want to see numbers for. I remain skeptical regarding how useful stings will be in Wrath, particularly given their piss-poor showing in the past (except at lower levels).

I foresee very few hunters choosing to go deep enough into MM for this talent (which is the last in the tree).

Beast Mastery

This seemed really weird to me the first time I read it. It removes stun effects from the target. Huh?

I think this talent will have some obvious benefits, but like Righteous Defense, its probably going to end up being very awkward to use.

Free mana regen? As BRK would say (and I’m using this phrase entirely without his permission, because there’s been a rash of such activity lately and anybody who’s anybody is doing it now), “foshizzle!”

Shorter cooldowns mean more opportunities to proc these abilities. I’m for it. (Although, whether this is a talent you would want to choose over another if you’re running short on points is unclear at the moment.)

Crit mania! Feel free to rocket up the damage meters, BM hunters (like you don’t already own them). This talent seems kinda like a no-brainer to me.

Looks like another no-brainer for the BM tree. (Almost makes me consider going BM again…) This talent improves upon one of the corner stones of personal utilities that hunters possess: our aspects. And it has obvious applications both for PvE and PvP. So far, I can’t find anything wrong with it.

I can see definite “fluff” factor here, as well as a nod to some of the more casual among us. I would be interested to see what kind of difference those extra 5 points made, though. While this talent sounds pretty neat, I’m not sure how practical it will actually be.

New Builds

I’ve played with a few different builds, but I don’t think I’ve come up with any one in particular that I think just rocks socks yet. One thing I have noticed, however, is that hybrid builds will now be able to get two group buffs–one from each of the two trees of your choice. For example, you could get Expose Weakness AND Trueshot Aura, which I find really intriguing.

For those of you who have already spent some time playing with the talent calculator, have you come up with any builds that you’re really excited to try? What are they? What do you hope Blizzard will change about the talent trees before Wrath goes live?

For those that haven’t checked out the new talent calculator yet, GO DO IT!