PTR 3.3 Notes Posted
Blizzard has just posted the first Public Test Realm (PTR) version of the Patch 3.3 patch notes. These will probably change a lot during the next several (or more!) weeks of PTR testing.
You can find the patch notes at the official location on the WoW website. The big content, of course, is Icecrown Citadel, but I’ll grab some of the most interesting hunter-related bits below.
Hunters
- Misdirection: Redesigned. Instead of having finite charges, it now begins a 4-second timer when the hunter using Misdirection performs a threat-generating attack, during which all threat generated by the hunter goes to the friendly target. In addition, multiple hunters can now misdirect threat to the same friendly target simultaneously.
- Beast Mastery – Intimidation: If the hunter’s pet is in melee range of its target, the stun from Intimidation will now be applied immediately instead of on the pet’s next swing or attack.
- Pets – Avoidance: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 30/60/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
In addition, there are a lot of small but nice touches for the lowest level players, like more health and mana regen and reduced spell costs. Racial attribute bonuses have also been smoothed out a bit. This won’t affect most of us, but I’ve known a few new players who obsessed over their starting attributes because they were afraid they’d gimp themselves forever.
And … not a whole lot more yet. But I’m sure more will be coming.
Table of Contents for Series: Patch 3.3
- PTR 3.3 Notes Posted
- PTR 3.3 – Unnoted Hunter Changes
- Ghostcrawler on Pet Avoidance
- PTR 3.3: Culling the Herd, Cower Revised
- PTR 3.3: Faster Pet Leveling
- PTR 3.3: Spectral Bear?
- PTR 3.3: Northshire Wolves Getting Sick
- PTR 3.3: Arcturis the New Spirit Beast
- Patch 3.3: Arcturis the Spirit Bear, Diseased Wolves in Elwynn and More
38 Comments
I have a feeling that Misdirection might be used alot more then what is the norm right now as far as raiding goes, the change seems like a nice one.
It seems like it’ll be a little more complicated to pull a boss with only 4 seconds, but it’ll be great during a fight, especially right as you’re popping all your cooldowns.
That….is a very nasty nerf to pets for PvP. I don’t even want to THINK about Wintergrasp with that in mind. Just…..ugh. They should have it at least reduce damage from player AoE by 50%.
The MD change is nice. The increase in Avoidance’s resistances is also nice (for one that raids and doesn’t pvp)… though honestly, I don’t see my pet dying to player AoE -anyway- during PVP when I do do it. Most people ignore it, since if I die, it goes away anyway. Intim… again, nice (it sucks when your pet misses and wastes it, f’rex) but useful only for soloing so it doesn’t affect endgame. Might make for a decent interrupt outside raids though.
Overall… nothing OMG either way, but a couple of acceptable tweaks.
Kelwina – 4 seconds is a pretty durn long time, imo. I burn my three charges in only like 1-2 sec normally.
And…eeh, I think you’re really overestimating how much AoE gets tossed out by players in PVP towards pets. What happens to -me- is ‘pet gets feared or frozen or simply ignored, I eat (insert huge damage attack here), I die, pet vanishes.’ If your pet is dying too much, toss some points in increased stamina or armor. *shrug*
they should’ve replaced thing from intimidation back into how long Beastial Wrath lasts for. the nerf on it now just became ridiculous, not that im complaining about it since I now raid/pvp surv, but bm was badass till they nerfed it. and cmon….no more AoE dmg reduc. for pets? whats blizz trying to do? make BM the new “RAID” spec?
It’ll need testing, but the way I’m reading the Misdirection changes, the timer STARTS when you use a threat generating ability. For my standard MD pull now, that means I would get Aimed-Silencing Shot-Auto-Arcane Shot – Auto as the initial burst, instead of just Aimed-Silencing-Auto. Add that it can be stacked by multiple Hunters and you’ve got a MEAN threat lead out of the gate…
It seems like the MD starts ticking once you attack the target, instead of when you cast MD. That’s nice! It should help out a lot—especially with multiple Hunters on one tank!
And that BM change helps out so much in PVP skirmishes… Especially when someone decides to be cute and try to gank. Oh, the joys of World PVP…
Yeah I’m not happy with the change to TBW either, why couldn’t it just be 15 seconds, I’d be happy with 15 seconds :/ as it is, I’ve had to hash my rotation even more, and figure out what do I want to get out first, should I sacrifice Arcane and Multi for a buffed SS and SS spam? And .. that’s basically what I do, I spam arcane, then multi, pop everything I can, then tbw then serpent sting then steady spam and get out about 2/4 steadies before it wears off.
My rotation is FAR from simple anymore tbh :/ never felt so pressured, ug.
At anyrate I will love the AOE changes atleast, as I won’t have to worry.. if I ever get accepted into a hc let alone any raid, about my pet dying from AoE as that’s really the only thing that was threatening it half the time, so I might be able to not have imp mend pet.. hopefully. Atleast not the full 2/2.
But tbh it should still affect player AoE atleast 30/50% as, I HAVE seen my pets go down, not just from focused fire, but from aoes, ever have to work and push it past a few mages spamming the crap out of blizzard? And everything else that can aoe, spamming it, in one small space, to prevent you and other players from getting back into your own base [AV]? I have, it’s gruesome.
In WG hell it doesn’t matter, if you’re BM you’re dead anyways, if you’re SV or MM who cares if pet dies, it’s not 50% of your damage [ok 30-50%].
But outside WG, as haven’t been in the new bg yet, AV is the other AoE heavy place I’ve been in, where pets can go down really, really fast sometimes.
New Spirit Beast much! :O Should be one, just a matter of where ;)
The misdirect buff is immense, as stated by Nachtwulf, I use my MD in the same way, about 1-2 seconds and BOOM, gone… but yeh, awesome :D
Sorry Nacht, but your wrong, at least on my server. When huge fights erupt, AoE flies everywhere, and even as it stands my pet can eat a substantial amount of ‘incidental’ damage off of AoEs. I also stated Wintergrasp being a nightmare now because, well, tenacity is a bitch in the first place. It may not seem it to you, but I wager you don’t PvP all that much. One of the only reasons a pet can survive in an onslaught or during a major, pitched battle is because they don’t take a ton of AoE damage. Now our pets are going to eat the full fury of Bladestorm and flat out whirlwind, seed of corruption, living bomb, and so on and so forth. Not to mention the amount of damage a the AoE’ers are going to be able to do when focusing on a pet now. Take my word for it when I say as of 3.3, our pets are going to start dying a lot more in the larger number BGs, and more in regular sized ones. I’ll test this when it hits the realms, but I already have a very, very bad feeling.
i think i know whats gonna happen, almost every hunter in wow will start sending angry mails to blizz if thier pets dies way too quickly. hopefully then blizz will assign some player aeo reduction. until then we probly have to just tough it out
I’m just disappointed that Icecrown citadel is going to be a dungeon… A DUNGEON! What happened to it becoming a raid? The biggest foe in the game so far, and it will take only 5 players to beat him? I was expecting to go back to the good old days when we were 60 and bring back a 40man raid! 40man again, that would be awesome!
just an afterthought, if pets do die really quickly, maybe cunning pets will make a comeback. thier carrion feeder restores health and happiness to 100%, so if you bring it back from fighting before it dies, or if you just rezed it, instant health and happiness in 2-3 seconds. also, usually they die faster than ferocity or tenacity pets, due to skills like bloodthirsty and silverback, but if all pets are quicker to die they may be more valuable (still bad news for BM hunters).
I just cheked the ptr notes. Death Knights’ pets are not listed. Have the already some sort of AoE inmunity? Or aren’t they to get nerfed with all the rest of pets?
In any case, is very strange the Blizzard concept of “balance”…
@Rottingham: Icecrown citadel *is* a raid. It just has 3 5-man dungeons in it as well (just like the Argent Tournament has both a 5-man and a raid). We also don’t know yet how the interaction between Jaina/Sylvanas, the 5-man group and Arthas will play out, but I very much doubt Arthas will be dead at the end of it.
The misdirect change is great. It will finally make it work properly with Explosive Shot, as well as allowing it to Misdirect the first four seconds of Volley (I remember the good times when a whole volley cast consumed one MD charge, but it hasn’t worked like that in ages – letting us MD up to 4 seconds of it is a nice compromise). And, as others have pointed out, the 4 seconds from the first aggressive moves means that it will always cover 3 special shots (the first one starts the 4 second timer, the other two happen 1.5 seconds and 3 seconds through the duration) with an covered auto shots being a bonus. Not having to worry about being blocked by another hunter’s MD is also a nice improvement.
As far as the pet avoidance change goes, I can’t see it getting to live as it currently stands. While it’s a significant improvement for PvE, it’s a huge PvP nerf to all pet classes and doesn’t help with insta-gib attacks like Mimiron’s rockets.
Good to see the intimidation design finally changed – it should have worked that way all along.
@Antarx: look at the DK notes again (specifically the ones for the Night of the Dead talent in the Unholy tree). Blizz covered most of their bases with this change – hunter pets, warlock demons, DK ghouls, Druid treants, Mage water elemental, Priest shadow fiend.
The only ones not currently covered that I can see are shaman (elementals and spirit wolves) and I’m not sure if they get avoidance in the first place.
Nimizar:
Thanks for clearing that up. I thought it was just going to be a 5man :P
That was something they talked about before, Nim. How they wanted pets to be able to take less damage from PvE targets but more from PvP targets, but how nothing short of, say, 100% AoE immunity in PvE would help against attacks like that. That 90% reduction will help against smaller forms of PvE AoE, but the more or less ‘instant death’ ones will still blow them to Kansas.
PvP…..I don’t know what to think. I like to think that you actually have to FOCUS on my pet to kill them, and not that they’ll just fold from incidental damage. However, and I wish I were exaggerating, if that change goes live then hunters will see their pets life spans severely shortened in any sort of large scale battle or against an opponent who has nasty AoE tendencies in the first place. What’s also bad for PvPers is that Avoidance is on the way to Rabid, and while we may not want ((Or get any benefit from, rather)) avoidance, we definitely DO want rabid, forcing us to waste three talents points that could be spent else where. At the VERY least if they go through with this, they should unhinge rabid from Avoidance.
Another interesting question is this: Will the generals and lieutenants and what have you in AV and Isle of Conquest do full damage, or reduced damage? I’d say reduced since it’s an NPC, but I wonder…..
MMO-champion have datamined the new tooltip wording for the Avoidance abilities now and it says “damage from creature AoE”, so I would say that the NPC damage in battlegrounds will definitely be reduced.
Definitely agreed that something will have to change with the Avoidance pet talent dependencies if it says the way it is though. If avoidance has no PvP effect, it would be rather silly for PvP hunters to have to get it anyway in order to pick up Rabid in Ferocity, Wolverine Bite and Wild Hunt in Cunning and possibly even Last Stand in Tenacity.
My suspicion is that we’re seeing a partially implemented change here, so I’m not overly concerned at this stage. After all, the pet scaling changes aren’t in this initial build, so who knows how that is all going to work.
I’m pretty sure several MORE varients of almost killed Arthas, but not quite, is going to get old quick. On the other hand, it’ll prolly be harder to “farm” than ToC is. Maybe we will get an olde-tyme 40-manner.
As far as the Intimidation changes go, I don’t see it changing gameplay much other than not having to worry about missing as much. It will probly help BM’s in reaction time in BG’s and arena. My curiosity is whether you could use it while stunned since it’s something your pet’s doing instead of the hunter. That mechanic would prove to make hunters more PvP viable against stunlock specs.
With avoidance, I don’t think this really matters in all reality until they implement full stat scaling.
No matter your opinion on the matter, I recommend stabling your hunter and rollin out on some alts.
One rather alarming change in the initial spell changes up on MMO champion: It looks like nearly all silencing is going to be removed from pvp alltogether. Looks like they really want more healer combinations over cleaves. Healers are going to be a real pain to take out in arena if this goes through. It reminds me of a friend talking about unbalences back in Warhammer Online where it took like 5+ people to take down 1 healer in pvp always.
Playin’ a Belf, it was down to the timing against the other player to throw up a silence vs when they cast an immunity ability OR to shut them out while cleaving another player. Great, now the healers have more incentive to just stay on top of me or LOS. Kinda makes me feel like dwarves inface of other racials like stuns, damage boosters, or free trinket. Yup that sliver of mana is really gonna help thanks.
Not too peeved about avoidance because I never talented into it or rabid seriously. Heh, I was thinking about it though because I’m finding lick your wounds to be generally useless for clutch pet survival. It’s more of a pain because the autocast likes likes to kick it on while farming and I’ll send my pet out only to have it stop and lick itself right after dismounting because his HP bar hasn’t updated yet and he thinks he’s about to die.
LnL going back down to 22 seconds. Wonder how long that will last.
It’s too bad I was having tons of fun with my lol-worthy BM/Hunter Vs. Wild pet-tank build. Definitely not something I’d suggest anyone do, I can’t vouch for it until I get to high-end play and I’m raiding to get some better weaponry before I go on into the 1300s-1400s. Not high at all yet.
Wait – I’m a tard, I misinterpreted the descriptions!
If you read the tooltips, now I’m not sure if all silences are now flat 3 seconds only in pvp, similar to how Wyvern has altered times based on pve/pvp. This might be good for BElves and bad for everyone else (and marks.) Wonder if diminishing returns will still apply to silences in pvp if it goes through.
(again, I don’t have the space to download the ptr client so it’ll be interesting to hear about this.)
I’m trying to figure out when the LnL internal cooldown was ever *not* 22 seconds (i.e. 2 seconds shorter than the trap/Black Arrow CD when you have 3/3 Resourcefulness), as that’s how long it was when it was first added. For the moment, I’m chalking that one up to a data mining glitch on MMO-C’s part.
Regarding the “removal of Silence” in PvP, I think you’re misreading the spell diffs. The mention of all the silencing effects is just bringing their tooltips up to date to reflect the current spell mechanics (i.e. the silencing spells still work as interrupts against bosses that are otherwise immune to silencing effects).
GC answered a question about Avoidance on the forums too – their tentative plan is that it will just become an innate passive hunter ability (as it is for other pet classes) and we’ll get a new 3 point pet DPS talent of some kind in that location in the pet talent trees instead.
A couple more tidbits from the forums:
- shaman have the 90% pet AoE avoidance as well, so the fact that this isn’t mentioned looks like it is just an accidental omission in the patch notes (GC also notes that these days only 3 of the classes – rogues, warriors, paladins – don’t have even a temporary pet/guardian talent or class ability!).
- they recognise the avoidance change is a pet PvP nerf and will be considering other buffs to compensate
(just posted on mmo) – Dude, raid weeklies! It didn’t occur to me that cross-battlegroup pug raids could happen. There’d be few reservations when you’re on a different server from your groupmates, so I’d be less inclined to roll with snippy people from other servers whom I’ll prolly never see until I’ve forgotten about them.
AV/Isle games are bad enough (since you can’t bounce around from games anymore, I tend to never play them now because once you get in there, you’re stuck there for half an hour – and boy, do the kids love to call everyone out. I end up contributing and earning more from a few shorter WSG/AB/EoTS games than from one long and drawn-out, usually losing Isle game, and having to waste marks on a repeatable turn-in.)
(alright, last post tonight really lol)
I’m pretty sure they said at Blizzcon that cross-server LFG will be starting out limited to 5-man dungeons only. The tech allows them to expand it to 10- and 25-man content, but they want to see how it goes in the smaller format first.
The idea of raid weeklies is pretty cool though.
off-topic……. since when do druids have pets???
Druids
* Pets
o Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
As for the hunter changes… the “nerf” to pet pvp survivability blows. Didn’t blizzard say that they’d allow for pets to survive longer in pvp overall? and then they do this? grrr Pet survivability in PVE, especially in raids are almost up to the hunter keeping an eye out to heal their pet from time to time because some healers sure as heck don’t heal pets and think they’re a waste of mana. Avoidance would help and work wonders on 5-man dungeons…. a full straight raid fight like those found in Naxx and Ulduar won’t cut it, they’ll still be dead early on due to their smaller health pool (even when buffed and not specced as BM).
See my post earlier – balance druids have treants.
Just out of curiousity, did anyone look at the new leatherworking recipes they added in with 3.3 on the test center, notice that INT is missing from all of the mail gear……either shamans are getting some loving, or the change to focus from mana is coming for hunters sooner then we relize…
@ Aftathott;
This would be and awesome hidden throw in. I might actually play my hunter on the PTR if that happens.
NO! no focus for meh! EVER! plz and thx blizz >:/
“Pets – Avoidance: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 30/60/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.”
Way to gimp us even more, Blizzard. Why not just make the pets invincible to PvE content but die with one hit from PvP content?
@ Rowdypotter–
Any priest who doesn’t heal a pet is a fail priest. I have 9 of them on my /ignore list,and I’m sure there will be more in the future. lol
Intimadation(sp?) is a funny ability…I’ve missed sooo many of them,I hardly use it now. This will help bring it back to use against those nasty casters. At least for me.
@ Aftathott–
Moar info,please! I heard about the new LW recipes with Nature Resistance,but this would be awesome! Thank you! (As long as they don’t drop in a raid,I’ll be happy!)
Kitairra
The itemisation on those craftable mail items is almost certainly placeholder info, as it’s identical to the itemisation on the new leather gear.
Being one of those “silly” hunters who think Tenacity pets are a viable alternative to tank some heroic and raid boss encounters, I see most of these changes as a good thing. Especially, giving me 4 seconds to let any of my attacks be Misdirected to my pet. Right now the initial explosion of Explosive trap eats 1 MD, the remaining explosions cause threat to the hunter. So dropping a trap and doing Volley for 4 seconds. . this will be invaluable on multi mob trash pulls. Giving the pet free AoE avoidance = good especially if it is replaced with a better dmg increasing talent. This would give the pet more threat generation. Which is really their biggest short fall atm.
Doesn’t make you silly at all, Rudda. Most of the changes are good, and all of them are good for PvE. It’s just PvP that’s getting screwed. Again.
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