Oh thank God. My guild’s last Ony run was bordering on the ridiculous. “Devilsaur in to the whelp caves!” Since pets automatically position themselves at the rear, our pets were CONSTANTLY getting knocked back- our leader finally just asked us to hold our pets at our side. Everybody’s damage got gimped (particularly the poor BM specced hunters), but it was the only way we could win the fight…

I’m going to hold off judgement on Cower until I see how it plays. I can see it being valuable as a way of keeping your pet up through an unlucky Whirlwind, but we’ll see.

No, I don’t like the snare component, and would greatly prefer it to be debuff to pet dps, so IMO blizz should change the new Cower so that it reads “Reduces the damage your pet deals and receives by 40%”. This would make more logical sense, since a cowering pet would be less focused on smacking the target, as well as enabling 2/2 ImpCower to become useful by eliminating the dps debuff. This reworking would answer the complaints I have read in this thread and elsewhere about the new Cower, while also keeping it from becoming just a baseline Shell Shield ^^
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Something I’ve been thinking about though is could this change to Cower be in response to the change in Misdirection? I don’t think anyone else has addressed this issue so far here, but the new MD gives the hunter the potential to MD about 300% more threat to the tank per CD. There has been no change to the CD of MD itself so far, so that means that if MD is used every CD, a hunter will be able to transfer 13%+ of their threat to tank (considerably more if a BM hunter syncs with BW.) For those who haven’t bothered to read patch notes, the new MD will redirect all threat from the hunter for 4sec instead of the current 3x charges
This change should also make AOE soloing brainless as the newMD will be able to redirect all threat from Volley to your pet instead of only 3x arrows from said Volley right now.
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Since I have yet to be able to login to the PTR, can anyone who has access please tell us whether CtH stacks with Ferocious Inspiration? Getting 6% dps for me and 3% for pet every time my pet crits sounds rather nice ^^

And unfortunately Xan, six seconds is just not a long enough duration to be of much help anywhere. I don’t know what, but inexplicably all of the hunter’s defensive durations suck serious ass. The pet durations I can sort of explain, but the player durations I can’t.

That time frame would also be appropriate if they decide to wind up to it with a bigger event than they have in the past.

Even though they have said otherwise, I kind of expect them to do the new Hunter chages before then since it is so drastic of a change. Since it will be a large alteration in playstyle, we may get a month or so of being way overpowered and then get nerfed all to hell.

I’m expecting a June-ish release for Cataclysm personally. Logically, it would be later than that (based on the previous two) but consumer attention spans just won’t hold much longer than that I believe. Although the release of other Blizzard projects may alter that prediction.

As for itemization, I suspect that any ‘hunter’ or ‘enhancement shaman’ gear will just have intellect removed and added onto other stats……well, agility and stamina anyway. And remember that attack power is going away too, so they’ll already be doing a pass on a ton of gear for that reason.

They MAY do the new race/class combination before Cataclysm proper, but pretty much everything else I agree with. Flying won’t happen until the old world changes are made, and I don’t think the old world will change until Cataclysm is out. As for quest updates, I see that being a MASSIVE undertaking, which I don’t mind. Try to remember that for the most part, quest rewards in old Azeroth suck. It’ll be nice to actually see some real options for quest rewards.

For Wrath, the final TBC arena season closed before the bridging patch, and the first Wrath arena season didn’t start until well after the expansion itself came out (although I would expect a shorter expansion->first arena season gap this time around). In addition, all TBC raids were severely nerfed when the bridging patch was released (something like a 30% reduction in boss health). The whole achievement system was also added in 3.0 rather than waiting for the expansion.

In both previous cases, the expansions were only required to gain access to the new zones, level past the old level cap and to take up any new professions, races or classes.

Cataclysm makes this a bit trickier since they don’t have the easy chokepoints for restricting access that they had with the Dark Portal to Outland and the boats and zeppelins to Northrend. It isn’t quite as clear what content Blizzard will be restricting to folks with the expansion and what will be available to everyone (particularly since Blizzard have said that the modified terrain will be available to everyone).

My guess is that we will at least have to wait until the expansion for:
- worgen/goblin characters
- new race/class combinations
- access to Archaeology
- ability to level past 80

The things I definitely expect to see in the 4.0 bridging patch are just the mechanics changes:
- hunter focus
- warlock soul shards
- mastery system and associated talent tree revamps (but no mastery on gear at this point)

And then there are a whole pile of updates that relate to the Azeroth changes, that I expect to be present in the 4.0 patch files, but not enabled until Cataclysm is actually launched:
- new zones and map and terrain changes in Azeroth (Access to new zones for people without the expansion could be restricted completely, or else just by hiding all the quest NPCs)
- flying in old Azeroth (this is linked to the previous point, as the ability to fly won’t go live until the new terrain goes live. It will be interesting to see if Blizz restrict flying in Azeroth at all, or if they just let it be a matter of anyone being allowed to fly in Azeroth as soon they learn how to fly at all)
- quest updates in old Azeroth (as with flying, the new quests require that the new terrain has been put in place first)

Finally, I’m not clear on how thorough Blizz plan to be in retroactively applying their changes to itemisation. For previous itemisation changes they left existing gear alone, leaving the situation to resolve itself as people upgraded their gear. In this case, though, they’re already doing a cleanup pass over the old world quest rewards and drops to ensure they still make sense in light of current itemisation, so they may do the same for TBC and Wrath gear as well.

Oh most definitely. I agree with that too, and I apologize for not being clear.

I just meant that if Blizz was going to cause talent chaos then Cataclysm is most likely the most-likely expansion for this to happen in a pre-release patch. That perhaps the new talents won’t be something we have a chance to have in 4.0. Perhaps 4.0 will come, we have our same 3.3 talents, but instead on the night of release they throw out Patch 4.0.1 and give us our new talents for Cataclysm.

After all, releases tend to fall on Tuesdays… ;)

Oh and yes Palla, the .0 patchs are the expansion patches. =)