If you'd like to see the actual patch notes (as though they're any chance you haven't already), head over here. I'll just go over the big ones here.
Marksman:
Aimed is now required to be used instead of arcane. This is a fine change, since top tier hunters were doing this anyway. It will make the spec a little clunky, but the extra focus and focus savers will help alleviate some of that. Throw in the glyph, and that Aimed no longer interrupts Auto-shots, and MM is in a pretty good place.
MM loses Silencing Shot. That's too bad. I knew it was happening because they wanted less CC. I understand that 2v2 doesn't matter to much of anyone, but having Silencing Shot made it lots of fun to go up against healer-dps teams.
No more Serpent Sting. I have absolutely no problem with this. It didn't really make sense for MM anyway.
Survival:
LnL is now baked into Black Arrow. No worries here. Having traps force proc it so you know for sure you were going to get at least one proc during your opener was really nice. But it seems Blizz has been wanting SV to rely more and more on RNG for a while now, so over all, no big deal.
No more kill shot. This one surprised me a bit, with traps at 50% reduced cool down, I thought they were trying to give SV a little bit of a pvp push, but simultaneously taking away our execute, and taking away any sure chance of proccing LnL, will make that pretty tough to finish someone off. Still, in some comps and in RBGs it will be nice to have the added sustained damage.
Serpent Sting is SV only. This was to be expected. And I'm happy with the change. However, this is somewhat nit-picky, but I'd rather do away with Arcane Shot. Call it serpent sting, or serpent shot, whatever, and it can work exactly the same as arcane shot with serpent baked in, I just feel like it's quite messy to call it arcane shot. It doesn't make any sense that hunters would be using arcane to begin with, anyway.
Perks:
- Improved Camo: Camo no longer breaks from dealing or taking damage.
- Enhanced Camo: You heal 5% of your max health every 1 sec while Camo is active.
If this makes it to live, it means we get 30% of our health back every minute, without affecting our DPS. That is insanely awesome, and is enough to make me really excited about playing SV.
Beast Mastery:
Having to choose between Blink Strikes and Stampede will be rough. This might turn into a substantial AoE / single target type decision, especially once they add in all of the pet damage buffs from the Perks. I imagine Stampede will become "mandatory" for single target.
No more Serpent Sting. BM is going to have a lot more "free" damage from pets auto-attacks. So getting away from SS will be a good thing.
Everyone:
No more aspects; except all the aspects are still there, they're just abilities now. Can I get a great big "who cares?"
Loss of CC pets. I don't feel as upset by this as others seem to be. They're removing lots of CC from the game. So of course they have to do it to hunters as well. It'll be alright.
Loss of Hunter's Mark, Distracting Shot, Rapid Fire, Widow Venom, Scatter Shot. I understand that scatter shot has to go away because of CC changes. But thank the titans they let us keep Conc Shot. What makes a hunter the most fun in the game, is when it's just you and your pet, out in the wilderness, taking down giant dinosaurs or what have you. Distracting shot wasn't in the way for anyone? it didn't have any implications for PvP (well...) and was only rarely used for Raiding (adds on garrosh, maybe a couple others this tier). Widow Venom wasn't in the way of anything either (I didn't check to see if monk's were losing this ability as well). These types of abilities don't really affect balancing or anything else. They just make playing hunter more fun. So I'm sad to see them go.
Hunter's Mark hasn't been very useful since they made it auto-apply to your current target. So in that regard, not having hunter's mark isn't much different than having an auto-applying hunter's mark. Perhaps I'm still lamenting losing it long ago, when it stopped being useful.
There's more, and maybe I'll throw in my two cents as time allows. This post is probably long enough as is, though. (Of course, there's always room for a picture of taking down a dino). It looks like over at the Brewhall Darkbrew has a good overview of all the changes, and Bendak at Eyesofthebeasts is doing a post on each different spec that gets into more details, if you're searching for more hunter specific info.
For the time being, thanks for stopping by! I'll be adding more to the resources pages up top, and hopefully having some decent content to add up here.
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