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Versatility Hunter Build


In the latest Dev Watercooler they went over the latest stat changes.  You'll remember at first we were getting Tertiary stats, which would occasionally be included as bonus stats on pieces of gear.  Then those just morphed into secondary stats which would be offered along with the normal secondary stats,  though they hinted that they might only come on specific items, primarily trinkets.   Well they've updated the new secondary stats, and what were once tertiary stats are now "minor stats".

Secondary Stats
  • Haste: (Unchanged) Increases attack speed, spell casting speed, and some resource generation
  • Critical Strike: (Unchanged) Increases your chance to critically strike, dealing double damage
  • Mastery: (Unchanged) Increases the effectiveness of your specialization-specific Mastery
  • Multistrike: (New) Grants two chances for your damage and healing effects to fire an additional time, each at 30% effectiveness
  • Versatility: (New) Increases damage and healing, and reduces damage taken
  • Spirit: (Unchanged, healer-only) Increases mana regeneration rate
  • Bonus Armor: (New, tank-only) Increases your armor
Minor Stats
  • Movement Speed: (New) Increases your movement speed
  • Indestructible: (New) Causes the item to not take durability damage
  • Leech: (New) Causes you to be healed for a portion of all damage and healing done
  • Avoidance: (New) Reduces your damage taken from area-of-effect attacks.

That's a lot of new info. Gone are Amplify and Readiness,  and we see several useful new stats, most of which we were already aware of or expecting.  The minor stats will be fun little bonuses; though it does seem fairly strange that there are such incredibly powerful minor stats, like Movement Speed and Leech, right next to completely useless (at least in combat) stats like Indestructible.


Hybridity
Of the new secondary stats, one in particular is of interest to any hunters wanting to do some soloing:
New Stat: Versatility
The removal of Readiness left some space in our itemization plans and room for another stat to take its place. It’s important to offer players plenty of different secondary stats so that you have a wide variety of interesting and compelling gear to choose from. To that end, we’ve been working on a new secondary stat called Versatility. Versatility is pretty simple: 1% Versatility grants a 1% increase to your damage, healing, and absorbs, and reduces the damage you take by 0.5%. It’s a straightforward, obvious upgrade to your primary role’s performance, but also gives significant boosts to secondary role performance and survivability. The healing increase it provides does work on self-heals, such as Recuperate, for example. We won’t be tuning it to be anyone’s highest throughput secondary stat, but it’ll be close, and it’ll give you a nice boost to how versatile your character is in the process. It’ll be especially attractive to hybrids who want to feel more “hybridy.”

 We've already got some amazing improvements to hunter extreme soloing in the form of Draenor Perks, primarily the added healing from camo, and situationally, the added healing from killing blows.   If we can get a substantial Versatility Build, it's going to significantly boost not only the new Camo Healing,  but also our Spirit Bond, Spirit Mend and Chimera Shot, and it looks like it will stack with Animal Bond, all while simultaneously reducing damage and giving a slight dps increase.

If  we have a trinket with the secondary Leech stat as strong as Juggernaut's Focusing Crystal, we could be seeing self heals on the level of a Blood Death Knight!

Ok, so maybe the Focusing Crystal is a bit too much to hope for,  and perhaps we'll never see as much self healing as a Blood DK; this is still a major buff to Hunter Soloing, and hopefully will bring us back up to where we're supposed to be, at the cutting edge of Extreme Soloing,  pushing the limits where other classes still tremble in fear.

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