Ret, New Stats, Upcoming.

Ret Paladins. Currently a major force to be reckoned with. How large a force? Completely OP. It begs the question, why oh why Blizzard? How could you allow a class this imbalanced to go live?

Well, thankfully Ghostcrawler(confirmed it's a man... 90% sure) gave some insight into why this was allowed. As well as a little hope for the future "Are we going to nerf Ret? TO THE GROUND BABY." A sense of humor is always welcome on these oh so touchy subjects. Whether or not the Paladins enjoy this sense of humor is yet to be seen.

My hunter lost over 15% of her dodge rating. I'm down to 9% on live. Supposedly this number dwindles to around 2% by the time I hit 80 once WotLK comes out, but then slowly climbs back up as epic gear is again attained. Kind of a sad state of melee survivability. The reason for this change? Because they gave us the new Disengage instead. Hmm... A good trade off? Probably. But it still hurts a little to see class balancing done as some hunters keep putting it, and recently in a very sarcastic manner, "One step back, One step forward."

My crit also skyrocketed about 8 or 9%. This is because of the new talents of course. The Marksmanship tree has almost nothing to take in the middle and near the bottom, all of it's good talents are scrambled near the top. This makes it hard for 51 point Survival or BM to decide on what to take, but it's great for a MM hunter. What made this crit possible was because one of the old talents, Master Marksman, was changed to provide a further 5% crit increase on top of Lethal Shots. It's surprising they'd put two such crit gains in the same tree, making MM comparable to Survival Crit possibilities.

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Upcoming hunters changes from Ghostcrawler:

" Two changes coming up:

We aren't happy with how Aspect of the Viper is working in PvP, but it seems fine in PvE. We're going to try changing it so that 50% of its current regen is passive, leaving the remaining 50% active. That should give hunters some more mana in Arenas in particular when dealing with opponents who manage to get out of LOS a lot. Yet, in PvE where hunter dps is very high, the difference in regen shouldn't be very noticable. We are also going to let Viper return mana from melee attacks for those cases where a melee opponent is too close for comfort.

The second change is to some of the numbers on the special attacks of exotic pets to make sure the pets are around a 10% increase from normal pets. This should make exotic pets a reasonable benefit for the talent point (especially when you also count the bonus pet talents) without making every BM hunter feel like they are limited to just those pets."

The AotV change? Incredibly welcome. PvE will not only have nothing to complain about because they are regenn'ing the same amount of mana they were before, and PvP gets a much needed passive portion in case our target is constantly LoS'ing us.

The pet change? Needed so badly. Nobody currently wants to take the 51 point talent. Not for PvE, not for PvP, it's purely cosmetic. 10% added damage to all exotic pets boosts their desire greatly, meaning a full BM spec'd hunters pet will be doing 50% more damage through straight damage talents then any other hunters pet. That's what BM should be about. Now if only BM pets survived a little better...