HOLY CRIT!

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from fellow hunters lately about how dramatically our stats have changed, not to mention a startling dps loss on the road to 85.  So I’m going to put your minds at ease, take a deep breath everything is going to be fine.

First off agility is still our prime stat and you should be gemming and going after agility loaded gear still.  Agility is still giving you attack power and crit bonus. 

However,  if you’re not hitting your target none of that is going to mean a whole lot.  Yes boys and girls our hit cap has gone up and gone up a shit load!  Try about 700 more points to hit cap.  Yes to reach our new raid goal hit cap of 8% you’ll need 961 (841 for Drenei) to hit a raid boss.   Now this doesn’t mean you need to start reforging and gemming for hit straight away at level 81, 82 etc.  Blizzard implemented a nice little feature in our character pane that when you hover over your hit rating it will give you your current miss percentage for level appropriate mobs depending on what level you’re at.  

The quest, reputation and JP gear is really quite good and will quickly get you moving along to where you need to be.  Plus if you find yourself getting behind at all a quick trip to the reforger can carry you along till the next upgrade is attained. 

Now as for our secondary stats, which is where all the questions seem to be arising from  especially now that we can reforge items:

The debate about crit and mastery is still ongoing with plenty of well known community hunters doing testing.  As far as returns go crit seems to be more beneficial than mastery right now.  Not by a huge margin only within a slim percentage point, but if you’re min maxing you’ll want to keep an eye on these as you replace gear.  Now I realize due to the stat changes that happened during the last patch that you noticed your crit dropped by a huge margin.  Again breath easy, I know it’s a huge change but it is across the board to all of us hunters and isn’t anything you did or need to worry about.  Like I said your gear upgrades just from leveling will be substantial and carry you into heroics.

I’m not going to go into confusing in depth number calculations and percentages instead I’ll give you a simple rundown on what’s going on.  In BM 1 mastery is giving us about a .75% increase to overall dps whereas crit is a just a hair more than a 1% flat dps increase for each point.  In SV mastery gets 1% on magical damage, but doesn’t apply towards auto shots, kill shot, or pet dps numbers.   Crit however gives 1% to all of these.  So feel free to reforge into some crit over mastery right now, even if you didn’t have mastery on anything you still get 8% because that’s the baseline to start anyhow.  I recommend playing around with reforging crit and mastery numbers and testing on the dummy to see how your own numbers are stacking up.  It’s easy to just read online about who’s doing what and copy them, but doing a little of your own testing will help you see for yourself how it’s affecting you. 

MM is still a viable spec but right now it isn’t top dog over SV anymore, at least for now.  So my recommendation is to have a BM and SV spec until they let us triple spec.  BM for questing/soloing and in case your 5 man needs a buff from an exotic.  And SV for dungeons and raids. 

Real quick, I mentioned above about possibly running BM in a group for buffs, well as most of you already know many of our pets now grant group buffs similar to what other classes bring to a raid.  For example let’s say you’ve got a 5 man going and there’s no Shaman, uh oh no heroism.  Not so fast, just bring out the core hound and they have an ability called ancient hysteria that when you pop it will have everyone in the group asking “Holy crap where did heroism come from!?”  Here is a list of the raid buffs and abilities for the pets, happy hunting!

Ferocity Hunter Pet Buffs

• Agility and Strength: cat, spirit beast (exotic)
• Burst Haste: corehound (exotic)
• 5% crit: wolf, devilsaur (exotic)
• 12% armor debuff: raptor
• 30% bleed damage: hyena
• Cast speed reduction: corehound (exotic)
• 10% melee attack speed reduction: tallstrider, fox

Cunning Hunter Pet Buffs

• Health: silithid (exotic)
• 12% armor debuff: serpent
• Cast speed reduction: sporebat
• 4% physical damage taken: ravager
• 8% spell damage taken: dragonhawk, wind serpent
• 10% physical damage: carrion bird

Tenacity Hunter Pet Buffs

• 5% stats: shale spider (exotic)
• 10% physical damage: bear
• 30% bleed damage: rhino (exotic), boar
• 4% physical damage taken: worm (exotic)

• Bat Sonic Blast:  2-second stun.
• Bear Demoralizing Roar: reduces physical damage caused by all enemies within range by 10%
• Beetle: Harden Carapace — reduces all damage taken by 50%
• Bird of Prey Snatch: disarm.
• Boar Gore:  increased bleed damage.
• Carrion Bird Demoralizing Screech: reduces physical damage caused by all enemies within range by 10%.
• Cat Roar of Courage: Str/Agility buff.
  Prowl: stealth.
• Chimera (exotic) Froststorm Breath: conical damaging attack.
• Corehound (exotic) Lava Breath: 25% cast speed reduction.
  Ancient Hysteria: attack speed increase (Heroism/Bloodlust).
• Crab Pin: 4 sec root.
• Crocolisk Ankle Crack slow effect.
• Devilsaur (exotic) Monstrous Bite: reduces the effectiveness of heals received by 25%
  Terrifying Roar: 5% increased crit chance buff.
• Dog Lock Jaw: 4-sec root.
• Dragonhawk Fire Breath: increased magic damage taken buff.
• Fox Tailspin: attack speed reduction
• Gorilla Pummel:  2-sec. spell school lockout.
• Hyena Tendon Rip:  increased bleed damage taken.
• Moth Serenity Dust: interrupts/prevents spellcasting from that school of magic for 2 sec.
• Monkey Bad Manner: 4-sec blind.
• Nether Ray Nether Shock:  interrrupt/spellschool lockout.
• Raptor Tear Armor: armor debuff [I'm sure this will be fixed to stack 3 times for 12% like every other armor debuff.]
• Ravager Ravage: increases enemy’s physical damage taken by 4%
• Rhino (exotic) Stampede: bleed damage increased by 30%.
  Horn Toss: knockback.
• Scorpid Clench: disarm.
• Serpent Corrosive Spit: armor debuff. [Note: I'm sure this will be changed to stack 3 times to be the same as all the other armor debuffs in Cataclysm.]
• Shale Spider (exotic) Embrace of the Shale Spider: 5% stat increase (like Kings or MotW).
• Silithid (excotic) Venom Web Spray: 5-sec root.
  Qiraji Fortitude : stamina increase (fortitude).
• Spider Web: 5-sec root.
• Spirit Beast (exotic) Spirit Mend: targeted heal and HoT.
  Roar of Courage: Str/Agility buff
  Spirit Walk: stealth
• Sporebat Spore Cloud: cast speed reduction.
• Tallstrider Dust Cloud: attack speed reduction.
• Turtle Shell Shield: damage reduction.
• Warp Stalker Time Warp: movement speed reduction.
• Wasp Sting: 2-sec stun.
• Wind Serpent Lightning Breath: increased magic damage taken.
• Wolf Furious Howl: 5% crit chance increase.
• Worm (exotic) Acid Spit: increased physical damage taken.
  Burrow Attack: AoE attack

References: WoW.com & Petopia