OutDPS!

MMO-Champion posted additional notes on patch 3.3. Of interest, here are the hunter changes:

Hunter
Beast Mastery
-Mend Pet, Scare Beast had the mana cost of their lower ranks reduced.

Marksmanship
-Silencing Shot additional tooltip text – Non-player victim spellcasting is also interrupted for 3 sec.
-Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, Serpent Sting, Volley, -Hunter’s Mark had the mana cost of their lower ranks reduced.

Survival
-Explosive Trap now burns all enemies for [ Ranged AP + 900 ] additional Fire damage over 20 sec. (Up from 900)
-Point of No Escape now increases the critical strike chance of all of your attacks on targets affected by your Frost Trap, Freezing Trap and Freezing Arrow. (Old – “Increases the critical strike chance of all attacks”)
-Misdirection redesigned – The current party or raid member targeted will received the threat caused by your next damaging attack and all actions taken for 4 sec afterwards.
-Lock and Load now has a 22 sec cooldown. (Down from 30 sec)
-Wyvern Sting, Mongoose Bite, Raptor Strike, Counterattack, Freezing Trap, Explosive Shot had the mana cost of their lower ranks reduced.

First off, some of this was talked about yesterday. A lot of the changes are simple implementation of their lower level questing speed boost. That said, there’s a whole lot of level 80 changes to chew on. Let’s start ruminating, shall we?

PvE

At first glance, I see that explosive trap’s damage over time component now causes a massive amount of damage. I would have to run the numbers to be sure, but this might change the way we handle aoe. Right now, I fire black arrow and explosive shots on whatever the tank has targeted between volleys. This trap went from doing 900 damage per target over 20 seconds to (for me, raid buffed) 8600 damage per target over 20 seconds.

Looking down a bit, we run into some confusing wording about lock and load. They claim that they are bringing the cooldown down to 22 seconds where it had been 30 seconds, however as we all know (and supported by testing done on elitist jerks) the cooldown has been 22 seconds and the proc chance 20% per black arrow tick since 3.2 launched.

PvP

I was about to start decrying the rapid fire nerfs these notes seem to be bringing, however I was recently reminded that patch 3.3 is when our pets are supposed to start inheriting our stats, including resilience. Making avoidance no longer protect your pet from AOE in arena might be made up for by the fact that it now has a portion of your resilience. The change to silencing shot, however, has no answer. It used to be an interrupt/silence cooldown used to help control the opposition, and it is now only an interrupt. Unless this whole time it hasn’t been locking players from casting for 3 seconds- I’ll have to clarify that with Jurgwena.

The point of no escape change is a slight nerf, although I don’t know how much of one.

Don’t forget, this is a preliminary build subject to much change. We’ll keep on top of it for you- watch for more analysis as things change.