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Beast mastery hunters may escape Stampede nerf

Olivia Grace
Updated ·2 min read
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Blizzard Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street posted a lengthy Dev Watercooler yesterday, focused on Mists of Pandaria PvP.

Within that Dev Watercooler, one thing he mentioned was the extremely high burst being put out by Beast Mastery Hunters, saying:

Ghostcrawler
Beastmastery Hunters – We agree that stacking too many cooldowns to blow someone up is not interesting, skillful, or fair. (I also want to be clear that with all of these issues, we're not blaming players for using the tools that we gave them; we're blaming ourselves.) We're taking a hard look at the various Hunter cooldowns with the intention of reducing their burst. Hunters are receiving a buff in that they will no longer need to swap between Aspect of the Hawk and Aspect of the Fox. We also hope these changes help result in higher representation of Survival and Marksman Hunters.


Very shortly after the Dev Watercooler was posted, Ghostcrawler took to twitter, announcing that a substantial bug had been discovered, which only affected beast mastery hunters in the arena:

Community Manager Zarhym emailed us late last night to inform us that the bug had been isolated and added to the beast mastery hunter-specific section of the blog. The bug is now detailed as follows:



Ghostcrawler
Update: We have just discovered a bug in which the debuff that makes Stampede pets weaker than normal pets was not being applied in Arenas. This helps explain why hunters could cause so much damage in Arenas but not in (say) the outdoor world or a dungeon environment.


This is a huge bug. Watching the video in the header of this post, players can see how strong the beast mastery stampede is, effortlessly taking out two of the world's best arena players, Cdew and Snutz. The player who posted the video asserts that he had never played beast mastery before. While Stampede summons all the pets a hunter has with them, it seems from what the developers are saying that they should be dealing far less damage than usual. This wasn't happening in arenas.

Blizzard has said they will be looking into a hotfix as soon as possible, and will keep players updated. If the bug fix solves the problem, it may mean beast mastery hunters escape further nerfs.

Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.