It's good news/bad news time for Hunters in the Wrath beta. I'll give you the good news first. There are some upcoming buffs to Disengage, primarily for PvP:

• The cooldown is being lowered from 30 seconds to 25 (16 with talents).
• It no longer requires you to have a target selected; now you can slam it as soon as you see someone getting close without pausing to click on them. It does require you to be in combat, to prevent this becoming some kind of crazy Hunter Blink.

Bad news: you're getting nerfed for PvE. It seems that hunters were simply doing too much damage in level 80 raid situations, so the following steps are being taken to address that:

• Raid boss armor is being raised by 10%. This will affect all physical damage dealers, though Ghostcrawler says classes will be buffed back up as necessary (like the recent Fury buffs).
• Windfury Totem and Improved Icy Talons will no longer benefit ranged attacks.

If that's what they had to do to get Hunter DPS in line, fine. But I'm not really happy to see increased separation of what works on melee and what works on ranged; I'm still irritated about when ranged AP and melee AP were split and no-one knew what items and enchants affected which classes.

The best thing you can say about Hunters in Wrath in this Beta build is that we still have the new Disengage, at least for now. In this build, most of our new PvP tools have had much of their new functionality removed or greatly scaled back in this build.

So we're expecting the new pre-Wrath content patch any week now, and with it a whole flood of new mechanics and abilities, such as raid buff stacking. It should be interesting to see how all this new stuff fits in to the current Burning Crusade end game, and how people adapt to it as they prepare to plunge into Wrath. Of course, many will probably get a head start on Inscription, while others may already have a new haircut picked out.

Myself, I'm looking forward to playing around with the new changes to my Hunter. Disengage and the new Freezing Trap mechanics are looking delicious enough to me that I may just see if I can get back into Arenas for a few weeks to check them out. I'm also pretty interested to see how the Aspect of the Viper changes feel on some big boss battles. It'll be nice to have to essentially have no mana regeneration worries ever again, assuming the current version stays as is.

What about you? Given everything we'll likely see in patch 3.0.2, what are you looking forward to doing while you wait for Wrath?

With the newest Beta build that hit live servers last night, MMO Champion found yet another round of inscription glyphs in the build. In particular, I'd like to talk about the Hunter glyphs. They still seem half-finished, with some values that are most definitely placeholder, and a good portion of them are firmly in the PvP camp.

Still, most of them are complete enough that they're worth analyzing, if only to know how to advise Blizzard to change them in future Beta builds. Not to say there aren't some good ones, but there's also some that no sane Hunter will use. Let's check them all out after the break.

With all the Hunter changes we've been promised in relation to PvP, one that has recently been announced may be the biggest yet. Disengage will be getting a new trick.

In a future Beta build, Disengage will cause the Hunter to jump back from their target 10-15 yards. As a result of this buff, however, the cooldown will be extended to 30 seconds.

This really is the change Hunters need, more that the recent Aspect of the Beast and Mongoose Bite changes by far. What we really needed is a way to get back to range, and between this and Master's Call, we should now have a relatively dependable non-talented way of doing just that. 10-15 yards may seem a bit low, but it should be more than enough to get off a quick concussive shot, set a trap, or use a talented crowd control ability such as Intimidation, which will become instant cast rather than on next attack.

Another set of baseline ability changes has to do with traps, and should be very helpful in both PvE and PvP. Freezing Trap will no longer break on any damage, but will instead break on a set amount of damage -- meaning a stray cleave or a miscast DoT won't completely ruin you. With this new functionality, Bear Trap will be removed and replaced at level 80 with Camouflage, which is returning after being discarded. Since setting a trap won't break Camouflage, it will become incredibly useful for setting PvP ambushes as well.

There's plenty of other exciting changes on the way for Hunters, including a talent tree revamp that's currently up on Blizzard's official Beta site. Look for analysis of that in the coming days on WoW Insider. It's looking more and more like Wrath's going to be a great time to be a Hunter, and we're looking forward to seeing how the class plays with all their new toys at level 80, in both PvP and PvE.