Welcome once again to Scattered Shots, WoW Insider's spot for all things Hunter, except for the stuff Big Red Kitty covers. Daniel Whitcomb will be your host today (a day late, for which he apologizes) as David Bowers tries to shake off some extra aggro.

The state of Hunters in PvP is perhaps one of the most debated subjects in WoW PvP. Some call Hunters overpowered for their dispelling Arcane Shot (which is going away in Wrath, to be sent to the non-damaging Tranquilizing Shot), while others point to their low Arena representation and the ease of using line of sight to negate most of their DPS and Abolish Poison to get rid of their main PvP utility as proof that they need buffs. Regardless, even the devs acknowledge that Hunters probably need some help in PvP, and class designer Koraa recently spoke on the subject on the Beta forums. In his post, he covered the problems he sees Hunters having, and how Blizzard will be helping with those moving forward into Wrath.

Unfortunately, his solutions seem confused in and of themselves. They involve giving Hunters more melee attack power (instead of more way to break from melee so they can use their ranged weapon) and a variety of talents scattered around many trees in such a way that it will be difficult for a solid PvP build to get them all. And, as I mentioned in a post yesterday, they still aren't giving pets resilience.

Other Hunters such as Megatf have done an excellent job responding to some of Koraa's points in the thread itself, but I'd like to address and respond to the post myself in this week's column, and see how they stack up to the problems Hunters face in small scale Arena PvP.

MMO-Champion got their hands on the Patch 2.3.2 notes and they contain many interesting changes. Some highlights include:

• "Withdraw Repair Only" control on the guild bank control panel that can be set by rank
  
• Many buffs (or un-nerfs really) for Hunters we covered in an earlier post
• Mana cost reduction for some Shaman spells as well as a change to how Water Shield restores mana
• Mage buffs we reported on earlier including Ice Block becoming a spell for all Mages and a replacement talent called Icy Veins.

There are many more class buffs, tradeskill tweaks, boss changes and bug fixes (including one for the button mashing issue). Check out the complete notes on MMO-Champion.

No word yet on when this Patch will hit the Test server.

EDIT: Hortus announced the PTR is coming up later today.

EDIT2: Not leaked anymore! Here's the official patch notes.

A few weeks ago, Eliah reported that buffs to the Mage class were slated for an upcoming patch and more details were released today. A few hours ago, Eyonix posted a listing of the changes that will be included in the next patch, 2.3.2. It sounds like the frost tree will be getting some nice buffs, but magi of all types will have reason to rejoice. Read the entirety of his post below.

Here's some more good news today for mages. On top of Hypothermia going back from 45s to 30s, Kalgan has stopped by the mage forums to promise some additional buffs in person. These probably won't make it into 2.3, but he says they'll go in "in the near future." My guess is that translates to 2.3.X or 2.4. It looks like Blizz is basically in a "buff" swing recently, which fits in with their general design philosophy -- start underpowered, and then build the classes up as necessary. Buffs make far fewer people angry than nerfs do.

What are these buffs, you ask? Trainable Ice Block, and "to-be-finalized improvements to mana issues in longer fights" (source). We've been seeing more and more skills moved to trainable as the game has matured, from Evocate to Holy Fire to Improved Sap. Ice Block mades good sense to add to that list. Kalgan's reasoning is that IB is something they want to be able to design PvE encounters around all mages having, and that it helps open up the range of viable specs for PvP. As far as the "mana issues" improvements, it's hard to comment too much on that without any details, but efficiency is good. Any speculation on what they're going to do there?

Oh, and in a later post, Kalgan lets slip that mana gems are also slated to be buffed. Let that be a sort of after-dinner mint of buffage.