Patch 3.2.2 Hunter Changes

Some big changes to the Beast Mastery tree are coming up quickly, as the 3.2.2 patch is nearing its release.  Here are the changes:
 

Hunter

• Talents
  
  
  • Beast Mastery
    
    
    • The Beast Within: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds. In addition, hunters with this talent will do 10% additional damage at all times.
    • Bestial Wrath: The duration of this talent has been reduced to 10 seconds.
    • The Beast Within - Now reduces the mana cost of spells by 50% for 10 sec. (Was 20%)
    
      
    
  
  

For now it looks like patch 3.2.2 will leave BM Hunters as still the one trick pony with Bestial Wrath, but the trick will last much much shorter...  Even with the 10% damage buff to the Hunter, BM will be worse off after patch and less fun.
  

However, not all is bad, just today we received a very good answer from Blizzard on the direction BM might be headed:

Aarulan, I think those are all good points. I can't go into detail on all of them, but for starters Intimidation could be a lot better and Kill Command could be as fun as say Lock and Load instead of a macro'd ability. We're not going to be in a big hurry to buff Tranq Shot. It might be a better way to go to nerf all dispels to something more like that so that they didn't trivially undo buffs, debuffs and CC.

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer 

Link: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19820327060


If Blizzard does end up buffing Intimidation and Kill Command BM Hunters will gain utility, which BM severely lacks.  I just hope we see these buffs sooner rather than later (especially the Intimidation buff).