WoW Patch 3.2 brings some Hunter love

I discussed last week about how Hunter trapping and crowd control had gone the way of the dodo. And now as reported earlier today, we have much to celebrate with the release of the official Patch 3.2 PTR Notes. Ghostcrawler and the development team are really showing us Hunters some much needed luvin.
Aspect of the Cheetah: Can now be learned at level 16. I was really wondering what we were going to do now that mounts were available at 20. It seems we are in good hands. We only have 16 painful levels of slow run until we can get Aspect of the Cheetah and start zipping around.

Deterrence now has a new visual spell effect. New graphics are always cool.

The time that traps will exist in the world after being put down has been reduced to 30 seconds, down from 1 minute. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this one. I guess if your target hasn't tripped your trap in 30 seconds, they probably never will.
Traps now have separate 30 second cooldown categories: Fire (Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap and Black Arrow), Frost (Freezing Trap, Frost Trap) and Nature (Snake Trap). A hunter can have one trap of each category placed at one time. Is this the best thing since peanut butter on pancakes or what! Separate cooldowns? Finally, the ability to fire off Black Arrow, drop both a Freeze and Snake traps basically at the same time. I can't wait to take this one on a test drive.

Talents
Beast Mastery
Catlike Reflexes now also reduces the cooldown of your Kill Command ability by 10/20/30 seconds. How about that folks, even our Beast Mastery Hunters got some help. Being able to use Kill Command more often will definitely help out the Beast Master's DPS.

Survival
Entrapment: This talent no longer works with Immolation Trap or Explosive Trap. Lock and Load: Now has a 22 second cooldown. The Lock and Load effect cannot be obtained on targets immune to snare effects when Frost Trap is used. Well, we might not be able to use Entrapment like we have in the past. But that's okay since Immolation or Explosive Traps still share a cooldown with Black Arrow. Since I don't see anything really big there, I have to be missing something. I need to look more into this one.

But did you catch that Lock and Load cooldown? I noticed a couple of things. First we're seeing it on a 22 second cooldown. Looks like this might give our Survival Hunter friends some extra procs. Too bad we can't just go off hootin' and hollerin' though, seems that if your enemy is immune to the snare effects of Frost Traps you won't be getting any Lock and Load procs. All that really means is we just need to be smarter than the average Rogue.

Pets

Roar of Sacrifice: Redesigned. This ability can now be used on any friendly target to make that target immune to critical strikes, but the Hunter pet takes 20% of all damage taken by that friendly target. Cool down increased to 2 minutes. This is a major sweet change. One of the things I've always wanted was to be able to use Roar of Sacrifice to help my party members out. Now I can do that. How unbelievably sweet is that!

Now for the down side, we might have to rethink some pet talents to give our pets some extra Health since they'll be taking a 20% hit on ALL damage taken by our friend.

The cooldown change will impact PvP Hunters since the cooldown will be 2 minutes versus the 30 seconds it is now. Also, we PvE Hunters will be limited to only once per battle now. That being the case, we'll need to make sure and keep an eye on that cooldown.

Macros


Macros and scripts will no longer be able to target totems by name. Seems we'll have to find a new macro to use while in PvP. We can't just spam our Attack Totem macro and let Fluffy wreak havoc. But don't despair. I'm sure us Hunters will come up with something.

Well, that wraps up what we have heard so far. These are some serious changes and I can't wait to take a deeper look into how they are going to impact how we play our favorite class. So stay tuned, I'll be on the case and keep you updated as the Patch 3.2 PTR progresses.