Here are some upcoming changes for Hunters and Shadow Priests posted on the official forums earlier.
Hunter changes:
[BLUE=“http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11228402925&sid=2000”][hunter]Hunters[/hunter]
Two changes coming up:
We aren’t happy with how Aspect of the Viper is working in PvP, but it seems fine in PvE. We’re going to try changing it so that 50% of its current regen is passive, leaving the remaining 50% active. That should give hunters some more mana in Arenas in particular when dealing with opponents who manage to get out of LOS a lot. Yet, in PvE where hunter dps is very high, the difference in regen shouldn’t be very noticable. We are also going to let Viper return mana from melee attacks for those cases where a melee opponent is too close for comfort.
The second change is to some of the numbers on the special attacks of exotic pets to make sure the pets are around a 10% increase from normal pets. This should make exotic pets a reasonable benefit for the talent point (especially when you also count the bonus pet talents) without making every BM hunter feel like they are limited to just those pets.[/BLUE]
Shadow Priest changes:
[BLUE=“http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11224022301&sid=2000”][priest]Priests[/priest]
We need to fix two problems with Shadow priests. One is that their damage is too low, especially at epic level. The second is that stacking Vampiric Embrace from too many priests probably represents a balance problem. These changes will go live before Nov 13.
Vampiric Embrace—we need to nerf it, but we don’t want it to be terrible for priests in small groups or solo. So we are going to make it 5% healing to your group (not raid) but 25% healing to yourself. Assume the talents that affect it get it up to this level.
Vampiric Touch—we’re adding some of the damage adjustment to this spell, by doubling the coefficient (from 0.2 to 0.4).
Shadowform—we’re adding the rest of the adjustment here. Your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch do an additional percentage damage equal to your critical strike chance. Basically if your crit is 25%, your SW:P does 25% more damage. This has the side effect of making crit a little more useful for Shadow priests.
Since Affliction locks and other classes with many dots might ask, we think long term that a good thing to look at is making dots crit. We’re not sure yet if we’ll do this by just making them actually crit or adding more talents that do neat things with your crit rating, but it is definitely something we’re looking at.
There’s still the issue with Replenishment losing ticks while being refreshed.
I believe this is fixed. There was another bug related to Replenishment that should have been fixed as well.
The issue with VE, as a few other players have suggested, was that groups were going to stack shadow priests in order to have really good healing AND really good dps. You would have seen raids with a tank and 4 shadow priests in one of the groups. Remember, VE applies to the shadow priest’s damage. That makes it better than the death knight’s Blood Aura, which applies to individual dps. Blood Aura does not heal healers much for example.
As I said at Blizzcon, we nerfed the Shadow priest mana battery role and also let other specs provide that role. Since Shadow priests were virtually mandatory in BC, we thought it was only fair to seriously buff their dps. It has lagged behind, partially because they weren’t benefiting from all of the group crit buffs, though that’s not the only reason.
In our tests, these changes really turned them around, so we’re anxious to see how it works out in Arenas and raids. [/BLUE]
*sniff* i still love you shadow priests!