Talisman of the Master Tracker

A significant change for at least 2 of the 3 hunters specs will come after killing tier 18's final boss. The Talisman of the Master Tracker is a trinket dropping from Archimonde, which will make small to moderate changes in our rotations, depending on what difficulty Archimonde you kill.

Beast Mastery: Bestial Wrath now lasts an additional 30 sec on your pet, and it increases your pet's damage.

BM hunters won't see much in the way of rotational changes due to this trinket. With Bestial Wrath's pet damage being increased for 40 seconds of up-time, there's not even much need to plan out CDs to overlap, as almost everything will. This (along with the BM 4 piece set bonus) will continue to increase the value of Mastery and Haste, as both will work multiplicatively with this bonus (at least slightly more than Crit, MS or Versa).

I haven't seen many simulations done for BM considering trinkets yet, but it would seem this would be ideal for both Single Target and AoE (and should help particularly with sustained AoE). Though we'll have to wait and see how the trinkets are tuned before knowing if the Talisman makes it onto the BiS list.

Marksmanship: Your Shots deal increased damage per yard between you and the target.

This definitely fits with MM's image as the "turret" spec.  Of course, on training dummies this trinket feels ideal, though it will take a lot of consideration of the particular mechanics of any fight before we know whether or not the trinket is worth using.

Considering how low mastery is in our stat priority, we're not going to see a lot of chances to make this is a particularly large buff.  In the gear I was wearing to test on the PTR, I had a range of 47 yards, which would have given me about a 15% damage buff with the mythic version of this trinket. That is definitely not insignificant, but there's rarely a chance to just stand still at max distance.  Mostly because you need to do mechanics, but also because tanks rarely keep bosses perfectly still, and if the boss takes a step or two away while you're in the middle of a cast, you'll be losing out on more than 15% of your damage.

One side effect of this trinket is, because it does not increase pet damage, it's looking as though, if you get the trinket before you get your 4 set, it will pull Lone Wolf up to be our top level 100 talent, especially as the Lone Wolf +30% damage buff and trinket damage buff seem to work multiplicatively.

Another side effect of the Talisman, is it takes Barrage out of our possible talents.  As barrage continues to not work with Sniper Training's added range (you'll be able to cast it from over 40 yards, but it won't do any damage), you'll most likely want to use Power Shot, which feels pretty good with the current state of Marksmanship.

Survival: Arcane Shots and Multi-Shots have a chance to reset the cooldown of Black Arrow.

While playing Survival is not really an option at current tuning levels (it still has not received any attention since the huge Serpent Sting nerf that was announced around the time of the first PTR patch notes), I did have a lot of fun trying to get the most out of this trinket.

When playing on counsel-type fights, the Talisman has great synergy with our 2 piece set bonus. What I liked to do, was cast a single Multi-Shot (as Multi-Shot has been nerfed to the ground, there's pretty much no reason to ever spam Multi-shot in 6.2; since there will be no extra serpent sting ticks, they won't have the added benefit of the Black Decay buff, where Arcane Shot will) to apply serpent sting to all targets, then choose a target to start with, and you'll do 10-15 seconds of your rotation on that target, starting with Black Arrow.  After Black Arrow is cast, you have 15 seconds of Black Decay, which increases all of your elemental damage, so you'll want to stick to the target with black arrow on them, fire off your Explosive Shots and Arcanes Shots (hopefully a Lock and Load proc or two), until one of your Arcane Shots resets the CD on Black Arrow again, at which point you'll switch to the next target, cast Black Arrow (which again, applies Black Decay), and cast your single target abilities on there again.  You can complete this rotation on all of your targets, just making sure to: A. reapply serpent sting to all targets every 15 seconds; B. cast your single target abilities on whichever target has Black Decay; C. switch targets to re-cast Black Arrow as often as possible.  This may cause problems if you have a particular target you're trying to priorities, at which point you'll simply want to make sure you always keep Black Arrow running on that target, and do as much during the Black Decay portion as possible.

The benefits of the Talisman are much murkier in Single Target fights, or fights with short bursts of adds.  While, again, there's little chance you'd want to play that SV in these situations, if you are a die-hard SV fan, there may be some small things you can do to gain a little bit of extra DPS (assuming you don't have a different trinket you can equip instead).  The trick to optimizing DPS with single target is similar to Multi-target, in that it has to do with taking advantage of your 2 piece set bonus.  The first thing you can do (and this applies with or without the Talisman) is use up as much of your focus as possible while Black Decay is active.  You can then cast four or 5 cobra shots in the time in between black decays. The second, is there will be times where it's beneficial to re-apply Black Arrow before the previous Black Arrow is finished ticking; namely, right before your 3 Explosive Shots if LnL procs late.  This works out because the most you risk cutting off is 1 or 2 ticks, and the extra damage on your Explosive Shots should easily make up for that.

Talisman of the Master Tracker

While these may not be the most powerful trinkets, they're certainly interesting, and for both MM and SV, should provide some compelling decisions to be made during fights.  I'm fairly dissapointed that the spec the majority of players will be playing (which is currently capable of significantly more DPS than the other two), BM, gets the least interesting effect. I don't like the idea of specs have large amounts of passive damage, and this trinket just adds to that passive damage.  Hopefully that means they'll tune the other trinkets to be more worthwhile, though.