Patch 6.2 PTR: Build 20076

No new Hunter abilities, or major changes on the latest PTR build, but there it does look like they're getting started with spec balancing and set bonus tuning.  The changes for hunters are:

• BM 4 piece set bonus: Fel Boar melee attacks now do 60% less damage.
• BM 2 piece set bonus: Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot now add 1 second to the duration of Focus Fire. 
• SV 2 piece set bonus: When you cast Black Arrow, it applies the Black Decay debuff to the target, causing them to take 15% more elemental damage for 15 seconds. 
• A Murder of Crows: now deals 75% of normal damage when used against players by Beast Mastery hunters. 

While I love being incredibly OP as much as the next guy, I can't say we didn't all see the BM set bonus nerfs coming.  I think 2 seconds for the 2 piece would have had the same effect to your rotation, without causing as much of a nerf to damage.  At 1 second, it's not something you're ever going to really plan for, or change your rotation to accommodate. 

The 4 piece, for BM, of course, is the proverbial other shoe we've been waiting to drop.  For anyone curious, the Fel Boar's Attack Power is still, the same as the hunter's.  But where the formula had been 4(2*AP/3.5), it's now 1.6(2*AP/3.5).

As for SV, I really like this change.  The more I play with it, the more I like the Black Decay mechanic.  It makes our lack of AoE much more interesting, when paired with the Archimonde Trinket, as you'll have little windows where you'll want to do your single target rotation, and times when you can switch to multi-dotting.  I don't think the increase to 15% is enough to see Black Decay start to effect our Single Target rotation, but it's heading in the right way.  

The last thing, which I just saw on MMO-Champion's datamined info, I haven't actually tested myself (since I haven't tested any PvP), is that they brought down aMoC just a little bit more in PvP, but made the nerf apply to BM only. That's great. Even down to 75% of normal damage, for BM it will still do more damage than it would if you were playing MM or SV, since in WoD Season 2 conquest gear we're looking at fairly easily hitting 70-75% mastery (75% mastery means it'll be doing roughly 131.25% more damage than it would have were you MM or SV). 

Anyhow, not a lot going on (still no news on the lack of Careful Aim in the MM 2 piece set bonus). But, I haven't been writing many updates lately, and was looking at the changes to Fel Boar, thought I might as well write about it here.