Closer and Closer

With parts of the 2.4 on the Blizzard background downloader, let's take a quick look at the small list of hunter changes that will be hitting the live realms shortly. Apart from a few animation and display fixes, we have:

• Hunter's Mark: Hunters with Improved Hunter’s Mark will now properly overwrite Hunter’s Mark cast by Hunters without the talent. Wow, this might be enough to undo part of my recent rejig and get Improved HM again if I can actually tell which mark on a boss is which.
  
• Improved Mend Pet now has a 25/50 chance to remove one Curse, Disease, Magic, or Poison effect, up from 15/50%. Very nice for BM hunters, this stops situations where it's easier to let your pet die and rez him clean than deal with unpleasant debuffs.
• Multi-Shot: This ability will no longer strike any secondary targets which are under the effect of crowd-control spells that break on taking damage. i.e. Polymorph, Sap, etc. I'm not sure I like this one - talk about easy mode! Note that the change says secondary targets, which I translate as meaning that multi will still break CC if you target a CCed mob directly, but it will certainly make multi a lot more useful in raids, instances and even PvP, where at least one enemy is CCed.
  
• Track spells will now persist after death. This isn't particularly earth shattering, but it makes life easier, particularly in battlegrounds.

That's it for 2.4 for hunter mechanics - not a lot, but a few interesting ones. The multi change dumbs things down a bit, but to be honest multi-shot was fairly underused in most circumstances. This change will make it more popular, and stop huntards everywhere from embarrassing themselves.