Hunter changes

As Blizzard and a number of blogs have reported, the hunter talents and skills are out. There is a leaked list of pet abilities out there, but I'm going to avoid comment until Blizzard "officializes" them (yes, I made that word up).

Of note today is a post where Blizzard discusses a number of changes to the formulae that the hunter uses to calculate damage, dodge, and crit. What strikes me immediately is that Hunters are going to become much more viable in melee than previous. They're crit chance should be equivilant to a rogues and they'll acutally have a pretty decent chance to dodge. The reduction of RAP to 1 per Agility should have interesting effects as it will require massive reitemization, though I've yet to deduce how they'll do it. Oh, ranged DPS shouldn't change much as they are going to up the damage on ranged weapons significantly, which will actually help non-hunters also as ranged attacks will actually be somewhat useful for anything other than pulling.

In case it isn't obvious, I'm looking forward to the expansion and all the changes that will come with it.