Tag Archives: featured

Hunter Guides, Hunter News

Beast Mastery Hunter Guide for Battle for Azeroth

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Just thought I’d post that everything has been updated on my Wowhead Beast Mastery Guide and is now relevant for level 120. The guide is more detailed than it has been in the past as Wowhead has really upped their standards for class guides (seriously, this was a ton of work). You can easily access it on any Wowhead page by hovering over the Hunter icon at the top, but I will link all the pages of the guide here too for convenience.

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Hunter Pets

Guide to Hunter Pets in Battle for Azeroth

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Hunter pets are being streamlined in Battle for Azeroth. You can no longer freely choose the specialization for each of your pets because each family has a set specialization. Pets from all three specializations — Ferocity, Tenacity, and Cunning — will all deal the same DPS and have the same amount of baseline health and armor, but they will be differentiated by new and powerful abilities. Additionally, every pet family now has some a special family ability (even if many of them are duplicates of others). All Exotic pet families (Beast Mastery only) have at least 2 special abilities.

As we are still in beta, none of this is final. This post will be updated whenever new pets are added or changes are made.

Latest Update (June 28): 10 MORE STABLE SLOTS!

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Hunter Pets

How to craft (and tame) your very own Iron Juggernaut

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Well, this is a first. In Legion (well, technically patch 7.0) Hunters will be able to venture into Siege of Orgrimmar and gather parts to make their very own Iron Juggernaut pet — in four different colors! To fully discover all the ins and outs of this taming challenge took many hours of searching around SoO, and the rest of Azeroth for that matter. I spent most of the time searching around with Valnaaros from the Petopia forums.

One of the parts needed turned out to be extremely well hidden, and when we didn’t see it on first inspection we assumed it was found elsewhere. After visiting every gnomish and goblin type area in WoW, we finally went back to SoO and found the missing piece. If you want to discover all this for yourself, skip the guide section below.

Note: There is currently a bug with these where you cannot tame them below level 120. Wait until you’re 120 before you spawn them! But if you used it before 120 and got the “too high level” message then you should be able to make a ticket and ask for it to be restored since this is a bug.

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Hunter Pets, Opinion

How Blizzard could bring back Hunter pet loyalty

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Hunter pets back in vanilla were convoluted by today’s standards. You couldnt’ simply tame a pet and use it. You had to worry about several things:

  1. Pets did not level up to your level. If you were level 60 and tamed a level 10 pet, you would have to manually level them up. Very slowly, since they weren’t able to do any tanking for you when they’d get killed in a few hits.
  2. Pets had 6 loyalty levels, which also had to be leveled up. The more loyal they were, the easier it was to keep them happy.
  3. Pet Happiness had to be kept up by feeding your pet regularly, if you didn’t keep your pet happy they would do less damage. If they stayed unhappy for too long, they would permanently abandon you.

In today’s WoW this simply wouldn’t fly, but there was something good buried under all that. Hunters tended to pick a single pet and stick with it (helped that we could only have 2 other pets in the stable at the time). Rak’shiri was my main pet through a good part of vanilla. Your pet was your best buddy because you worked so hard to get them there. Not like today where it’s almost become a collection mini-game.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy collecting pets, but I still think something was lost from the spirit of the class. Pets feel more disposable than ever.

It got me wondering if there was a way to bring back the idea of a hunter bonding with their pet, without all of the baggage that made it not fun.

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Hunter Guides, Opinion

Beast Mastery in 6.1

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Well, it’s been a couple of weeks since patch 6.1 dropped and I can say I haven’t once specced out of Beast Mastery the entire time, and I’m loving it. I don’t know what it is, but I just have more fun playing it. Survival is still strong but it was becoming stale for me. What I like about BM is all of the opportunities to stack cooldowns and trinkets. Focus Fire has turned into its own little mini-game, with a ton of variables to take into account rather than the old method of simply using it when the button flashed.

I feel like having so much DPS potential built into Focus Fire has added an entire new dimension to the spec that rewards you for proper decision making. There is a downside with the RNG component, but that probably helps keep it balanced. If gaining Frenzy stacks was more predictable, it’s possible that Focus Fire wouldn’t be able to have the same power level. And to be honest, the awesome feeling I get when I have a pull with good Frenzy stacks outweighs the pulls where I have bad luck. I actually grin when I get good RNG as I play Beast Mastery. I never did that with survival.

In the first paragraph I said I don’t know what it is, but I guess I just answered my own question.

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Hunter Pets, Opinion

What new pets do you want to see?

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I’ve written posts in the same vein as this before (like this Scattered Shots) and I try my best not to sound like a spoiled, entitled hunter. The reality is, we have a crapton of pets to choose from. There’s not much reason to beg for more, but hey, Muffinus asked! The same designer responsible for Gara and other new pet families in in 6.0.

So with that in mind, I thought it would be cool to touch on some of the interesting potential pets out there. Think of it as a wishlist. Some of them are new skins for existing families, and some would have to be new families entirely (much less likely outside of a new expansion).

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News, Hunter Pets

How to tame Gara the Spirit Beast

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A couple of nights ago, a bunch of hunters banded together on Twitter and the Petopia forums to try to solve the Gara mystery on the beta. Those I recognized from the forums or Twitter were right beside me in game trying to figure out the same problems, coming up with crazy theories, and just having fun. After a massive group effort and a little bit of luck, Gara has finally been solved.

Just how do we tame her? It turns out that it’s become more complicated than any of us ever imagined. Thanks to some clever datamining of some spell IDs by someone on the Petopia forums, we received enough clues to get past our 4-day rut of no progress beyond the Shadowberries step.

Taming Gara takes you across all of Draenor, and to me it’s basically a mini class quest without actually calling itself a quest. It’s not on the same level as say the warlock green fire quest, but make no mistake, a good deal of effort went into creating this event for hunters!

Basic Requirements:

  • Level 90+
  • Horde or Alliance
  • Beast Mastery spec

What follows contains spoilers, so stop here if you want to discover everything for yourself (and good luck with that!).

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Hunter Pets

New hunter pet families in Warlords of Draenor

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Warlords of Draenor is introducing five new hunter pet families, bringing the grand total to 48 different families. It’s kind of disturbing to think that we barely have enough stable slots to house one pet from each family. Many families will remain unrepresented in my stables unfortunately (WTB more stable slots), but these five new families will not be among the excluded.

One of the new families (Clefthooves) is a rename of an existing one to incorporate some new beasts, but the other four are brand new.

  • Hydras
  • Clefthooves (Exotic) — formerly known as Rhino
  • Riverbeasts
  • Stags
  • Rylaks (Exotic)

First things first, you can check out the below video I made previewing the new families.  I picked a handful of pets from each family to show off. It is by no means an exhaustive list, if it was I would have never finished the video.  I recommend fullscreen 1080p for this one. Lots of cool scenery! Enjoy.

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Hunter Guides

Hunter Soloing in Warlords: The Inside Scoop

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Editor’s Note: I’d like to welcome Shoot from Nightmare Asylum as another guest writer on Eyes of the Beast. Shoot has many world first hunter solo achievements under his belt. He is also one of the raid leaders of Team Hunter, the all-hunter raid group currently tearing its way through heroic MoP raids.

Hello, my name is Shoot and I’m a hunter raider and soloist in the WoW community.

Many WoW players in the community are enjoying the Warlords of Draenor beta raid testing and leveling, but a lot of people are curious what soloing is like and how the item squish affects it. Let’s start off by taking a look at older content on the live servers and compare it to beta servers from a hunter perspective.

Soloing on Live

  • Tier 10 and lower: Bosses are fairly easy to solo and do not require a high amount of gear or damage.
  • Tiers 11 – 13 (Cataclysm): Bosses are soloable; some bosses require mechanics that must be followed, but some bosses are still an all out damagefest and do not require much awareness or gear. Any boss in 25H is generally very difficult and requires a high amount of gear and special tactics.
  • Tiers 14 – 16  (MoP): Most bosses are impossible to solo as a hunter. Currently there have only been two Mists of Pandaria raid bosses that were soloed by a hunter in 10 normal. You can watch those videos below.

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Off Topic

10 Years, 10 Questions

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The ALT:ernative Chat blog has started a “10 Years :: 10 Questions” project, asking players to answer 10 questions about their finest memories in World of Warcraft. She plans on reading them all and producing a series of podcast documentaries featuring some of the best entries.

I thought this project sounded pretty awesome, and I’ll never turn down an opportunity to wax nostalgic about my old times in WoW. I chose to answer my questions in blog form, but you can also submit your answers directly to the project here.

Ready to be crit with a wall of text for over 9000? Then continue reading…

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