Tag Archives: Hunter Set Bonuses

Antorus gear for Beast Mastery: Trinkets, set bonuses, and more

If you haven’t heard, tier sets are going away in Battle for Azeroth. So Antorus (Tier 21) will be the very last tier where we get class set bonuses. It’s also the final tier of the expansion, so that must mean Blizzard is going to give the system a nice send off and give us some truly cool bonuses to enjoy while we wait for BfA, right?

Oh, sweet summer child. No.

Updated Feb 6, 2018: Updated set bonus section for small hotfix buff to T21 4pc. It now reduces the cooldown by 3.0 sec. See the Set Bonus FAQ for discussion on this.

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Hunting Party Podcast Episode 210: Preparing for patch 6.1

Wow, have we already done 10 of these? In this episode, Darkbrew, Delirium, Solarflair, and Bendak talk about upcoming changes to hunters in patch 6.1, talk Blackrock Foundry, and give a detailed rundown of the tier 17 set bonuses for all specs. We also say goodbye to Scattered Shots and WoW Insider. If you missed my final Scattered Shots, you can read it here.

The show is broadcast live on Twitch TV every second Sunday at 10:00 am ET (14:00 GMT). In addition to the live show, you can find it at:

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WoD Beta 18888: Tier 17 set bonus testing, Dire Beast and Survival nerfs

Updated to include a new Black Arrow nerf from Sept. 23 build.

Survival got some small nerfs in this build. I’m kind of perplexed by this since it was already doing less damage than BM and MM. Maybe the accompanying MM/BM changes will be in the next build? I really don’t understand what’s going on. As I said on twitter earlier, context matters. Unfortunately I have no context at all, so it’s pointless to comment.

  • Explosive Shot now deals (39% attack power) Fire damage per tick (down from 42%)
  • Serpent Sting now deals (160% attack power) Nature damage over 15 sec (down from 175%)
  • Black Arrow now deals (400% attack power) Shadow damage over 20 sec (down from 500%)
  • Dire Beast now restores 2 focus per hit (down from 5 focus)

And the Dire Beast nerf is one I truly don’t understand. It’s so unwarranted that I’m tempted to call it a bug. The reason you wouldn’t have seen this change on MMO-C or Wowhead is that the tooltip still indicates 5 focus, but while I was testing the set bonuses I immediately noticed the change on my scrolling combat text.

Now that the nerfs are out of the way, the cool thing about this build is that you can snag a full set of heroic tier 17 gear (Rylakstalker) from the Flaskataur vendor! This means we can finally play around with the new set bonuses! I tested them all for a bit and here are my observations.

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More changes to T17 Hunter set bonuses

Beta build 18537 went up and with it comes the third round of changes to hunter tier 17 set bonuses. There’s some real cool stuff here, but knowing how often these have changed so far, don’t get too attached. Although I’m sort of already attached to this new BM one…

Beast Mastery
  • 2-piece bonus: Kill Command has a 25% chance to reset the cooldown of Bestial Wrath.
  • 4-piece bonus: While Bestial Wrath is active, one additional pet is summoned to fight with you.

The 4p bonus was unchanged from before, only the 2p bonus is new. Yeah, so, this is pretty awesome. The best pet is a big red pet. These are the types of set bonuses I’d come up with on a wish list. Stuff that is sitting right on the line dividing realistic and too good to be true. I know some people dislike RNG bonuses like this, but I’ve always liked them.

I still wonder if the 4p bonus is just going to summon a Dire Beast or if it’ll be an actual pet from your current active pets with full abilities and all (or at least basic attacks).

What I would change: Nothing, except maybe a guarantee that the second pet it pulls out will be the first available one in your list. Say you have pet 3 summoned, it will summon pet 1. If you have pet 1 summoned, it would summon pet 2.

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WoD Alpha build 18443: Hunter tier 17 armor revealed, new set bonuses

The vast majority of hunter changes in this build are tooltip changes for clearer wording, or to merge two abilities into one to reduce spellbook clutter. Piercing Shots is still listed in this build even though it’s supposedly getting removed, but I would wager that it’s just an oversight. The Enhanced Piercing Shots perk for marksmanship, which would have added Piercing Shots to Multi-Shot, has been changed to Improved Chimera Shot. Before we get started, keep in mind that some of these set bonuses could still change.

Beast Mastery T17 Set Bonuses
  • 2-piece: Kill Command has a 25% chance to increase the size and damage of your pet by 10% for 8 seconds.
  • 4-piece: While Bestial Wrath is active, one additional pet is summoned to fight with you.

These are much nicer than the old temporary ones. The 2-piece bonus lasts just long enough so you can apply its bonus to your next Kill Command.

The 4-piece sounds like it might just be an extra Dire Beast summon that pops during Bestial Wrath, which means probably only melee attacks and no specials. I hope I’m wrong and it pulls another one of your active pets with all its abilities intact (or at least claw/bite/smack). That would be very nice.

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Hunter changes in Warlords alpha build 18379

Not too many changes to report here, though Celestalon did say this build was created in the middle of them adding a lot of changes, which is why some classes got more than others. Hunters were one of the classes missing out for this build.

New passive abilities

All classes received these new attunement abilities with a different stat for each spec. I’m not sure what the point of them is. Either they wish for these particular stats to be stronger for their respective specs, or they’re worried that these particular stats will have less value so they’re trying to balance them out.

The chosen stats make me think it’s the former. Beast Mastery definitely values mastery more than the others, and Survival is all about lots of smaller individual hits and ticks so there’s more chances for Multistrike to proc. I would have expected a haste boost for Marksmanship, but I suppose crit plays well with Enhanced Aimed Shot.

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