Monthly Archives: June 2014

Hunter News

WoD Alpha: Quick first impressions of the 3 hunter specs

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I’ve spent some time with all 3 specs recently. Ran the dungeon at least twice with each, and did a little bit of testing (what little I could without a damage meter). Yesterday, I shared some more general impressions of the alpha as a whole.  Today, I’m keeping it short and to the point.  I’m sure opinions will change as I play it more, but for now this is what stood out to me after my extremely limited experience in a single zone and a single dungeon over the course of a couple of days.

Beast Mastery

I had Improved Arcane Shot and Enhanced Basic Attacks for perks.

  • Hardly anything has changed vs. BM on live servers apart from the lack of Serpent Sting. I don’t miss Serpent Sting for BM at all.
  • Kill Shot is nice. It hits harder and the cooldown reset when it doesn’t kill the target is much faster.  Oh, and the 15% heal ain’t bad either.
  • Pet damage is a little low at the moment, but a numbers tuning pass hasn’t been done yet.
  • Blink Strikes is too mandatory to give up. Seems weird I’ll seemingly never have a desire to use Stampede as a beast mastery hunter.
  • This applies to all specs, but I like that pet buffs are permanent auras now.

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Hunter News

WoD Alpha Huntering: Day 1

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I’ve been in betas before, but never in something as early as a F&F alpha. I’m used to betas basically being finished products, minus some balancing or minor issues. This is a lot different from what I’m used to. A good deal of my time is filling in bug reports or crash reports it seems, but I’m happy to do it as it’ll help make the final product better. There’s still lots of fun to be had too.

The alpha starts you right after the Dark Portal intro event. Your 90-91 XP bar is half filled, which presumably will be where it’s at once you’ve completed that intro event. I was basically thrown right into my garrison, and the vast majority of the questing in Frostfire Ridge is tied into setting up your garrison and gathering followers.

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Hunter News

I’m in!

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I’ve safely landed in Draenor! Lots of huntery alpha coverage will be coming soon. I didn’t get things setup until very late tonight, but I did do a few quests and tamed my first two new pets (a savager ravager and one of the new boars) before I had to force myself to go to sleep.  Stay tuned for more. 🙂

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Hunter Pets

Pet of the Week: Arcturis

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Most people think that Loque’nahak is the most difficult spirit beast to tame, but I’d argue that honor goes to Arcturis. At least Loque has multiple spawn points, so you could always get lucky and find him at one of the spawns where no one is currently camping. Arcturis, on the other hand, spawns at a single location and almost always has at least 1-2 hunters camping that spawn point.

One of the problems with this is hunters will fight over the spawn and Arcturis ends up dead in the process. If you’re taking the camping approach, it might be best to befriend any other hunters who are camping. Perhaps you can come to some sort of agreement where neither of you will be jerks and kill the bear after someone starts taming it. If that doesn’t work, you might need to become a little more dedicated.

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Hunter News

Latest alpha patch notes clean up the Hunter spellbook [Updated]

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Updated: If you read this post earlier, there were some more hunter changes added to the notes. Updates are in red.

Blizzard just updated the alpha patch notes with a handful of hunter changes and an explanation of their philosophy on adding the new secondary stat attunements which were discovered in the previous build.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Official Forums)
A new concept that we’re introducing is each specialization having an attunement to a particular secondary stat. These take the form of a passive ability that grants a 5% increase to the amount of a specific secondary stat gained. This provides a good starting point for where to focus your secondary stats. Usually, it will be your highest throughput stat (not counting Spirit for Healers, and Bonus Armor for Tanks, which is an optimal secondary stat in most cases). There are exceptions, and raw throughput may not even be the biggest concern in some situations. Treat this as a guideline, not a rule, about which secondary stat to favor.

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Off Topic

TBT: The WoW machinima I was never able to finish

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Taking cue from Delirium and Darkbrew, I’m going to have my own TBT (or Throwback Thursday) posts from time to time. Especially now, there’s really not much to talk about aside from the occasional alpha or beta build. Since I’m not actually in the alpha, I can only say so much about what I read in the patch notes. Whenever I get in, that should change, but for now the odd nostalgia post will help keep me busy.

My first post is about my first (and only) WoW machinima I did back in mid-2009. It was called Conquering Ulduar and it was a cinematic look at Ulduar 25 raiding. The concept was pretty simple: I’d turn off my UI, and then run around and film the raid at interesting angles while trying not to get killed. I was killed a lot as you might imagine. Some of this video was filmed from the perspective of my corpse or resurrected as a DK ghoul. My guild was kind enough to carry me as I did this filming. I was inspired to do this video by Jack (who is also a hunter!) and all of his cinematic WoW machinimas he’s been making since vanilla (I love those things).

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Hunter News, Hunter Transmog

Hunter weapons in Warlords of Draenor

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I thought I’d put together a little post with pictures of all the datamined hunter weapons in Warlords of Draenor. This will be one of those posts I keep on the sidebar and I’ll update it any time new weapons are added.

I’ll link the appropriate items when I can, but some of them (like the questing ones) will be used for multiple weapons.

If you’re viewing this post long after Warlords has been released, keep in mind all of these are patch 6.0 models.

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Hunter News

Hunter changes in Warlords alpha build 18379

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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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Hunter News, Opinion

Lone Wolf: How to play a pet class without a pet

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Lone Wolf is a new level 100 talent for survival and marksmanship hunters. It’s kind of a big deal. It lets you play a pet class without a pet. Whoa. It’s pretty simple: Dismiss your pet and get a 30% damage buff. Lone Wolf is undoubtedly the result of player demand. Demand from all of the players who want to play an archer class without having to maintain a roster of pets. Even more demand from raiders who were sick of their pet doing silly things like getting stuck in random places and not doing any DPS.

I’m not currently in the alpha, so most of what follows is just speculation. I’m just going by what I can see on paper and the limited amount of info I’ve been able to gleam from the handful of hunter streamers in alpha.

The following talents and abilities will simply not function if you spec into Lone Wolf:

Spirit Bond is something I’d have trouble living without, though the new self-heals from Kill Shot and Survivalist will help somewhat. The loss of Master’s Call is probably a deal breaker for a lot of PvP hunters.

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Hunter Pets

Hook Wasps are joining the Wasp family, Rylaks will be exotic

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The previously announced Hook Wasp exotic pets are going to be folded into the regular Wasp family and will no longer be exotic. Replacing them as the new exotic family in Warlords will be the Rylaks. If you’re wondering what a Rylak is, it’s the same thing as an Iron Skyreaver mount (minus the rocket boosters) as seen above.

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