The talent changes mentioned earlier in the official patch notes all seem to be active in this beta build. I’ll go over those again, but first there is some news on Gara the Spirit Beast. You can read up on Gara here, but the TL;DR is that it’s a new spirit beast with some kind of quest/event/challenge required in order to tame. According to Muffinus, it has been fully implemented as of this build.
@BendakWoW Fully implemented, good luck 🙂
— Jeremy Feasel (@Muffinus) September 3, 2014
If you want to avoid anything Gara related and discover it for yourself, you’ll want to skip down until the talent changes section.
The picture above shows a group of us hunters searching for clues, trying to find out what the next step was after scratching her behind the ears. We… haven’t made much progress yet. There’s been one new dialogue option with the wolf, but that’s all I’ve discovered so far. When you have a Shadowberry in your inventory it gives you an option, but nothing seems to happen other than another hint. The image below shows the progression in dialogue.
Update on Gara: For the latest info on Gara, see this new post. Most of the speculation below has been ruled out.
Things that have been tried:
- Using any emote we could think of on Gara (/pet, etc.)
- Talking to Gara with food in inventory.
- Kiting Mother Om’ra all the way over to Gara (she is the one who drops the Shadowberries).
- Trying to tame the spirit wolves Om’ra spawns.
- Visiting Gara and Om’ra as a ghost (can’t see them).
- Using Flare and other hunter abilities (feed pet, beast lore, etc.)
- Killed Shinri the spectral talbuk to see if he dropped any spirit meat or something along those lines (lol).
- Visited Gara on subsequent days to see if it’s some kind of daily progress.
- Explored all around Shadowmoon, and some of Frostfire for clues.
Other potential clues:
- The large gravestone has what appears to be the Frostwolf clan symbol as well as some paw prints on it.
- There are 3 smaller gravestones. One with a sword, one with a shield, and one has nothing on it. Maybe missing something?
- The Shadowberry tooltip says “Has a very distinctive smell” and when you show them to Gara she sniffs them. That’s got to be some kind of clue.
- I found this Void Lantern item in the most recent build. Maybe we need to be in the void realm to tame? No idea where it drops though.
I’m sure someone will crack it soon. Maybe it’ll even be solved by the time I wake up tomorrow. Have any thoughts? Be sure to leave them in the comments. I’ll try anything!
Update on Gara: For the latest info on Gara, see this new post.
Talent and Spell Changes
We’ve got some more number tuning, and the talent changes previously reported have been implemented into this build. Survival is also back to its old Lock and Load mechanic.
Beast Mastery
- Kill Command now deals 204% attack power damage (down from 240%)
- Kill Shot now deals 660% weapon damage (up from 550%)
Kill Command keeps getting nerfed with each passing build. I guess it’s hard to understand without seeing the overall picture of where they want every class.
Marksmanship
- Aimed Shot now deals 420% weapon damage (up from 350%)
- Kill Shot now deals 660% weapon damage (up from 550%)
- Steady Shot now deals 75% weapon damage (up from 60%)
Again, with no big picture it’s hard to know what the heck is going on. For those who are worried, Chimaera Shot still does more damage, so you’ll still want to prioritize it in most cases. Except perhaps Careful Aim. I’ll let a math guy like Delirium check that one out. 😛
Survival
- Black Arrow now deals 500% attack power damage over 20 sec (down from 510% over 18 sec)
- Lock and Load has been returned to its previous version: Your Black Arrow periodic damage has a 20% chance to trigger Lock and Load, causing your next two Explosive Shots to cost no Focus and trigger no cooldown.
- Black Arrow’s cooldown is reset when it gets dispelled.
- Survivalist now increases the damage of your multistrikes by 20% (Old: Increased multistrike chance by 10%)
Note that even though LnL is returning to its old version, it no longer has an internal cooldown (it used to be 10 sec). It’s also back to ticking every 2 sec instead of every 3. There is one guaranteed proc per Black Arrow, but more can happen. In my limited testing, extra procs were extremely rare. Also note that LnL charges no longer stack, so if you get another proc before you use the charges they are wasted. The cooldown reset on dispel is a welcome change for PvPers.
Since we’re back to the old LnL, the baseline multistrike is no longer required in order to ease the transition from 90-100. Instead they’ve opted to increase multistrike damage for survival.
Talents
- Thrill of the Hunt now has a 6% chance to trigger for every 10 focus spent. (Old: 20% flat chance). Here is what the proc chance works out to:
- Aimed Shot: 30%
- Arcane Shot: 18%
- Multi-Shot: 24%
- Kill Command: 24%
- Chimaera Shot: 21%
- Explosive Shot: 9%
- Glaive Toss: 9%
- Barrage: 36%
- A Murder of Crows: 18%
- A Murder of Crows has been changed. Its duration, cost, and cooldown have been reduced by 50%. It no longer has a shorter cooldown when used on low health targets. Instead, its cooldown is reset if the target dies.
- Fervor has been replaced with a new passive: Steady Focus
- Steady Focus increases Focus Regeneration by 50% for 10 seconds after using Cobra Shot or Steady Shot twice in a row, or after using Focusing Shot.
- Barrage now costs 60 Focus (up from 30 Focus), and its damage has been increased (or it was supposed to, I’m not sure that change made it in).
- Wyvern Sting now has a 1.5 sec cast time.
Steady Focus seems a bit underwhelming at first glance considering it only affects passive regeneration. It does add up over time though. I think the talent encourages a little bit more aggressive use of focus. You can’t afford to hover in the middle too often when you’re forced to do back-to-back generators or you’ll risk focus capping (very bad). In that sense, the talent does change the gameplay. Maybe it will be a better companion to Focusing Shot since it only takes one to activate it? It also seems like a talent that’ll get better as the expansion goes on. It may take until T18 for its long-term focus returns match that of Fervor.
I don’t think the Barrage changes mentioned in the patch notes have been fully implemented. In the notes it said it was being reduced to a 20 second cooldown and that it’s damage was being buffed. I’m pretty sure the damage is the same as it used to be. All that has changed in this build is a doubling of the focus cost I think?
I like the A Murder of Crows change quite a bit. I like how you can use it at any time and not feel like you’re wasting it. Heck, you can even use it while leveling now. Can you imagine using the current AMoC like that? I sure can’t.
Note that the Thrill of the Hunt tooltip says it affects your next 6 shots. It’s actually still just 3. An unfortunate tooltip error! The proc chances scaling with focus cost make a lot of sense to me, but this change just made Marksmanship AoE even worse (if that’s even possible). Because of Bombardment, Multi-Shots will only have a 9% chance to proc for Marksmanship the majority of the time.
Other Stuff
- T17 2p Survival bonus: When you cast Black Arrow, you automatically trigger Lock and Load. This will make for 2 guaranteed LnL procs per Black Arrow.
- Crackshot Longrifle: Really cool new gun model!
- The engineer crafted (BoP) gun seems to have 3 item level stages — 630, 640, and 655. It also seems to get random secondary stats upon crafting.
- No major taming changes for pets. Many basic pet models still cannot be tamed.
- The skeletal wind serpents in Spires of Arak are no longer tameable. That sucks.
- Tons of other non-hunter stuff. View the Wowhead post.
i guess you dont pvp much cause that wyvern sting change is HUGE. that leaves only intimidation as our instant cast cc. i guess it was comming as most other classes dont have instant cast cc anymore.
will be interesting to see how we end up in the balance of pvp.
I sat next to Gara for a good hour last night pondering this. The only other thing I could think of (but haven’t tried yet) was that she was looking for ingredients for a recipe? I’ll need to check and see if Shadowberries are part of any meal or something like that. That’s my 2 cents.
Can’t find any recipe or food with them as ingredients. Back to square 1 methinks!
Shadowberry recipe is a good idea, warcraftpets showed a ghostly frostwolf pup pet. I wonder if you can stir Gara to action with a puppy to watch over.
What about using/eating the shadowberries where she can see you?
Eating the Shadowberry did not seem to have any effect on Gara. I did notice that notice that if you have the Shadowberry buff that the non-aggressive ghost wolves in the area will become aggressive towards you.
Those ghost wolves are pets of the ghostly ancestors. Only the ancestors drop loot, but they don’t seem to drop anything but junk. There’s a small possibility that if you kill them with the berry buff they’ll drop and item. I’m not convinced of that though.
That’s got to be part of it, surely? Gosh this has me stumped.
Weird I’m not seeing that. The spirit wolves are still neutral for me w/ berry buff.
They stay neutral in color, but they will sometimes attack you if you have berries in your inventory.
Not seeing that either. At least not yet
Same for me – spirit wolves remain neutral with berry buff.
Steady Focus doesn’t seem to be triggering off of Focusing Shot in the current build, and the tooltip doesn’t reflect that aspect of gameplay either. Was it changed?
Ok, Aoife is now trying to figure it out. I’ve already seen Mizzy and Silanah and a few others this morning, paying visits to Gara. I love puzzles like this….
can you use the feed pet ability on the berries and target Gara? just a thought.
Tried ‘feed pet’ with the berries and got ‘Your pet doesn’t like that food’
Damn…
The black german sheppard which played Sirius Black in animal form in the Harry Potter movies is/was called Shadowberry. Not sure if that is a coincidence.
make that german shepherd 😉
Looks like the damage increase is in there for Barrage, though I thought in the forums Celestalon had said a 20 sec CD for barrage, which isn’t in the build. I’m still not able to get barrage to do more damage than GT, but at higher haste levels, it may.
Ah, I had no reference beyond the tooltip since I didn’t use it a whole lot in beta. Seemed underwhelming (for single target) for 60 focus and 30 sec cooldown.
It looks like instead of reducing the cd to 20sec (like celestalon said in the beta forums) they increased the damage even more. Where in the past you got 16 shots over the cast, and each shot did .4 weapon damage ((6.4*weapon damage)/16), it’s now doing your weapon damage for each individual shot, so it’s like there are 16 autoshots strung together really fast. That’s a bit more than the 100% increase, which is, I imagine, why they didn’t decrease the CD.
That seems like a lot. Guess I need to give it another go.
Also, it could be a tooltip error, but did you see the other TotH change?
The 6 charges thing I mentioned? Yeah that’s an error. Still 3.
Hmm – can’t get on Petopia forums – will post here I guess instead
Just made my first pass in FFR – nothing. Hit up all the suspect spots. Only stones with wolf on them were frostwolf clan areas (not surprising) – I noticed that the stuff around them were pretty much the same as by gara – so I think looking for a weapon to lay down or something is a dead end. Art assets are art assets :/
The one hit wolves still one hit me with berry buff – nothing could be found there either.
Tried a few more things with Mother Wolf – and her corpse once you do her quest – can target her corpse – almost thought I had it when it started to let me rez pet on her – was bugged though.
Couldn’t find anywhere else that stuck out or dropped anything – went to all the places that have wolves.
Never found anything back in Shdwmoon either – the only thing I couldn’t really test out was – matriarch wolf Rare – right next to alli town (North across river area of Gara area) – seems to be a quest or she just never spawned when I was in area – looked like you have to kill a bunch of wolves there ? – didn’t try doing that – assumed it was an alli quest thing.
The neutral wolves in Gara area – do not go hostile if you have berry buff – if you eat a berry by them – so not sure why people thought they were aggroing when they had berry buff?
Tried stuff with mother and SB again – trapping at different times – kiting them to different spots –
collected all the offerings in area -did nothing either (was actually the very first thing I did before killing mother the first time)
I am really starting to think something isn’t working right somewhere along the line – or this is the most convoluted taming thing going on. Past tames were either camp it – find it by tracking – and then challenge by using different abilities. I have tried numerous things that simulated these methods – nada
not sure if they would really make us go to different zones or not –
what was it that muffins said in a tweet – we would feel connected with the SB when we finally got her????
Regarding the Ghoswolves, Bendak and found that they aggro you when you pull your pet out. They don’t seem to like pets. Nothing to do with berries, and probably a bug.
another thought. did anyone try to scan Gara with Beast Lore by chance?
Yes, doesn’t work.
With the progressive text box; scratching her ear then showing her the berry, it seems to me its gonna be a build up a “loyalty” thing, which will probably be a daily thing, we’ll see tomorrow i suppose 😛
Does anyone with this archeology pet: http://wod.wowhead.com/npc=86422, knows if Gara somehow interacts with it?
Bendak, do you have exalted reputation with Frostwolf Clan? Wondering if that could be a piece of the puzzle since the emblem is on the stone there.
*Edit* Well, Stormpike since you’re Alliance. Thought sounds stupid now. X-D
I think we need to form a group to run Shadowmoon Burial grounds on beta to see if the lantern is there. I have been trying to get in on my hunter with the lfd but it hasn’t gotten any groups. I would be willing to tank or heal it as long as someone brings a hunter in case we find the lantern.
Just a quick FYI – your WordPress connect isn’t working properly at all. I have 2 WordPress accounts and I cannot login on YOUR site with any of them. I’m logged in just fine on my own – but your site is broken somehow (your Jetpack is what is allowing the connection and I think that’s what has it all confused)
Now to Gara.
She was friendly to me – and I clicked on her and scratched behind her ears. She perked up – but after that the dialog disappeared and she “ignored me and looked at the grave”
Will putz around with this today and see what I can come up with.
Kill Mother Om’ra – looted Shadowberries, Gara looked “expectantly” at me when I showed her the Shadowberries. I tried to target Gara and use the Shadowberries but all it did was use them on myself.
Hmmph. Not sure. Like you said, jetpack handles all that stuff. I was able to log in with my wordpress.com account (not this site account) for commenting. I have user registration disabled here (since it results in dozens of spam accounts per day) if that’s what your referring to, but you should still be able to comment w/ the wordpress account. Maybe it was just a glitch.
It just kept telling me my username was wrong – but I was logged into my WordPress already. The URL on the little window that popped up was jetpack.wordpress.com — so not sure what’s going on there.
In any event, there is literally no new news regarding Gara. I’ve been scouring the web all day and in game. It’s probably something really easy, too ><
I also think we should create a Twitter hashtag #SolveGara to collect all the information out there.
Tried going there with no pets as well, since the ghost wolfs around seem to dislike it. Nothing happened 😛
I want beta access now.
Can you put the berries on the unmarked grave?