There’s not a whole lot of hunter news for patch 6.1 thus far. All of the spell changes you may have seen on a site like Wowhead or MMO-Champion are simply tooltip updates from 2 months worth of hotfixes. There might be some in there that are actual changes, but if they are then it is minor. I’ve totally lost track of them all at this point. We won’t know for sure until Blizzard puts out actual patch notes.
The one actual hunter change is the increase in range for pet battle resurrection spells: Dust of Life (Moth), Eternal Guardian (Quilen), Gift of Chi-Ji (Crane). They have all been buffed to 40 yard range, up from 20 yards. This will make hunter battle resurrections a heck of a lot more reliable from now on. You can thank Artemishowl (WHU) for this one. She pleaded with the devs at BlizzCon to make it happen.
Here’s a few other bits that stood out to me from the datamining. As of now the servers aren’t up so I can’t check any of this for myself.
Interesting bits
- Harrison Jones will be a new follower. I already knew he was going to be my favorite just because he is Harrison Jones… but then I saw that he was a Survival Hunter. Oh yeah! He also comes with Scavenger and Mentor automatically.
- The legendary follower, Garona Halforcen, counters 3 abilities (instead of 2 like an epic follower) and also comes with Epic Mount and Master Assassin.
- There are new Blackrock Foundry garrison missions. They require your followers to be 660 item level. Keep stocking up on those upgrades from the bunker and salvage yard!
- You can collect music from past expansions and use the garrison jukebox to change the music in your garrison. If I can play the Storm Peaks music all the time in my garrison, I am going to be very happy. Bonus points if it can actually switch between the day and night themes if the zone has them.
- The Trans-Dimensional Bird Whistle will allow you to bring out Pepe wherever you are, but the achievement to get this toy is rather exhaustive!
- More opportunities to tame flaming feral druids with Fandral’s Seed Pouch.
- There is now 125 stat food from cooking. RIP Savage Feasts.
- Apexis Gear can be upgraded to ilvl 670, for the low-low price of only 5873692837689 Apexis Crystals. OK, I may have exaggerated a bit. But I’m not too far off. I think the apexis gear is a really poor system. Farming gold and buying BOEs is more worthwhile for your time, but I digress.
- Lots of random follower upgrade/re-roll items, and more chances to get them from missions.
- Apparently there will be a new questing hub at the Iron Docks in Gorgrond.
- There are new anti-aliasing options — 2x, 4x, and 8x MSAA as well as 2x SSAA and 2x SSAA + CMAA. Anti-aliasing removes “jaggies” or smooths out the edges of models in the game. Just what does all this technical jargon mean? Well, it’s good news if you have a beefy video card, but it means nothing if you don’t. 🙂 This stuff interests me and I may do a post comparing all the AA methods in the future.
I was secretly hoping for Tanaan Jungle, but maybe it’s too early for a new zone or island at this point. I really enjoyed Isle of Thunder and Timeless Isle and I’m patiently waiting for the WoD equivalent.
My guess is they want to get this patch out the same week that Blackrock Foundry unlocks, so I don’t think this will be on PTR for more than a month or so.
Once I can login I’ll see what else I can find out. Maybe they snuck in a new hunter pet or two?
Off Topic: Rogerbrown, hunter extraordinaire from Method, will be joining us on the next Hunting Party Podcast. It will be streamed live on January 18 at 10 AM EST (14:00 GMT), or you can always listen to the recording later!
I might as well list the buffs that I see that I cannot find previous hotfixes for…
Arcane Shot now 125% Arcane damage up from 110%
MM
Steady Shot deals 85% damage up from 75%
BM & SV
Cobra Shot deals 77% nature damage up from 66%
These buffs should bring Hunters up and the Arcane Shot damage buff should bring BM closer to MM and SV – with SV getting a bit stronger. Unless these are always tooltip fixes.
Actually I think some of these may be hotfixes from pre-WoD during 6.0. I don’t see them buffing Survival any more, it’s already doing extremely well — both among hunter specs and across all other classes. They’ve let some things go a long time without tooltip updates.
Nat Pagle is also a Survival Hunter
Soon we’ll have Blizzard’s notes for PTR 6.1
What a long, strange, interdimensional trip it’s been achieve for Pepe whistle appears to not require any difficulty in particular, so Normal dungeon kills and LFR boss kills should qualify for earning it.
Most of Draenor functions like Timeless Isle did. Treasures, Rare mobs, and rewards not directly from daily quest type activity.
I’d love to have Pagle as a follower, but the requirements are beyond my patience. Perhaps over the course of the expansion I’ll actually fish that much.
Yeah, Pepe will just require a lot of time (and a lot of porting back to garrison to re-apply the buff).
I know Draenor has a lot of Timeless Isle elements but hardly any of it is for max level content. Once you’ve killed the one-time rares and gotten the treasures there is nothing left really. All of the max level areas in each zone are basically there to support the apexis dailies which is pretty disappointing. Isle of Thunder and Timeless Isle were both things a max level character could go and do whenever, and make some kind of progress.
Basically I have nothing to do right now aside from my garrison chores and weekly raids, which is why I want this new content!
I just received confirmation that the Arcane Shot and Steady Shot changes are in fact buffs. I suspect the Arcane Shot buff was for BM. Steady Shot for MM. While Arcane may affect SV I don’t see people shooting it more than for dumps or reapplying Serpent Sting.
(sniff sniff) I wanted more in a patch. As I look right now, dimly grant you, it feels like a smattering of odd bits tossed about that hardly warrant a new patch status. If all those changes are merely tool-tip changes then gone are my hopes for a bump in power that often comes with a patch. On one hand (my off hand) I’m glad those changes have gone live as they are constantly re-tuning our classes, this is very important and feels right; on the other hand I wanted something to anticipate beyond new achievements. Let’s hope the Iron Docks are interesting and have strong rewards!
Great to hear that Rogerbrown will be coming to the podcast again. Looking forward to it!