Monthly Archives: July 2016

Opinion

What are you playing?

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Patch 7.0 is upon us and Hunters are… well, kind of different. The reaction I’ve seen to the new Hunter specs has been mixed to say the least. It’s probably more shocking if you didn’t put in any serious play time on the beta or PTR. These are new specs, and it’s pretty much a new class. So take a deep breath and give it at least a week. 😛

I’m not saying negative reactions are unwarranted because I had many of them myself. The difference is I’ve had about 6 months to adjust! Accepting these changes didn’t happen overnight for me. Don’t think I’m totally happy with everything either — far from it — but I also realize that at this point nothing serious is going to change. So I’m done with complaining about changes and giving feedback. It’s time to move forward.

If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend trying out all 3 specs. If you want an easy low-stress place to do that, just do some Timewalking dungeons. It will give you some perspective on where the whole class stands. Maybe you’ve always been a BM Hunter, but you’ll try Survival and love it? Who knows?

Personally, I’ve warmed up to the new BM. It’s not perfect, but I have fun playing it. And it’s even better (IMO) once you get Hati and are able to have two custom pets. Marksmanship feels kind of disjointed to me unless I am using the Sidewinders talent. Survival is mostly a curiosity. I’ve never been a fan of melee combat in WoW, but Harpooning around with your pet is pretty damn fun.

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Hunter News

Get Play Dead, Fetch, Aspect of the Chameleon, and a toy in Sholazar Basin

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Hunters can regain some of the functionality of old glyphs by heading out to Sholazar Basin and visiting Mardan Thunderhoof at the Nesingwary Base Camp. Originally I thought these items were only available in the class hall, but it turns out I was wrong!

Here is what this vendor sells. All four items cost 50 gold each.

  • Pet Training Manual: Fetch — Teaches you the Fetch ability. Use this to have your pet loot nearby corpses for you.
  • Pet Training Manual: Play Dead — Teaches you both the Play Dead and Wake Up abilities. This is actually better than the old glyph because you can have your pet feign death without you. If you want to replicate the functionality of the old glyph, you can macro both Play Dead and Feign Death together.
  • The Art of Concealment — Teaches you the Aspect of the Chameleon ability, which makes you untrackable for 1 minute. This is similar to the old Aspect of the Beast.
  • Hunter’s Call — A toy that summons a small beast to follow you around for 15 seconds on a 30 second cooldown.

Update 7/23: Additionally, you can pick up the Fireworks Instruction Manual from Bryan Landers in Dalaran (both old and new Dalarans) to teach you Fireworks.

As for glyphs, we are lacking them in the pre-patch (only Lesser Proportion is available) so you’ll have to wait until Legion. I previously covered the new glyphs here.

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Hunter News, Hunter Pets, Opinion

Patch 7.0 Hunter Info Dump: Pets, addons, stats, trinkets, and more

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It’s been nearly 13 months since the last major WoW patch. Can we never have that happen again, Blizzard? Please? Alright then… so what’s there for a Hunter to do on patch day? Well, I can tell you what I’ll be doing.

First I’ll login to every character to collect their transmogs, then vendor most of that gear away (I have a feeling the enchanting market will be flooded). Then I will tame some new pets, probably starting with Thok. Then I’ll go learn all of the items that have become toys in 7.0. Collecting toys is kind of my thing (I even made a damn spreadsheet in preparation). I think I’ll have about ~270 of them on patch day, so getting to the 300 toy achievement in Legion should be easy (you get a recolored Sky Golem mount as the reward).

Then at some point I’ll begin the laborious process of opening thousands of Salvage Crates. From the gear in there, I will learn the appearances I don’t know and probably auction the rest to other transmog collectors. This is the part where it sucks to have only played Hunters for most of your WoW career. I do have some reasonably high level plate and cloth toons to send BoEs to for unlocking (and I think I will need to for the achievements, there’s only so much mail armor).

After that there won’t be much for me to do until the pre-expansion content starts unlocking (demon invasions). I am looking forward to that stuff. I imagine there will be a little more for you to explore if you weren’t on the beta or didn’t spend much time on the PTR.

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News

Weapon options for Survival Hunters in patch 7.0

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If you’re interested in playing Survival when patch 7.0 drops, you may be wondering what the heck you’re supposed to use for a weapon since you probably only own ranged weapons at the moment. Sure, you will be getting your Talonclaw on day one of Legion, but for the 4-5 weeks in the interim you will need something to poke demons with. Thankfully, Blizzard will be sending you a melee weapon to get started with. If that’s not enough, there are several other options to tide you over until Legion.

survivalisthuntingspear

Option 1: Blizzard’s Weapon Insurance

All Hunters who login to patch 7.0 will receive an in-game mail from Blizzard informing them of the weapon change for Survival. Attached to the message is a Survivalist’s Hunting Spear polearm.  Its item level will be different depending on your raiding progress in Hellfire Citadel:

  • No raid experience, or only LFR experience: ilvl 655
  • Normal HFC raid experience: ilvl 690
  • Heroic HFC raid experience: ilvl 705
  • Mythic HFC raid experience: ilvl 720

I am not sure what the threshold is for Blizzard thinking that you have the experience, but if I had to guess it would be something similar to how the raid caches from the ship yard work. So if you’re currently getting heroic raid caches from the ship yard, you can probably expect an ilvl 705 polearm. This is just an educated guess, they may have different requirements.

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