I enjoyed Antorus quite a bit. It reminded me a lot of Ulduar — not any specific bosses, but just the big epic areas and general style. It was just normal mode so most of it was one-shotted (including Argus), but we were overgeared so I wouldn’t read too much into that. Though from what I hear, Heroic is also a little easier than ToS Heroic was (I won’t be doing that til later in the week). Hopefully that translates into Mythic as well, because I did feel like ToS (especially Mythic) was too hard in general. I thought Nighthold was a lot better in terms of overall difficulty.
My favorite boss was definitely Argus — it’s a visual feast and has really cool mechanics. One of my favorites ever. Plus it felt cool that I was briefly rank 1 of all Hunters on that fight (I had to screenshot such an occasion). Ah, the perks of raiding on day one before the EU and Koreans get in there. 😛
My least favorite boss was Varimathras. The entire fight seems like it’s on the tanks, and everyone else is doing patchwerk. I actually like having a patchwerk fight once per raid, but this one just wasn’t fun. A fun patchwerk fight to me is something like Krosus from Nighthold.
The dumbest boss was the Portal Keeper because hunter pets are completely bugged on it. Here’s a tip: Don’t take the portals to the platform because Blizzard forgot to implement pet pathing up there. It’s a complete mess. Tell your raid leader you need to stay down.
Another thing worth mentioning is that several bosses have an emphasis on CC, which is pretty cool. Tar Trap, Freezing Trap, and Binding Shot will all get a lot of use in this raid.
There’s a lot of spread cleave in this place, so just like ToS it’s going to be a raid that probably favors the DoT classes. However, there is still a good amount of single target, which is all BM is good for right now. BM Hunters are, unsurprisingly, low on the overall ranks after the first day. For example, my rank 1 Hunter parse on Argus was rank 115 overall at the time.
I am actually a bit worried about future tuning, since Blizzard tweeted that they’re probably going to be nerfing old set bonuses soon. This is not good because BM uses those bonuses as a crutch right now. I do understand the desire to move on from the old gear, but they need to make careful adjustments elsewhere if they do this. What happens when you take away the crutches from someone who needs them? Yeah.
For starters we’d need a compensatory buff, and secondly the Tier 21 needs to be brought up to the same power level of other specs. On average, most specs get an 8% gain from the T21 bonuses. BM is closer to 4% (the other Hunter specs are bad as well). Our T21 stuff literally needs to be twice as good as it is now just to be average. But I’ve ranted one too many times about these absolute garbage bonuses and I’m going to start sounding like a broken record at this point. Just please fix it, Blizzard.
Speaking of gear, I was lucky enough to snag the Golganneth’s Vitality trinket from Argus, which was frankly a relief. Out of the 27 in our raid, only 4 got their trinket from this first kill. Of course none of us got Aman’thul’s Vision — there are only about a half-dozen reported cases of that dropping thus far. I’m going to assume it has a higher chance to drop in Heroic and Mythic, but supposedly there is a cap on the number of Aman’thul’s Vision than can drop per kill. There’s not enough data yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was limited to one per kill.
But the epic Pantheon trinkets are quite a bit more common. If I had to guess from all the reports I’ve seen, it feels like it’s a 10-15% chance, but that’s totally a wild guess. These trinkets are push loot, which means it doesn’t matter what your raid’s loot is set at — it’s an individual personal loot chance for each player. They only drop from Normal mode or higher, and push loot cannot be bonus rolled. Presumably starting next week we will be able to get the upgrade items from Argus that will increase it by 5 ilevels every week, up to 1000.
At 940, the trinket itself isn’t that spectacular. I have a 925 Mastery stat stick with a socket which is roughly the same value as a 940 Golganneth’s. Once this trinket is upgraded that’ll be a different story. It’s a solid trinket, and if the legendary stays as rare it is now, it’s what pretty much every raiding Hunter will be using a couple of months from now (let’s hope there’s some sort of bad luck protection for these trinkets). Once you get this trinket to 1000, it’s remarkably close to the legendary (as I discussed in my Antorus gear post). But if you had the choice, you’d probably use the legendary.
The whole ending was pretty cool — awesome cinematic, and pretty crazy changes to the landscape of Kalimdor. Fun fact: It takes a full 30 seconds to free fall from the top of that sword to the ground. It’s ridiculously big. Poor Azeroth.
What did you all think of the raid if you’ve done it already?
Did 9 fights tonight on normal, and loved it! The most underwhelming fight to me was Eonar. It looked so cool from the pictures I had seen, but in practice it wasn’t that fun after all.
Really looking forward to seeing them on heroic!
It was a joke on Normal. Stuff died instantly. Hoping Heroic is a little better. But I did have fun flying around from level to level.
We went 6/11 last night normal. We had to call it due to some guild members working. To me it was not that bad.
I went platforms tonight with BM, had no issue with it. Maybe they fixed it already? If I used any abilities before the pets spawned on the platform, they would never show up, still being down at the lower platform. But if I waited for them to spawn before using Kill Command, it went fine.
I had to dismiss and resummon, and then I still got some “no path available” errors. There was also a problem with Dire Beasts: When summoned, they do their Stomp beside you instead of when they reach the target.
It is possible they hotfixed all this already.
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! I said it before, i told the care bares over on petopia but they got all QQ so i deleted my account.
You Never have to dismiss your pets. NEVER. You toogle passive/assist until they teleport to you. Usually only once. This works if there is no path available. IT DOES NOT WORK if there is and your pets are just “slow” getting to you.
I toggle it on and off no problem on that fight and they teleported to me every time.
My issue is i fell threw the world when taking the portal………not that needs to be fixed!
I did Normal and the first two bosses in HC, loved the way it looked and everything. Gz on Trinket. Our “Good” BM got Golg’s as well. She also got a 945 fang which simmed a bit higher than my 925 crit stat stick. We’re currently discussing how to go about upgrading our leggos. I went with the neck first and swapped the boots for Sephuz so far.
Fang is pretty disappointing for the only non-AoE trinket in there. If the procs had about 20% more stats it’d probably be a decent trinket. Last time I simmed, my 935 cradle was just as good as a 960 fang. :\ Cradle does have downsides, but it puts the weakness of the trinket vs. stat sticks into perspective.
LOL.
“If the procs had about 20% more stats it’d probably be a decent trinket.”
Patch notes today:
Shadow-Singed Fang stat bonuses increased by 20%.
No hunter buffs though 🙁
Bah, no edit button. 😛
We got 4pc increased to 2.5s CDR on Wild. Almost doubled it, so that’s something I guess.
Called it!
I already noticed the pathing bug for the pets on normal Varimathras on Wednesday. So indeed as you mentioned i did call out to the RL that I didn’t want to go up on our HC run yesterday. And that was okay 😀 Stupid pathing issues :S
We’re a 9/9 mythic ToS guild that cleared everything on normal without a single wipe (except for some really dumb stuff on Argus, where we just didn’t know what we were doing) – Later the same day we entered HC and 1-shot everything up and until Kin’Garoth. We spent 3 attempts on him before he went down. The first real challenge for us as a raid (excluding individual mistakes) was Coven of Shivarrah. That fight is pretty painful with some mechanics that makes you want to be reactive but also some that you can’t react to but have to plan for in advance.
We ended the night by killing Aggrammar HC. That fight was easy to understand but took some effort to execute, which I kinda like.
The next day my guild – without me – took Argus HC down in 3 pulls. It seems he’s under-tuned at the moment.
I really do enjoy Antorus though! The visuals and the bosses in general are fun albeit quite easy on normal and HC, so I’m looking forward to Mythic. I agree with you @Bendak, I hope they are easier than ToS while still providing a challenge so you feel joy when you overcome them as a team eventually.
All in all, so happy to move on from ToS and I embrace Antorus with open arms… As I would embrace Aman’Thul’s trinket 🙁 Oh well…
A very good read as always. I couldn’t have put it better myself!
As i consider myself as a pretty hardcore bm hunter, i am also very worried when thinking about our future.
We are already almost at the bottom of the overall antorus charts once again. One could say that “there is no significant data you could validate this statement”, but let’s face it, it will just get worse for BM, since a) our t21 is crap and we are only where we are atm cause of t19/t20, and b) we scale horribly.
I mean, i use 2 t19 parts atm with 910/915 ilvl and got my hands on 945/930 t21. In zoo i sim 55k dps less, in any other combination i could think of it’s still like 20k dps behind.
To top that, they nerfed the t21 4set. I mean, in what world do those class-developers live? 🙁
The tweet you are refering to scares me the most. It would be a typical blizzmove to just nerf the old sets without giving 2 cents about the consequences for us.
To be honest I would love a nerf to old sets in order to be able to use t21 (i think every new raidtier should be supperior to the last), but that would need proper (not just pseudofake as usual) buffs to either the setboni or certain corespells.
Anyways, lets hope for the best (very tiny spark of hope) and thanks a lot for your impressions 🙂
Another great post, as always. You rock!
My guild is pretty casual, but we still managed to clear normal and the first 2 on heroic this week. Raiding so much later in the week, I generally didn’t have the same issues as you with Portal Keeper, although on our first pull my pet never did appear upstairs. I was one of the two lucky people in my raid to get Golganneth’s though!
Like Scrya, I am pretty concerned that Blizz will nerf our T20 with no compensatory buffs to us or T21. If that is in fact what happens, is T21 even worth using? I was not blessed with fabulous titanforges in either NH or ToS, so offset pieces will very quickly look more appealing to me if our bonus remains crap.
That tuning pass…..wtf. I’m so lost as to what the goal and thought process of the devs is other than to troll us.
Does anyone have any suggestions for getting half decent dps on Life Binder? I cant seem to get any higher than 800k (935 ilvl) as BM. I am in a group assigned to bats which I feel has me with too much downtime where I’m not dpsing anything (around 60% active time). Any words of wisdom would be much appreciated.
The only way to up your DPS on that fight is to basically ignore your assignment and immediately go wherever the mobs spawn. My guild does it as basically a free for all on heroic (with a tank and healer parked at each entrance).
Don’t bother with bats as BM, your pets can’t even hit them most of the time.
Thanks for the fast reply Bendak. Tbh this is what I was thinking, as I couldn’t see any other way of upping my numbers. Good to know that is the case…I will see if I can get away with this next kill haha. Keep up the good work mate, and know that we all very much appreciate what you do for the Hunter community.
A quick question regarding new spec role trinkets and sims.
My 950 http://www.wowdb.com/items/154174?bonusIDs=3984,3987 is simming about 30k more than my 930 http://www.wowdb.com/items/147019?bonusIDs=3561,1512,3337
We don’t have enough trinkets in our guild group yet to have the empowered proc yet. Are these sims already counting the empowered proc on average proc basis or are they ignoring it? I would think that trinket may not actually do 60k+ more damage without empowered proc.
Thanks!
PS:- Here are the sims for reference, not sure for how long they stay up on raidbots before expiring.
With Tome: https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/c3ZxsE7ku6tmRr9tpDYDK9/simc
With Golganneth: https://www.raidbots.com/simbot/report/fkkFK9LqvxBz14KFTTKHJJ/simc
Sorry, didn’t realize raidbot links are from wowdb. Here’s wowhead links, no edit button 🙁
https://www.wowhead.com/item=154174/golganneths-vitality&bonus=1482:3983
https://www.wowhead.com/item=147019/tome-of-unraveling-sanity&bonus=1512:3561
The sims only add Pantheon procs if you enable more pantheon trinkets in your raid (it’s one of the options on raidbots). You can specify how many other pantheon trinkets exist in your raid. In your case, the second pantheon proc is not used in that sim.
Thanks! Looks like that trinket at 950 is better after all probably because of all the agility and it will get only better with upgraded ilvl.
Man, BM AoE is really really bad, isn’t it.
I put it in as a suggestion in-game, but one thing that might help is if the focus cost on Multi got knocked down from 40 to 30 – it’s hard to even keep Cleave up and hit ANY other buttons at the same time. Do that, put Beast Cleave back to where it was originally, and we might be at least competitive again.
I do just fine single target, but get dumpstered by everything on any kind of AoE – even if they’re clumped. 🙁
As an aside, finally dropped my NH 2-pc and went back to killer cobra. Need to rebalance stats – have way too much crit right now (about 46%) – haste and mastery are both quite a bit higher with my gearset. Probably want to just balance all three as much as possible again (and minimize Vers as it’s horrible).
In beta, the “Focus of the Titans” trait reduced the Focus cost of Multi-Shot instead of increasing the damage (which is where it got its name), so they had the right idea originally then they decided to make the trait somehow worse than 2% dodge chance.
It seems like the T21 set bonus is still pretty much garbage. Even tryin’ at 960 gear with AOTB and KC it still sims lower than my T20 4-piece with Parsel’s and some other random legendary.
I’ve tried pretty much every combination of tier sets and legendarys but nothing is able to beat that set, even with optimal stats for KC and DF.
Overall a pretty dissapointing raid for my BM to get gear since all i seem to need are the off-pieces and the trinkets. It’s still pretty fun to run though.
They are indeed trash. And the funny part it’s not even like our T20 bonuses are remotely OP, they just look that way in comparison.
Oh interesting. You’re using Parsel’s and Sephuz then?
Bit of a shame, I refuse to not use the best legendary in the game (i.e., Prydaz).
Have you guys seen the Method’s world first M Argus kill video? They used 2 BM Hunters who were pretty much at the top of the chart ….. interesting!
Just Rogerbrown was BM, but yeah he did pretty well. The meters are hard to read since they keep switching POV and people were using different addons. Some of them reset on the individual phases, others don’t. BM’s single target is mostly fine, so I’m not too surprised.
Yeah sorry just double checked and it was only one BM. Pretty good numbers and I think part of the reason is, this fight had lots of movements, much more than heroic. BM always shines on those fights!
I just hope Blizz wont think, yeah BM is not just fine but doing better than they expected and don’t need buffs.