Monthly Archives: April 2018

Hunter Pets

Guide to Hunter Pets in Battle for Azeroth

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Hunter pets are being streamlined in Battle for Azeroth. You can no longer freely choose the specialization for each of your pets because each family has a set specialization. Pets from all three specializations — Ferocity, Tenacity, and Cunning — will all deal the same DPS and have the same amount of baseline health and armor, but they will be differentiated by new and powerful abilities. Additionally, every pet family now has some a special family ability (even if many of them are duplicates of others). All Exotic pet families (Beast Mastery only) have at least 2 special abilities.

As we are still in beta, none of this is final. This post will be updated whenever new pets are added or changes are made.

Latest Update (June 28): 10 MORE STABLE SLOTS!

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Hunter News, Opinion

BfA Alpha: Changes to Dire Frenzy and Dire Beast, Bestial Wrath goes on the global cooldown

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There is no longer a choice between Dire Frenzy or Dire Beast, all BM Hunters will now be using Dire Frenzy for their Focus generator/Bestial Wrath reset. Well, now it’s actually called Barbed Shot instead of Dire Frenzy, and it behaves totally like a shot (in that it requires a ranged weapon, and uses a standard shot animation).

Barbed Shot seems like it’s not fully implemented at this point, but I think I can gather where it’s going to be when it’s finished. The shot you fire will now be the damage component as it applies an 8-second bleed, and this bleed is what sends your pet into the frenzy (right now it’s an instant attack and not a bleed, but I’m sure that will change). Currently on alpha, the pet still does its regular dire frenzy attacks in addition to the shot damage, but since this isn’t mentioned in the tooltip I suspect it will be removed. Your pet will still charge to your Barbed Shot target, so it still functions as a target swapping mechanic similar to Kill Command’s charge (which is nice).

Frenzy stacks on your pet are still a thing, so maintaining these stacks will remain a core mechanic. It’s too early to say how crucial it will be to maintain 3 stacks since no numbers are balanced. But if Blizzard decides to make pets do more damage again (in contrast to Legion where their auto attack damage is quite low), then a lot more emphasis could be put on those frenzy stacks.

Continue reading BfA Alpha: Changes to Dire Frenzy and Dire Beast, Bestial Wrath goes on the global cooldown →

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Hunter News

BfA Alpha: Beast Mastery gets a couple of new talents (build 26433)

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Finally, we have a bit of action in the Beast Mastery talent tree! In today’s BfA alpha build, there is a brand new talent and one redesigned talent.

New Level 15 talent

Killer Instinct: Kill Command deals 50% increased damage against enemies below 35% health. (replaces Big Game Hunter)

BM has an execute again! This talent is so much better than the old Big Game Hunter (which was a “reverse execute”) — not only because executes are more desirable, but because it works for 35% of the target’s health.

The level 15 tier is looking a little more interesting now, but like I said in my earlier post, I think Dire Beast needs an interesting secondary effect to make up for the loss of Frenzy stacks. Animal Companion is still not working, but it looks like it’s just going to be a flat, passive single target buff, whereas the new Killer Instinct gives you a more Kill Command focused build (and will pair very well with Killer Cobra).

It’s no Kill Shot, but it’s something.

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Hunter News

Changes to Focus in Battle for Azeroth

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In Battle for Azeroth, Focus is still a resource across the whole Hunter class, but it works a little differently for each specialization. Beast Mastery is staying the same (mostly passive regeneration), while Marksmanship is going back to a pre-Legion type of Hunter where the majority of Focus regeneration is active rather than passive. Survival is somewhere in the middle.

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Opinion

BfA: Ideas to improve Beast Mastery Hunters in 8.0

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The release of Battle for Azeroth is coming up fast. Quickly enough that I’m getting a bit worried about the state of Beast Mastery. My main concern is the talents as there are a lot of mandatory and just plain dead talents that will never be considered.

Beast Mastery in Legion is in a decent place depending on who you ask (at least compared to its launch state), but only because of artifact traits and a few specific builds that require different tier set, legendary, and trinket combos. In BfA this is all gone and the spec feels remarkably similar to how it was at the start of Legion. To be fair, there are some improvements like having Cobra Shot reduce the Kill Command cooldown. We don’t know to what extent Azerite armor will help with this, but I really think it needs to start with some better fundamentals.

Beast Mastery in Battle for Azeroth has not seen any serious changes since the pre-alpha BlizzCon build back in November, 2017.  Since alpha started, there have been minor tweaks here or there, but nothing substantial. So I think it’s safe to say BM is probably not getting the same treatment as MM and SV, and any hope for a re-design is off the table. The main hope for BM is tweaks to baseline abilities and a serious pass at the talents.

So with that in mind, here’s feedback and ideas to improve BM. I did a post similar to this before alpha started, but that was going in blind. Now I know what we have to work with. I’ve already sent a lot of this off to Blizzard via in-game feedback on the alpha but I figured I’d write it out in this form as well.

Disclaimer: This is one Hunter’s opinion. I’m not claiming to speak on behalf of all BM Hunters. I just want the spec to be good in BfA.

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Hunter News, Opinion

BfA Alpha: Opinions and feedback on the three Hunter specs in early April

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I’ve been trying to play all three Hunter specs pretty equally on the alpha, including leveling, dungeons, and island expeditions. This will be the first of hopefully several posts on my current opinion of the state of the class on alpha/beta. I’m also going to keep this bullet point form to make it easy for both of us.

Continue reading BfA Alpha: Opinions and feedback on the three Hunter specs in early April →

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