All posts by bendak

Hunter Pets, Opinion

The 20 new pets I’m taming in Warlords of Draenor

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I kept putting it off, but I finally did it with patch 6.0 only a few days away. I made room in my pet stable for some new pets in Warlords.

From 55 pets to 35 pets, and here’s the proof…

emptystable

I abandoned sent 20 pets out to pasture. I went through all of the new pets coming in 6.0 and decided I wanted to tame 20 of them for my collection. “Only” 20. The good news is, most of the pets I deleted gently released weren’t rares, or if they were then I made sure they weren’t difficult to find ones. I have all the spirit beasts and didn’t send any of them to the farm. Same deal with the ultra rare ones like King Krush or Aotona, or my pair of oil-stained wolves (one of them is a backup if I ever lose the oil coat).

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Hunter Pets

Pet of the Week: Saddled Clefthooves

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I delayed in posting about these pets because I honestly thought there was a possibility they’d get nerfed (made untameable). After all, I’ve been disappointed before when I find a pet I love in beta, only for it to be made untameable. For a while, the only saddled clefthoof which was tameable was Giantbane and I was waiting for that to change — for good or bad. I think I have my answer now. Blizzard actually added 3 new tameable colors in the most recent set of builds. I think it’s safe to say these awesome pets are here to stay!

The clefthoof (exotic) family — which includes rhinos from the old family — is one of the most formidable when it comes to their special ability load out. Clefthooves bring two DPS buffs (5% Multistrike and 3% Versatility) with Wild Strength, and a damage reduction cooldown with Thick Hide.

You can check out all 4 colors in the video below.

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Hunter News

Latest round of number tuning un-nerfs Survival

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It’s nice to have a beta build that isn’t all nerfs!

WoD Beta build 18967 went up last night and had a few hunter number changes. Both BM and SV got a little bump, which was sorely needed. In Survival’s case, it was more of an un-nerfing.

  • Arcane Shot now deals 110% Arcane damage (up from 100%)
  • Multi-Shot now deals 40% Physical damage (up from 30%)
  • Cobra Shot now deals 66% Nature damage (up from 60%)
  • Kill Shot now deals 759% Physical damage (up from 660%)
  • Black Arrow now deals (440% Attack Power) damage over 20 sec (up from 400%)
  • Explosive Shot now deals (42.9% Attack Power) Fire damage per tick (up from 39%)
  • Serpent Sting now deals (176% Attack Power) Nature damage over 15 sec (up from 160%)

And now the one nerf of this build…

Despite the buffs, BM and SV hunters are still simming in last place among all other DPS specs. These sims do not account for any movement, or situations which may be detrimental to the potential DPS of other classes. This is to be expected, but a lot of us feel like the penalty we’re getting for our freedom of movement may be a bit too severe. There definitely needs to be one, but 20-30% DPS penalty, as the sims are showing now, seems a little too steep. Maybe I’m wrong, but Marksmanship is sitting much higher on the charts, even if you have crummy uptime on Sniper Training.

The Exotic Munitions nerf is puzzling. Lone Wolf was already ahead of it in single target damage before this nerf (or maybe on par for Survival), this just takes it another step further. I don’t like the idea of forcing MM and SV hunters to get rid of their pet if they want to do the most damage.

It just doesn’t seem very huntery to me. I’m glad the petless option is there for those who desire it, but let’s not forget that hunters are THE pet class. Let’s not punish them for keeping their pet around, eh?

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Off Topic

Getting things done before 6.0

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Well, patch 6.0 is now less than 2 weeks away. And I’m still procrastinating. Not all of my pre-Warlords goals have been met yet, but I’m making progress.

Complete: Brawler’s Guild

Funnily enough, I ended up spending over 10k for my invite because I purchased it shortly after the Brawler’s Guild came out. Then I did a couple of bosses and didn’t touch it again until this week. I kept putting it off, thinking I’ll finish it eventually. Then 6.0 got close and we were told those achievements are becoming legacy. So I ended up banging out all 10 ranks in a couple of days, trying to go there on off hours so the queue wouldn’t be too long. I found that a queue of about 2-3 people is perfect because it gave just enough time for my cooldowns to finish. Queues of around 10 during prime time are painful.

The first 7 ranks were mostly fights that lasted about 4 seconds (yay for overgearing content). Hexos was the first real challenge. Here’s a tip: Don’t listen to a guide if it tells you to move Hexos through the maze. Concentrate on keeping yourself from being hit, NOT Hexos. Once I did this it wasn’t too bad at all.  But if I could ever dream up a nightmare raid encounter, it would be everyone having to do their own personal Hexos to progress the fight. Can you imagine that? Ahoo’ru (final rank 9 boss) was the biggest challenge for me. I just had a lot of bad RNG I think. It took me about 5 or 6 attempts. Also one of those attempts was wasted because I thought I could pop Deterrence and clear out the orbs: NOPE.

Happy to have the mount and title. I’ll be too busy in Warlords to bother then I think.

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Hunting Party Podcast

Hunting Party Podcast Episode 201: Loaded For Bear

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Last night we had an epic level 1 dwarf hunter WHU raid on Icecrown-US to celebrate the return of the Hunting Party Podcast. About 80 hunters showed up in Dun Morogh! Then we raided Hogger, the Gurubashi Arena, and finally Orgrimmar. It was a blast and I can’t wait for future WHU hunter events. 🙂

This morning we recorded the first new Hunting Party Podcast since it went on hiatus back in January — Episode 201! We’ll be doing it again every second Sunday at 10AM ET (14:00 GMT) live on Twitch. Recorded episodes will appear on YouTube, iTunes, and Stitcher, and huntingpartypodcast.com (YouTube version is embedded below).

This episode primarily focused on the overarching hunter changes of 6.0. We tried to cover everything we could in a couple of hours. We hit a lot of it, but there will be much more to talk about regarding hunter changes in the next episode. For all we know, the 6.0 pre-patch may even be out by then!

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Hunter Pets

Pet of the Week: Teroclaws

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Teroclaws are a new type of hunter pet found in Talador and I believe it’s the first type of hunter pet that has both flying and grounded variants. They have been added to the Carrion Bird family, though many of us were hoping the grounded ones would have made it into the Raptor family.

These are some really nifty looking pets. My only quibble with them is their family. Carrion Birds only bring the Bloody Screech (Mortal Wounds) debuff, which isn’t something I find myself needing very often. Of course, some pet family has to fill this niche, right? One of the grounded versions is actually flagged as a Bird of Prey (Versatility buff), but this may be a bug. I hope it’s not though simply because it gives us more options.

Below is a video showing off the different tameable versions. Ji-Kun from Throne of Thunder uses the same model as the flying variant, but I don’t believe it’s been made tameable yet. Perhaps in a future expansion? Anzu from Sethekk Halls is also not tameable.

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Hunter News, Hunter Pets

WoD Beta 18927: Set Bonuses, Teroclaws, and the big taming pass

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The most recent beta build is light on the class changes, but heavy on the pet changes! Ever since alpha/beta started, there have been a large number of pets that should have been tameable but were not. Most of those, but not all, have been fixed this build!

Tier 17 Set Bonus Adjustments

  • T17 MM 4-piece: While Rapid Fire is active, your critical strike damage increases by 3% per second. (Old: 5% per second)
  • T16 SV 4-piece: When you hit a target with Explosive Shot, your multistrike damage is increased by 50% for 3 sec. (Old: 25% for 3 sec)

It makes sense since Marksmanship’s bonuses was the strongest and survival’s was likely the weakest. Unfortunately there’s no other number tuning at the class level. Survival is still drastically behind by all counts. Marksmanship is looking best for single target, and BM is decimating the AoE numbers. Survival seems to be doing worse than MM even in the AoE department! And knowing how crummy MM’s AoE is, that’s saying a lot. The entire hunter community is absolutely baffled with what’s going on with the survival spec right now. On one hand, we have Blizzard telling us it was doing “slightly too much” damage, and on the other hand you have things like these latest SimC numbers. SimC is still very much beta, so who knows how truly accurate this is. I’m not panicking yet, but 6.0 is really darn close… it’s getting harder to say “don’t worry, things will be OK, number tuning yadda yadda.”

However, if you are excited about new pets, you’ll like this next bit. 🙂

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Hunter Pets, Opinion

Let’s talk about Pet Collars

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How many of you wish you had a oil-stained wolf like the one above? Or maybe a boar that’s on fire? Or maybe one of those Icepaw Bears with glowing frosty paws? Tames such as this were only possible though some “clever use of game mechanics” (aka glitching) and they were all eventually fixed by Blizzard. They did let those hunters who tamed them keep their pets, but taming in such obscure, glitchy ways was obviously not their intention.

Pets that have additional effects or props attached to them almost always lose them upon taming. There are some exceptions, like Gib, but for the most part anything not part of the original model is lost. There’s a good reason for this. The way I understand it, these effects are applied with a hidden aura (buff) and whenever you tame something it is intentionally stripped of every single aura it has. This is so hunters can’t tame a pet while it has a damage buff active or some other game-breaking buff. The downside is we can’t tame pets with these unique effects.

A while ago there was mention by Dave Maldonado on Twitter that they were going to look into making these appearance auras be attached to the pet even after a tame, but nothing ever really came of it. Muffinus stirred the pot recently when he responded to this tweet:

Hunter pet dress-up items? Sounds like a perfect opportunity to add this sort of functionality to the game. The first time I ever saw the hunter pet collar idea brought up was an old post by Frostheim at the WHU. His idea centered around making it a piece of gear with stats on it that you slot into your pet, but what I’m proposing is that pet collars become the new way we can customize the appearance of our pets. You want an oil-stained wolf? Why not an oil-stained tallstrider or devilsaur?

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Hunter News

WoD Beta 18888: Tier 17 set bonus testing, Dire Beast and Survival nerfs

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Updated to include a new Black Arrow nerf from Sept. 23 build.

Survival got some small nerfs in this build. I’m kind of perplexed by this since it was already doing less damage than BM and MM. Maybe the accompanying MM/BM changes will be in the next build? I really don’t understand what’s going on. As I said on twitter earlier, context matters. Unfortunately I have no context at all, so it’s pointless to comment.

  • Explosive Shot now deals (39% attack power) Fire damage per tick (down from 42%)
  • Serpent Sting now deals (160% attack power) Nature damage over 15 sec (down from 175%)
  • Black Arrow now deals (400% attack power) Shadow damage over 20 sec (down from 500%)
  • Dire Beast now restores 2 focus per hit (down from 5 focus)

And the Dire Beast nerf is one I truly don’t understand. It’s so unwarranted that I’m tempted to call it a bug. The reason you wouldn’t have seen this change on MMO-C or Wowhead is that the tooltip still indicates 5 focus, but while I was testing the set bonuses I immediately noticed the change on my scrolling combat text.

Now that the nerfs are out of the way, the cool thing about this build is that you can snag a full set of heroic tier 17 gear (Rylakstalker) from the Flaskataur vendor! This means we can finally play around with the new set bonuses! I tested them all for a bit and here are my observations.

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Hunter News

Hunting Party Podcast Returns

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Good news, hunters. Just in time for Warlords, the Hunting Party Podcast is making its triumphant return.

It will feature Artemishowl (WHU), Darkbrew (The Brew Hall), Solar (Cloak and Quiver), Delirium (Thrill of the Wild), and even yours truly. Talk about a cast of hunters. 🙂

You’ll be able to listen live here on Twitch even second Sunday (twice a month). It will also appear on iTunes, Stitcher, Youtube, and be posted on the HPP website. I’ll also be posting the recordings of every episode here.

Episode 201 will be live Sunday, September 28 at 10am EDT (14:00 UTC/GMT). Please join us in the chat!

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