Duskfang is the only tamable cat to use the “Black Saber Cat” skin and can be found in Swamp of Sorrows. Since it’s is a quest mob, it will always be up and available for taming. It’s one of my more favorite cats and is usually what I run with if I need to provide a mastery buff as survival. Also matches well with the Panther Cub battle pet.
Duskfang is level 55 and can be found inside the cave at 11,34 on the far east side of Swamp of Sorrows.
Continue reading Pet of the Week: Duskfang
When it comes to rare hunter pets, what aspect of taming do you like the most? Ultra rare spawns like Wrath spirit beasts? Challenge tames from the Firelands patch? Hidden beasts which you need to track down with your flare in Mists? WoW Senior Game Designer Jeremy Feasel wants to hear from you on Twitter about what you think works and what doesn’t.
#Hunters of WoW, did you enjoy MoP’s rare tames? How about Cata? Tweet us your thoughts on what you want to see in Warlords!
— Jeremy Feasel (@Muffinus) March 8, 2014
The spirit beasts in Northrend (and some of the others, like King Krush) are very rare and highly camped. Both things are not necessarily the problem. The main problem with these is achievements like Frostbitten or the fact that they drop any loot at all. I think it’s a good thing that some pets are exceptionally hard to find as it makes finding them that much more exciting. It took me over 5 years of looking on and off to finally find King Krush alive and it felt good to finally tame that dino. When there is a benefit to killing the pet (even those grey vendor items), there will always be people who go out of their way to kill them.
Continue reading How would you change pet taming?
A new video from February’s press event has been uncovered, and I am very happy to say it features some new information about the hunter talents in Warlords. They are a little different than they were back at BlizzCon. You can find the video below, but I’ve gone through frame by frame to pick out all of the tooltips and summarize it for you.
Continue reading New Hunter Talents Revealed
This transmog gives your hunter that leather look, and all of the pieces are extremely easy to acquire. It was built around the Shado-Pan hat, and the only real wild card here is the bow. There’s a good chance you may have completed the quest and unintentionally trashed the bow if you did any leveling in Zul’Drak, but there is a green BoE version that you may be lucky to find on the AH. I’m open to suggestions on the cloak as it’s not something I traditionally use since I hate when weapons clip through it.
Continue reading Hunter Transmog: Shado-Pan Hunter
The image above is Rexxar, Champion of the Horde, the one hunter in Azeroth (well, Outland) who refuses to give up his melee weapons. The melee hunter concept is a longstanding joke for many hunters, and a secret desire for others who like the idea of ditching their bow to fight side by side with their loyal companion. The earliest iterations of survival’s talent tree were almost entirely melee focused. It’s clear Blizzard once had the intention for hunters to be able to play as melee — or at least a melee/ranged hybrid — but that has been slowly eroded over the years.
Before BlizzCon, I thought the idea of a pet-less hunter was almost as far-fetched as a melee hunter, but the new Lone Wolf talent showed me how wrong I was. There was a vocal minority of hunters who prefer to play without their pets and go it alone, and Blizzard listened. Hunters were always a pet class first and foremost, so I never expected a talent or ability to give you a benefit for not using one. It made me wonder if a melee hunter spec was possible in this day and age.
Continue reading Could a melee hunter work?
This week’s pet is one of my favorite turtles, Bloodtooth (level 87). He is the only currently tamable turtle to use the “Black Spiked Dragon Turtle” model. He is a rare spawn in Krasarang Wilds, but it’s almost a guarantee that he will be up when you go looking for him. Why? Because he is one of the Pandaria pets which can only be revealed by a hunter’s flare.
If you’ve never searched for one of these pets before, the only way to find them is to look for their tracks on the ground (which appear every 30 yards or so). Once you’ve found the tracks, follow them until you don’t see any more tracks. Then comes the tricky part. You need to use Flare where you think the pet is going to be. Bloodtooth makes this more difficult because a lot of his tracks are underwater and it’s very easy to lose track of him. The following map shows his patrol route.
Continue reading Pet of the Week: Bloodtooth
I gave up on Diablo 3 fairly early into its release. The biggest problem for me was always the loot. I never, and I mean never, got a good drop I could actually use on my main character (Demon Hunter). Sure, I looted some stuff that was good for other classes, and managed to sell a lot of it on the auction house (both gold and RMAH) — but every single piece of gear I was wearing was acquired from the auction house, not from killing monsters.
Diablo is all about the loot hunting so that’s probably why the game barely lasted more than a month for me. I decided to give it a go with the recent 2.0 patch and let me tell you — the game is about a thousand times better now. Loot 2.0 is fantastic. I am getting drops I can use all the time. It has recaptured that feeling I used to get from getting new loot in Diablo 2, only now it’s even better. When I see a legendary sitting on the ground, I know it’s going to be good.
Continue reading Off Topic: Hunting in Diablo 3
I don’t think you’ll believe where I found out this little tidbit of news, but it was in the Twitch chat for tonight’s Legendary show. While the hosts were talking about the hunter crowd control changes, Lore and Celestalon — who were both in the chat — chimed in with this news about hunter focus dumps:
So, to clarify, survival and beast mastery will continue to use Arcane Shot as their primary focus dump, but now marksmanship will dump their focus solely with Aimed Shot. And yes, Aimed Shot is still a casted ability. This is going to make marksmanship feel a lot different from the other specs. I for one am excited!
I do hope they make the Glyph of Aimed Shot baseline though (unless their plan is to remove the glyph entirely). Note that you can play the spec like this today, so you may want to give it a shot because you’ll have to get used to not having Arcane Shot as a marksmanship hunter. Earlier this week, while looking closely at the video here, I noticed that Aimed Shot’s focus cost was reduced by 20 during Thrill of the Hunt. It all makes sense now. 🙂 Reminder: This is all subject to change.
The latest WoW Dev Watercooler talks about some of the upcoming game system changes, but a lot of it seems to be stuff we already know (at least those of us who gobble up every morsel of WoD information we can find). The highlights, as they relate to hunters, are as follows.
Currently, gear and character power progress linearly from levels 1-60, and then exponentially from 61-90. In Warlords, they are changing this so power progresses linearly from 1-85, and then exponentially thereafter. The power curve will also be a lot less. They are confident this will not affect old world soloing, but in order to guarantee it they are implementing a system to further increase your power against lower level targets. If you’re critting for 450k now, you’ll probably be critting for around 30k when patch 6.0 drops. Spells will no longer have any base damage component (e.g. Aimed Shot) and instead will be pure weapon damage scaling or attack power scaling. The previously announced stats, Amplify and Cleave, have been put on the back burner (source). The main secondary stats in Warlords will be crit, haste, mastery, readiness, and multistrike. (Note that Readiness is the same effect of Assurance of Consequence and Multistrike is the same effect of Haromm’s Talisman — both of these trinkets will get converted to the new stats in 6.0).
Continue reading Warlords of Draenor: Game system changes & hunters
The change to Disengage in patch 5.4 to allow it to work out of combat was one of the best modifications made to the hunter class this entire expansion if you ask me. Such a simple change, but oh so fun.
If you haven’t been using the Glyph of Disengage, I highly suggest equipping it. When you combine with with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Chimera and Assurance of Consequence you’re looking at a mere 7 second cooldown. I sincerely hope readiness rating in Warlords will still apply to this. There are 3 awesome things about Disengage:
Continue reading I love Disengage
