All posts by bendak

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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Hunter News

Legion: More number tuning for Hunters

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Today’s beta build brought a few interesting changes (along with some nerfs) that are worth talking about.

Beast Mastery

  • Kill Command damage buffed by 20%.
  • Chimaera Shot now deals 180% weapon damage per target, down from 265%.
  • Dire Stable now generates an additional 12 Focus, up from 8.
  • Killer Cobra now has a 100% chance to reset the cooldown of Kill Command.
  • One With The Pack now increases the chance for Wild Call procs by 15%, up from 10%.
  • Hati’s death cooldown is now 30 seconds, down from 2 minutes.

Buffs all around for Beast Mastery with the exception of Chimaera Shot. It seems like they really don’t want it to be the default choice. I think they already succeeded in that with previous buffs to Stomp and Dire Frenzy, so I’m not sure this nerf was necessary. I felt like all 3 were pretty powerful in their own ways and relatively balanced.

The most interesting change here for me is the one to Killer Cobra. A couple of months ago, one of the builds actually had Killer Cobra function like this and it was pretty nice. It felt more powerful, as a level 100 talent should be. I think this could make it a much better competitor with Stampede. It makes Bestial Wraths a whole lot of fun. Tons of Kill Commands! The One With the Pack buff is nice but I still doubt it’s enough. Not while the majority of Wild Call procs are mostly wasted.

The buff to Hati’s death cooldown is a very welcome one. I’d still rather have control over resurrecting Hati myself immediately with Revive Pet, but at least it’s no longer a full 2 minute wait to get Hati back.

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Opinion

A disappointing alpha and beta for Hunters

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The Legion alpha and beta process has been a long one. I’ve been in for nearly 7 months, and I wasn’t even in the first wave. One would expect a good deal of iteration over such a long period of time, but for Hunters that really hasn’t been the case.

Blizzard was receptive to feedback about cosmetic “class fantasy” issues. The most notable example is Beast Mastery being a literal zoo of impersonal pets you didn’t tame yourself. Many Hunters didn’t like this. Shortly after the BM spec was unlocked, Blizzard responded to player feedback and made compromises by adding in the Glyph of the Dire Stable, Dire Frenzy, and Essence Swapper. They also listened to MM Hunters who missed having the option of a pet. On the topic of tameable pets, I think they took much of their inspiration from player feedback and suggestions. They did an amazing job with new tames this expansion.

This brings us to how the class actually plays. On this front I felt there was little iteration or developer communication at all. It was basically the complete opposite of what happened in the pre-Warlords testing. I couldn’t even keep up with all the blue posts and tweets back then. Leading up to Legion, I’ve watched the specs stay mostly the same despite overwhelming negative feedback.

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Hunter Pets

How to craft (and tame) your very own Iron Juggernaut

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Well, this is a first. In Legion (well, technically patch 7.0) Hunters will be able to venture into Siege of Orgrimmar and gather parts to make their very own Iron Juggernaut pet — in four different colors! To fully discover all the ins and outs of this taming challenge took many hours of searching around SoO, and the rest of Azeroth for that matter. I spent most of the time searching around with Valnaaros from the Petopia forums.

One of the parts needed turned out to be extremely well hidden, and when we didn’t see it on first inspection we assumed it was found elsewhere. After visiting every gnomish and goblin type area in WoW, we finally went back to SoO and found the missing piece. If you want to discover all this for yourself, skip the guide section below.

Note: There is currently a bug with these where you cannot tame them below level 120. Wait until you’re 120 before you spawn them! But if you used it before 120 and got the “too high level” message then you should be able to make a ticket and ask for it to be restored since this is a bug.

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Hunter Pets

Pet of the Week: Lowland Manashell (aka Tortos)

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Ever wanted to tame Tortos? Well, now you can — sort of. In lieu of actually making the boss from Throne of Thunder tameable, Blizzard has re-used Tortos’ model for a new turtle species, the Lowland Manashell.  These turtles are found in Suramar, the level 110-only zone in the Broken Isles. More specifically, in the river north of Shal’aran (the main hub of the zone).

While it’s not an actual rare, the Lowland Manashell isn’t very common. Sometimes when I visit the area there are none of them spawned. I believe it may share a spawn with the common turtles in the area, and every time one of those spawns there is a chance that it’s one of the Manashells. I’ve also only seen one up at a time thus far. They can spawn anywhere along the river there, including under water or above the waterfall. If you don’t see any, try killing regular turtles in the area. A “/tar Lowland Manashell” macro is helpful.

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Hunter News

New Hunter Glyphs in Legion

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The glyph system in Legion is changing in several ways. First, there are no more major glyphs, only cosmetic minor glyphs. Second, glyphs are now applied to the affected ability directly and are consumable. You can no longer permanently learn a glyph. For example, when you right-click one of the Dire Beast glyphs it will open up your spellbook and highlight Dire Beast, which you then click to apply.

Hunters have a few cool glyphs and a few that could still use some work. I’ll explain them all below, but you can also watch this video to see them in action.

Looking for Hunter glyphs in the Legion pre-patch? There is only one. You’ll have to wait for Legion for the rest. In the meantime, you can purchase some abilities from previous glyphs.

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Hunter News

Legion: First round of number tuning for Hunters

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The latest alpha build (geez, it’s still alpha after 5 months?) is the start of class number tuning. Beast Mastery Hunters saw some fairly big numbers changes on both abilities and talents, a lot of them for the better. Survival and Marksmanship saw fewer adjustments. Here’s what Celestalon had to say about this build:

Originally Posted by Celestalon (Official Forums)
Tuning has started! A very rough pass has been made over all classes to get them into the same ballpark. Note that we have not yet finished a first tuning pass on artifacts yet; some specs are still significantly under- or over-powered with full artifacts. At this point, class mechanics are firm, but not necessarily set in stone yet.

The last sentence is the big one. Class mechanics are now “firm” but it looks like they’re not opposed to future changes. There has been a lot of feedback requesting changes to some aspects of the class, but Blizzard has stuck to their guns so far. At this point I wouldn’t expect any major changes to core mechanics, such as getting a traditional Focus generator back for BM.

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Hunter Pets

How to tame Friender the Mechano Wolf

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I think it’s safe to say that Friender the mechano wolf is the first legitimate taming challenge discovered in Legion. We have Treble and Rush, which are found via track hunting, but Friender is something completely new. Shout out to Kyfus who was the first Hunter to discover this one.

When Blizzard first announced mechanical pets they specifically mentioned a mechano strider challenge in Gnomeregan. So far, we haven’t seen that one specifically, but it’s possible that Friender is the end result of that original idea. He should be tameable once the 7.0 prepatch goes live before Legion.

To begin, make sure you can actually tame a mechanical pet. Gnomes and Goblins can do so innately, but other races must obtain a Mecha-Bond Imprint Matrix from their local engineer. Unfortunately, engineers won’t be able to craft this until Legion, so only Gnomes and Goblins will be able to do this in the prepatch.

Secondly, the buttons can only be used by level 100+ players.

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Off Topic

The Legion has not claimed me

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I apologize for the extended absence. I’ve been extremely busy IRL and any time I’ve had to write about Hunters has gone to my bi-weekly Blizzard Watch columns. Things have calmed down a bit and I should be able to get some regular posts going again. The good news is… I didn’t really miss that much. Hardly anything has changed for Hunters in the intervening month or so.  I have been playing all the new builds, but not as much as I’d like. That should change now. My favorite part about the beta is finding new pets and that looks to be in full swing now.

I’ve got a few posts in the works, so stay tuned. 🙂 Also, thanks for sticking around!

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