Category Archives: Hunter Guides

Hunter Guides

Hunter Soloing in Warlords: The Inside Scoop

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Editor’s Note: I’d like to welcome Shoot from Nightmare Asylum as another guest writer on Eyes of the Beast. Shoot has many world first hunter solo achievements under his belt. He is also one of the raid leaders of Team Hunter, the all-hunter raid group currently tearing its way through heroic MoP raids.

Hello, my name is Shoot and I’m a hunter raider and soloist in the WoW community.

Many WoW players in the community are enjoying the Warlords of Draenor beta raid testing and leveling, but a lot of people are curious what soloing is like and how the item squish affects it. Let’s start off by taking a look at older content on the live servers and compare it to beta servers from a hunter perspective.

Soloing on Live

  • Tier 10 and lower: Bosses are fairly easy to solo and do not require a high amount of gear or damage.
  • Tiers 11 – 13 (Cataclysm): Bosses are soloable; some bosses require mechanics that must be followed, but some bosses are still an all out damagefest and do not require much awareness or gear. Any boss in 25H is generally very difficult and requires a high amount of gear and special tactics.
  • Tiers 14 – 16  (MoP): Most bosses are impossible to solo as a hunter. Currently there have only been two Mists of Pandaria raid bosses that were soloed by a hunter in 10 normal. You can watch those videos below.

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News

Hunter scopes in Warlords of Draenor

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It looks like hunters will finally have more than one weapon enchant to choose from, for the first time since vanilla that I can recall (back then it was 3% hit or +9 weapon damage I believe). Unfortunately they still don’t make your weapon glow or shoot out flaming arrows or anything fancy like that. Visual effects are still the territory of melee enchants it seems.

The new scopes proc one of three secondary stats. Like everything else in Warlords, the procs are moving away from primary stats entirely. It’s a good move in my book. I spoke here about how this new system is almost like a replacement for reforging, allowing you to customize your secondary stats to a reasonably large degree. These scopes further emphasize this new method of secondary stat stacking. (Update: You can’t stack secondary stats quite as much as you used to with the reversal to agility flasks, but it’s still there to some degree).

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News

WoD Beta: 4 fun things to do with Aspect of the Fox

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Aspect of the Fox is primarily used to help your fellow raid members, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun with it on your own.

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Hunter Guides, Opinion

Reforging 2.0: Consumables and Enchants

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Update Aug 13: Blizzard has removed secondary stats from Flasks, and reduced the amount from enchants and food. The point of my original post is kind of moot, but I’ll leave it up anyway. You can still customize your secondary stats, just not to the high degree you could earlier in beta.

I have a love-hate relationship with reforging. I love using it to min-max or make a piece of subpar gear into something decent. I hate having to juggle hit and expertise caps (and having to use a reforging calculator to do it perfectly). Without hit and expertise, reforging is just about customizing your stats. No calculators or external tools required. All the good, none of the bad. So you can understand why I was initially a little disappointed at its removal.

I know the goal was to reduce the amount of extra work needed to be done in order to make a piece of gear usable. When you don’t need to valor upgrade, reforge, gem, and enchant something you can just equip it as soon as it drops. Unless, of course, it’s a neck, ring, or cloak. Then you’ll want to make sure you have an enchanting scroll ready for it.

Blizzard wasn’t kidding when they said they wanted fewer but more powerful enchants.

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News

WoD Beta: Lone Wolf and Adaptation talent previews

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This is second in a series of posts about the new level 100 hunter talents as they currently exist on beta. The first post was all about Exotic Munitions. Today, it’s about Lone Wolf and Adaptation. This talent changes based on your current spec: Lone Wolf for marksmanship and survival, Adaptation for beast mastery.

These talents couldn’t be more opposite if they tried. One removes your pet, the other turns your pet into a superhero pet. If you’ve read my posts before, you’ll know I am not really down with the whole Lone Wolf thing. I play hunters because of the pets. I still think it’s cool they’re giving the option to those who want to play a pure archer, but the BM version of this talent appeals to me more.

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News

WoD Beta: Exotic Munitions preview

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Today we’re taking a closer look at the newest of the level 100 hunter talents in Warlords of Draenor, Exotic Munitions. This is a passive talent that modifies your Auto Shots in 3 different ways. Only one of these munition types can be active at a time.

  • Incendiary Ammo – Arms your ranged weapon with exotic ammunition that lasts for 1 hour. Each autoshot deals 20% additional weapon damage as Fire to all enemies within 8 yards of the initial target.
    • To be used primarily in AoE raid encounters, dungeons, or just farming large numbers of mobs out in the world.
  • Poisoned Ammo – Arms your ranged weapon with exotic ammunition that lasts for 1 hour. Each autoshot deals (200% of Attack power) additional Nature damage over 16 sec. When this effect is refreshed, the remaining damage will be added to the new effect.
    • To be used primarily for extended single-target fights.
  • Frozen Ammo – Arms your ranged weapon with exotic ammunition that lasts for 1 hour. Each autoshot deals 40% additional weapon damage as Frost and reduces the target’s movement speed by 50% for 8 sec.
    • To be used primarily for PvP, or for when you’re fighting one target at a time that won’t live long enough to fully benefit from Poisoned Ammo. If we had this talent today, I’d probably be using it to aid in my 2 or 3-shotting of Gulp Frogs.

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Hunter Guides, Hunter Pets

How to tame Chimaeron at level 90 and 100

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Taming Chimaeron is simple for a level 100 character, but if you want to tame him in patch 6.0 at level 90, it’s a little trickier to do solo, but still perfectly doable. I’ll start with level 100. It isn’t quite as simple as walking in and taming. First you need to show Chimaeron who’s boss (that means getting him below 20% health before you can tame).

Taming Chimaeron at level 100
  • Set the legacy raid difficulty to 10-player (or 25-player is fine for level 100 players) and enter Blackwing Descent (the entrance is near the top of Blackrock Mountain in Burning Steppes/Searing Gorge).
  • Kill Magmaw and Omnotron Defense System to unlock the next area with Chimaeron. With the new stat scaling, you will kill them very quickly.
  • Head down the elevator and take a left. That’s where Chimaeron is located.
  • Talk to Finkle in the cage behind Chimaeron (this is so if you don’t tame him fast enough, he won’t one-shot you later on).
  • Dismiss your current pet and slowly DPS him down to 20% health, but be very careful not to kill him outright with your buffed damage.
  • Be VERY careful — once he hits 50% you may just want to use auto shot. I wouldn’t recommend survival spec for this since the DoTs could kill him after 20%. If Chimaeron dies, you have to wait a week to try the tame again.
  • Begin the tame once he enrages at 20% health.

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News

Hunter item upgrade priority in patch 5.4.8

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Patch 5.4.8 drops today, much sooner than I expected it to be. It introduces 2 more upgrades to patch 5.4 PvE gear, for a total of 16 ilvls in upgrades. People began their mad rush to cap their valor points for the new item upgrades, but it turns out they only had a week to do so! Sneaky Blizzard. Those of you who were already sitting on 3k valor will be able to fully upgrade 8 of your items this week (assuming they all had 2 upgrades already).

If you’re in that situation then you’re going to have everything upgraded fairly quickly. If you’re not sitting on a large pool of banked valor, you may be wondering what you should upgrade first. I played around a little bit with Zeherah’s DPS Analyzer (which she just updated for 5.4.8 support) to see which gear would give the most bang for your valor point.

I knew weapons would be the largest upgrade, but I was surprised the legendary cloak was less of an overall upgrade than several pieces at normal and heroic.  Sometimes we let raw item level blind us, I guess. 🙂 For a raider in mostly normal mode gear, the 2 extra weapon upgrades represent about a 2% overall DPS increase. Trinkets are next on the list with about a 1.2-1.5% increase depending on the trinket and spec. Warforged gear in the Chest/Legs/Helm slots tends to come out ahead of the Legendary cloak.

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News

Ricket’s 5.4 marksmanship guide

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Tired of beast mastery and survival? Ricket has posted a great video guide to marksmanship DPS in 5.4 on her YouTube channel. She discusses stat priorities, arcane vs. aimed shot focus dumps, the opener, and more. She’s currently ranked #1 for marksmanship on Malkorok 25H on worldoflogs, so it’s a safe bet you can take these tips to the bank.

With the possibility of marksmanship being a stronger spec in Warlords, you may want to get a head start and try it out now if you haven’t yet. Just remember that Aimed Shot will be the exclusive focus dump in the future, so don’t get too attached to Arcane Shot while playing MM! You can see a summary of marksmanship changes in Warlords revealed thus far here on Eyes of the Beast.

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Hunter Guides

Solo Warbringers for mounts and profit

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I got into Zandalari Warbringer farming a few months ago when I was just looking for something else to do. I came for the mounts, and I stayed for the gold. Back in 5.2 when they were added to the game, they were camped 24/7 so I didn’t bother with them. Nowadays, I find them alive with regularity. I’ve made as much as 20,000 gold in a single day just from the stuff that these guys drop.

Hunters can solo them easily with a few simple tips. What prompted me to write this was seeing so many hunters fail at this. The Warbringers have hard-hitting abilities which can kill your pet very quickly, but if you know what abilities to watch out for, it’s a complete cakewalk.

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