Category Archives: Hunter News

Hunter News, Off Topic

Sunday Catch Up: WoD release date, hunter spell effects, and other stuff

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November 13, 2014. Only 10 days away from the actual 10-year anniversary. I like the date. It’ll add an extra level of excitement to the BlizzCon festivities since they’re so close together.  I’ll be killing Iron Horde at the Dark Portal and the revamped UBRS on one screen, with the BlizzCon livestream on the other.

The only thing I don’t like is that it’s a mere 5 days away from the release date of Dragon Age Inquisition, a game I am very excited to play. Sorry, Dragon Age, you’re going to have to be put on the backburner for a while.

There’s some other bits and bobs I wanted to mention. Small stuff I didn’t think was deserving of its own post, so I’ll cram them in here. 🙂

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Hunter News, Opinion

WoD Beta: Number tuning is almost here, but is that all?

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Survival and marksmanship are in need of some help in the damage department, and it’s coming soon.

This is both good news and bad news. Good news because numbers will start to become balanced. Bad news because it means most of the actual design is done. I’m personally most concerned about survival right now, but marksmanship has problems too depending on who you ask. The other specs have both a cooldown and execute. Survival feels strange without either. There is, however, some good news about Black Arrow.

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Hunter News

WoD Beta 18689: Perks on the chopping block

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The Draenor perk system has been changed to only grant 4 perks on your way from 90-100 (down from 9 perks). Most of the damage boosting perks have been baked into their respective spells, but some perks have been removed outright.

I’m not sure why this was done to be honest. After leveling a lot on beta (one hunter to 100, one to 96, at least four to 92), I have to say that getting a perk every level was a lot of fun. I enjoyed watching the perk slot machine spin up and went “hell yeah!” when I received a perk I was hoping for. It was a nice reward for dinging a new level, and it was also a noticeable power increase in most cases. The power increase was great because it counteracted the feeling of getting less powerful as your haste, crit chance, etc. plummeted with each level.

There are a few other minor changes and additions we’ll cover before tackling the perks. I’m skipping the datamined ability scaling changes since they’re all related to the perks going away (no actual change).

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Hunter News

WoD Beta 18663: Clefthooves, Stags, and more new pets

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The highlight of this beta patch was a serious amount of new tameable hunter pets. We have two new pet families and a bunch of new pet skins to discover.

Let’s get the non-pet stuff out of the way first because there’s not much of it in this build:

  • Glyph of Misdirection is back in the build. This has been absent from alpha/beta for a very long time, and some of us were beginning to get worried. It’s all good though.
  • Misdirection is now learned at level 42 (old: level 76)
  • Exotic Munitions: Poisoned Ammo has been buffed slightly (40% AP to 48% AP)
  • Exotic Munitions: Frozen Ammo has had its damage nerfed considerably (40% weapon damage down to 15%). There should no longer be a question of what munition does the most damage on single target.
  • Hunter WoD PvP Marksmanship 4P Bonus: Aimed Shot reduces the cooldown of Rapid Fire by 5 sec.
  • All enchants have been buffed. For example, cloak enchants now grant 250 seconday stats (up from 200).
  • Scopes have been buffed (from 750 to 938 stats)

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Hunter News, Hunter Pets

Gara, the loyal Spirit Wolf: Hints at a new tame?

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Hunter @Miacoda discovered this sad and lonely spirit wolf, Gara, apparently keeping vigil at its master’s grave in Shadowmoon Valley for Elune knows how long. The interesting thing about Gara is that you can only interact with her if you are in beast mastery spec. Nothing happens yet, but this is a pretty big hint at something.

Update on Gara: For the latest info on Gara, see this new post.

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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 News

Many Hunters! Handling it! An interview with Artemishowl on all-hunter raiding

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Who needs tanks when you have turtles? Who needs healers when you have spirit beasts?

A group of top US Horde hunters have been tackling Mists of Pandaria raid bosses over the last couple of months with much success. Both tier 14 and tier 15 have been cleared in 10-man and 25-man. They’ve even killed the majority of them in heroic mode (all but a few in Throne of Thunder). This Saturday, August 2 they will make their first all-hunter attempt at Siege of Orgimmar in flexible mode.

I contacted one of the raid leaders of Team Hunter, Artemishowl of Blood Legion, to ask her some questions about what it takes to pull this off. She was kind enough to take time out of her schedule to answer, so let’s get to it. You’ll also find some videos embedded in this post showing off some of their kills.

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Hunter News, Opinion

Ding! WoD Beta leveling impressions

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After seeing the Tanaan Jungle intro zone and Shadowmoon Valley one too many times, I’ve finally made my way through the rest of the zones and hit level 100. The servers were stable enough to allow me to do this without pulling out my hair, so kudos to the Blizzard server engineers who bent over backwards to fix all those realm crashes and disconnects. It’s night and day from what it was a week ago.

The leveling pace is fairly quick. It was actually a bit faster than I thought it would be, but that is probably due to going in with a high item level and killing stuff extremely quickly. The Hellscream’s Warbow didn’t hurt either (by the way, it ends up at ilvl 633 at level 100).  It wasn’t until about level 95 where stuff ceased to be killed in 1 or 2 GCDs.

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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 News, Hunter Pets

Hunter Pet Update: Clefthooves, Stags, Teroclaws, Raptors, and Gyreworms

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My poor stable.

We have some new pet families coming to Warlords of Draenor in addition to the already announced Hydra, Riverbeast, and Rylak.

First up is this tweet in the traditional Muffinus style where he likes to hashtag everything to get hunters excited. He revealed tameable hydras in much the same way, only this time it’s Clefthooves. Yep, those big suckers you’ve hunted for our good friend Hemet Nesingwary in the past. You should be able to tame the old Outland ones, or one of the new ones as shown above (I snuck into the new Nagrand a little early with some Eagle Eye hopping  😉 ). Not sure if they’ll be a new family or part of the Rhino family as an Exotic beast. Time will tell. Makes me wonder if Mushan beasts could be added to that family as well.

Update on Clefthooves. They will be part of the Rhino family.

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