Category Archives: Hunter News

Hunter News

New Hunter Talents Revealed

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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.

  • New Level 100 Talent: Flaming Shots – Your auto shots now deal 80% weapon damage as fire damage (Bola Shot has been removed!)
  • New Level 100 Talent: Focusing Shot – Deals 100% weapon damage and generates 75 focus. 2.55 sec cast. Replaces Cobra Shot and Steady Shot. Cannot be cast while moving. (This is very similar to Snipe from BlizzCon, but less weapon damage and more focus regen)
  • New Level 100 Talent: Versatility (beast mastery only) – Increases your pet’s combat experience to 70% increased damage (a 20% pet damage buff) and grants many specialization-specific abilities regardless of chosen spec. (This is the same as it was at BlizzCon)
  • New Level 100 Talent: Lone Wolf (survival and marksmanship) – Increases your damage done when you do not have a pet summoned. Celestalon tweeted that Lone Wolf is still in.
  • Stampede is now a talent. It replaces Lynx Rush in the level 75 tier.
  • Thrill of the Hunt now affects Aimed Shot in addition to Arcane Shot and Multi-Shot. As I reported earlier, Aimed Shot is now marksmanship’s only focus dump. Marksmanship no longer uses Arcane Shot.
  • Aspect of the Iron Hawk renamed to Iron Hawk. Due to hunter aspects being removed, this is now just a 10% damage reduction.

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Hunter News

Warlords of Draenor: Aimed Shot to be marksmanship’s focus dump

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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:

twitchchat

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.

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Hunter News

Warlords of Draenor: Game system changes & hunters

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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.

Stat Squish and Items

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).

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Hunter News

R.I.P. Scattered Shots

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I’ve known for about a week, but Alex just posted it publicly today, so I’ve already got the initial disappointment out of the way. But yes, class columns are getting shut down at WoW Insider. The only reason for this is budget cuts, and it’s not just WoW Insider that’s affected — it’s other AOL sites like Massively as well. This is by no means the end for WoW Insider.  It’s still being staffed by a big group of people who love the game, and I’ll still be going there for my daily WoW news fix.

I’ve only been there for 5 months, but in that short time I’ve met some great people. I had fun hanging out in the work chat room all day just talking about WoW and whatever else was on our minds. There’s a ridiculous number of talented writers and it’s sad to see so many go, but I’m glad to have made their acquaintance and I’ll still be following what they all do on Twitter and whatnot.

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Hunter News

Blast from the past: Rhok’delar

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Recently, some of the WoW designers have been posting photos of their oldest surviving design notes on the game for “throwback thursday.” Today, Alex Afrasiabi (Creative Director) posted up his ancient design notes for the hunter class quest in vanilla. This quest was truly an epic undertaking, and at the end you were rewarded with Rhok’delar, Longbow of the Ancient Keepers.  The quest also rewarded you with a melee weapon, Lok’delar, Stave of the Ancient Keepers.


In order to start the quest, you needed to get the Ancient Petrified Leaf to drop in Molten Core. Unfortunately, this is no longer available in the game. It was removed in Cataclysm and I’m still kicking myself for not completing it when I could in Wrath. The problem was, back then I never would have thought we’d get transmog. Oh well.  This quest took you to Felwood, where you were then sent to slay 4 demons across Azeroth. They all required specific strategies and you couldn’t have any help or else they’d despawn. Finally, you’d have to kill Onyxia before turning it in for your weapons. Frostheim also wrote a great article on the quest back when it was still available.

Are any of you lucky enough to still have this on your hunter?

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Hunter News

Hunter Aspects being removed in Warlords of Draenor?

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That’s right, it looks like hunter aspects are being removed from the game. The below video is from Blizzard’s recent press event for Warlords. It features someone playing a hunter who, frankly, has no clue how to play a hunter. It’s a little painful to watch at times, but there are a couple hunter things we can learn from it, and you get a good look at the new Shadowmoon Valley.

You might be thinking the player just forgot to use an aspect (after all, they don’t even use a focus generator), but careful examination will show that the hunter aspect bar is missing from the default UI. That’s pretty solid evidence for their removal.

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Hunter News

Proving grounds silver medal for heroics

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In the recent WoW press tour, Watcher has announced that heroic dungeons in Warlords of Draenor will require a silver medal from the Proving Grounds in order to queue for random matchmaking.  Their reasoning for the requirement is that Warlords heroics will be higher in difficulty than what we’ve been used to recently. If you enter with a pre-made group, there is no medal requirement. Warlords will also have normal mode level 100 dungeons (Mists didn’t have max level normals), which I am guessing will be similar in difficulty to Mists heroics. I am assuming item level will still have a minimum requirement, but it can probably be lower than it would need to be without the Proving Grounds medal.

There’s been quite the uproar over this, from both sides of the fence. In my opinion it is a good thing, but that’s only because it’s going to make randoms less frustrating for me. It also ensures I’m grouped with people who know the most basic principles of the game. I’m sure that I’m not the only one with horrific flashbacks of doing Cataclysm launch heroics in random groups. Good grief that was frustrating. I totally understand Proving Grounds are not something everyone wants to do, but I don’t think asking for 20 minutes worth of “tests” to be completed before you enter harder content with random people is too much to ask. You don’t even have to go anywhere, you queue right from any class trainer.

However, I don’t really think it is necessary for the requirement to be completed on every character, unless it’s a different role. For example, if you get a DPS silver on one class, then all future DPS toons are eligible. For those people who run with 10+ max level toons, re-doing the Proving Grounds over and over could get tedious.

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Hunter News

Welcome to Eyes of the Beast

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My name’s Bendak and I’d like to welcome you to my new hunter blog. Some of you probably know me from the writing I do at WoW Insider for the Scattered Shots column.  Scattered Shots was actually my first go at blogging, and I’ve since enjoyed writing about hunters every week. I figured it was time to start my own personal blog so I can talk even more about hunters and WoW. And with large sites like the WHU now retired, I don’t think it would hurt to have another regularly updated hunter blog out there.

If you’re wondering about the name, yes, it is named after our extinct Eyes of the Beast ability. I had several ideas for the name, but this was the only one with a .com domain available so it won by process of elimination. I kinda like it though. What you can expect from this blog is a combination of hunter news, guides, transmogs, and opinion pieces.  Some of the posts may simply be pointing out a Blizzard tweet that’s relevant to hunters, and others may be 1500 word columns like what you’ve been used to on Scattered Shots. I’ll probably post about other games I’m playing from time to time, but those will be categorized as Off Topic so you can choose to only view the hunter categories if you wish. Make no mistake, the main focus of this site is all hunters, all the time.

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