Hunter News

WoD Alpha build 18443: Hunter tier 17 armor revealed, new set bonuses

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The vast majority of hunter changes in this build are tooltip changes for clearer wording, or to merge two abilities into one to reduce spellbook clutter. Piercing Shots is still listed in this build even though it’s supposedly getting removed, but I would wager that it’s just an oversight. The Enhanced Piercing Shots perk for marksmanship, which would have added Piercing Shots to Multi-Shot, has been changed to Improved Chimera Shot. Before we get started, keep in mind that some of these set bonuses could still change.

Beast Mastery T17 Set Bonuses
  • 2-piece: Kill Command has a 25% chance to increase the size and damage of your pet by 10% for 8 seconds.
  • 4-piece: While Bestial Wrath is active, one additional pet is summoned to fight with you.

These are much nicer than the old temporary ones. The 2-piece bonus lasts just long enough so you can apply its bonus to your next Kill Command.

The 4-piece sounds like it might just be an extra Dire Beast summon that pops during Bestial Wrath, which means probably only melee attacks and no specials. I hope I’m wrong and it pulls another one of your active pets with all its abilities intact (or at least claw/bite/smack). That would be very nice.

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Hunter News

Shadowmoon Valley gallery

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Shadowmoon Valley was open briefly on the alpha realms today. I got maybe 20 minutes of actual gameplay amongst the constant disconnections, but I was screenshotting constantly because it’s an amazing looking zone. In terms of visuals, Frostfire Ridge isn’t in the same league, if you ask me. These shots were only taken from a very small area of the zone. Unfortunately, the alpha is offline until Monday because of all the issues. I thought I’d share these screens in the meantime.

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Hunter Pets

Warlords of Draenor: New exotic pet abilities

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I recently spent some time outside Draenor to get my hands on a few exotic pets to test their new abilities. Today we’ll be looking at the new Quilen, Rhino, Devilsaur, and Core Hound abilities. Exotic pets in Warlords can have up to 3 special abilities or buffs. For example the Core Hound has a 5% multistrike buff, Ancient Hysteria, and the new Molten Hide. Exotics which only have 1 special ability bring double buffs instead

Quilen

Stone Armor: When falling below 40% health, the Quilen’s skin will change to stone, causing it to take 30% less damage and regenerate 3% of its maximum health every 1 sec for 8 sec. This effect can only occur once every 120 sec.

This has a similar visual to the turtle’s shell shield, only its automatic whenever the pet’s health gets low. The turtle’s shell is arguably better since it’s 50% reduced damage for 12 seconds on a 1 min cooldown, but the benefit of this one is its passive nature and the healing. The Quilen also comes with its crit buff and the battle rez compared to the turtle which has zero buffs.

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Off Topic

TBT: My first beta

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The first WoW beta I ever participated in was the Wrath of the Lich King beta. According to the screenshot’s filename, this was taken on September 16, 2008. The first thing I did, as any hunter would, was take a trip to Shadowmoon Valley to tame Uvuros. Core Hounds were a new pet family being introduced in 3.0 and I remember being quite excited about it. They weren’t shrinking very much once tamed, as you can see. I always liked the ridiculously large pets, even though melee must hate them with the fury of a thousand suns (sorry melee).

This was only a month before the pre-expansion patch 3.02 came out, so it was near the end of beta. I don’t remember doing a ton of testing in Wrath content. I think I didn’t want to spoil myself. That’s not really a thing anymore in the age of content being datamined before the developers can even open their mouths. That pre-expansion patch is worth another TBT in the future.

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Hunter News

WoD Alpha: Quick first impressions of the 3 hunter specs

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I’ve spent some time with all 3 specs recently. Ran the dungeon at least twice with each, and did a little bit of testing (what little I could without a damage meter). Yesterday, I shared some more general impressions of the alpha as a whole.  Today, I’m keeping it short and to the point.  I’m sure opinions will change as I play it more, but for now this is what stood out to me after my extremely limited experience in a single zone and a single dungeon over the course of a couple of days.

Beast Mastery

I had Improved Arcane Shot and Enhanced Basic Attacks for perks.

  • Hardly anything has changed vs. BM on live servers apart from the lack of Serpent Sting. I don’t miss Serpent Sting for BM at all.
  • Kill Shot is nice. It hits harder and the cooldown reset when it doesn’t kill the target is much faster.  Oh, and the 15% heal ain’t bad either.
  • Pet damage is a little low at the moment, but a numbers tuning pass hasn’t been done yet.
  • Blink Strikes is too mandatory to give up. Seems weird I’ll seemingly never have a desire to use Stampede as a beast mastery hunter.
  • This applies to all specs, but I like that pet buffs are permanent auras now.

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Hunter News

WoD Alpha Huntering: Day 1

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I’ve been in betas before, but never in something as early as a F&F alpha. I’m used to betas basically being finished products, minus some balancing or minor issues. This is a lot different from what I’m used to. A good deal of my time is filling in bug reports or crash reports it seems, but I’m happy to do it as it’ll help make the final product better. There’s still lots of fun to be had too.

The alpha starts you right after the Dark Portal intro event. Your 90-91 XP bar is half filled, which presumably will be where it’s at once you’ve completed that intro event. I was basically thrown right into my garrison, and the vast majority of the questing in Frostfire Ridge is tied into setting up your garrison and gathering followers.

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Hunter News

I’m in!

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I’ve safely landed in Draenor! Lots of huntery alpha coverage will be coming soon. I didn’t get things setup until very late tonight, but I did do a few quests and tamed my first two new pets (a savager ravager and one of the new boars) before I had to force myself to go to sleep.  Stay tuned for more. 🙂

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Hunter Pets

Pet of the Week: Arcturis

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Most people think that Loque’nahak is the most difficult spirit beast to tame, but I’d argue that honor goes to Arcturis. At least Loque has multiple spawn points, so you could always get lucky and find him at one of the spawns where no one is currently camping. Arcturis, on the other hand, spawns at a single location and almost always has at least 1-2 hunters camping that spawn point.

One of the problems with this is hunters will fight over the spawn and Arcturis ends up dead in the process. If you’re taking the camping approach, it might be best to befriend any other hunters who are camping. Perhaps you can come to some sort of agreement where neither of you will be jerks and kill the bear after someone starts taming it. If that doesn’t work, you might need to become a little more dedicated.

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Hunter News

Latest alpha patch notes clean up the Hunter spellbook [Updated]

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Updated: If you read this post earlier, there were some more hunter changes added to the notes. Updates are in red.

Blizzard just updated the alpha patch notes with a handful of hunter changes and an explanation of their philosophy on adding the new secondary stat attunements which were discovered in the previous build.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Official Forums)
A new concept that we’re introducing is each specialization having an attunement to a particular secondary stat. These take the form of a passive ability that grants a 5% increase to the amount of a specific secondary stat gained. This provides a good starting point for where to focus your secondary stats. Usually, it will be your highest throughput stat (not counting Spirit for Healers, and Bonus Armor for Tanks, which is an optimal secondary stat in most cases). There are exceptions, and raw throughput may not even be the biggest concern in some situations. Treat this as a guideline, not a rule, about which secondary stat to favor.

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Off Topic

TBT: The WoW machinima I was never able to finish

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Taking cue from Delirium and Darkbrew, I’m going to have my own TBT (or Throwback Thursday) posts from time to time. Especially now, there’s really not much to talk about aside from the occasional alpha or beta build. Since I’m not actually in the alpha, I can only say so much about what I read in the patch notes. Whenever I get in, that should change, but for now the odd nostalgia post will help keep me busy.

My first post is about my first (and only) WoW machinima I did back in mid-2009. It was called Conquering Ulduar and it was a cinematic look at Ulduar 25 raiding. The concept was pretty simple: I’d turn off my UI, and then run around and film the raid at interesting angles while trying not to get killed. I was killed a lot as you might imagine. Some of this video was filmed from the perspective of my corpse or resurrected as a DK ghoul. My guild was kind enough to carry me as I did this filming. I was inspired to do this video by Jack (who is also a hunter!) and all of his cinematic WoW machinimas he’s been making since vanilla (I love those things).

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