Hunter News, Hunter Transmog

Hunter weapons in Warlords of Draenor

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I thought I’d put together a little post with pictures of all the datamined hunter weapons in Warlords of Draenor. This will be one of those posts I keep on the sidebar and I’ll update it any time new weapons are added.

I’ll link the appropriate items when I can, but some of them (like the questing ones) will be used for multiple weapons.

If you’re viewing this post long after Warlords has been released, keep in mind all of these are patch 6.0 models.

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Hunter News

Hunter changes in Warlords alpha build 18379

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Not too many changes to report here, though Celestalon did say this build was created in the middle of them adding a lot of changes, which is why some classes got more than others. Hunters were one of the classes missing out for this build.

New passive abilities

All classes received these new attunement abilities with a different stat for each spec. I’m not sure what the point of them is. Either they wish for these particular stats to be stronger for their respective specs, or they’re worried that these particular stats will have less value so they’re trying to balance them out.

The chosen stats make me think it’s the former. Beast Mastery definitely values mastery more than the others, and Survival is all about lots of smaller individual hits and ticks so there’s more chances for Multistrike to proc. I would have expected a haste boost for Marksmanship, but I suppose crit plays well with Enhanced Aimed Shot.

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Hunter News, Opinion

Lone Wolf: How to play a pet class without a pet

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Lone Wolf is a new level 100 talent for survival and marksmanship hunters. It’s kind of a big deal. It lets you play a pet class without a pet. Whoa. It’s pretty simple: Dismiss your pet and get a 30% damage buff. Lone Wolf is undoubtedly the result of player demand. Demand from all of the players who want to play an archer class without having to maintain a roster of pets. Even more demand from raiders who were sick of their pet doing silly things like getting stuck in random places and not doing any DPS.

I’m not currently in the alpha, so most of what follows is just speculation. I’m just going by what I can see on paper and the limited amount of info I’ve been able to gleam from the handful of hunter streamers in alpha.

The following talents and abilities will simply not function if you spec into Lone Wolf:

Spirit Bond is something I’d have trouble living without, though the new self-heals from Kill Shot and Survivalist will help somewhat. The loss of Master’s Call is probably a deal breaker for a lot of PvP hunters.

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Hunter Pets

Hook Wasps are joining the Wasp family, Rylaks will be exotic

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The previously announced Hook Wasp exotic pets are going to be folded into the regular Wasp family and will no longer be exotic. Replacing them as the new exotic family in Warlords will be the Rylaks. If you’re wondering what a Rylak is, it’s the same thing as an Iron Skyreaver mount (minus the rocket boosters) as seen above.

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Hunter News

R.I.P. Bear Trap, 40-second Bestial Wrath, and 7-second Disengage

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Well, that didn’t last very long.

R.I.P. Bear Trap, for the second time (it was originally slated to be added in Wrath before being removed in that beta).  It sounds like there isn’t going to be a replacement either. When Celestalon says it’s “not needed without Readiness” I think he means one of the reasons they added Bear Trap in the first place was so Survival would have a DPS cooldown affected by the stat. However, now that Readiness is kaput, they feel like there’s no need for it.

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Off Topic

Obligatory “I’m not in Alpha” post

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I’m currently living vicariously through twitch streams of all the cool kids who got invited to the alpha. Boy, it sure looks like a lot of fun. One of the few hunter streams I’ve found so far is Azortharion’s. Feel free to point out any others you find in the comments.

I’m kind of sad I’m not in, but it’s understandable since I’m pretty new to the community and not very well known. I started writing Scattered Shots less than a year ago and I wasn’t blogging before then. Eyes of the Beast is even more recent. It hasn’t even been 4 months yet! I am happy with how the site has taken off though (in terms of page views, way beyond what I imagined). The hunter community has been very supportive.

Speaking of them, it’s too bad there are no hunter bloggers (that I’ve seen so far) who got in.  Needs more hunter love, Blizz. Come on! Even some of the folks at WoW Insider don’t have an invite yet, so I guess it’s been mostly limited to streamers. That’s what it feels like anyway.

Hopefully the invites ramp up soon and I’ll get into beta. I am just chomping at the bit for some new stuff, and I’d love to write about it over the summer.  In the meantime, back to Twitch (ever try listening to 3 streams at once? Yikes!).

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Hunter Pets

Pet of the Week: Chromaggus

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There’s a lot of hunter art out there, but the above “Taming Chromaggus” piece is, without a doubt, my favorite. Taming raid bosses is a rite of passage for any hunter. It’s all the more special if it’s a boss you’ve faced in the past when it was relevant content. Next on the list of tameable raid bosses is going to be Chimaeron in patch 6.0. I’m so ready.

Chromaggus is a Core Hound pet found in Blackwing Lair (level 60 raid) and at level 90 there’s really no trick to taming him. He’s the second last boss of the instance. Razorgore is the biggest obstacle (some people still have trouble soloing that one). If you’re currently farming Dragonstalker armor, you will need to give up a chance at the shoulders because if you tame this guy, he’s obviously not going to drop any loot.

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Hunter News

More details on Black Arrow and Lock and Load in Warlords

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Updated: The below post is now irrelevant as Celestalon tweeted there’s going to be another change to Lock and Load. Every time one of Black Arrow’s ticks multistrikes, it adds a stack of Lock and Load.

One of the changes coming in Warlords of Draenor for survival hunters is that every Black Arrow will guarantee at least one Lock and Load proc. Traps can no longer proc Lock and Load, which is why LnL itself has been removed and it’s now just a built-in component of Black Arrow.

Some hunters were wondering exactly how this guaranteed proc was going to work. Did it just mean that the final tick was always guaranteed to be a proc, or what? Turns out, that the guaranteed proc is randomly placed on one of the ticks, and it does this by determining how many procs you get on cast and then randomly placing them among the ticks.

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Hunter News

Hunter Update for WoD Alpha build 18322

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A new alpha build hit the servers today. There’s a couple of hunter changes to report, mainly in the self-healing category.

  • Kill Shot You attempt to finish the wounded target off, firing a long range attack dealing 550% weapon damage. Kill Shot can only be used on enemies that have 20% or less health. If the target dies, the Hunter will regain 15% of maximum health. If Kill Shot fails to kill the target, the cooldown is instantly reset, but cannot be reset more often than once every 6 sec. Requires Ranged Weapon. Hunter – Beast Mastery & Marksmanship Spec. 45 yd range. 10 sec cooldown.
  • Survivalist (New) After killing a target, you gain 15% health over 10 sec. (Survival Spec)

Marksmanship and Beast Mastery hunters will get a heal if the killing blow is made with Kill Shot, whereas it sounds like Survival hunters will get a HoT on every killing blow (since survival does not have Kill Shot anymore). If I had to guess, I would say the HoT won’t stack and if you get another killing blow, it simply resets the HoT. More self-healing is always good. This seems like a PvP buff more than anything, but it would also be helpful for leveling. Also remember that at level 100, Kill Shot can be used on targets with 35% or less health instead of 20%.

It also looks like the Glyph of Distracting Shot was added back into the build (Distracting Shot was put back in the build prior). Anything else being datamined so far looks like tooltip bug fixes.

Nothing much else huntery to report, but Wowhead has a nice summary of the patch, including a list of all the items (so far) that are going to be added to the Toybox.

 

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Hunter Transmog

Hunter Transmog: Alliance Rifleman

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I have a soft spot for this armor set. Back in vanilla, I spent a great deal of my time PvPing and I seriously lusted over this set. It was so prestigious that I remember only 1 or 2 hunters on my realm even had the full set since you needed to be rank 14 to get it all. The highest I ever got was rank 10 (Lieutenant Commander), and I played a lot of PvP. To give you an idea how much, I had about 75,000 honorable kills before Burning Crusade even came out. So you can imagine how much one would have to play to get rank 13 or 14 back then. I’m skeptical there were any rank 14s who didn’t account share at least a little bit.

Anyway, when patch 2.0 came along before Burning Crusade they let everyone buy this stuff with honor points. That short period between 2.0 and Burning Crusade was a fun time to be a hunter. Arcane Shot had just gotten buffed to scale with AP (before this it was a static 183 damage… I’m not even joking) and it was obscenely powerful. An instant cast ability which crit for 1500 or so back then was insane. Throw 2500 damage Aimed Shots on top of that and clothies didn’t stand a chance. Health pools averaged around 4k at that time.

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