Hunter News

Warlords of Draenor pre-order thoughts

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Warlords of Draenor is now up for pre-order (at least digitally). The “free” level 90 character boost as well as the mount and pet are all available immediately. I, of course, bought it the first moment I could, but I was a little surprised that the price had gone up $10 over previous expansions. I think a lot of people (especially alt-a-holics) would be interested in a $39.99/59.99 expansion, like they used to cost, without the 90 boost option.

Price stuff aside, I was really disappointed to learn that the release isn’t expected until the fall of this year (which means September at the earliest). I was under the impression that MoP’s final tier would be shorter than previous expansions. A full 10 months of Dragon Soul was very… very tedious. Granted, Siege of Orgrimmar is ten times better as a raid tier, but with this news we’re looking at it lasting at least a full 12 months! Yikes. If there’s one good thing to come out of this, it’s that I’ll be enjoying the summer (outside!) a whole lot more.

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Hunter Pets

Pet of the Week: Duskfang

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Duskfang is the only tamable cat to use the “Black Saber Cat” skin and can be found in Swamp of Sorrows. Since it’s is a quest mob, it will always be up and available for taming. It’s one of my more favorite cats and is usually what I run with if I need to provide a mastery buff as survival. Also matches well with the Panther Cub battle pet.

Duskfang is level 55 and can be found inside the cave at 11,34 on the far east side of Swamp of Sorrows.

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Hunter News

How would you change pet taming?

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When it comes to rare hunter pets, what aspect of taming do you like the most? Ultra rare spawns like Wrath spirit beasts? Challenge tames from the Firelands patch? Hidden beasts which you need to track down with your flare in Mists? WoW Senior Game Designer Jeremy Feasel wants to hear from you on Twitter about what you think works and what doesn’t.

 

The spirit beasts in Northrend (and some of the others, like King Krush) are very rare and highly camped. Both things are not necessarily the problem. The main problem with these is achievements like Frostbitten or the fact that they drop any loot at all. I think it’s a good thing that some pets are exceptionally hard to find as it makes finding them that much more exciting. It took me over 5 years of looking on and off to finally find King Krush alive and it felt good to finally tame that dino. When there is a benefit to killing the pet (even those grey vendor items), there will always be people who go out of their way to kill them.

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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 Transmog

Hunter Transmog: Shado-Pan Hunter

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This transmog gives your hunter that leather look, and all of the pieces are extremely easy to acquire. It was built around the Shado-Pan hat, and the only real wild card here is the bow. There’s a good chance you may have completed the quest and unintentionally trashed the bow if you did any leveling in Zul’Drak, but there is a green BoE version that you may be lucky to find on the AH. I’m open to suggestions on the cloak as it’s not something I traditionally use since I hate when weapons clip through it.

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Opinion

Could a melee hunter work?

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The image above is Rexxar, Champion of the Horde, the one hunter in Azeroth (well, Outland) who refuses to give up his melee weapons. The melee hunter concept is a longstanding joke for many hunters, and a secret desire for others who like the idea of ditching their bow to fight side by side with their loyal companion. The earliest iterations of survival’s talent tree were almost entirely melee focused. It’s clear Blizzard once had the intention for hunters to be able to play as melee — or at least a melee/ranged hybrid — but that has been slowly eroded over the years.

Before BlizzCon, I thought the idea of a pet-less hunter was almost as far-fetched as a melee hunter, but the new Lone Wolf talent showed me how wrong I was. There was a vocal minority of hunters who prefer to play without their pets and go it alone, and Blizzard listened. Hunters were always a pet class first and foremost, so I never expected a talent or ability to give you a benefit for not using one. It made me wonder if a melee hunter spec was possible in this day and age.

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Hunter Pets

Pet of the Week: Bloodtooth

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This week’s pet is one of my favorite turtles, Bloodtooth (level 87). He is the only currently tamable turtle to use the “Black Spiked Dragon Turtle” model. He is a rare spawn in Krasarang Wilds, but it’s almost a guarantee that he will be up when you go looking for him. Why? Because he is one of the Pandaria pets which can only be revealed by a hunter’s flare.

If you’ve never searched for one of these pets before, the only way to find them is to look for their tracks on the ground (which appear every 30 yards or so). Once you’ve found the tracks, follow them until you don’t see any more tracks. Then comes the tricky part. You need to use Flare where you think the pet is going to be. Bloodtooth makes this more difficult because a lot of his tracks are underwater and it’s very easy to lose track of him. The following map shows his patrol route.

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Off Topic

Off Topic: Hunting in Diablo 3

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I gave up on Diablo 3 fairly early into its release. The biggest problem for me was always the loot. I never, and I mean never, got a good drop I could actually use on my main character (Demon Hunter). Sure, I looted some stuff that was good for other classes, and managed to sell a lot of it on the auction house (both gold and RMAH) — but every single piece of gear I was wearing was acquired from the auction house, not from killing monsters.

Diablo is all about the loot hunting so that’s probably why the game barely lasted more than a month for me. I decided to give it a go with the recent 2.0 patch and let me tell you — the game is about a thousand times better now. Loot 2.0 is fantastic. I am getting drops I can use all the time. It has recaptured that feeling I used to get from getting new loot in Diablo 2, only now it’s even better. When I see a legendary sitting on the ground, I know it’s going to be good.

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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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