Tag Archives: featured

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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Opinion

WoD Beta: Missing the Mark

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Editor’s Note: If there’s one thing most hunters will agree with on the Warlords beta, it’s that marksmanship and survival are simply missing “something” in their current state. I thought Jademcian articulated the reason for this better than I ever could, so I asked him to do a guest post for the site. Hopefully this will spark some more discussion and help improve these specs before release. -Bendak

A few days ago I made a four part post on the beta class forums for a discussion regarding Marksmanship. Many of the posters seemed to  enjoy Beast Mastery while feeling Marks and Survival were hollow by comparison. In my post I made a few remarks on Marksmanship based on the discussion then went into a comparison between it and Beast Mastery, why I thought one felt more complete than the other and an example of what could be done to make Marksmanship feel the same ‘completeness.’

Bendak asked if I would write about that post here, on his site, and I happily obliged because I think it’s something the hunter community may be able to use to fuel player/developer conversation. The first step is identifying that something feels missing, the second step is figuring out what that thing is, and the third step is in Blizzard’s hands. So, whether you like Beast Mastery or not, or what was axed from Marksmanship, I hope you find my thoughts a useful tool for communicating your own.

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News

WoD Beta: Lone Wolf and Adaptation talent previews

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This is second in a series of posts about the new level 100 hunter talents as they currently exist on beta. The first post was all about Exotic Munitions. Today, it’s about Lone Wolf and Adaptation. This talent changes based on your current spec: Lone Wolf for marksmanship and survival, Adaptation for beast mastery.

These talents couldn’t be more opposite if they tried. One removes your pet, the other turns your pet into a superhero pet. If you’ve read my posts before, you’ll know I am not really down with the whole Lone Wolf thing. I play hunters because of the pets. I still think it’s cool they’re giving the option to those who want to play a pure archer, but the BM version of this talent appeals to me more.

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Hunter Transmog

Hunter Transmog: The Mercenary

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I was going for a “gun for hire” vibe with this transmog. I had a lot of fun putting it together. Most of the pieces aren’t too hard to find, though some of the green items will probably cost you. The whole set can be completed solo.

No matter how many times I kill Flame Leviathan (25m) I can never get the goggles to drop, which I think would also go well with this transmog as an alternative to the eye patch. Both are pretty cool options. I chose the Rifle of the Stoic Guardian over Wolfslayer Sniper Rifle because it’s more compact and fits better with the theme of the set, though the rifle would go well with it too (what transmog doesn’t that rifle go with?).

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Hunter Guides, Hunter News

WoD Beta: Exotic Munitions preview

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Today we’re taking a closer look at the newest of the level 100 hunter talents in Warlords of Draenor, Exotic Munitions. This is a passive talent that modifies your Auto Shots in 3 different ways. Only one of these munition types can be active at a time.

  • Incendiary Ammo – Arms your ranged weapon with exotic ammunition that lasts for 1 hour. Each autoshot deals 20% additional weapon damage as Fire to all enemies within 8 yards of the initial target.
    • To be used primarily in AoE raid encounters, dungeons, or just farming large numbers of mobs out in the world.
  • Poisoned Ammo – Arms your ranged weapon with exotic ammunition that lasts for 1 hour. Each autoshot deals (200% of Attack power) additional Nature damage over 16 sec. When this effect is refreshed, the remaining damage will be added to the new effect.
    • To be used primarily for extended single-target fights.
  • Frozen Ammo – Arms your ranged weapon with exotic ammunition that lasts for 1 hour. Each autoshot deals 40% additional weapon damage as Frost and reduces the target’s movement speed by 50% for 8 sec.
    • To be used primarily for PvP, or for when you’re fighting one target at a time that won’t live long enough to fully benefit from Poisoned Ammo. If we had this talent today, I’d probably be using it to aid in my 2 or 3-shotting of Gulp Frogs.

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Hunter Guides, Hunter Pets

How to tame Chimaeron at level 90 and 100

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Taming Chimaeron is simple for a level 100 character, but if you want to tame him in patch 6.0 at level 90, it’s a little trickier to do solo, but still perfectly doable. I’ll start with level 100. It isn’t quite as simple as walking in and taming. First you need to show Chimaeron who’s boss (that means getting him below 20% health before you can tame).

Taming Chimaeron at level 100
  • Set the legacy raid difficulty to 10-player (or 25-player is fine for level 100 players) and enter Blackwing Descent (the entrance is near the top of Blackrock Mountain in Burning Steppes/Searing Gorge).
  • Kill Magmaw and Omnotron Defense System to unlock the next area with Chimaeron. With the new stat scaling, you will kill them very quickly.
  • Head down the elevator and take a left. That’s where Chimaeron is located.
  • Talk to Finkle in the cage behind Chimaeron (this is so if you don’t tame him fast enough, he won’t one-shot you later on).
  • Dismiss your current pet and slowly DPS him down to 20% health, but be very careful not to kill him outright with your buffed damage.
  • Be VERY careful — once he hits 50% you may just want to use auto shot. I wouldn’t recommend survival spec for this since the DoTs could kill him after 20%. If Chimaeron dies, you have to wait a week to try the tame again.
  • Begin the tame once he enrages at 20% health.

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Hunter News, Hunter Pets

New hunter pets in Shadowmoon Valley

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Shadowmoon Valley had a wider variety of tameable pets than Frostfire Ridge did (a lot of the ones in Frostfire weren’t yet flagged as tameable on the alpha). Some of the ones in Shadowmoon still can’t be tamed, but that’ll be fixed in time.

Is your stable full? You might want to make room for some of these guys, and this is only the stuff from a single zone… nevermind any rare spawns we haven’t even seen yet.

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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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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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