Tag Archives: Hunter Changes

Hunter News

Hunter news from day 2 of BlizzCon 2015

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For the most part, Blizzard focused on broader topics rather than specific class information. That doesn’t mean we didn’t learn nothing about Hunters though! I’ve picked up this information from various sources over the course of today. Just a reminder that a lot of this isn’t confirmed and can change.

The Hunter Class Hall

  • We got further confirmation that it is located in Highmountain (a new zone in Legion).
  • Again, referred to as a “hunting lodge” so you can guess what kind of environment it will be.
  • Classes get unique bonuses from their class halls. The Hunter bonus is an exclusive (and presumably faster) flight path network in the Broken Isles. We fly around on eagles.  This should be a sweet bonus before we get flying later in the expansion.
  • We have this bonus because of a special relationship the Hunters have with the eagles of Highmountain.
  • The “hearthstone” to send us back to our class hall is an eagle that swoops down and picks us up. We can then use the same eagle to instantly return to our original location (just like Death Gate).

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Hunter News, Hunter Pets

Patch 6.0.2: Hunter guides, gems, new pets and buffs, and Survival hotfixes

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It’s patch day! That means it’s time to TAME ALL THE PETS. This is probably how things will play out for me upon logging in today:

  • Get my 3 extra Challenge Mode mounts from my mailbox, which will put me to exactly 200 mounts and give me the achievement! Woot!
  • Add all my toys to the Toy Box, fill up the new Void Storage tab, add reagents to reagent bank, and just clean up bags and bank in general. I’m going to be freeing up well over 150 bag slots.
  • Set up addons, action bars, etc. and change my gems (more on that below)
  • Tame Chimaeron!
  • Do the Blasted Lands quests for the launch event and get the title and pet (as seen in the image above from PTR).
  • Moar pets!

Hot off the press we also have some Survival hotfixes. Explosive Shot, Black Arrow, and Serpent Sting all had a 12% damage buff. It should help Survival a little bit, which according to sims was the lowest DPS spec in the game for 6.0, and I’m not just talking about hunters. We’ll see how accurate those sims were as we get to test things more. Survival likes multistrike, but the only way you’ll be able to get some in 6.0 is from the raid buff (one of your pets), which gives you 5%. Plus you can get a little more from Haromm’s Talisman.

Hunter guide for 6.0

My Patch 6.0 / Warlords of Draenor hunter guide was published on Wowhead today.  It’s geared mostly towards new or recently returned players, but I think most hunters will see value in it. It covers all the bases in a concise manner, including transitioning to 6.0 at level 90. Go check it out!

The WHU also posted their 6.0 hunter guide last night which you should also check out. So much hunter love.

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Hunter News

WoD Beta 18816: The hunt for Gara begins, talent changes, and more

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The talent changes mentioned earlier in the official patch notes all seem to be active in this beta build. I’ll go over those again, but first there is some news on Gara the Spirit Beast. You can read up on Gara here, but the TL;DR is that it’s a new spirit beast with some kind of quest/event/challenge required in order to tame. According to Muffinus, it has been fully implemented as of this build.

If you want to avoid anything Gara related and discover it for yourself, you’ll want to skip down until the talent changes section.

The picture above shows a group of us hunters searching for clues, trying to find out what the next step was after scratching her behind the ears. We… haven’t made much progress yet. There’s been one new dialogue option with the wolf, but that’s all I’ve discovered so far. When you have a Shadowberry in your inventory it gives you an option, but nothing seems to happen other than another hint. The image below shows the progression in dialogue.

Update on Gara: For the latest info on Gara, see this new post. Most of the speculation below has been ruled out.

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Hunter News

WoD Beta 18689: Perks on the chopping block

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The Draenor perk system has been changed to only grant 4 perks on your way from 90-100 (down from 9 perks). Most of the damage boosting perks have been baked into their respective spells, but some perks have been removed outright.

I’m not sure why this was done to be honest. After leveling a lot on beta (one hunter to 100, one to 96, at least four to 92), I have to say that getting a perk every level was a lot of fun. I enjoyed watching the perk slot machine spin up and went “hell yeah!” when I received a perk I was hoping for. It was a nice reward for dinging a new level, and it was also a noticeable power increase in most cases. The power increase was great because it counteracted the feeling of getting less powerful as your haste, crit chance, etc. plummeted with each level.

There are a few other minor changes and additions we’ll cover before tackling the perks. I’m skipping the datamined ability scaling changes since they’re all related to the perks going away (no actual change).

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Hunter News

WoD Beta 18663: Clefthooves, Stags, and more new pets

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The highlight of this beta patch was a serious amount of new tameable hunter pets. We have two new pet families and a bunch of new pet skins to discover.

Let’s get the non-pet stuff out of the way first because there’s not much of it in this build:

  • Glyph of Misdirection is back in the build. This has been absent from alpha/beta for a very long time, and some of us were beginning to get worried. It’s all good though.
  • Misdirection is now learned at level 42 (old: level 76)
  • Exotic Munitions: Poisoned Ammo has been buffed slightly (40% AP to 48% AP)
  • Exotic Munitions: Frozen Ammo has had its damage nerfed considerably (40% weapon damage down to 15%). There should no longer be a question of what munition does the most damage on single target.
  • Hunter WoD PvP Marksmanship 4P Bonus: Aimed Shot reduces the cooldown of Rapid Fire by 5 sec.
  • All enchants have been buffed. For example, cloak enchants now grant 250 seconday stats (up from 200).
  • Scopes have been buffed (from 750 to 938 stats)

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Hunter News

WoD Beta 18566: The new Chimaera Shot (and more!)

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The amazing header image for this post was created by Draven aka SpiritBinder of WarcraftMounts.com. Unfortunately, Chimaera Shot doesn’t look quite that cool in the game!

Another build, another round of hunter changes. The biggest is the newly updated Chimaera Shot (formerly Chimera Shot), but there are also some new perks, some updated visuals, and several bug fixes.

Chimaera Shot
  • Renamed Chimaera Shot (old: Chimera Shot)
  • Now hits 2 targets, one for frost damage, and one for nature damage.
  • On a single target, it randomly chooses nature or frost damage.
  • Still does the same damage as old Chimaera Shot, there seems to be no penalty for the new cleave component.
  • Each Chimaera “head” independently crits and multistrikes.
  • Seems to choose the closest target for the second shot.
  • Currently it’s not “smart” and will break CC on the secondary target.
  • The visuals might be temporary since they are using a Dragonhawk head rather than a Chimaera!

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Hunter News, Hunter Pets

The best new Hunter Glyph: Glyph of Play Dead

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Out of the handful of new glyphs being added for hunters in Warlords, the Glyph of Play Dead is definitely my favorite. It only takes up a minor slot, so you don’t have to worry about it clashing with anything important.

The pet not only plays its death animation but also drops aggro. This is only useful in some situations, as I quickly discovered when I feigned death to get a rare elite back on my pet. Since the pet also dropped aggro, the elite mob reset and started evading. Any time you want to be able to feign to drop aggro without resetting the fight, you’re not going to want to use this.

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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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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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