Tag Archives: New Warlords Pets

Final beta video: B-roll footage of hunter pets at 60fps!

If you didn’t know, YouTube recently introduced support for 60fps videos. You obviously need to upload the video in 60fps for this to work, and YouTube also seems very picky with the encode settings, but once it works it’s pretty cool!

It only works in the Google Chrome browser (or IE11 if you enable HTML5 video), but doesn’t appear to work in Firefox at all. You also need to set the video to 720p or 1080p to see the 60fps version. Support on non-PC devices or apps is spotty.

You’ll know it when you see it, because the difference between 60fps and 30fps is night and day.

Beta ends tomorrow, so enjoy this final video of some random hunter pets. Remember to set it to 720p or 1080p!  :mrgreen:

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Pet of the Week: Druids in Travel Form

Blizzard finally gave into our demands and made druids tameable. The catch is you can only tame them in their travel form. So if you were hoping for a kitty or bear druid, you’re out of luck (for now). A druid in travel form is part of the Stag family once tamed and brings the versatility raid buff with Grace.

Druids are not exotic, so no need to worry about that. The trick is just catching one in travel form who won’t notice your Tame Beast channeling. AFK druids work best. I wouldn’t recommend taming one of your friends or guildies, since you may lose them as a friend once they can no longer control their druid.

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Pet of the Week: Spirit of Atha

Hail Hydra! That seems to be the hunter mantra of the week. Everywhere I go, I see hunters sporting their newly tamed hydras. Arguably one of the coolest is Spirit of Atha, the ghost hydra.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tamed this elusive beast. I was one of those who tamed it back in Wrath of the Lich King when there was a bug that allowed hunters to tame it as a crocolisk pet. In my infinite wisdom, I abandoned it and regretted it ever since. It was only available for a short time before it was fixed. In my defense, we could only own 5 total pets back then. For a while it remained a crocolisk until Blizzard made a new hydra family just for this one pet in Cataclysm. That version of the hydra family had a crit buff, today’s Hydras have a mastery buff.

The Spirit of Atha is found in Sholazar Basin. It doesn’t exist naturally in the world, the only way to get it is to summon it via a quest.

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

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.

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

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The 20 new pets I’m taming in Warlords of Draenor

I kept putting it off, but I finally did it with patch 6.0 only a few days away. I made room in my pet stable for some new pets in Warlords.

From 55 pets to 35 pets, and here’s the proof…

emptystable

I abandoned sent 20 pets out to pasture. I went through all of the new pets coming in 6.0 and decided I wanted to tame 20 of them for my collection. “Only” 20. The good news is, most of the pets I deleted gently released weren’t rares, or if they were then I made sure they weren’t difficult to find ones. I have all the spirit beasts and didn’t send any of them to the farm. Same deal with the ultra rare ones like King Krush or Aotona, or my pair of oil-stained wolves (one of them is a backup if I ever lose the oil coat).

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Pet of the Week: Saddled Clefthooves

I delayed in posting about these pets because I honestly thought there was a possibility they’d get nerfed (made untameable). After all, I’ve been disappointed before when I find a pet I love in beta, only for it to be made untameable. For a while, the only saddled clefthoof which was tameable was Giantbane and I was waiting for that to change — for good or bad. I think I have my answer now. Blizzard actually added 3 new tameable colors in the most recent set of builds. I think it’s safe to say these awesome pets are here to stay!

The clefthoof (exotic) family — which includes rhinos from the old family — is one of the most formidable when it comes to their special ability load out. Clefthooves bring two DPS buffs (5% Multistrike and 3% Versatility) with Wild Strength, and a damage reduction cooldown with Thick Hide.

You can check out all 4 colors in the video below.

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Pet of the Week: Teroclaws

Teroclaws are a new type of hunter pet found in Talador and I believe it’s the first type of hunter pet that has both flying and grounded variants. They have been added to the Carrion Bird family, though many of us were hoping the grounded ones would have made it into the Raptor family.

These are some really nifty looking pets. My only quibble with them is their family. Carrion Birds only bring the Bloody Screech (Mortal Wounds) debuff, which isn’t something I find myself needing very often. Of course, some pet family has to fill this niche, right? One of the grounded versions is actually flagged as a Bird of Prey (Versatility buff), but this may be a bug. I hope it’s not though simply because it gives us more options.

Below is a video showing off the different tameable versions. Ji-Kun from Throne of Thunder uses the same model as the flying variant, but I don’t believe it’s been made tameable yet. Perhaps in a future expansion? Anzu from Sethekk Halls is also not tameable.

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WoD Beta 18927: Set Bonuses, Teroclaws, and the big taming pass

The most recent beta build is light on the class changes, but heavy on the pet changes! Ever since alpha/beta started, there have been a large number of pets that should have been tameable but were not. Most of those, but not all, have been fixed this build!

Tier 17 Set Bonus Adjustments

  • T17 MM 4-piece: While Rapid Fire is active, your critical strike damage increases by 3% per second. (Old: 5% per second)
  • T16 SV 4-piece: When you hit a target with Explosive Shot, your multistrike damage is increased by 50% for 3 sec. (Old: 25% for 3 sec)

It makes sense since Marksmanship’s bonuses was the strongest and survival’s was likely the weakest. Unfortunately there’s no other number tuning at the class level. Survival is still drastically behind by all counts. Marksmanship is looking best for single target, and BM is decimating the AoE numbers. Survival seems to be doing worse than MM even in the AoE department! And knowing how crummy MM’s AoE is, that’s saying a lot. The entire hunter community is absolutely baffled with what’s going on with the survival spec right now. On one hand, we have Blizzard telling us it was doing “slightly too much” damage, and on the other hand you have things like these latest SimC numbers. SimC is still very much beta, so who knows how truly accurate this is. I’m not panicking yet, but 6.0 is really darn close… it’s getting harder to say “don’t worry, things will be OK, number tuning yadda yadda.”

However, if you are excited about new pets, you’ll like this next bit. 🙂

Continue reading WoD Beta 18927: Set Bonuses, Teroclaws, and the big taming pass

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Pet of the Week: Toucans! (aka Axebeaks)

Don’t ask me how the physics work here or how those tiny wings can support such a front-heavy bodyweight which is apparently 90% beak, 10% feathers. Let’s just hope your group or raid needs a versatility buff at some point so you have more excuses to use these adorable freaks of nature.

Toucans (officially called Axebeaks, a fitting name) are part of the Bird of Prey family. They bring Tenacity (not to be confused with the pet spec), and Trick, which you can use to make them do loops at your side.

They come in four colors. Here’s a short video.

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How to tame Gara the Spirit Beast

A couple of nights ago, a bunch of hunters banded together on Twitter and the Petopia forums to try to solve the Gara mystery on the beta. Those I recognized from the forums or Twitter were right beside me in game trying to figure out the same problems, coming up with crazy theories, and just having fun. After a massive group effort and a little bit of luck, Gara has finally been solved.

Just how do we tame her? It turns out that it’s become more complicated than any of us ever imagined. Thanks to some clever datamining of some spell IDs by someone on the Petopia forums, we received enough clues to get past our 4-day rut of no progress beyond the Shadowberries step.

Taming Gara takes you across all of Draenor, and to me it’s basically a mini class quest without actually calling itself a quest. It’s not on the same level as say the warlock green fire quest, but make no mistake, a good deal of effort went into creating this event for hunters!

Basic Requirements:

  • Level 90+
  • Horde or Alliance
  • Beast Mastery spec

What follows contains spoilers, so stop here if you want to discover everything for yourself (and good luck with that!).

Continue reading How to tame Gara the Spirit Beast

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