Tag Archives: Warlords of Draenor Beta

Hunter Guides, Opinion

Reforging 2.0: Consumables and Enchants

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Update Aug 13: Blizzard has removed secondary stats from Flasks, and reduced the amount from enchants and food. The point of my original post is kind of moot, but I’ll leave it up anyway. You can still customize your secondary stats, just not to the high degree you could earlier in beta.

I have a love-hate relationship with reforging. I love using it to min-max or make a piece of subpar gear into something decent. I hate having to juggle hit and expertise caps (and having to use a reforging calculator to do it perfectly). Without hit and expertise, reforging is just about customizing your stats. No calculators or external tools required. All the good, none of the bad. So you can understand why I was initially a little disappointed at its removal.

I know the goal was to reduce the amount of extra work needed to be done in order to make a piece of gear usable. When you don’t need to valor upgrade, reforge, gem, and enchant something you can just equip it as soon as it drops. Unless, of course, it’s a neck, ring, or cloak. Then you’ll want to make sure you have an enchanting scroll ready for it.

Blizzard wasn’t kidding when they said they wanted fewer but more powerful enchants.

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Hunter News

I am become death, the destroyer of worlds

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We officially have our first bugged beta pet. These baby riverbeasts are cute when they are at the appropriate size… but this…

I never asked for this.

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Hunter News

WoD Beta: Adventures in Gorgrond gallery

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I recently leveled from 92-94 in Gorgrond, and I really enjoyed this zone. The mix of lush jungle and desolate badlands makes it interesting because the scenery is always changing. It feels like there’s multiple zones in just one. There’s lots of little nooks and crannies to explore, mountains to climb, and big trophy mobs to kill. Killing one of these big elites gives you a quest item which rewards a bunch of XP and supposedly a trophy to display in your garrison (doesn’t seem to work yet).

I encountered several new beasts in my travels, some of which I was able to tame. You’ll also find pictures of some of those in this gallery. You can click through to any of these pictures for a full size 2560×1440 version. I imagine some of these would make nice wallpapers. Enjoy. 🙂

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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, Opinion

WoD Beta: Improvements to Lock and Load and Chimera Shot on the way

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Celestalon has been tweeting more about hunters, and we have some good news for both survival and marksmanship to talk about. None of these changes are in the build (or patch notes) yet, but they should hopefully make it in soon so we can test them.

Lock and Load

We’ll start with the survival changes. One is a nice quality of life change (and opens up some new gameplay avenues), and the other will help survival at lower multistrike levels. In case you haven’t been keeping up with the news, Black Arrow now procs 1 charge of Lock and Load every time it multistrikes.

Patch 6.0 at level 90 would have been really awkward without this baseline chance. If you have Haromm’s Talisman, you should be able to get around ~20% total multistrike with the appropriate raid buff (more if they add level 90 versions of the multistrike flasks and food) when patch 6.0 launches.

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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 News

More changes to T17 Hunter set bonuses

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Beta build 18537 went up and with it comes the third round of changes to hunter tier 17 set bonuses. There’s some real cool stuff here, but knowing how often these have changed so far, don’t get too attached. Although I’m sort of already attached to this new BM one…

Beast Mastery
  • 2-piece bonus: Kill Command has a 25% chance to reset the cooldown of Bestial Wrath.
  • 4-piece bonus: While Bestial Wrath is active, one additional pet is summoned to fight with you.

The 4p bonus was unchanged from before, only the 2p bonus is new. Yeah, so, this is pretty awesome. The best pet is a big red pet. These are the types of set bonuses I’d come up with on a wish list. Stuff that is sitting right on the line dividing realistic and too good to be true. I know some people dislike RNG bonuses like this, but I’ve always liked them.

I still wonder if the 4p bonus is just going to summon a Dire Beast or if it’ll be an actual pet from your current active pets with full abilities and all (or at least basic attacks).

What I would change: Nothing, except maybe a guarantee that the second pet it pulls out will be the first available one in your list. Say you have pet 3 summoned, it will summon pet 1. If you have pet 1 summoned, it would summon pet 2.

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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 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 News

There’s still some hope for a Survival cooldown

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Ask any hunter who has played on beta, and they’ll probably tell you that survival feels a little empty without any baseline cooldowns or executes. We know Blizzard wants to push for survival to be the multidot/sustained damage spec, but many hunters feel it’s gone a bit too far. The good news is, it sounds like they are still mulling over the idea of survival having a cooldown.

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