Posts with tag beastmastery

Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted the blog post I think most of us have been waiting for ever since Cataclysm went live. It features a summary of where the dev team sees the PvE and PvP games at this point, including some analysis of various classes and specs, and some planned changes for those specs that are underperforming and overperforming.

In PvE, Ghostcrawler mentions that Blizzard is mostly happy with the tank classes and notes that while healers do have it a bit hard, this is intentional. Heroics are meant to be a challenge. As for DPS, he offered that some classes, such as arcane mages and marksman and beast mastery hunters, are too low in their damage, while others, such as shadow priests and fire and frost mages, are being watched closely before final judgment is made on their numbers.

In PvP, Ghostcrawler says Blizzard is satisfied with the decreased emphasis on healing prevention and burst damage. Crowd control and dispel mechanics, especially offensive dispels, may see some PvP nerfs, and priests will specifically be getting some PvP buffs.

Stats also got some mention. A lot of stats are being neglected by some classes, and the dev team wants to fix this. Mastery will be either buffed or completely revamped for many specs, such as unholy death knights and retribution paladins. Haste may be made to scale with more attacks, such as Lacerate, Slam, and Steady Shot, in order to make the stat more desirable to certain specs.

Check after the break for the complete text of Ghostcrawler's post, including a list of specifically planned (but not finalized) class changes for future patches.

Here's some pretty awesome news from the maven of all things hunter pet-related, Mania: Chromaggus is tameable on the beta servers. Chromaggus is a boss in Blackwing Lair known for keeping healers on their toes with a variety of debilitating debuffs, for making magic users curse his name thanks to a shifting resistance shield, and for dropping the coolest-looking shoulder armor in the entire game. You need be a beastmastery hunter to tame him, as he is a member of the exotic Core Hound family. Not only is he a great pet for a nostalgic, old-world raider, he also has a very nice-looking, unique skin, and he'll be in high demand for certain raiding groups, as Core Hounds now provide Ancestral Hysteria, a Heroism replacement. For my own part, if he remains tameable when Cataclysm goes live, I know I'll eventually be pulling my old hunter out of the mothballs and calling in a few favors.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW Insider's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion (available Dec. 7, 2010), from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysm news category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.

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Welcome to Scattered Shots. I am Eddie "Brigwyn" Carrington from The Hunting Lodge and you're not. Today we are reviewing what pets you should consider for raiding and how to spec out your pet for the best possible DPS. So join me will you? As we explore what it takes to make a raiding pet.

This past week has been an interesting one for Hunters and their pets. If you were like me, finding out that Hunters could tame Garwal's Worgen form, reminded you of why being a Hunter is truly awesome. Of course it would last and Zyrhym showed up and had to burst our bubble by delivering the bad news that Blizzard was removing them from the game. Well, it was fun while it lasted.

What was nice about this glitch was the passionate responses seen on the Official Forums and Hunter community at large. It really highlighted how much we Hunters love our pets. Many of us see them more as companions than just some other weapon in our Hunter bag of tricks.

One way Blizzard has helped foster this idea is by letting us have three different categories (Ferocity, Tenacity, and Cunning) and literally hundreds of different pets to go out and tame. But to me the best part is being able to not only tame my pet of choice, but having the ability to train him. Doing this makes Hunters and their pets a combination as epic as Nutella and Pancakes.

When you set out to tame your pet, make sure and match your need with the correct category. For pure DPS you have Ferocity. Need a tanking or good solo pet? Get a Tenacity one. And if you are in a PvP situation and want to make sure someone has your back no matter what? You could try a Cunning pet. With dual specs and Call Stabled Pet you can now match up your spec with the right pet and further enhance your status as the Supreme Hunter! Let's take a moment and talk about Ferocity Pets and raiding specs, alright?

Welcome to Scattered Shots. I am Eddie "Brigwyn" Carrington from The Hunting Lodge and I'll be your tour guide each Thursday as we explore what makes our Hunters tick and how we can make them better.

I've read comments here, over on the Official Forums, and other Hunter blogs and forums saying how Blizzard is forcing Hunters to spec either as Survival or Marksmanship. I always find this a hard argument to support, especially since it is Blizzard that has continued to give us three different talent trees that we can spec into. But as always, there seems to be a preferred talent spec.

To me the blame isn't Blizzard but us Hunters always looking to squeeze out every ounce of DPS out of our class and remain on top of the damage meters. (Go ahead let the flames begin, but hopefully you'll give me a chance here.) We go out of our way looking, experimenting, and testing different build combinations to find the one magic build that gives us top DPS. Once we have found that, we tend to forget that we really can play all three builds. No, they all won't perform the same. And if you are in a progressive, hardcore, min/max raiding guild, well then stick with the spec-du-jour. But if you are like the majority of the players out there, you probably want to play something that better fits your play style. Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it has to fit just right.

So let's look at the different Talent Trees, discuss a bit about what makes each one tick. Then look at the currently recommended builds and shot rotations for each spec.

No more quivers, no more pouches, no more bullets to make us slouches. Ok, so I'm terrible at poetry, but you get the picture. This has been on a lot of Hunters' wish lists for a long time, but it's finally here. No more ammo.

Or rather, ammo will be an item more like a relic or a wand that modifies our ranged weapon damage without being consumed. Engineers, that means you better make hay while the sun shines. Soon, we'll be buying our last crate of Mammoth Cutters ever.

This is far from the only changed announced tonight -- or this morning, depending on where you are. Let's look at them all one by one.

Welcome to Scattered Shots, where Daniel Whitcomb is totally making plans to walk with rhythm so that he can attract the worm.

So with Wrath less than a week away, we got our work cut out for us, so to speak. Luckily, 3.0's early release has given us time to learn to handle our pets and respec to take advantage of new talents, but now the big push is upon, as 10 levels and a whole slew of new zones opens up for us. When you step off the boat or zeppelin in Borean Tundra or Howling Fjord, where will you go? What will you do?

Here's a few quick Hunter specific tips to getting started in the Wrath of the Lich King.

Be warned that the video above contains a few instances of profanity, so you may not want to watch it right now if you're at work or something like that. If you'd prefer to not hear their Ventrillo chatter, you could always mute the video, pop open Winamp and play some trance or techno. It'll be just like every other raiding video, then!

Durante of Hydraxis-US did what many Hunters have been dying to do since the changes for Wrath of the Lich King were announced: He tanked a raid boss. Or more specifically, his pet tanked a raid boss. His Gorilladin (dubbed thusly by BRK) Bubbles smacked Gruul around for a raid made up of members of the guilds Snuggles, Redemption, Gone Casual and Unemployed.

I'm not sure if this video displays how powerful Hunter pets are after patch 3.0.2, or just how much raids were nerfed. A little from column A, a little from column B? In the thread on the official forums, Durante mentions that the raid's DPSers didn't really need to hold back on threat much at all, nor did they need to stand around forever as you can see in the video above. A few seconds was more than enough time for Bubbles to hold aggro, and the raid only had four healers. I'm willing to bet things would have gotten a little more dicey if Gruul lived long enough to stack more Growths, but he didn't, so it's kind of moot. If you're interested, Durante has also posted his 'tanking' spec as well as his pet's spec.

I'm willing to bet we'll see a lot more Hunter pet tanks in level 70 content, but it'll drop off dramatically (perhaps completely) at level 80. Time will tell!

Welcome to Scattered Shots, where Daniel Whitcomb is doing a special happy dance over that whole Aspect global cooldown removal thing.

Before we get into the meat of this week's column, I have a confession to make. I was tempted to make a very short column that consisted primarily of a recording of me making squealing noises that you would generally only expect to come from a giddy schoolgirl, punctuated by a bit of gibberish that might sound something like "Aspect of the Dragonhawk."

But that said, there's a lot of other things I could talk about, and I won't leave you hanging. It's a busy time in WoW, and Hunters have a lot of stuff to do now that 3.0.2 is out. By now, hopefully, your server has calmed down enough for you to get on, play around with learning all your companions and mounts, and start trying to figure out talent specs. Hopefully by now, you've seen some of our articles on the subject, such as Big Red Kitty's Hunter and Pet Talent overviews, and David Bowers' guide to exotic pets currently available in game. They're great resources, so I'm not going to attempt to replicate them here. Instead, I'm gonna focus on a quick and pertinent question:

You've finally found some time to play WoW, your server's stable enough to let you play WoW, and you've just logged on your Beastmastery Hunter for the first time since 3.0.2 went live. What do you do?

Worm:

The worm is your exotic Tenacity option if you need a really hard-core single-target tanking pet. It doesn't have the gorilladin's ability to tank multiple targets at the same time, but you can't do much better than Acid Spit for single target debuffing over time. The more physical damage-dealers you have attacking that target over the longest period of time possible, the more you'll see its effect stack up. It looks to me like the best boss-tanking pet you can find in a party made up of mostly physical damage-dealers rather than magical, if you can get your friends to let it tank the boss, of course. In PvP, the effect doesn't wear off as fast as the devilsaur's ability, so you might find it somewhat useful there as well, if you need a pet with more survivability.

BRK showed us worm a while back, and of course Wowhead can show you all its 6 colors (as well as the upcoming Northrend version). In Azeroth, the most likely place to find these is in Silithus, or if you're in the Horde, you can just hop down to Ragefire Chasm and tame one there.

If you need a non-exotic pet with armor reduction, you can try out the wasp and its Sting, though that's a Ferocity pet for damage more than tanking. If you want a good Tenacity pet for PvP before Northrend, then the crab and its Pin ability might be what you're looking for. In Northrend, however, you're going to want a Rhino for all your PvP Tenacity needs, without a doubt.

If you're a hunter, you're probably pretty excited about the new talents we're getting in Patch 3.0.2, not the least of which is the new Beast Mastery talent, appropriately enough called Beast Mastery. It gives you 4 extra talent points, and enables you to tame "exotic" pets that would otherwise be beyond your reach. But which exotic pet is right for you? Where can they be tamed? Are they really better than the regular pets?

There are seven exotic pets in all, but only five of them are available to us now:

• Chimaera
• Core Hound
• Devilsaur
• Silithid
• Worm

The Rhino and the Spirit Beast will only be available in Northrend once the expansion actually arrives next month. For now, we have the selection of exotic beasts that would become available to a level 60 hunter upon first clicking that 51st talent point, and reaching the pinnacle of his or her mastery of beasts. These pets are not necessarily set in stone, of course, and they will change a bit over the next month or so, though how much is still anyone's guess.

So what makes each of these pets special? Let's have a look.

Core Hound:

If casters are giving you trouble, then the core hound is the exotic pet for you. Their Lava Breath ability slows down the enemy's casting speed by 50% for 10 seconds. The cooldown is also ten seconds, so you don't even need the Longevity talent to keep this up all the time, which is especially nice for PvP also. Their Ferocity talents give them lots of extra damage and self-healing options as well.

The core hound is the pet with the loudest footsteps in the game -- their feet pound the earth so hard it even makes everyone's screens shake if they happen to be nearby. So if you're the kind of hunter who likes to announce to the entire world, "Here I am! Look at me! Right here!" then this is the pet for you; but if you want to be sneaky and avoid attention, then you ought to look elsewhere.

BRK loves core hounds lots. There are three types to choose from: red hot, green hot, and white wolf; found in Blackrock Mountain, Shadowmoon Valley, and Azuremyst Isle respectively.

If you want a non-exotic alternative to core hounds, you could consider the serpents and their Poison Spit ability, which is almost just as good as the core hound ability, and ranged too! You won't deafen people and shake their screens with a serpent, but you'll do the trick just as well, more or less, especially if you have Longevity. Serpents are Cunning pets though, so you it also depends on which talents you prefer.

Silithid:

The silithid is your choice if you want to keep an enemy stuck in place. It has a ranged Venom Web Spray ability which can do some damage and trap your enemy for 4 seconds every 40 seconds or so. Longevity helps with that, but to me at least it still doesn't seem as nice as the chimaera's Froststorm Breath. But it all depends on how you use it, I guess, as well as what other sorts of talents you choose for yourself. This is a Cunning pet, just the same as the chimaera.

BRK had a look at this a while back, which showed off the pets abilities and looks. There are four different colors, and for the most part, they can be tamed in Tanaris, Un'Goro, and Silithus.

The spider is your closest non-exotic alternative, with Webs that do the same thing as the Silithid but without the extra bit of damage.

Chimaera:

Pronounced "kai-meh-ra," this mythical mish-mash of different animals has a Froststorm Breath ability, which does a bit of damage slows down your enemy by 50% for 5 seconds. Normally the cooldown is 10 seconds, which in itself isn't that bad, but with the Beast Mastery talent Longevity, you can shorten this to 7 seconds. Combined with well timed Concussive Shots, you could keep an enemy slowed to 50% speed for 12 out of every 14 seconds. That makes this pet one of your best bets kiting, and excellent for PvP: if melee types like rogues and warriors keep slowing you down with their hamstrings and crippling poisons, this beast is your revenge. It won't free you if you're snared, but it will snare them and give you some hope of escape. It's a Cunning pet, so it's extra mobile, and it can also help you recharge your mana in a fix, but it may not have some of the extra damage capabilities or survivability of Ferocity and Tenacity pets.

Check out BRK's video of a chimaera pet, have a look at Wowhead's chimaera gallery to see whether you prefer the Azerothian or Outland breeds, and then scan their list of tamable chimaeras to find the one nearest you, in many places, such as from Winterspring to Shadowmoon Valley.

If you're wondering what sort of normal pets have similar functionality, the next closest pet to the chimaera is the hyena, with Tendon Rip, which lasts 1 second more than the chimaera's ability, but has a 10-second longer cooldown.