Posts with tag crab

Ghostcrawler took to the official forums to address the lack of spirit cloth gear that some players have experienced in the Mists of Pandaria beta dungeons currently available for testing. Spirit gear for pure healers is necessary to retain mana regeneration levels and output as content increases in difficulty. With a lack of spirit gear, some healers found their jobs more difficult. Ghostcrawler confirmed that the level-up dungeons found throughout the 85 to 90 content cannot be over-challenging due to the nature of their place in the progression.

The meat of the answer is that as you approach endgame content at level 90, more gear appears with endgame stats on it -- dodge, parry, and block for tanks, spirit for healers, and so on. When that gear becomes important is when the stats start appearing. Until then, pop some reforge, check reputation vendors and other sources of level-up gear for spirit stuff, and mish-mash together a set of decent healer gear. (Or, at the end of the day, you're just really unlucky with drops.)

After a bit of a hiatus as a public face, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has returned to us with a post on the WoW community website about the current state of raid progress in Cataclysm. After discussing dungeon difficulty, Ghostcrawler has set his sights on tackling players' responses to the current tier of Cataclysm raiding.

Ghostcrawler discusses how there is a fine line between too easy and making the raid game feel shallow, as people want and expect a challenge but don't want to grow more and more frustrated over time as the tier of raiding winds to an end. The sweet spot, according to GC, is making it feel like every raid group can make some kind of progress.

One very interesting point that Ghostcrawler makes is about encounters nerfing themselves over time, as people learn new strategies, disseminating those strategies amongst the player base, as well as UI mods. Making specific mention of UI mods lends to the overall theme that the UI is moddable for a reason. Also, as we have suspected, Blizzard does like to nerf content slowly over time so that accessibility continues to be the name of the game.

If you've been reading WoW Insider for a while, you probably remember Big Red Kitty's meditations on the Gorilladin. With judicious use of the Gorilla Hunter pet's Thunderstomp skill, you could grind multiple mobs at once and bring Hunter leveling and farming to a whole new level -- enough that Blizzard's had Gorillas under the microscope for a while. Now the word has come down: No more monkey business in 3.1. Gorillas are losing Thunderstomp as a unique pet family ability.

That doesn't mean, however, that Thunderstomp is going away. Rather, it means that all tenacity pets are getting it.

Love will soon be in the air, and it's time you worked out your game plan. Chances are that it won't be just the city guards and leaders that will catch your eye (or eye socket).

Whether you're looking to reel someone in, set up a romantic excursion, or send an enemy a delicious surprise, you'll find that preparation is the key. This year, crafted items are the hot new trend. What better to say, "Darling, I can't get enough of the way your eyes puss" than with handmade?

First, you have to look the part. For all of you gents out there, I recommend seeking out a tailor for your very own Tuxedo Jacket, Tuxedo Pants, and coordinating Tuxedo Shirt. Alternatively, a Festival Suit will have you standing apart from the crowd, while a Colorful Kilt will set up some easy access to um, cultural traditions.

For the gals, we have the lovely and sophisticated Festival Dress, or the elaborate and vaguely desperate White Wedding Dress. If you want to attract a different sort of attention, then try the Red Winter Clothes on for size! They aren't just for Winter Veil, and are snazzier than anything Victoria keeps secret.

Daniel Howell contributes BigRedKitty, a column with strategies, tips and tricks for and about the Hunter class, sprinkled with a healthy dose of completely improper, sometimes libelous, personal commentary.

We've seen the Age of the Scorpid, but Crabs have always been a bit of a rarity. They're Tenacity pets in Wrath of the Lich King, and you may find their Pin spell to your liking.

Cats? Nobody uses cats, do they? Nah. But just for historical purposes, we'll show you Cats in WotLK too.

Do you think you could use a hunter-pet that permanently reduces a caster's cast-time by 50%? Look at Serpents, their Poison Spit, and dare to dream.

You are invited to download the YouTube version (81MB) of this movie here, and the full-sized version (120MB) here.

As always, a great big Thank You to the WoW Insider editors for allowing us to publish this movie both here and on our little blog at the same time!

Welcome to another edition of Scattered Shots, the other WoW Insider weekly Hunter column. Daniel Whitcomb is your guest host again this week.

So, we theorized about talented pets a bit quite a few installments of Scattered Shots ago, but now we have the actual trees live and testable on the Wrath Beta, and they seem to be firming up nicely. There's a few promised changes yet to come, such as the removal or lowering of focus costs on many major abilities and talents, and it's still very possible that Blizzard may make changes here and there before live, but I think they're solid enough at this point that we can look at each tree and make some solid predictions about how people will use them and how various talent builds might look.

The Midsummer Fire Festival officially ends on July 5th, just a few scant days away. That means no more Lord Ahune, no more chances to get the Deathfrost enchant, no more desecration, no more turning into a crab, no more Torch Tossing... Yeah, I'm a little bummed too.

Still, we have a couple days left to make the best of it. Of course, the question is -- what exactly do we do with it? Myself, I'm torn. My enchanter still needs the Deathfrost enchant, so I may want to get a group together and go slay Ahune a few more times. Then again, I still haven't gotten some of the Midsummer loot on a couple of my 70s, so maybe I want to make a push to get the last few blossoms for those.

But I'm also thinking that it would be nice to get my shaman to level 30 before Patch 2.4.3, and thus I'm tempted to just go out and slog through the last few levels with her, bolstered by the all the various Fire Festival buffs and the Ribbon Dance buff.

I'll have to think about it some more, but in the meantime, do you have a plan for these last few days of the Midsummer Fire Festival?

So by now, hopefully a lot of you have had time to check out some of the new stuff that's shown up at the Midsummer Fire Festival this year. With the help of our walkthroughs, it's a piece of cake to get right into the thick of things.

My impressions so far have been pretty favorable. I very much enjoyed being a crab (and asking everybody for "maybe little pinch"), and while it took me a while to master Torch Catching (It became easier once I turned spell effects up to high so I could see the shadow of the torch on the ground), I've gotten pretty good at that already. If there's one thing I'd complain about a little, it's probably the fact everything seems a bit expensive. With 3 level 70s and a couple level 60+ types who might like Braziers, Robes, and Sandals, it'll be a bit of a pain to get all the stuff for them, and it should take quite a few hours to desecrate or honor enough fires for all that. Still, at least you get good gold for all that desecrating, so it's not a complete waste.

How's your experience been so far? Is Torch Catching a challenge? Are you a thief yet? What about Lord Ahune, have you seen him fall yet? Share your experiences in the comments.

Keep watching WoW Insider while you're at it. We're hard at work writing more guides that will tell you everything you need to know about Lord Ahune and the rest of the Midsummer Fire Festival, and they should appear on the site today and tomorrow.

Scattered Shots is for Hunters. David Bowers is caught in a Freezing Trap this week, so Daniel Whitcomb -- who did not set the trap, he swears to the Light -- is substituting for him.

You hear it pretty much all the time if you've ever slightly dipped into the world of Hunters. If you want to play in the big leagues, conventional wisdom says you're pretty much stuck with a select handful of pet types (also known as pet families): Ravagers, Cats, and Raptors for PvE, Scorpids for PvP.

But do you know why those pet families are so desired? What it really comes down to is Hunter roles and abilities.

While looking over the new "fake" pet skills page at Petopia earlier today, one of the biggest things that struck me is that the whole Thorns skill that the temporary Crab pets get for the lowbie Hunter taming quests would be a great thing for normal Crab pets to get. Right now, They're stuck learning nothing but Claw, placing them right near the bottom of the pet pantheon - very close to Sporebats, who can't learn any special abilities at all.

My two high level Hunters tamed a Carrion Bird and a Boar, respectively, so I'm lucky enough to have a good selection of skills to use, but I think there should be more options for people who love their offbeat pets like Sporebats or Hyenas or Crocs. They can even use some of the old rumored alpha skills for pets that popped up around the time of Burning Crusade's alpha. I'm hoping that Blizzard shows more types of Hunter pets some love in WoTLK with a wide selection of new skills, be it thorny shells for Crabs, a Cannibalism-type skills for Raptors, or anything else that lets us see Hunters fighting alongside fewer Cats and Ravagers (or in the case of arenas, Scorpids).

What do you think? Should Blizzard focus a bit more on a wider variety of options for Hunter pets? Or should Hunters just take what they can get and be grateful for it? If the former, what types of new pet skills would you like to see?

Reader Zedlav sent us these two shots of crabs that were supposedly found by the WoW Model Viewer by his friend, and apparently are in the PTR client in advance of Wrath of the Lich King. The names "Forgotten Crab" and "Icecrown Crab," we're told, were made up by his friend, but that font on the pictures looks familiar to me-- if you know where these pics came from, let us know and we'll credit them further.

At any rate, they look convincing enough to us. We know there are all kinds of new wildlife in Northrend (we saw a few of them at BlizzCon, including a killer whale-type of creature swimming in the waters off the Howling Fjord. So big crabs, icy or "forgotten," aren't too much of a surprise. Check the concept art gallery below to see what else we'll see up North.