Posts with tag pet-leveling

Scattered Shots is your weekly guide to improving your Hunter skills, brought to you by Jessica "Lassirra" Klein of The Hunter's Mark, covering a variety of Huntery topics. Today, we'll be looking at talent builds for your pets as you level.

At level 10, every Hunter completes a series of quests that will teach them to tame the beasts they encounter in the wilds to serve as their constant friend and comrade. Whether your chosen companion is of the Cunning, Ferocity or Tenacity persuasion, your pet will grow in strength as you both progress through levels, and at level 20 your pet begins to learn their first talents (and receives an additional talent point every 4 levels from then on) to improve their skills and their ability to lend a hand during your joint adventures. There are many options available to you in the choice of your pet's talents as you level, and today I'd like to present you with a few options to help you along.

The talents your pet will have available to it are determined by the family of pet you've chosen to tame. Cunning pets are considered more "balanced" than their Ferocity or Tenacity counterparts and can be great for leveling when your pet's ability to simultaneously tank mobs and deal damage is an important consideration.

There are a wide variety of Cunning pets available in the game even at low levels, so finding one that's both functional and aesthetically pleasing shouldn't be too difficult. From levels 1 to 20 you'll find a variety of Bats, Birds of Prey, Dragonhawks, Ravagers, Serpents, Spiders and Wind Serpents to choose from if a Cunning pet is what you're after.

Tenacity pets are also an excellent choice for leveling as their ability to take damage is significantly better than other types of pets, and many Tenacity pets have unique abilities that make dealing with multiple mobs simultaneously extremely easy which in turn speeds up the leveling process. Like their Cunning peers, there are a multitude of Tenacity pets available at low levels, such as Bears, Boars, Crabs, Crocolisks, Scorpids and Turtles.

Once again, we return to Mania's Arcania for the latest and greatest in pet news:

First off, hunter pets' leveling has been improved in the latest beta patch, so that now pets have to get just 1/10th (10%) of the hunter's total experience per level rather than 1/6th (16%). That's a big improvement of more than a third off of pet leveling time, but considering that now our characters have a ton more experience to earn per level than they used to, and a huge part of that experience we get comes from turning in quests. Our pets were taking an incredibly long time to level up before, I'm personally not sure this improvement will be enough to give it that special "training a pet feeling" (if it ever could -- personally I would do without pet leveling altogether, but that's just me). Hopefully this still won't be so bad, since, as we already know, if you tame a pet any lower than that, it will automatically just jump right up to 5 levels below your hunter. Hopefully Blizzard will be paying attention and reduce the leveling time even more if it's still too slow, or maybe even, as Mania hopes, include quest experience in pet leveling too.

Secondly, "caster stats" on pets are at last going extinct. Many of us have, in the course of our travels around Azeroth, desired one nifty pet or another, only to find out that it was a "caster pet" with reduced stats, and far inferior to the regular pets. Somehow for ages now, beasts found in the wild with a mana bar haven't changed to regular pet stats when you tame them, and have basically been a waste of stable space (nevermind why in the world beasts would have mana bars). But now that is going to change! As Mania reported, and Ghostwalker confirmed, caster pets will be a thing of the past, and their damage will be brought in line with all the other pets of their family type.

Scattered Shots occasionally wanders around collecting arrows and bullets when they totally miss the target.

The key to understanding hunters in the beta is to look at the big picture. This is something affecting all classes currently, but I'm going to discuss it in relation to hunters in particular. Beta testing buffs and nerfs ultimately come down to a matter of perspective -- do you see your class changes happening in isolation, for now and forever as long as you and your pet shall live? Or are your particular class changes happening as part of an ever-evolving system involving you, me and everyone else over time?

As you've probably heard, hunters got some nerfs in the latest beta update, and some people are understandably upset about them. I'm not worried about it though -- and now I'll tell you why.

Scattered Shots is here for you. As long as you're a hunter, you get to tell us what to write about, and we get to ignore you do whatever you say.

I love these months just before the next expansion is released. There's such a sense of anticipation, where the whole game, including your own class, is in fluid motion, constantly changing. This is the time when the developers actually want you to give them your feedback, to tell them what they're doing wrong; and -- strange as it may seem -- there is actually a chance they will listen to you, take your advice, and actually implement whatever change you suggest!

That's why the last few days I've had my eye on the beta hunter forums, looking for the latest ideas about my favorite class. Lots of the player suggestions they have there are really neat, but unfortunately there's also some of what we call "QQ" (which stands for whining because it looks like two little eyes with tears coming down). It's hard to get good suggestions on the forums without also getting bad QQ. Sometimes when forum-goers clash, they get into an annoying argument and the whole thing devolves into boring name-calling.

So let's weed out all the muck and jumble, shall we? Let's just cut to the prime-rib-beef of what really good ideas are out there and skip all the blah blah blah about who's stupid, who's an idiot, and who's just dumb.

Hunters received a lot of changes in patch 2.3 and now Salthem on the european WoW forums has announced even more. Patch 2.3.2 will bring three buffs to the class, or two buffs and one un-nerf, depending on how you look at it. Check out the list of changes below.