Posts with tag wow-hunter-info

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing the differences between survival and beast mastery raiding.

It's been a long time since I felt the need to agonize over what spec I want to play on my hunter in raids. Usually there's one clear cut winner, but in Siege of Orgrimmar both survival and beast mastery are doing pretty darn well. Maybe we're not putting out warlock numbers, but we're well into the upper half of the charts when it comes to DPS. The recent hotfix to Aspect of the Hawk gave us just enough of a kick to keep us competitive as everyone continues to gear up. Marksmanship has cemented itself as a popular PvP spec in 5.4, and maybe it's OK that one spec is more PvP oriented. At least we have large numbers of hunters playing all three specs -- it's not a luxury we've always had in the past.

One of the most common questions I see from new hunters is what spec should they play for the best DPS? It's difficult to answer such a question, and it reminds me a lot of the "what is the best pet?" question. If we're talking about PvE it really comes down to beast mastery vs. survival. I haven't forgotten about marksmanship, but in my opinion it's just not as versatile for raiding this tier, or this entire expansion for that matter. As for choosing between survival and beast mastery, the best place to start is to learn the differences.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing UI addons for hunters.

I've personally never been much of a fan of cosmetic UI addons, but I'm a big proponent of utility addons and feel like they can improve your performance dramatically. Therefore, I won't really be talking about unit frames or action bar replacements because frankly I'm not very current with them. If you're interested in giving your whole UI a facelift, you may want to look into an all-in-one solution such as ElvUI, or check out WoW Insider's addon spotlight. Let's start with the addons I can't imagine playing my hunter without.

Essential addons

• Skada Damage Meter (Curse | WoWInterface): This one is my personal preference over Recount. I like being able to save individual parses for later viewing, and I like some of the plugins you can use with it. One of the best ones is SkadaExplosive. This one is entirely made for tracking the T16 4-piece survival bonus. It lets you know what your longest Explosive Shot streak was (every time I get a 10 streak I feel like it's Christmas morning), the highest damaging tick, and other Lock and Load stats.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing how awesome tallstriders are, along with some other interesting hunter pets.

I still deeply regret abandoning my hydra pet back in Wrath of the Lich King. A bug in one of the daily quests in Sholazar Basin allowed hunters to tame a ghostly hydra, oozeling, or crocodile. Blizzard fixed the bug, but allowed everyone to keep their pets. In my defense, we were only allowed to have four pets in our stable at the time, and there was spirit beasts to be had. Do you know how heavily camped Loque'nahak was back then? You think cross-realm zones are bad?

Before Wrath added a couple of extra stable slots (which cost gold, by the way), hunters only had two stable slots throughout vanilla and BC in addition to our active pet. Then Cataclysm came along and let us tame a whopping 25 pets. I'm pretty sure the server hosting the Petopia forums spontaneously exploded in the back of a room somewhere, ruining some poor IT guy's day. It felt like it could never get any better for a pet collector. Then patch 5.3 came along and Blizzard said: "You guys want, like, 30 more pet slots? Sure, here you go."

The new slots were welcome, but just how does one tame 55 unique pets?. Once you've tamed every rare and hunted down every spirit beast, what else is there? The tallstrider, of course. Get one in every color and have your own fleet of tallstriders. Tallstriders are awesome! Maybe even more awesome than sporebats.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing the fourth hunter specialization masquerading as a talent.

If you missed Scattered Shots last week, you can go check it out for a summary of what we learned about hunters at BlizzCon 2013. Today, I want to focus on the most controversial of the new talents: Lone Wolf. By taking this talent (only as survival or marksmanship) you gain 30% increased damage when your pet is not active. I've read a lot of posts, tweets, and comments over the past week and it seems that hunters are split right down the middle with this talent, along with a few in the middle who like having it as an option for pet unfriendly encounters.

My initial reaction to Lone Wolf was very enthusiastic, but then I started to wonder how it was going to work with a class built around pets. It's going to have a cascading effect on many existing hunter talents and abilities, namely anything that works in conjunction with your pet. It's possible Blizzard will add secondary effects to these talents so they work without a pet, but if they spend the time adapting older abilities then why not just go all in with the idea? If someone is leveling up a hunter, shouldn't they be able to make a play style choice as drastic as this early on instead of at level 100? Then again, hunters are a pet class ... so why do we need this talent, anyway?

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing the future of the hunter class.

In little more than a week, we'll know what we have to look forward to in the next expansion at BlizzCon. Whether or not we hear something about hunters specifically remains to be seen. There's no class panel scheduled and class questions won't be allowed during the Q&A panel. We have had some hints from the developers here and there, but ultimately our future is a mystery and may remain so until we see the first beta patch notes.

Arth over at the Warcraft Hunters Union has been compiling a community-generated list of hunter ideas and suggestions intended for the developers known as The Hunter Project. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the hunter class as it stands, but there are some areas where I think some changes are needed. We'll take a look at some of the suggestions put forth in The Hunter Project and I'll add my own input to the mix.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. This week, your host Adam Koebel, aka Bendak will be discussing the black sheep of the hunter family.

To the hunter pariahs who still religiously play marksmanship, all four of you, I salute your dedication to our forgotten specialization. You've kept the spark of hope alive in our hunter hearts. The hope that someday marksmanship will make its triumphant return to the top of the damage meters, just as it was in the armor penetration glory days of Icecrown Citadel.

Perhaps I'm being a teensy bit dramatic, but as a 8-year (soon to be 9-year) hunter, I do have a soft spot for marksmanship. That's why I was happy to hear about the recent hotfix to boost Chimera Shot's damage by a whopping 50%. I wondered if this was enough to make marksmanship competitive, so I decided to shun my traditional beast mastery and survival specs for a week to give marksmanship its fair chance.

Hunter changes are beginning to show up on the patch 5.3 PTR patch notes, and those changes are of the buff variety, assuring that they'll get the seal of approval from the hunter community. Certainly 5.3 is bringing the hunter love, with these buffs coming on the heels of 50 stable slots!

Hunters are getting a flat buff to their DPS, while BM and MM hunters are getting substantial AoE DPS buffs. It's still early in the PTR process, and we can expect to see more changes coming, but for the time being BM is the winner of patch 5.3, getting more benefit from the changes than the other specs.

Let's take a loot at what's changing, and how it will impact the hunter specs.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim or ask him on Google+.

In the very early incarnation of the patch 5.3 PTR, hunter stables have been expanded to accomodate up to 50 hunter pets. This awesome feature was discovered by a score of hunters almost as soon as the PTR was available, though I believe Kalliope reported on it first.

With this change hunters will now be able to collect up to 55 different pets, with 50 in the stable and 5 in the active pet slots.

In the comments to this news at the WHU, Arth made an apt observation:

Min. range is gone, our specs are fairly well-tuned and are all viable, we aren't terrible in PvP, and now this. What the hell are we supposed to complain about?

What indeed, hunters? Let's take a moment to look at why hunters need so ridiculously many stable slots, and why we got them.

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim or ask him on Google+.

With the awesome buffs to MM in Patch 5.2, MM hunter DPS is better than ever, just a theoretical wee bit behind SV DPS. Despite this, however, MM continues to be vastly under-represented in raid parses, often having so few it's impossible to make a statistical evaluation of their performance (and that's before even considering the selection bias).

Theories abound for the lack of MM representation: MM is harder to play; MM is technically a bit behind the others so everyone leans on the ones ahead; MM has no clear role in which they are superior (unlike BM burst and SV AoE); MM is associated with elves, and no one wants to have anything to do with dirty elven things.

It's been a long time since MM has been a popular spec, and most of the hunter optimization sites focus on maximizing your performance in BM or SV. So now seems like a good time to review how to optimize your MM hunter to take full advantage of all those juicy 5.2 buffs.

With MoP patch 5.2 due to be released in just a couple weeks, Blizzard has released several hunter buffs on the PTR that are designed to bring the hunter specs closer together in DPS output -- and from the looks of it, it may well bring the hunter specs closer than at any point in WoW history.

I'm talking insanity of biblical proportions here, BM and MM living together, mass hysteria!

While it's almost all good news, there were some nerfs to hunter PvP in specific -- though keep in mind that some of these are sometimes tied directly to abilities that are also being buffed. So lets take a look at the entire list of hunter changes for 5.2, both those from this past week and the others still around from earlier in the 5.2 PTR, and see what it means to the hunter class.

Last week we went over the patch 5.2 hunter gear -- everything, that is, except for the most complicated slot. And as always, the roughest gear and most debated gear decisions revolve around trinkets.

The question of which of the hunter trinkets are best is further complicated by the fact that current trinkets can be upgraded (a feature that will not be available to us once patch 5.2 hits). So will the upgraded Relic of Xuen be a contender with the new trinkets? Or should you spend those valor points elsewhere in your remaining weeks?

So let's roll up our sleeves and do some trinket math! We're going to take a look at all the new hunter trinkets datamined in patch 5.2, and compare that against the upgraded forms of some of the top other trinkets.

It looks like we're going to be seeing patch 5.2 land within the next couple of weeks, and now thanks to some datamining we have an idea of all the hawt new gear we're going to be seeing in patch 5.2.

Included in this gear is our new tier 15 set: Saurok Stalker's, which is a spiky looking set with a helm that bears a suspicious resemblence to a lizard is eating our heads. Fun Saurok Stalker's set activity: get to just the right depth in water and can make it look like a crocodile head floating on the surface. Then jump out and kill something.

On to the gear!

Hunters, rejoice! A fix is in, at least preliminarily. Do head over to the PTR and check it out when it's up with the next build.

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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