It’s Saturday and that means it’s time for another Saturday Show Notes. I won’t be turning this one into a beta report. I’d love to, but I’m out of town visiting my outlaws so I don’t have the time.
Anyway, onto to this week’s news.
Beta Build 18537
There were a couple of beta builds this week, but the only one of significance was 18537. I don’t know about you, but I think of these build numbers like lottery numbers, and each time I see a new one, I hope we hit the Hunter jackpot. This time we sort of did.
There was an update to the PvE Tier 17 set bonuses. I covered it here, but here’s a recap of the changes.
Beast Mastery
- T17 2 piece – Kill Command has a 25% chance to reset the cooldown of Bestial Wrath.
- T17 4 piece (not changed) – While Bestial Wrath is active, one additional pet is summoned to fight with you.
Marksmanship
- T17 2 piece – Aimed Shot critical strikes restore 10 additional Focus.
- T17 4 piece – While Rapid Fire is active, your critical strike damage is increased by 5% per second.
Survival
- T17 2 piece – Black Arrow deals damage 33% more often.
- T17 4 piece – When you hit a target with Explosive Shot, your multistrike damage is increased by 25% for 3 sec.
Pretty awesome right? Well just like winning the actually lottery, the taxman tends to take a pretty big bite when you collect that lump sum, and thus these aren’t the final numbers.
PSA on Set Bonuses: PvE ones are “beta” quality for design. 1000% untuned numbers. PvP ones, still actively being designed.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) July 12, 2014
A one in four chance to reset Bestial Wrath every six seconds was probably too much to hope for. Still very nice bonuses though.
Celestalon on Marksmanship and Survival
There have been concerns that Survival might not have enough Multistrike to make the spec worth while at lower gear levels. Blizzard is taking steps to fix that.
@Bulletdwarf We’re raising Lock and Load’s duration to 30sec, and giving Survival an additional 10% baseline multistrike chance to help. — Celestalon (@Celestalon) July 14, 2014
Survival is shaping up to be one of the more interesting specs in that there will be some decision making whether to hold on to Lock and Load procs or fire them as you get them. Expect there to be lots of discussions on this in the future.
Celestalon gave us a hint at how the design should play out.
@Bulletdwarf It will be a slight *sustained* DPS loss to pool them, in exchange for a significant *burst* DPS gain.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) July 14, 2014
There have also been concerns about Chimera Shot and the fact that it doesn’t do much of anything. Celestalon agrees and changes are on the way.
@Bulletdwarf We have a change coming that will add a bit more Chimaera flavor to it.
— Celestalon (@Celestalon) July 15, 2014
My feeling is that signature shots should be like the computer from the second season of Lost. Failing to push the button when the timer is up should result in catastrophic things happening to your DPS.
All Hunter Raid Tackles Heroic Throne of Thunder
Credit to Bendak for posting about this one. The all Hunter raid organized by ArtemisHowl from Blood Legion will tackle heroic Throne of Thunder on July 19th at 8:30 PM Eastern.
I watched the first Tier 14 raid via Ricket’s Twitch stream. I anticipate that she’ll continue to stream so be sure to check it out. It’s great fun to watch.
Good Reads
If you haven’t checked out some of the other Hunter blogs this week, here are some good articles you might have missed.
Thrill of the Wild wrote about Explosive Shot vs. Kill shot and what your priority should be. It’s not as straightforward as you might think.
The Grumpy Elf shared his thoughts on secondary stat attunements. Spoiler alert: He doesn’t like them. I don’t dislike them as much as he does, but I am concerned about needing to have multiple gear sets and the loss of reforging in Warlords.
Eyes of the Beast had a guest article from Jademcian on the current state of Hunter specs in Warlords of Draenor.
Bendak also wrote about one of the new Rylak pets found in Frostfire Ridge. It’s got an amazing animation, that is likely a bug, but you never know. I’ve posted his video below.
