Over the weekend I finally won the STV fishing tournament and cleared the way to get my Salty title. It doesn’t have quite the same ring as Brewmaster, but it’s one that I’ve wanted ever since the achievement system was rolled out.
Done Fishin’.
Apr 102012
Yesterday Ghostcrawler popped up to explain how the pet system is changing in Mists of Pandaria. You can see his post here.
- Every pet has 3 specs: Ferocity, Tenacity and Cunning. These work much like class specs, with a similar UI.
- Pets come with the spec you’d expect (Ferocity for kitties) but you can change it. If you want a tanking cat or a DPS crab, you can. If you have a favorite pet, you can just always use that one and swap the spec around.
- I hope to see A LOT of DPS crabs.
- Each spec comes with 2-3 active and 2-3 passive abilities. We took a careful look at what pet talents most hunters were taking and tried to take the best of those. Things like Roar of Sacrifice, Last Stand and Heart of the Phoenix made the cut.
- We didn’t think we were getting a ton of gameplay out of the pet talents on live — players interacted with them even less than the class talents — and we didn’t think pets needed the full tiered system like the Mists talent implementation, so we decided the best way to offer pet customization is to let hunters choose their pet mostly because of how it looks (and its one special ability) and not from its role.
This is pretty much what we expected to happen. You can now make any pet be any spec. That means Cat tanks, DPS Turtles, and so on. Personally I would have preferred that they expanded the current system by given our pets a talent system similar to the revamped ones they did for classes, but this will do.
If you raid, and all of your buffs are covered, you now have the option to bring whatever pet you want and not have to sacrifice and ounce of DPS. The exotic pets as Beast Mastery only is still in place, only now you can take that Spirit Beast on your extreme soloing adventures.
Overall this is a positive change to the pet system. It should be noted that this is not fully implemented yet in the beta. For example you can’t change your pets spec yet, and I suspect pet abilities have not been finalized yet either.
According to MMO-C, Blizzard will deploy a new beta build before the end of the week. There was only one note pertaining to Hunters.
- Frenzy now lasts 30 sec, up from 20 sec.
This may not sound like a big a change, but it may very well be. In episode 125 of the Hunting Party Podcast we talked about Frenzy and Focus Fire and there was some confusion on how it was implemented in the beta. Since doing that episode I had a chance to logon to the beta and play around with it.
Basically it works similarly to how it does in live. Your pet attacks, builds up stacks of Frenzy, and then you can use Focus Fire to consume those stacks and get a haste buff per stack. Now in the beta your pet only has a 40% chance to get Frenzy, but you get an 8% haste buff per stack, meaning a full five stacks of Frenzy will give you 40% haste. Yes, 40%.
On the surface this sounds good, but what I noticed was happening is that it was virtually impossible for your pet to get a full five stacks of Frenzy. Your pet would get a couple of stacks of Frenzy, hit a bad streak, and then the stacks would drop off.
Because Frenzy has a strong chance of dropping off your pet, it means you have to monitor your pet’s Frenzy stacks and make a decision to hit Focus Fire if it looks like they’re going fall off. By increasing the duration of Frenzy to 30 sec., it increases the likelihood that your pet will continue to build up stacks. We’ll have to see how this plays out.
One thing that should be noted is that my character in the beta has zero expertise, so it’s possible that my pet isn’t landing as many attacks as it should, thus contributing to the slow build up of Frenzy stacks. Note to self – hit the reforger ASAP.
Apr 012012
Killing Spirit Beasts!? Worst quest ever.
Gets posted right here. The focus of this phase of the beta is the Pandaren starting area, and leveling a panda from 1-10. None of the high level stuff is enabled yet. That means no new continent, dungeons or abilities beyond level 85.
I leveled a Pandaren Hunter through the starting zone. None of the new beasts there were tameable, but that could change. Minimum range is indeed gone and it’s wonderful. It also appears that you will learn new abilities automatically as you level. No more having to visit the trainer.
The new starting zone is quite nice, and the pandas are a lot of fun. The female ones look great. For now I’m going to give the Monk class a look before carrying on with the hunter. So move over Darkbrew, because here comes – Darkfu! If he looks a little stiff, that’s because the animations for the male Pandaren are little buggy right now. It’s beta and it’s to be expected. As such I’ve include a small gallery of some of the quirky and cool things I’ve seen so far. Personally I think they should leave the King’s lines as they are.
I was fooling around in the MoP beta and I noticed a nice quality of life change to Trap Launcher. This is now a toggle on/off ability.
What this means is that while you have it on you can launch any of your traps without having to click the Trap Launcher each time. The Trap Launcher stays on until you cancel it. If you want to drop a trap at your feet, just turn off the launcher and activate that trap.
Sloooowest download ever. If the beta hasn’t ended by the time it’s finished I’ll let you know if I find anything interesting.
Mar 222012
No Haikus or contests this time. Just straight cash. Stay tuned.
Mar 172012
Happy St. Patrick’s day to you, and happy blogiversary to me! It’s hard to believe that it was three years ago today that I decided to throw my hat into the Hunter blogging ring.
Now back in March of 2009 the blogging landscape looked a lot different than it does now. BigRedKitty was still active and sitting atop the Hunter blogging throne. Sites like Aspect of the Hare, The Hunting Lodge, and Slow Wolf were also going strong.
OutDPS was only about a month old and The Huntsman’s Lodge and the Warcraft Hunters Union were picking up steam. It was an intimidating pool to dive into, but I’m glad I took the leap.
This has been and continues to be a great ride. I haven’t written much during the course of this expansion, mainly because I found Cataclysm to be somewhat uninspiring, and the podcast is a great outlet to talk about things. Some highlights from the last three years are -
- Deciding to just blog.
- Doing the Hunting Party Podcast.
- Getting a chance to meet Euripides and Frostheim in person.
- Starting a guild with Euripides that has lasted for almost two-years now.
- Darkbrew Lager.
- Finally winning a Cataclysm beta key after writing many a haiku and losing many a contest.
- Getting a chance to talk to people who know a lot more about Huntering that I ever will.
My favorite post that I wrote was this one.
My two favorite screen shots that I ever took were -
In fact WoW Insider stole the Lich King one for this article :P .
Thanks to all of you who continue read this blog and listen to the podcast. I’ll be here for Mists of Pandaria, and I hope you will be too.
Mar 022012
“I had it in my hand” – Indiana Jones
During our 25-man raid the Seal of Primordial Shadow dropped. I passed on it because it has eewww Expertise. Yes, I know that the red-gem gives this ring more agility than any of the others at this level, but it has eewww Expertise!
Who knew that this already decent ring was truly going to be BiS caliber going into Mists of Pandaria. From the recent Dev Watercooler.
Ranged attacks will be able to be dodged. Hunters will benefit from expertise and will have it on their gear, which will also allow hunters and Enhancement shaman to share gear more easily.
