Mend Pet

BEAST MASTERY

• Improved Aspect of the Hawk now has a new spell effect.
• Improved Wing Clip: This talent has been removed.

Sorry, did I say exciting?  I meant nonexistent.

A new animation, and the removal of a talent which ISN’T EVEN IN THE BEAST MASTERY TREE.

But there is this sneaky little one, which is kinda BM, and it makes me quite sad:

Stampede (rhino) only affects 1 target, but adds a 25% bleed damage debuff (that does not stack with Mangle etc.) in addition to its knockback.

/sadface.

No more punting groups of people around in AV!  No more Rhino Bowling!  Well, it’ll empty up a stable spot for me… being able to knock stuff around was the only reason I had the Rhino.

Patch 3.0.9! Time to fix Beast Mastery!

Well, not quite.  As you may know, I want to get back to BM as soon as possible… so first thing I did when I got on after today’s patch was run some Target Dummy tests.  First, I ran with my current Survival spec.  Then after a couple of attempts, I switched to a Beast Mastery spec.

Some conditions of the tests:  My glyphs are spec’d for BM still. I used all my cooldowns whenever I could. Because of how long (or short) it took me to OOM in BM, I still only had time to use BW once.  Also, this is taking advantage of the 3/3 in the Sniper Training talent, which isn’t always applicable in raid fights.  No kill shots were used.

Brajana & Ambrose VS Heroic Training Dummy

As you can see, Survival is still quite the master. More DPS and better mana efficiency. But the numbers for Beast Mastery have improved for sure, most notably pet DPS (as to be expected from the changes).

But is it enough for BM to be viable in a raid environment? I’m sticking with it for tonight’s Naxx-25, and I’ll be sure to update with results when I know how it’s doing!

The wait is over!  A few of the 3.1 changes have been anounced for hunters!  If you haven’t read them already…

1. Consumable ammunition has been removed from the game. Arrows and bullets no longer stack, but are not consumed. Ranged attack speed bonus gained from quivers and ammo bags will be preserved in a different capacity.
2. A new tier of hunter pet talents have been added. In particular, this allows Beastmaster hunters to improve their damage per second (DPS) with their 51 point talent.
3. Hunting Party – this talent has been reduced to 3 ranks and also grants a passive bonus to the hunter.
4. Piercing Shots – this talent has been changed. Your Aimed, Steady and Chimera Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20/30% of damage dealt for 8 sec.
5. Sniper Training – this talent has been changed. After standing still for 6 sec, you gain a 2/4/6% damage bonus to Steady, Aimed and Explosive Shot.
6. We are also looking to add additional trap functionality to Survival.

They are nice.  While it doesn’t affect the nerfitization of Hunters, #1 is by far the most exciting change for me.  I don’t know what I’m gonna do with all the bag space!  I’m just sorry to all the ammo vendors out there.

I hope the new pet talents are really snazzy – I’m pretty happy with the ones I’ve been using, so they better be crazy good.

Over all, they are some attractive changes, but… where’s the major rebalance?

I think some of the other classes have had much more intense changes than we have – and all along they’ve been acting like their going to change what it means to be a Hunter.

I’m sure there is more to come… but this isn’t at all what I was expecting.  It’s not bad, it’s just different.

Ah, Patch 3.0.8!  You make me feel all these different feelings… I both love and hate you!

I got to play quite a bit last night after the patch, and here are the good and the bad that I’ve observed so far.

The Good

• +85 AP to 2H ([Greater Savagery]) now has a nifty red glow effect!
• Arcane Shot is doing incredible amounts of damage for me, about twice as much as my auto shots.
• [Aspect of the Viper] is off of the GCD!
• The [Volley] nerf is barely noticeable on Naxx trash.
• Shot rotations for Beast Masters!  Woo!
• New Achievement for having the [Vampiric Batling] from Tenris Mirkblood.
• [Kungaloosh] and a couple other recipes are available, and therefore the Chef title.
• Ghost run speed increased greatly.
• Moar graveyards!
• Mining nodes now only takes one hit.
• Rep gains from killing mobs doesn’t decay with level.
• [Convention at the Legerdemain] only requires 4x[Northern Stew]!

The Bad

• Wintergrasp is broken.
• Lag and disconnect issues are still abound, at least on Hydraxis (may be due to Wintergrasp being fail).
• [Aspect of the Dragonhawk] is STILL on the GCD (broken).
• [Steady Shot] now does about the same damage as auto shot for me.
• My kitty only does about 20% of my damage, rather than 50%.
• New Warlock [Ritual of Summoning] is broken.
• Paladins using [Hand of Protection] on other players get the Forbearance debuff applied to themselves (broken).

Since Naxx was such fail, and we were unable to conflate as a raid for any single boss due to all the disconnects, I don’t really have accurate stats on my new shot rotation and talents and such.  We had even more disconnection issues than we had before the patch, it was not a happy time for anyone.  We still managed to finish one wing (we’ve had a lot of practice fighting bosses with half the raid disconnecting) but we gave up when we couldn’t take Noth down.

Hopefully tonight will be more pleasant, and I’ll be able to report how my damage is looking!

Yep, I’m doing a Wrath of the Lich King post.  Surprise!  Well, I had a theme going… I had to finish it!

I’m going to take this opportunity to actually read through the patch notes for the beta, I’ll highlight all the changes I am interested in or excited about.  This will be the first time I’ve actually looked at them, so it should be fun, but my naivety about the upcoming expansion will be apparent.

Patch 3.0.1 (beta)

Barber Shop – This is a neat idea… not sure if they have decided if they are bringing in brand new hairstyles and such, because that would be great, but I don’t think I’d changed my look right now.  Besides, you can’t see my hair – I’m wearing a bucket on my head!

Achievement Points – I think this will be fun.  I hope they make the points worth something – tabards and titles and such… but even if they don’t, I don’t see why anyone would have a real problem with this.  Sure, you might not really be concerned with achievements, but they aren’t going to hurt your game.  Well, maybe it will be a bit annoying for people to be bragging about them or whatnot, but they’ll do that with anything.

Death Knights - I look forward to trying out my own Death Knight.  I probably won’t do it right away, and I doubt I will level it to 80… probably won’t even get it to 70.  But it’ll be neat to see!  I’m afraid of the over saturation of Death Knights that is inevitable… we saw a lot of Blood Elves and Draenei with the release of Burning Crusade, but this time, it will affect group composition.  I’ve never really been into melee type classes, so I probably won’t be a big fan of playing the Death Knight.  But, at least Blizzard has added a new class to the game!

Pet Talents – Woo!  This is awesome, adds a whole new dimension of customization to the Hunter class.  I really look forward to playing around with it and figuring out the best way to spec my pet.  I also hope this helps with the always present “pet can’t hold aggro” issue.

If a hunter tames a pet that is more than five levels beneath their own level, the pet will then have their level increased to five levels beneath the hunter’s own level. I must say, I’m probably going to go looking for new pets because of this.  I’ve always been waaay too lazy to level a pet up.  I think I can deal with 5 levels though.

Improved Shadow Word: Pain (Shadow) – Now increases damage done by your Shadow Word: Pain by 5/10%, but no longer increases the duration of your Shadow Word: Pain. I think this is a nice move.  I know when I was leveling, I’d usually have a mob dead before the SW:P was worn off, making the talent point a little useless to me.

Wand Specialization (Discipline) has been removed. I don’t know, I always took this when leveling my priest.  Saves me mana if I can just wand the mob down the last 30% or so… Am I the only priest who used this?  But I guess they had to remove it to make room for other things.

New Calendar feature – Neat, but I think this might go the way of the voice chat… just a bit too late to be used, and it is something that either everyone or no one will be using.

Players will now be able to access their non-combat pets and mounts by clicking on the pets tab in the Character Info panel. *cue the beam of light from above and chorus singing*  I would buy the expansion for this alone.  Seriously.

There are a few other little changes that I think will be handy to have, even if they don’t make a big difference in the game:

• Quests can be shared with party members at any distance.
• Quests can be shared with party members by linking the quest into party chat.
• Shift-clicking to loot mail: You can now hold Shift and click on mail in your in-box to automatically loot any items and gold without opening the mail.
• A 5 minute timer will appear over the player’s unit frame showing the countdown until your PvP flag is cleared.

Well, I really am looking forward to the expansion.  I don’t really want to hear more detail than this stuff, but I don’t mean I want to be all hugger-mugger about it… I just like surprises and experiencing things first hand.  It’s nice to know the big things to expect, but I don’t need to know how much spell power is going to be on my gear and all that.  That is a discussion for another day… in about 5 or 6 months, I suppose!