Hunter & DK Pet Changes, Archaeology, Blue Posts

[Knirps]

That's the thing, though. They gave more people BL so that a class or spec WOULDN'T be mandatory. If anything, this opens up posibilitys, not closes them out.

And Hunters are already forced into a 'best pet' thing.

I highly doubt anyone will ever cry because a Hunter isn't BM with the right pet because I've never been in a raid that doesn't have a Shaman OR Mage. It's not that rare.

[lokna]

loving the hunter changes. to be fair its not that big of a deal with there new abilety's now pet finnaly have usefullness in a raid and whatkazefiend says totaly agree on it.

tired of seeing my wolf and for people that wine about it not every hunter is going beastmaster in a raid yes the buffs are handy but in a 25 man raid you got all the buffs in the raid that the pet provides so not really any use of a hunter bm there.

its to fill up the blanks in most raids like 10 man because its shit that only a shaman, (in cata also mage) can do bloodlust because on some servers thre arent many of those classes around.

so stop qqing and wait to see what will change because its never permanent because people whine to mutch that its op

[Kody]

That's the thing, though. They gave more people BL so that a class or spec WOULDN'T be mandatory. If anything, this opens up posibilitys, not closes them out.

And Hunters are already forced into a 'best pet' thing.

I highly doubt anyone will ever cry because a Hunter isn't BM with the right pet because I've never been in a raid that doesn't have a Shaman OR Mage. It's not that rare.

Yeah I think the saving grace for this is that Mages are extremely common. I can't remember the last time I did a 10-player raid without one.

So in that sense, it's not too bad. It's still a bit weird it's for a single spec though. I'd say it would be like adding the Blessing of Kings buff back as a talent, but they did that with an Exotic pet ability too. ;p

[Lugo Moll]

Yeah I think the saving grace for this is that Mages are extremely common. I can't remember the last time I did a 10-player raid without one.

So in that sense, it's not too bad. It's still a bit weird it's for a single spec though. I'd say it would be like adding the Blessing of Kings buff back as a talent, but they did that with an Exotic pet ability too. ;p

As long as being BM with a core hound is a sizeable personal DPS nerf compared to other pets/specs, I don't think it's very OP. It's more of an emergency solution if your 10-man doesn't have a mage or shaman.

It might be OP in rated battlegrounds, though.

[Knirps]

Well, being BM no matter what is somewhat of a DPS downer... They just plain don't have that much throughput. So, like I said before, you take some of your own DPS and abilities away to being a versitility pet to the raid.

[Vehemence]

Those Pet abilities better be alternatives, some of that did not had to change at all.

[Jonkheer]

i love the mount ! But how can the achievement be a guild achievement ? it looks like a solo thing.

[Kody]

i love the mount ! But how can the achievement be a guild achievement ? it looks like a solo thing.

It's a collective achievement. I agree it does seem a bit easy so maybe they'll change it to require rep or cost a lot of gold too. Like I mention in my news post, the gold cost may not be correct at the moment because the reward window is kind of buggy.

[Deleted]

i love the mount ! But how can the achievement be a guild achievement ? it looks like a solo thing.

I can't think of a way to explain it for some reason... But basically you have to just get exalted with each of the factions as a guild? So, let's say that you're exalted with all the factions but The Knights of the Ebon Blade, then someone comes into your guild who is exalted with that faction. You get the achievement. For some reason it's hard to explain, but I hope it helps.

[Covert]

The hunter and DK changes seem really cool. Too bad I play neither of those classes.

[Deleted]

The Hunter pet changes will especially help 10man raids, and the Bloodlust is not OP at all... No one will ever use the Core Hound pet in 25man raids though. :P

[Deleted]

Screw the corehound, ill be rocking a devilsaur anyway, 5% crit ASWELL as the 12% extra damage from his monstrousbite.. hell ya

[Altaria]

First they give me a murloc costume as a tier and after that they give me those awesome pet changes. I really don't know whether I love you or hate you blizz, you keep screwing my mind

[Deleted]

The hunter changes are goddamn bullshit!
Mages get a redundant spell as their 85 spell, disappointing enough. But now we're getting competition on this already weak ability BY A FUCKING PET?!

[Panoramixe]

Not to mention a specific *pet* within the spec.

You have to remember hunters will have 5 (I think 5, anyway more than one) "active" pets at a time they can swap between at any time outside of combat. And the stables will house even more pets, so you should expect your decent hunters to at least have one of each pet family standing at the ready.

As for it being BM only, I figure they didn't want to make heroism too common either. 3 shaman spec + 3 mage specs and 1 hunter spec seems plenty to make sure it's available in 10-man raids.

And to the guy saying you could make a raid with all dps being hunters, the opposite is true too you can make a raid with all buffs without any hunters. What's the point again?

[Kody]

That mount is pure awesome!

For some reason I'm disappointed that he didn't jump while riding it...

Alright, here you go:



Uploaded to my personal Youtube so the Curse subscribers don't get spammed with it.

[Darowen]

Finally a reason to play my hunter in raids now.

I agree with being able to have different pets in raids. Get tired of looking at hunters with wolves.

[Snorri]

What excited me the most was

"The latest beta build was HUGE, you can expect a lot of interesting things in the next days/weeks, we're definitely getting closer to a release date."

[Deleted]

It isn't unbalanced at all. I can see BM hunters being welcomed into raids with a core hound for this reason, especially if there's no shaman in the group already. For a while into the Beta I was really starting to frown at the hunter changes, but now I think they're started to look wonderful. Perhaps BM hunters won't be so bad anymore.

And now I think Archaeology (Need to think of a short way to write this.) looks really exciting! Can't wait for Cata.



Now why would you want that? Both the Celestial Steed and Invincible (Currently the only two horse mounts in the game with the same model.) look awkward and somewhat silly. Invincible less so than the Celestial Steed, but even so, they look strange and more like a pony than a horse. I'd like to see a revamped version of the original horse mounts.

Im not asking for the same model,im asking for the same animations. The current galloping of the horse mounts looks incredibly inaccurate and awkward whilst the cash shop mount's animations look way more realistic.

[Dran]

Screw the corehound, ill be rocking a devilsaur anyway, 5% crit ASWELL as the 12% extra damage from his monstrousbite.. hell ya

Unless I'm not following something, Monstrous Bite doesn't give any aditional damage. It's now the mortal strike effect, it's listed up there.

That's kind of the problem here too. When talking about BM damage, you're comparing live damage to beta damage that doesn't currently exist since the gear to put into the spec doesn't exist? Really? Besides, at theoretical top-end it's 'only' 1.5k difference in DPS. Of course if it doesn't bring anything to compensate (which it currently doesn't), that's alot of wasted DPS and not justified, but no one has any numbers for what the spec will be doing at 85 in raiding gear. I imagine with the pet changes it'll be perfectly competitive and justified with the current live numbers.

Then the oh noez heroism bit. On PvE terms it's as overpowered as any other buff listed. My GM with plans for 10man in Cata is a Shaman, so... suddenly the heroism bit isn't important at all because we have what's a great healer and fun person (!) with that button already. Maybe we'll have a Mage too, who knows. So then what you look at is what other critical buffs are missing, this in a 10man setting though you can actually miss something like Sunder in 25 if the only Warrior you have is DPS and doesn't want to / forgets. 10man though, no Warrior but a Feral and perhaps Death Knight tanking? Raptor for sunder, not even an exotic pet so you can be whatever special nonconformist spec you want and still have the sunder debuff raptor, which is a very big deal. Have a good stack of melee debuffs without your pet but casters are behind? Dragonhawk and Wind Serpent aren't exotic either, but provide a big 8% spell damage buff.

Most of the buffs that aren't heroism and passive buffs can be gotten by any spec. This provides Hunters with the diversity they need and want in their pets and makes me very happy. It's certainly better than previous itterations where it was "Oh cool, this pet can do the faerie fire debuff for us, but... it's only 40% uptime. Yeah, nevermind, back to Wolf or die." It also allows Blizzard to tune 10man hard-modes around having these things from some class/spec/scroll/pet rather than tuning around not having heroism or half the health/damage buffs, making the 10man heroics a pushover when you do have those buffs compared to 25man that's tuned around having and pushing everything the way they want to tune 10.