Casual Huntering

Posts Tagged ‘Hunters’

So, what else do we WoW bloggers have to do on patch day when the servers are down? Of course we talk about… the patch. So, patch 3.3.3 actually has a lot of stuff to it, and you’ve probably already read, memorized, changed your macros, changed your class, yada yada yada. But I’m going to post it anyway. Oh, by the way this doesn’t have the entire 3.3.3 patch notes, I tend to skip the classes that I’m not playing. Actually, up to this point I’d only comment on Hunters and Death Knights, but I’ve been playing my druid more (even if she’s only level 38). So, I’ve added the druid changes as well (even though at this point I won’t have a clue as to what the heck they mean). For the full patch 3.3.3 notes go to blizz’s website. Now, my list is getting shorter because of technical issues. I was using Word format, but it was eating my text, so we’re going to do something different, but we’re running out of time.

Classes: General

Several raid buffs have had their ranges increased to 100 yards, up from 45 yards, to prevent select buffs from repeatedly getting applied and removed during highly mobile encounters. Some buffs, such as paladin auras, totems, shouts and Blood Pact are intentionally meant to have shorter ranges and remain unchanged.

Seems like the buffs we would have liked to have increased their ranged didn’t.

Hunters

Talents

• Beast Mastery

Ferocious Inspiration: This ability is now an aura and provides 1/2/3% damage to all party or raid members within 100 yards and boosts the damage of Steady Shot by 3/6/9%

• Pet Talents

Heart of the Phoenix: Cooldown reduced to 8 minutes, down from 10 minutes.

I’ve already typed a big long paragraph on this, and then it was eaten by bad Word formatting. I’m too impatient to try again. Lets just say, yay for BM!

Death Knights

Icy Touch: This ability now causes a very high amount of threat while the death knight is in Frost Presence.

Chains of Ice: The ability now innately applies Frost Fever to a target.

Rune of Razorice: Now stacks 5 stacks of 2% Frost Vulnerability instead of 10 stacks of 1% Frost Vulnerability. Proc chance changed to 100%.

Talents

Blood

• Abomination’s Might: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc on certain strikes. Rank 1 is 5% attack power and Rank 2 is 10% attack power. The self strength buff remains unchanged.
• Will of the Necropolis: There is no longer a cooldown on the frequency at which this talent can be activated. In addition, this ability can now also be triggered by damage which deals less than 5% of your health.

Frost

• Endless Winter: No longer causes Frost Fever to be applied by Chains of Ice, but instead grants 2/4% strength.
• Icy Talons: The personal haste benefit provided by this talent is no longer exclusive with other sources of melee haste. This will allow death knights to always swing 4/8/12/16/20% faster when Frost Fever is applied. Windfury Totem and the party/raid component of Improved Icy Talons still do not stack.
• Improved Icy Talons: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc. The self haste buff remains unchanged.
• Nerves of Cold Steel: Now increases off-hand damage by 8/16/25%, up from 5/10/15%.
• Unbreakable Armor: The amount of strength granted is now 20%, up from 10%.

Unholy

• Scourge Strike: Now deals 70% weapon damage, plus 12% of physical damage done as shadow damage for each of the death knight’s diseases on the target. The net result should be larger strikes with no diseases present, while maximum damage with all diseases applied to the target should stay the same.
• Unholy Blight: In addition to its previous effects, this talent now also prevents diseases from being dispelled from victims afflicted by Unholy Blight.

I’m still trying to learn the DK class. I’m now dual speced as an unholy DPSer and a Frost tank. I know frost isn’t thee best tanking spec, but for what I want to do its pretty awesome. I’m only tanking 5 mans at this point, and I’m only doing that with my friends and family until I’m comfortable. In LFG I’m playing dps. My gear still sucks pretty bad at this point.

Druids

Nature’s Grasp: Now has 3 charges, up from 1.

Talents

Balance

• Starfall: The damage done by this spell has been significantly increased.
• Typhoon: Mana cost reduced to 25%, down from 32%.

Feral Combat

• Mangle: The debuff from this talent now lasts 60 seconds, up from 12 seconds.

I honestly don’t know what any of this means yet. I know I like my feral kitty druid. I love sneaking up on mobs and pouncing. But past that at this point I’m clueless.

I was going to add a lot more, but I was having some issues and I’m running out of time. I really should have started getting ready to go to work like 3 minutes ago. There are several things they are doing with this patch that will make my life so much easier. I love the fact that holiday bosses are now being added to the dungeon finder. I’ll actually do those bosses daily now, that and the summoning criteria has gone down. And you can’t do it more than once a day anyways, so that will make my life easier on holidays.

Engineering pets are no longer bind on pick up, that’s nice and annoying. I like my engineering profession, I don’t want to share it, but I’m not a goblin engineer, and I want the little bomb pet. So, what do you do?

Its nice to see dungeon finder get a little more refined. I always hated it when someone was voting to boot a player and I had no idea why. Overall they’re making it a little cleaner.

Seems like a lot of features that blizzard only recently added are being cleaned up, like the dungeon finder and the quest tracker and such. Plus we’re getting nifty random battlegrounds, and such. Should be fun to play with tonight. What I still want to know is …. where is my moose?? /shakes fist at ghostcrawler.

Well, with the Lunar Festival coming soon to a close the Elders of Azeroth come forth to bear their wisdom. The shared topic from Blog Azeroth, given by Khi, was to share some wisdom with people just starting out. I’m not sure exactly how wise I am, sometimes I can be downright immature, but I am Elder Aoirselvar, and every so often I come up with some profound.

Okay, so you decided to create a hunter. You like animals and guns? Or it was random decision and you don’t really know what you are getting yourself into. Great!

Well, welcome, you have come to the right place. Hunters are great! They are fun, great for leveling, great dpsers, and usually down right good looking (especially the dwarven types).

As Thorgas Grimson, Dwarven Hunter Trainer said,

Tamer of beasts, master marksman, proven tracker – what else ya want to accomplish in this lifetime? All those things combined takes quite a bit of intelligence and a great deal of patience.

The path of the hunter ain’t an easy one, that’s fer sure. You’re gonna need lots of training if you wanna be as good as even our lowest ranking rifleman. But that’s why I’m here.

One thing you should always remember is that you gotta respect the world you’re livin’ in. The beasts that choose to fight along side you; the shine of your weapon; the weight of your ammo; the bite of the bitter wind; all these things you need to know intimately.

Now when you start playing a hunter at level one you’ll notice something is missing. That’s right you don’t have a pet, you have to earn it. Level one through ten is often known as melee hell for hunters. As you will soon find out, we hunters aren’t so good up close and personal. We usually like to keep our big mean pets around to keep people out of our face. We have personal space issues.

But… you don’t get to do the quest chain to get yourself a pet until level 10. However, there are a few tricks to keeping mobs out of your face up to this point. And there are some very important skills to be learned at this point.

At first you’ll have next to nothing. You’ll be able to auto-shot and hit someone with your sword. Your auto-shot is the most basic range attack you have, and it is awesome. You just have to normally turn it on and forget about it. We’re the only class I believe that has a range auto attack (some people aren’t too happy about that).

You’ll see that this auto-shot range attack takes a break between shots for two seconds. So, this is what you’ll do when you attack mobs at first. Target something you want to kill, get as far away from it as possible with it still in range. Your auto-shot spell will be white when in range, red when out.

In range.

Not in range.

Then start your auto-shot, while you’re getting ready to shot again walk backwards, turn around and run, or strafe to one side or another, just for a couple of seconds then stop facing the mob again to let the auto-shot do it work (the only crappy thing about auto-shot is that you have to be holding still for it to work).

So, continue to do this, auto-shot, move, auto-shot, move, and before the mob can reach you it’ll be dead.

For some mobs all you have to do is back up for a couple of seconds, shot, and back up again. However, this doesn’t always work and some of the tougher mobs will catch up with you quickly. In these cases you’ll want to strafe shot them. That is running away with either the “Q” or “E” button, to the side, gaining distance from the mobs during your cool down on auto-shot then ever so briefly turning around, holding still for just a slight moment to get an auto-shot in, then start running again. The goal is to keep your melee weapon skills as low as possible to show just how well you did at killing stuff before they got anywhere near you. You’ll start to get the rhythm of it. It’s almost like a dance. Shoot one two shoot one two etc etc. (I had a harder time getting screen shots of the strafing because it generally requires both hands.)

If you are having a difficult time judging when you can auto shot again there are mods out there. The one I am using is called Kharthus’s Hunter Timers.

This is a good time to note that it’s probably a good idea to make sure you know what’s around you. It doesn’t do any good to walk right into a mob while backing up attacking another mob. But it shouldn’t matter, from level 1-6 all mobs are yellow, meaning they’ll only attack if you attack them first. By the time we get to mobs that are a bit more aggressive we’ll be focusing on a new tactic anyway.

Now as you start to level you’ll get some nifty shots to help you with your anti-melee quest. At level 4 you’ll get Serpent Sting, this is a DoT (damage over time) shot. You’ll want to start with this shot now and continue your auto-shot/ move /auto-shot thing. Important to note, you no longer even have to click on auto-shot. It starts automatically when you shoot your Serpent Sting at the mob. Now they’ll die even quicker. Muahahaha.

It is also important to note that Serpent Sting in an instant cast shot. That means you don’t have to be holding still to get this shot off. It’s probably best to hold still for the first shot so you can get your first auto-shot in as well.

At level 6 you’ll get Arcane Shot. This shot, like Serpent Sting, is also an instant cast. Now you’ll be able to provide extra damage while you’re moving. There are a couple of other skills we should discuss now that you have Arcane shot. (by the way, you now also have the Hunter’s Mark, a very important hunter ability that we won’t go into here – just use it all the time, very important).

Now that you have a couple of instant cast shots its time to look at a new skill, the jump shot.

This is the coolest badest thing you’ll ever learn as a hunter, but it’s a little tricky. If you are a keyboard turner, then you’ll have to stop that to figure this thing out.

Basically, when you have a mobs attention, you run away, but you jump, then using your mouse turn mid air shot an instant shot and turn back around before you land on the ground. (you’ll have to use hot keys for your shot, so if you like to use your mouse to click on your spells, well stop that as well).

Sounds difficult right? It’s not that bad. The trick is to use your mouse to do quick turning mid air. Big Red Kitty (BRK), one of the greatest hunter teachers of all time made a brilliant video on how to do this. If you seriously want to be a hunter then I highly suggest you go watch it and several of his other training videos. They are outdated in several aspects, but the basic skills remain the same.

It looks as if I’m shooting backwards, but when I actually hit the button I’m facing the mob, it just takes a second for the animation to keep up, thus the U-turn shot.

Once you figure out this jumping shot thing, then leveling without a pet become enjoyable. It becomes a game to see how far you can make the mob run after you and if you can get him down before he gets anywhere near melee range. (And if you thought strafing would be difficult to get screen shots for, try getting them for the  jump shot. I had to enlist my wife to take the screen shots for me.)

This my friend is kiting, that is pulling your mobs along like a kite on a string. It is, in my opinion, one of the most fun things you can do as a hunter. You don’t get asked to do it very often, but there use to be fights here and there where you could. I use to kite the tinman from the opera fight in Kara in BC around the room to keep him occupied while the rest of the mobs were killed. Great great fun.

Soon enough you’ll get to level 10 and you’ll get your pet. Then it’ll all change. You’ll no longer be required to run around every where, jumping and straffing and such. You’re pet will keep the mobs attention. There is something that’ll be lost. You’ll find yourself, every so often tell your pet to just chill for the moment, just so you can kite a mob here or there. My wife got really enjoyed when I did this, dragging mobs all over the place. It’s good fun. Of course these are invaluable skills in PvP. In PvP kiting is a very important skill indeed.

But it’s in the first 10 levels you learn this fun stuff. That’s why we don’t get pets right away; it forces us to learn how to fight without them. I suggest you put your pet on passive ever so often and show off how bad @ss you are.

Happy Huntering

It’s been about a year since I’ve written one of these guides. You see my friend Dave took a year off of playing WoW. He’s a real good friend of my older brother and when my brother recently started playing again, Dave soon followed (at least that’s what I assume, maybe dave was just hankering to play).

So, Dave has recently joined our little 5 man team that we’ve been doing on Friday nights. I took Aoirselvar the other night with them and we did several Burning Crusade instances in Hellfire and Zangermarsh. My wife was on her level 60 deathknight, my brother on his level 68 priest, my sister-in-law on her 67 warlock and Dave on his 73 level hunter. I switched to BM mode and tanked with my turtle as a pet. That was the first time I had done any 5 man tanking with my hunter. I was a little rocky for one major reason. A reason in which I’ve decide to write a new Dave’s Hunter Guide. So, in today’s installment of Dave’s Hunter Guide we’re going to be covering 5 man instances, some basics dos and don’ts.

Dave’s Hunter Guide – 5 man instances edition

Before we get started here are some definitions.

• Pulling: Getting the attention of a Mob or Boss by saying such things like, “Hey ugly! Your mom is a fatty!”

• Tank: The guy who is saying such things as “Hey ugly! Your mom is a fatty!” and the one tough enough to get away saying it to their face (in our case the turtle, Ravlesrioa, just implied it).

• Hunter: The one who can either make it look like someone else is saying “Hey ugly! Your mom is a fatty” by a neat little thing called Misdirect. Or he shuts up and lets the tank tell the mom jokes.

• Misdirect: That neat little thing.

Now that we got those definitions out there, let’s talk about what you are expected to do as a hunter in a 5 man instance. As you would have guessed, you are expected to kill things. That what us hunter do best, right?

Oh, and sometimes we can help out like dropping frost traps and stuff. We’re not going to worry ourselves about that right now.

Okay, remember the tank? Yeah, the guy making unpleasant comments about moms. We usually like to let him get everybody’s attention (pulling), or better yet, help him get everybody’s attention (misdirect). He usually has better tools for getting everybody to attack him, and he can take it better. He has better armor, thus he gets damaged less. Remember, it takes a big man to cry, but a bigger man to laugh at that man. Your tank is that bigger man. Basically, you probably shouldn’t make fun of other people’s moms, unless you are big enough to handle it.

Even if you are several levels above, some people in the group aren’t. Tanks tend to have ways of making fun of whole groups at the same time, thus they can keep a whole gang of mobs on them. My tenacity pet has its thunder stomp, grabs everybody at once. Your cat pet has growl, only grabs only one. What do the rest of the mobs do? Well, they get pissed off and start punching anyone they can see, often times that’s the healer. You see, when you’re not sure who to go deck, it’s really easy to start with the guy in the dress. Can you hardly blame them?

Best to just let the tough guy go in there and then shoot the wimpy mobs in the back while their attention is drawn. Now, it is also a good idea to attack the same mobs the tank is attacking. You see if the tank goes to the left group, you should do likewise. Attacking a completely different group of mobs (the group to the right)? Bad idea, remember what happens, those mobs tend to go after the guy in the dress. We want the guy in the dress to stay alive because he’s making sure the rest of us are. You want to take nice care of the man in the dress. You don’t have to cuddle with him or anything, but if someone comes over and makes fun of his mom, or his choice in clothing, you’d better let them know that you won’t stand for it.

Okay, did we cover everything? Let tough guy make the wise cracks, don’t go after random mobs, and protect the man in the dress. I think that’s about it.

Oh, I forgot one thing, don’t put your pet on aggressive. Most mobs don’t like cats, letting everyone know that you have one with you is usually enough to bring the whole instance down on you. Its best to keep your pet on a tight leash, don’t let him do just anything he wants to.

Do this and it’ll be good times all around.

We did have a good time, but its a good idea that we have some higher levels or we’d be toast. And apparently I haven’t done a lot of BC 5 mans, seeing how I got achievements for several of these. (/facepalm)

Anyway, I don’t plan on always having my pet tank, but it was fun to mess around with. When we get closer to level 80 instances I’ll have my DK tank for our group. It was amusing having Dave pulling groups left and right, as well as my brother, the priest. The sad thing is that we wouldn’t wipe, only my brother the priest, or my wife the lower level DK would get killed. With the priest dying a lot, I would attempt to use my jumper cables to rez him back to life, and without fail… well, it would fail. I guess that would be better stated, with all fail. But it was good, and we’ll get better as we go. My brother is new to healing, I’m new to tanking, my wife is new to Melee dps, Dave is just having a grand all time, and my sister-in-law is loving the fact that she gets a challenge (pulling the entire room does that). Anyway, good times by all.