Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Pets, Pets, Pets!

The long, LONG, sunset of an expansion is my favorite time to revisit my stable and do some pet collecting. We get announcements that may make you want to pick up a pet you don't have for the next expansion, and if you're into collecting rares your competiton will almost certainly already have what they want. Some tames might even be a bit easier now before we lose some of our abilities. If you recently boosted a hunter, you probably have quite a bit of pet collecting to do in order to get all the various buffs. If nothing else, it's something to do during a content drought. And if you want to try for the MoP challenges, you can spend waste a LOT of time looking for those damn tracks. (Side note, why make a taming challenge and then use the same skin later for a regular tame? They did it in Cata and again in MoP. Pretty silly in my opinion.) I spent some time the other night dropping some unused pets (Why did I have 5 cats in there?) and taming the serpent pictured above to grab a buff I didn't have.  I couldn't resist naming him Whitesnake.

The biggest pet news we have gotten recently is that Heroism and Battle Res will no longer be exclusive to Beast Mastery in WoD. If you never play BM or just want to cover all your bases, get yourself a Nether Ray for Hero and either a Crane or Moth for B Res. As sombody who likes to play Survival whenever possible I couldn't be happier about this change. No longer will I be pressured to go BM just for Heroism!

While it's been well documented already, a pet post would be incomplete without running down which pets will bring which buffs and debuffs in WoD. If you run in a smaller sized raid, or like me just want to have the whole hunter arsenal in your stable, you'll want to have one pet from each group. The groups right now aren't distributed very well, and this is the development process so I anticipate some changes. Note that I am including BM only exotic pets here. I'll do my best to keep the list updated.

The Pet List as of September 9, 2014 (Beta):

Buffs: Any group size bigger than 10 will almost certainly have these covered already, but weird things can happen with group composition. You'll definately be able to use them in the new 5-mans and scenarios. And if you go petless, the current thinking is you can bring one of these as an aura. See my note below about the importance of a Multistrike pet for Survival Hunters.
  • Stats
    • Gorilla (One of my all-time favorites. Happy he is going to be useful!)
    • Dogs
    • Shale Spider
    • Worm
  • Stamina
    • Bear
    • Goat
    • Hook Wasp
    • Silithid
    • Rylak
  • Spell Power
    • Serpent
    • Silithid
    • Water Strider
  • Haste
    • Sporebat (Nice to see we have some choice here. Lots of sporebats lately.)
    • Wasp
    • Hyena
    • Hook Wasp
    • Rylak
  • Crit
    • Wolf
    • Raptor
    • Devilsaur
    • Quilen
    • Shale Spider
    • Water Strider
  • Mastery
    • Cat
    • Tallstrider
    • Hydra (You'll want to wait for WoD and get this one because Hydra!) 
    • Spirit Beast
  • Multistrike
    • Basilisk
    • Chimaera
    • Clefthoof (Formerly called Rhinos)
    • Core Hound
    • Dragonhawk
    • Fox
    • Wind Serpent
  • Versatility
    • Bird of Prey
    • Boar
    • Porcupine
    • Ravager
    • Stag
    • Clefthoof
    • Worm

Debuffs: Not a lot to say here since so many debuffs have been removed. Make sure you have a Mortal Wounds pet at the very least.
  • Mortal Wounds
    • Devilsaur
    • Scorpion
    • Carrion Bird
    • Riverbeast (WoD pet)
  • Slow Movement
    • Spider
    • Warp Stalker
    • Silithid
    • Crocolisk
    • Chimaera
The most important pet buff every SV hunter will need to have is Multistrike. Multistrike will proc Lock and Load after 6.0. It is going to be imperative for SV hunters to have the highest Multistrike possible. Make sure you have a Dragonhawk, Fox, or Wind Serpent before 6.0 drops if you're going to go Survival. As of this update, Lock and Load has been reverted to an older version.

 As always Petopia is your best resource for "shopping" for cool and rare pets. I also want to mention that Raid Checklist is my favorite add-on for figuring out which buff or debuff I should bring to the group. If you raid lead or don't know every class inside and out, I highly recommend it. What pets are you collecting right now? What's your favorite pet? Mine is Karkin.


Monday, April 14, 2014

I'm Back...and Now with Stuff to Talk About!

Wow, I hate going this long between posts. The break began when there was just nothing to write about. End of expansion, no news, less people playing. I'll admit that I'm pretty burned on MoP right now, and maybe WoW in general. Been playing this game for nine years at this point. I even got back into Diablo recently because of how I feel about WoW at the moment. And then my vacation lined-up with the Alpha release. Just my luck. Considering the Alpha patch notes are a few weeks old at this point, I'm not going to summarize them here. But I am going to assume my readers have seen them. If you want great rundowns of the hunter changes go to The Brew Hall or Eyes of the Beast. Now that we have seen the very, very first iteration of the new hunter I'd say things look pretty good.

Button bloat: No real surprises regarding what abilities we lost. I am thrilled that traps are not only staying, but getting more powerful. Especially for survival hunters, proper trap usage is going to be really important. The change to Explosive Trap is so cool. Reminds me of the days of old. Also, survival is losing Kill Shot. While I actually advocated for all the specs to have it removed, I'm going to count that prediction as a win. I totally called that:) More importantly, I think it will really help SV. With Lock 'n Load and all the other cooldowns, our rotation is just chaotic enough to make a new shot that pops up at the end of a fight seem weird. I'll totally take being the sustained, dot based spec.

Differentiation: Blizz did a better job with this that I could have hoped. Only SV has Serpent Sting? Love it. Traps are better, and SV traps are better still? Hell yeah. A solid self heal once per minute? Now we actually live up to our spec's name! I do have to say I wish they had not changed how Serpent Sting is applied. There was some skill involved in keeping it up (especially on multiple targets) or remembering to reapply it after transition phases. But if the choice was between the new system and scrapping the ability altogether, I think Blizzard made the right choice. SV really sounds like THE dot and magic damage spec.

Draenor Perks: Such a cool idea. Some kind of power increase every level, in a random order. By max level everyone is the same, but how they got there will be a little different for everyone. As someone who really doesn't enjoy leveling, I think these could create some replayability for WoD. In any case, they sound totally fun.

Camouflage: Camo, in the alpha notes, is amazing. For a survival hunter camo becomes a nice self heal that one can use every minute without stopping the deeps. Sweet! Awesome! Killer! But here's the thing: we've been burned by camouflage before. In the Cataclysm development process, camo started out really cool and was slowly eroded into an almost worthless ability. I really hope we don't repeat that whole experience. I know it's the nature of game development and class balance, but I'm not sure I can go through that again with camouflage, considering how awesome it looks right now for survival.

I have heard people describe the changes as making Survival into the PvP spec. I can see why they feel that way. Our CC will be better, and the buffs to Camo will certainly help as well. On the other hand, it looks like we will have the lowest burst damage (although we can use some talent choices to mitigate that somewhat) and we won't have an execute button. It looks to me like SV will be a good choice for PvP, but I really hope Blizzard can get the balancing close enough that it is good for more than that. I feel like they did an amazing job balancing the hunter specs in MoP, so why not do it again?