Alterac Volley » Hunters

The Spoils Of Patch 3.2

Nance — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 03:25:04 +0000

Since the day Patch 3.2 was released I’ve been diving head first into running as many Heroics as I can fit into my schedule each day. The number of Emblems of Conquest I’ve managed to rack up since that day is right around 150. Not only was I hitting the older Heroics hard but I’ve also made daily trips into the Trial of Champions as well.

Anyway, since the patch I’ve managed to snag the following gear upgrades on my Hunter through Emblem purchases, lucky drops or cold hard cash:

As you can probably imagine, I’ve seen a pretty significant DPS increase from all of these upgrades. Aside from the gear I’ve also completed a lot of achievements I was missing out on. Oh yeah, and I finally had a good roll on the Reins of the Bronze Drake. It’s been a wild time since the Patch and I apologize for the lack of updates around here but I was too busy playing the game to spend a lot of time writing about it.

Coming up I’m going to do a Daily Quest Guide for the new Argent Tournament quests and maybe give some brief strategy posts on the Isle of Conquest and the Trial of Champions (particularly how ToC operates for Hunters).

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Would You Kill Loque’nahak?

Nance — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:26:03 +0000

I’ve been spending a lot of time doing Frenzyheart Tribe dailies and mining in Sholazar Basin now that most people are so busy in Icecrown with their Argent Tournament quests. The one thing I can’t get out of my head as I’m flying around the Basin doing my quests and stuff is this question: would I kill Loque’nahak if I happened to stumble upon her?

I should mention now that I only have one spec on my Hunter and it is Marksmanship. So if I did happen to catch Loque’nahak out of the corner of my eye (because I’m searching for Minerals on my radar, and not Beasts, by default these days) would I “do the right thing” and announce her location in General chat? Or would I be selfish and just kill her off myself for the loot and the chance to cross one more name off on the Northern Exposure achievement?

The Truth

I’d kill the hell out of her and loot the corpse as fast as I could before anyone saw what I had done. Is that awful? I’d probably feel bad for a bit but I’m sure that would pass in time. The smart play here is to stop being such a cheapskate, buy Dual Spec, and get a Beast Mastery spec in place just in case this hypothetical situation becomes all too real.

The Poll

What would you do if you were playing my character and ran into that situation? I’ve set up the handy little poll below for you to vote on what your own actions would be if you stumbled upon Loque’nahak as a Hunter with no ability to tame the beast yourself. Please feel free to vote and/or leave a comment on this post with what you would do.

Would you kill Loque'nahak as a Hunter without a Beast Mastery spec?

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My New Hunter Pet

Nance — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:39:16 +0000

I’ve traditionally used Cats as my Hunter pet of choice. This goes all the way back to my taming of the pet I exclusively used until the release of Wrath: Humar the Pridelord. After my brief fling with the Beast Mastery tree during my leveling to 80, I went back to Cats for DPS purposes once I started running Heroics and the occasional Raid as a Marksman.

Well, I recently made the switch from Cats to Wolves thanks to Furious Howl. The only problem I had was finding a decent looking Wolf to tame. The generic ones in the game just don’t do it for me and I’m not even that into the Shattered Hand Warhounds inside Hellfire Ramparts.

In the end, I settled on the Vargul Blighthound in Zul’Drak. It’s not very common to see on my server and that’s usually a requirement for me as well. I really don’t like to have the same thing everyone else seems to have.

Since I’ve made the switch to the Wolf (that I not-so-cleverly named “Woof”) I’ve seen a nice rise in my DPS when I’m in Heroics and Raids. I’m pretty satisfied with the new pet so far.

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Hunter Interest In Dual Spec

Nance — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:44:40 +0000

Am I the only person playing a Hunter who doesn’t much see the excitement over Dual Spec? Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s absolutely awesome for people playing classes with hybrid talent trees (like my Priest, for instance) but on my Hunter I just don’t see the point or can’t get overly excited by the new system.

I remember hearing BRK talk about this during one of his appearances on the WoW Insider show a few weeks ago. His basic point was that it will only be useful to Hunters as a means of quickly testing switching to another spec on a full-time basis. To him Dual Spec sounded like an easier way to test things out on the training dummies.

Has anyone else thought of a use for Hunters with Dual Specs?

Edit: PvP is obviously a huge reason for Hunter Dual Specs… as has been pointed out to me twice already in the comments. When I wrote this post I was thinking in my mind more about PvE for some reason so I apologize for the glaring omission of something as obvious as battlegrounds and arenas.

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Pet Food In Wrath Needs Buffed

Nance — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:24:21 +0000

There’s a recipe in Wrath called Spiced Mammoth Treats that gives your pet a 30 point boost to Stamina and Strength for the period of one hour. That sounds pretty great but the materials for these are pretty steep. Each Treat takes one Chunk o’ Mammoth and one Northern Spice. On my server that translates into a cost of about 7 gold per Treat.

That’s pretty pricey for some pet food. Fortunately, there’s an alternative from the Burning Crusade you should go back and check out. The pet food is called Kibler’s Bits and it offers the same buff as the Mammoth Treat but it only costs one piece of Buzzard Meat to make. That might run you less than one gold per Bit on Greymane right now.

I can only assume that the Mammoth Treat will be buffed in a future patch. It makes no sense to waste your time making them when there’s a perfectly fine and much, much cheaper alternative left from the Burning Crusade.

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Pre-Raiding Hunter Trinkets

Nance — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:37:31 +0000

Trinkets were one of the few item slots that I was constantly upgrading as I leveled my Hunter throughout Wrath. My other gear, while nothing exceptional, was very difficult to replace until I started to reach the higher levels of the game (77+).

For Hunters, there are several trinkets that are easy to obtain and are pretty much “must have” items. These trinkets aren’t from raids so they should be relatively simple for most casual players to come across. At worst you’ll need to grind some dailies for a few weeks or, if you can stomach the PUG scene, run some Heroics to get these trinkets.

Reputation Reward Trinket

Oracle Talisman of Ablution
This trinket is probably a requirement for Hunters who have no interest in running Heroics. If you run enough Heroics, you’ll eventually replace this with another trinket I’ll mention in a minute. But anyone who, for whatever reason, hates the idea of dungeon runs this is the trinket for you.

This is only available at Exalted, but grinding Oracles Reputation isn’t a struggle and the quests are, for the most part, entertaining.

The critical strike rating on the Oracle Talisman of Ablution is tough to beat and the Mana bump you get after each experience earning kill makes this ideal for players still leveling.

Heroic Drop Trinkets

Sphere of Red Dragon’s Blood
This trinket drops off of Keristrasza in The Nexus at about a 20% clip. This particular trinket is a great way to get yourself closer to the Hit Cap if you find yourself needing a boost in that area. I think with the right combination of gems and dual-wield weapons you can eventually replace this with one of the others on this list. You can also pop the Sphere for a nice attack power boost.

Incisor Fragment
The Incisor Fragment drops off of King Dred, the Jurassic Park castoff in Drak’Tharon Keep. This is one of the easiest Heroics to run and, with the right group, can be finished in under 30 minutes sometimes. If you’re willing to invest some time into this one it’ll drop for you soon enough thanks to it’s 22-25% drop rate.

I love the increase in attack power this trinket has to offer but there’s debate about the usefulness of armor penetration. For now, I’m using the Incisor full-time in addition to the final trinket on my list…

Mirror of Truth
The Mirror of Truth, available by spending 40 Emblems of Heroism is probably my favorite trinket in the game so far. It’s not terribly difficult to get as long as you enjoy Heroics. It’s the eventual replacement for the Oracle Talisman of Ablution thanks to its higher critical strike rating and awesome secondary ability to dramatically increase your attack power on a temporary basis. Plus, one you hit the level cap the Mana bump from the Talisman pretty much becomes obsolete unless you’re into PvP. And if you’re a Hunter into PvP, then God bless you.

That’s All Folks

All of these trinkets will probably be replaced when you take the leap into Raids but in the meantime these are so easy to obtain and better than generic quest rewards that there’s no reason not to try and acquire them. If anyone has better suggestions please leave a comment on this post.

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Licking Your Wounds Too Fast

Nance — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 23:30:44 +0000

Here’s a neat bug/feature associated with Lick Your Wounds that I just noticed: if your pet is summoned or appears as you dismount and is instantly attacked it will perform Lick Your Wounds (assuming you have it on autocast) immediately before the game has a chance to set the pet’s health to 100%.

As most hunters have surely noticed, summoning a pet comes with a slight delay as the game sets the health to maximum. This normally isn’t a big deal except in the above mentioned scenario where your pet instantly appears in the middle of a combat situation.

This isn’t a big deal but I thought i’d make a post so that everyone was aware.

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Humar’s Identity Theft

Nance — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:23:24 +0000

I ran with Humar the Pridelord as my main pet from level 25 until level 70. I’ve since moved on to other pets but Humar remains in my stable waiting for his chance to come out and get to level 80. Humar is, or rather was, one of those rare pets with a unique skin that had to be camped and fought over in order to tame.

Well, with the release of Wrath, those days of uniqueness are unfortunately over.

Early on in the Sholazar Basin, players run into a quest called The Part-time Hunter that asks you to kill a lion named Pitch. As you can tell from the picture at the top of this post, Pitch is an exact clone of Humar. What a bummer.

I’m sure on most servers, by the time Wrath was launched, Humar was already a pretty common appearance for most players. There were lots of hunters on my server with him for a long period of time although that changed with the release of the last patch with all of the hunter changes.

I was hoping that as Wrath progressed the Humar skin would fall out of favor but I’m not sure that even matters anymore now that the look is available on two separate mobs. We’ll have to wait and see because I really enjoy having a unique looking pet but I also really enjoyed running around with Humar.

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My First Wrath Heroic and My First Wrath Epic

Nance — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:20:35 +0000

This weekend I decided to take the plunge and start actively trying to join PUGs to run some 5-mans. In all my previous WoWing, I’ve never once joined a PUG or ran an instance that was at my level. When I hit 80, the first thing I did was go to Hellfire Peninsula and run Hellfire Ramparts and the Blood Furnace solo but that hardly counts as adequate experience for what I went through over the weekend.

After two successful runs through Drak’Tharon Keep and Gundrak on normal difficulty I felt like I had a good grip on the ropes so I hopped in with a group running Utgarde Keep on Heroic. Right out of the gate things were rough when they questioned my level 70 PvP gear. In the end, while I wasn’t near the top of the damage charts, I held my own all the way through the end.

The best part of the whole run was the final boss drop: the Drake-Mounted Crossbow. This ended my brief affair with guns as I ran back to crossbows in a heartbeat.

For the rest of the weekend, I kept running 5-mans as often as I could. I ran normal versions first to get the lay of the land before trying them on Heroic. While I didn’t see any more quality drops like I did during that first Utgarde Keep run I did get a ton of reputation with the Wyrmrest Accord. I’m about a quarter of the way to hitting Exalted and snagging my own Red Drake.

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