Archive for the ‘Patches’ Category

3.3 has just dropped and the servers are just coming back up. While they are coming up I am going to take some time and go over the patch notes for Hunters. Although there are not a lot of changes for us. There a few interesting changes we can look at.

Call Stabled Pet

I never really got why this was on a 30 minute cool down.  But I don’t think it makes that much of a difference. Although it will be nice to be able to call out a different spirit beast every 5 minutes. For raiding on the other hand, well it means nothing at all. For min, maxing you have to use a wolf, no matter what spec you are. This is something I don’t like and is a whole post in it’s self. The wolf is the new cat of BC.

Misdirection

Can you say wow! Its about time they fixed it. Now it no longer has charges, when you preform a threat-generating attack it will begin a 4 second timer. In that time all threat the hunter does will go to the friendly target. Also more than one hunter can misdirect at a time. No more having to work out what shot uses more than one charge, or having to have a rotation between all your hunters. Just cast it and unload everything you have.

Now casts as soon as you hit the button and your pet is in melee range. I haven’t really found this to be a problem but I’m sure this is a good change to all those who were having issues with it.

Pets

There is one big change for pets and a lot of smaller ones that I will let you read for yourself. That is the change to pet Avoidance. It is no longer a pet talent, this has been replaced and is now part of the base affect for your pets. Now we have Culling the Herd as our new pet talent. Which “increases pet and hunter damage by 1/2/3% for 10 seconds each time the pet deals a critical strike with Claw, Bite, or Smack”. More damage for hunters is always good. This is going to go along way to help us catch up to those warlocks and feral druids in damage.

Pet leveling has non also been increased. It is now up from 10% to 5%. So this will half the amount of experience your pet needs to level. Pets leveled pretty fast to me, but hey I was use to BC leveling for pets. Now is the time to get all those pets you ever wanted. You can now also changed your pets often and not care about how long it takes to level because it will be very fast.

I was a bit sad that there were no BM buffs to bring them in line with MM and SV. So I still can’t raid with my spirit beasts. The lost of just under 1000 dps is to much for me. Maybe one day I’ll be able to. But I’m guessing that is not going to be until the next expansion.

Good luck to all those heading into Ice Crown in the coming weeks. This is the final battle for Northernd. I hope you are up to challenge.

Full patch notes can be found here

Day 4

This day saw a few ups and downs, I had another Huntard walking around with his tamed Skoll at one of the spawn points, I saw a dead Skoll, first time I actually saw any sign of him. So I now know hes does exist. I also for the 3rd day in a row saw Vyragosa but this time I was the only one around and got the kill on her. On the bright side seeing the Skoll corpse gave me a time line to work with. Working on the assumption that spirit beasts have a 4-8 hour re-spawn timer I had a window to shot for. The only problem with this window was it was 3-5am in the morning. Well its not like I’m doing anything then anyway right? Who needs sleep anyway. So from 3am till around 7am I was back camping skoll’s spawns with 2 toons. But no sign of him. I came to the conclusion that he spawned in the gap I was catching up on some sleep between 1-3am. So at 7am I gave up and felt like crap so went to get some sleep for a few hours.

Day 5

I guess we have to call this day 5 now. I managed to get a few more hours sleep, before waking to start all over again. I walk to the office and log back into wow. To my surprise NPCScan goes off, and there he is, Skoll just standing there like he didn’t care that I have been after him for the last 4 days. Well there is only one thing to do then. I set down my trap, which of course doesn’t go off, so I decide to hit tame anyway because I’m to excited to wait for the cd on my trap. I do start to get a bit worried as my Heath starts to drop and fast. He actually hits hard.

But luckily my tame finishes before I bite the dust, and the long hunt has come to an end. Skoll is mine and I now have 2 out of the 3 spirit beasts.

Total time spent searching: 51 hours

Now to start the hunt for the mighty Loque’nahak.

Patch 3.3

If you haven’t kept up with the news Patch 3.3 will be droping next week. Ill try get a few posts in about the hunter changes, because there are a few that I am looking forward to. But for now, if you are after any more information on the patch, WOW head has a great run down on everything that is coming in patch 3.3.

So like if you live under a rock, or just haven’t logged on in a while wow got patched. As always servers have had huge issues and some were down for 24 hours, but come on, its patch day what do you expect. You have HoN to play any way, right?

I have spent most of tonight in the new BG. I spent far to much time in it on the PTR and i’m right back in there. I don’t really know why, its not that fun. The games are a lot faster then they were on the PTR. But I for one am not liking how its going so far. Games are over in under 10mins, and its a pure zerg fest. I’m unsure why they are over so quick, gate need more HP maybe. I believe they have nerfed the HP back to what it was in the very first build. After they buffed it games were a lot longer and from my point of view actually pretty fun. I think I’ll need to play a few more games to work it out. In the mean time here’s a screen shot for you. It say’s it all really.

Yes thats right some of us are still BM. The big move to SV was warrented, thats if you want to actually put out some good dps numbers. But there are a few that just cant stand to not be BM. Those few that cant bear to tear apart that relationship they share with their faithful companion. But over the last few patches we have been brought back into line, and are able to compete with all those lesser SV hunters. 

Well this week has seen me able to once again Raid on my hunter. I have dusted his bow off, for some well deserved action. QB has picked up a third healer, so I no longer have to fill that roll on Lyshonar. Also in QB news, we welcomed back one our long time members Damah, who was taking a break from the game. 

Even though I have no been able to test my numbers in a raid setting, we were suck on Flame Levaithan for two nights. I have taken to the Hunter dps spread sheet and the testing dummies, to see how things are shaping up. There has also been some great developments and discussion happening over on the Elitist Jerk forums. 

Today I spent a lot of time looking at my spec and what was coming out of the elitist jerks discussion . The new recommended spec is 53/11/7. But inside this spec there is a little bit of room to play with some of the talent points. As you can see this is how I am running the build. The first post has a run down on how you can adjust the talents to suit you, and also has the standard build that they run. So be sure to go take a look. In spread sheet testing it showed that I would get a net gain with this new spec. The thing is although it showed I would be doing slightly more dps, we can not test for one of the Talents. Why? Well for the simple reason that new little talent I picked up in the SV tree. Improved Tracking. I can not test at the training dummies becasue they are mechanical and of course Improved Tracking does not work on mechanical mobs. Also as far as I know this can not be done in the spread sheet. So I am going to have to wait till Monday night, on QB’s next expedition into Ulduar to find out what things are really like.

Now of course this is still down on our SV brothers, but we are now much more inline than we ever have been. Still on non-pet friendly fights BM hunters are going to lose out, because our pets are now doing more than 40% of our DPS. A well speced Devilsaur will be doing over 2000 dps.

I highly recommend you check out the Hunter Spread sheet. This way you can play around with the build, and also the one you are currently using. This will help you work out what is going to be best for you. Although the numbers are only theory they do tend to come out to pretty close to what happens in game. But before you jump in to playing around with the spread sheet read this guide, to help you get started.

Well day one is over for me, in the new world of 3.1. I have been up since 6am patching both my computers and updating add-ons. This process was made a bit harder by the fact that both my desktop and laptop are both running the new windows 7 beta. I ended up just patching the game on my file server and then copying the game back to both computers. It seemed easy at the time ok!

The servers didn’t come up till 12am so I had plenty of time to do it. But once I did get on I was very surprised. The servers were, how would you say this, stable. Stable is not a word that I would use normally on patch day, but I didn’t have any problems.

Even my add-ons worked, which has never happened. Sure I had the odd one that didn’t like 3.1. Like chatter, but that was quickly updated. Twice in fact and was back working in no time. Now all I have to wait for is x-perl to update. The author wants to wait till testing on the live server before he releases an update. Unfortunately he plays in the UK so is a day behind. No matter I’m sure by tomorrow this will all be sorted. But if you cannot wait till then there is a quick fix for the right click problem over at wowace.

There is really only one big bug that I have seen so far and that is a little extra talent point, notice the 72 talent points there? We did see this problem very early on in the PTR, and I guess they didn’t fix it.

I went and had a look at the new boss in VOA. Emalon the Storm Watcher. This is a fun little fight and is a bit harder than what we are use to in VOA. The dps have to be awake. As I found out today one mistake and the everyone dies. Although the fight, in its self is pretty straight forward, it can be a bit tricky to learn. As you can see in the screen shot, this was our first attempt. The dps was not fast enough in killing the add that was getting the stacking debuff, and boom went the raid. If you cant tell which add has the debuff, get the off tank to mark it. Or just look at which one is getting bigger and bigger. If you look to the top left of the screen shot you can see that one add is huge.

At the moment as you can see my tanking UI is a bit of a mess. but give me a break I only just got back into tanking a few day ago. I totally could not see all the debuffs on Emalon. I really need to fix this. But that is a job for tomorrow. For now I need some sleep.