Now that im on the beta ive had a chance to have a look round at all the wonderful, wonderful stuff, when i met this little chap. all alone with no friends to talk to. so I thought id better take him in, he`s a little small in the beta at the moment but he is quite pretty.
Stone cold Killer
Well, it looks like The hunter pets, pass has started, and some interesting results have come forth, here’s a list of pets and abilities that have caught my attention, this is by no means a complete list.
Core hounds: Ancient hysteria, aka heroism. 30% haste for all attacks, great if there’s no shammy in the raid, also Lava Breath reduces Casting speed of target by 25%
Spirit beasts: Spirit Mend, Looks to be a HOT, looks around 1400 a tick for 10 seconds with a 40 sec cooldown.
Wolves: Furious Howl, now increases crit by 5% instead of AP
Devilsaurs get the same ability but named terrifying Roar, however there monstrous Bite now reduces healing of target by 25%
Sithilids: Qiraji Fortitude, looks to be similar to Warlocks imp, a stam buff, i would hazard a guess that it scales the same as an imps. However their venom web spray no longer snares and poisons, rather now it just snares, spiders share this ability.
Some interesting changes indeed, I shall find how these new abilities work and report the findings here. check out mmo champion for more information and Petopia is always a great stop for hunter pet information.
Hunters camouflage.
You camouflage, blending into your surroundings, causing you and your pet to be un-targetable and providing stealth while stationary.
You can lay traps while camouflaged, but any damage done by you or your pet will cancel the effect. Cannot be cast while in combat. Lasts for 1 min.
20 Focus, Instant, 1 min cooldown
Youve probably seen these stats splashed around on mmo champion and so on but, as they say a picture paints a thousand words. so here it is. camouflage in action,
Thanks go to Kuroykaras and his bear for posing for this screenshot and thanks to Geebs for taking it.
Looks like 2 of my friends have been invited to the cataclysm beta, obviously mine is in the post somewhere. and im sure its just a clerical error which will be sorted out soon. till then im hoping they will post me with lots of huntery goodness from the beta.
Anything cool,not cool or broken or any interesting information I receive ill be posting here.
After a while away from huntery things it looks like Mr daniel howell, the biggest reddest kitty is coming back to the world of hunters, certainly at least for the alpha, for me this is great news, i was always a fan of his blog and his videos and I will be looking forward to his unique style of writing on his website bigredkitty.net
check out his blogs
Brain needed space and bigredkitty
So welcome back mr BRK, I for one missed you.
After doing extensive testing on the Ptr, i finally have a verdict.
Survival:
in the survival spec with normal gems compared to all agility gems, all agility came ahead by around 80 dps, i suspect from the expose weakness buff, crit pretty much remained the same around 54% ish, this i would guess comes from adding agility but losing critical strike rating, overall agility increased by a marginal amount, around 60 in total
avg normal gem dps on ptr : 5050
avg agility gem dps on ptr: 5130
one thing to remember this would be a larger increase on live realms in a raid, due to agility stacking well with blessings of kings, much better than say attack power or armour penetration, so if you’re looking to gain any extra dps in ice crown then if your high-end geared, say T9 or T10 then in my opinion stack agility where you can.
Marksmanship
Marksmanship does very well with armour penetration, so much so that many people stack Arp gems in every slot, but there’s a lot of confusion around when to do this, so on the ptr in my current gear and Armour pen rating i had several tests, averaging out at around 4,900 dps on heroic test dummies, that’s with 470 armour pen rating and standard socketed gems, Agi,crit,stam ans so forth, also using the needle encrusted scorpion as a marksmanship trinket.
Afterwards i also tested with all armour penetration gems, armour pen increased to near 800 and dps did increase, but not by a huge amount, roughly the same as survival with agi, came in at around 5,050 , It did seem that dps overall in all tests was lower than live but this can be attributed to server lag, going up from 100(live) to 450-500(ptr).
I think the trouble with my marksmanship tests are that im stuck between 2 setups when im gemmed pure Arp, there is a soft cap and a hard cap, the soft cap is around 670 ish armour pen on gear, and the rest coming from a trinket such as the needle encrusted scorpion, and there’s a hard cap around 1340 armour pen, at wich point the trinket becomes useless for Arp, so because i was over the soft cap but under the hard cap, the results are not fantastically great.
So in reflection i would say if your gear is around 600 armour pen, ungemmed then stick with normal gems and get a good armour pen trinket, if your gear is high say 800 or more, then go and gem armour pen everywhere and use a static armour pen trinket, example, one that says something along the lines of, “Equip, increases armour pen by X amount “, an on proc armour pen trinket wont be great mainly because once gemmed you`l be close to the cap and the armour pen from this type of trinket will be near useless.
Also want to make a note about arcane shot, this shot gains nothing from armour penetration as it’s a magic shot it does the same damage if the target is wearing full plate or if its wearing a paper bag, its damage is its damage and that’s that, but at a certain point in gear progression arcane gets less useful, i would say from personal experience, once your gear gets around 350 armour penatration then drop arcane from your rotation, you will find that steady shot does the same damage and has a chance to proc improved steady shot, and bleed effects. If you gear hs less than 350 Arp, then stick with arcane for the time being, also note that although arcane can be taken out of your rotation, it’s also worth having it close by, many fights will have you running around, and another instant cast shot you can do on the move is useful.
These are just my opinions from field testing, please feel free to leave constructive criticism, and thank you for reading.
On Bluemain i have dual specs, survival and marksmanship both at this time to pretty much equal damage, on Heroic boss test dummies both coming out at around 5000-5500 dps, currently im gemmed for agility for reds, stam/agi purple gems for blue slots and crit/agi orange gems for yellow slots to keep the socket bonuses. However i have seen people gem purley agility or armour penetration and ignoring the socket bonuses, so which is best, should i go pure agility for my surv spec or stay as it is, or maybe go all out armour pen for my marksmanship spec and again ignore the socket bonuses.
This would work out very expensive to test live as gem prices are not cheap, but then i had an idea! The test realms are up, all i need do is copy Bluemain over to the test realm and Copy a premade character of any kind over as well, from what i remember from the last ptr with premades they come with jewelcrafting, and all the recipes to boot, so that’s my plan, ive copied the characters over and i am now waiting for them to process.
The test schedule will be 5 tests on both specs, gemmed as he is on the live realm, burning down mana and recording the results, then 5 more tests on both specs burning down mana, using viper to get back up and burning down again, also gemmed as i am on live, this should give me a good base line to get an average dps from.
Once done i shall do the same tests gemmed purely for agility in survival and then gemmed purely in armour penetration for the marksmanship spec, if there is a clear winner on dps, that is what i shall use live, saving me thousands of gold in gems.
I’ll post the results here once there in.
