Today over at WoW Insider, a prep-list of sorts for 4.0.1:
Now that patch 4.0.1 looks like it’s going to be deployed on live servers any week, it’s about time to look into preparing our hunters for the transition. I should stress right here that these preparations are mostly with the raiding hunter (who is actually still raiding) in mind.
If you’re just burning time until Cataclysm hits, you really don’t need to do anything much to prepare. You will replace your gear while you level. You don’t care if your gear is slightly suboptimal for level 80 raiding if you’re not raiding — that is not going to matter when you’re leveling. You’ll replace it when leveling, then replace it several times over at level 85.
But if you’re still pushing current content, knocking down bosses and topping damage meters, join me after the cut for the rundown of what to expect and what you’ll need to change to keep raiding at peak performance when the patch hits…. Read More.
Hey Frost!
You wrote: Your ArP gems will turn into crit rating gems. As we just discussed, with the crit-capping dangers if you’re gemming all ArP and that all turns into crit, you’re likely to go over the cap and start wasting some of the effect of that crit rating. You probably want to change those over to agility gems.
Does that mean that we’ll have to change all our gems into Agility, or just some of them?
I had already started stockpiling cardinal rubies when RL got in the way and prevented me from playing much for the last two months… I plan to re-socket everything Agility personally. Crit is nice and all, but once cata hits and our crit rating goes bonkers, all of those crit gems will be pretty worthless anyways, meanwhile we will still be gaining 2 ap per agil.
Do you have any suggestions for ‘starting point’ talent pics for each spec?
I suspect gem prices will skyrocket, so based on your ‘gut feel’, are we better off just doing with what we have for the short term or really trying to improve now ?
What ‘starting point’ pets would you suggest? I assume we all have wolves.
Best wishes for fun in the woods.
Fly
frost isnt here, so im going to see if i can help /flex
I would suggest spending the next week looking for deals on agi gems, but try to get enough to fill ur slots by tuesday (since the patch should come out then), keep them in the bank until the patch does hit though, so u get the effect of ur current gems for now, but since prices will probably skyrocket, this gets you a deal.
I would suggest right now getting the 4 buffs that your raiding groups seems to have the least access to. ( the 5th slot being your wolf) then once the patch hits work on picking up other important ones. I wouldnt worry about filling the stable, 25 slots should leave room for ‘hey that looks cool’ pets
BTW, my personal opinion on a priority to get would be
1) wolf ( for now and for the crit buff)
2) Cat (agi + strength)
3) Raptor/serpent
4) Core Hound
5) silithid
Hope this helps!
I’ve had a wolf buddy since the beginning. So I’m keeping him. I honestly don’t care if it’s not the best pet in the lineup come Cataclysm. But, I would say my top 3 list is looking like:
1. Wolf
2. Core Hound (which I’m missing, but now that we have stable space I will be getting!)
3. Cat
As far as gems, I’m going to simply farm for gold. To, a) pay for the 310% flying and, b) pay for the gems/gear and anything else I might want at the start. Or I could do the sensible thing and level up my jewelcrafter…but NAH.
Is anybody else excited about the upcoming patches pre-Cat? Just me? Ok…
“Right now, the worm is looking like the new tanking pet of choice, the only tenacity pet with an AoE ability in the form of Burrow Attack.”
The worm was already my pet of choice for extreme solo, looks like it’ll stay that way. I always wanted my worm to burrow.
(On a side note, saw your comment in the other post about thread. Thank the Gods that will no longer be a concern. I need to re-glyph of course, but I can hardly wait to try it out.)
Ugh, I hate re-gemming. However, since I don’t raid, I think I’ll just wait for Cat to hit and deal with the short-term crappy DPS.
One major thing I thought of dealing with pets, anyone know of an addon that will check what specs are in a raid group to see what buffs are missing? this both would be helpful to raid leaders by knowing what classes to look for empty slots, but invaluable to hunters to pick what pet to bring, it would eliminate the risk of forgetting a buff or getting to the raid, then having to go back to the stable.
If there isnt one out yet (which is possible since there are soooo many buffs/debuffs right now), I’m going to have to find someone to make one.
Utopia does this pretty well right now, it shows what buffs you have in the raid and what buffs are not available. Who knows when it will be updated for the changed buffs coming in 4.0.1 though hopefully it’ll start checking hunter pets as well to see what buffs other hunters in the group have covered.
I likely will have boar pet in my stable given that I often miss the mangle/trauma debuff for 10 man content. It is too bad that as far as I can tell there are no ferocity pets with a gore ability. I also am trying figure the way to key bind and macro given all the changes. Macroing trap launcher is big on my list by using a castsequence and modifier key. Another one to fix would be my disengage macro that uses wing clip and raptor strike.
If you need bleed damage for your group, get the Hyena. I think it is what you are looking for. Petopia has a great page on pet buffs and what classes bring them.
http://forums.wow-petopia.com/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=4753
It is mentioned that ranged weapon damage is scaling up due to the removal of ammo. However, as of the latest PTR build, the scaling of those weapons still seems oddly inconsisent. Some 10 man weapons are still showing higher tooltip dps than their 25 man equivalents, while other weapons of the same iLevel have wildly varying dps.
I’m curious whether anyone knows if this is any different on the beta?
I know Frostheim has gone on a hunting trip IRL, but I wonder if anyone can answer this:
He says, “Right now, the worm is looking like the new tanking pet of choice, the only tenacity pet with an AoE ability in the form of Burrow Attack.”
Does that mean that Tenacity pets are losing Thunderstomp? Or did he simply mean that bears are losing Swipe and Crocs are losing Bad Attitute, but Tenacity pets will all keep Thunderstomp?
Also, what does this do to the desirability of a bear for questing/leveling/farming? Will this be an expansion where bears aren’t desirable (again)? I love bears (they’re even the racial pet for us dwarves now), and may still use mine regardless, but would be nice if it weren’t a liability to do so– but every time Blizz makes changes that are supposed to put “all” pets on an equal footing, they actually seem to cause some to be better than others instead.
tenacity pets will still be able to spec into thunderstomp. and bears will be fine cinterclaus, really for leveling you can pretty much use whatever you want. all the pets are changing the family abilities that do damage and are being replaced with a buff/debuff. that puts them on more even footing than they have been in the past without making them all the same.
so essentially just level with your bear if you want cinter, its not going to make much of a difference since it’s leveling
also a note, so far the worm seems to be the only exception that it has a secondary attack that does damage, blizzard has said they dont want any extra ablities that do damage, so its possible that it is an oversight they missed when they were remaking abilities.
Worms and Chimeras both have a damaging secondary attack that are AOE channels. Because they are channeled, the pet can not do normal attacks during this time. They are also both exotics.
These two are not oversights, they’re intentional. MM specs into Bombardment for AOE, Survival specs into Serpent Spread, but BM goes and tames a Worm or Chimera for AOE.
I see, thanks for the correction Daishi. I must have missed the chimaera attack. shame that they didnt give a ferocity pet the aoe that way a hunter could maximize it with talents.
One thing I am missing in this post, or maybe I overlooked or read wrong, is the spec builds.
Even if it’s just to give a global idea of what to take.
I was thinking of this one myself http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#cf0cZfdGoGRMuro
That looks roughly similar to the build I was considering, but I thought these talents seemed situational and could be better placed elsewhere:
2/2 Careful Aim: 1 point seems like it may be enough. Considering it increases the crit chance of cobra/steady/aimed by a whopping 60%, we may find ourselves hitting the crit cap with gear (for those shots).
Marked for Death: If the bonuses are exactly the same as hunter’s mark, we may be better off by simply re-applying hunter’s mark to our new target. This seems useless on a single target encounter.
Frenzy: While increased attack speed sounds like it should definitely boost our pet’s DPS, Bestial Discipline may be better if our pet gets focus-starved.
Also, Pathing may be worth looking into depending on how much haste improves our focus regen.
Take this with a grain of salt – I haven’t been on the PTR much and I’m not part of the beta.
I tried to get on the PTR yesterday to check for myself, finding there is a 5 days wait to get a char copied… 53 for a pre-made.
Also, I’ve been thinking about the focus regen for pets as well, but I have no idea atm how fast they can dump the focus. At the moment with my current build the pet seems to be doing fine.
The Marked for Death seems like a waste to me too. I only spec for raids, and absolutely hate PvP.
I’ll go over it again and see what I can come up with then
Did some shuffling and came to this. Btw: I got no clue which to take as Major Glyphs…
Pathing I will see when the patch hits us.
http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#cfhMZfduoGRMudo:zVcZcz0
When we tame pet in Cata, pet instatly become our level or we have to level it? I was heard that tamed pet will be about 3 level bellow than hunter is that right? I asking this becaouse if that is true, it’s better to tame pet’s like Corehound when Cata comes out. You don’t need to leveling them.
Hi everyone, Just wanted to say that I’m not too sure about the haste factor that frost had mentioned in the article. Early this morning I changed out death’s choice for that 264 war token increasing my haste to 25%. My dps jumped 200 points. I also kept everything I had from gear haste, in haste, and moved most of what I could from crit to mastery. This dropped my crit to about 50% but increase my Mastery to 26%. My dps went up again around 200 points.
My thinking here, and please anyone chime in if you think its messed up, is that the more shots we get off on the target, both with our mastery and haste, the more opportunity there is to have one or more of those shots crit. Essentially, providing us with more dps.
So far from test runs, both with the dummy and with random mobs, this seems to be the best solution I have found. I still have yet to see how it will work in raids. Once I do, i’ll let you all know.
No more burst damage for us it looks like, the serpent Chimera combo. But I actually like this a little better. I think I am currently staying right at 6k dps self buffed with the set up I gave above. Yes, its still a lot less then before the patch but a lot better then the 5.4-5.5k I was doing before I made changes.
All my gems are agility except the meta and a +10 to all stats, which I am going to change to another agility gem.
Thanks Frost for everything,
Aku