Patch 3.1.2 — a minor patch whose biggest claim to fame is new Argent Tournament mounts and the postponed Equipment Manager — has been pushed to the US Public Test Realm today.
The notes that download with this patch have only two small items for hunters, under Bug Fixes:
- Go For The Throat: Explosive Shot critical strikes now trigger this talent.
- Rabid: This Hunter pet talent no longer lists a percentage chance to be triggered, as that chance varies by the attack speed of the pet.
I’m going to be spending much of my day on the PTR checking out those new mounts for Warcraft Mounts, but I thought I’d call out these notes before I go.
[edit] I neglected to mention: Pre-made level 80 characters are available for this PTR. Grab ‘em before the wait balloons!
And by the way, I just got Realm First Level 80 Orc, Grand Master Herbalist, and Grand Master Miner or the PvE PTR. *smirk*
Grats on the Achievements :)
Well, at least they are “Trying” To help hunters with Go for the Throat…
Wow. Explosive Shot crits weren’t triggering GFTT before now? My pet’s DPS is going to go up *massively*; I wasn’t even aware of that as a problem! Not that I’m complaining in the least. :)
…. eh nothing special about the minor changes…. new mounts are cool I guess…
@Kurasu: LOL i hope that was sarcasm to pet DPS in regards to GFTT, because I found that funny that I had to post… it is not that useful for a SV hunter since the main damage dealer is you rather than your pet – but i am not totally discounting it even when I said so.
The upcoming patch is somewhat still in the early stages of testing so more changes may occur as they put more stuff in the PTR (but I’m not holding my breath on that — 3.1 was a letdown for some classes that got their health buffs nerfed and also turned my level 45 warlock’s VW pet into a risky tank thanks to losing over 1k health even with buffs and talents – fel synergy doesn’t cut it when some mobs call for more help and pummels it into the ground), but so far in this minor patch there is nothing noteworthy really for hunters except for that “bug” fix.
…as for that bug in regards to Explosive Shot for GFTT, even if I didn’t notice it not working, I can always go around it with other shots that actually does the job… so its not really a big deal when you get down to it. As for Rabid, all I can say is “that’s nice”.
I don’t really know what to say about these updates. I’m happy about them overall though. I recently off specced surv, so ExS crits helps. I’m also happy about equipment manager because that was one of the things I was looking forward to in 3.1. Maybe they’ll actually include it this time…
Well I found out with a dps meter from someone, my pet was doing more damage than me in one fight. Dunno wether to lol or wtf.
But yay for premades- I’ma gonna be able to test out palla/drood/mage/other builds now.
Edit: the comment was mostly at ‘My pet’s DPS is going to go up *massively’ btw :c
Just saw a bit on the currant PTR build over at MMO champ that LnL lost abit of % chance on ticks. Already given the iffy nature of it (and hearing bout it in raiding content on the BRK forums,) it made me wonder if I should push away from using it. Without it, I get 2 or 3 more talent points back into more dependable dps (if less overall, but That Much less dependence on RNG,) or even hawk eye on a SV raid spec or something. Last week and a half or so, nearly all of my time has gone towards world events, and lemme tell you, LnL is beyond useless in farming now. Granted I’m silly for even using black arrow farming, the burst on such weak crap guarentees that LnL now procs after fights, instead of the nice opener it used to be. If you wanted to connect it with a freezing arrow and two mobs, you can, but…why? Way more fun before to kite a mob into an immolation trap while your pet focused on one, and you could focus blasting both and running. One at a time is far from interesting. And yeah, still feeling like Affliction Lock. All about stand, stand, dot, dot, burst. Rince and repeat. Standing still, again, being the key here.
I’ve also pulled away from using pure stamina gear lately solo. It’s definitely faster, but yuck…
(I’ve heard some silly stuff, and noticed it soemwhat when I tried a BM duel spec prior to 3.1. When in my stamina gear, my pet had farm more attack power than when spec’d beast mastery. I’ve yet to deal with a spreadsheet honestly, but has anyone ever tried a BM/Hunter Vs. Wild spec? It’s missing those 3 crucial points for BM though which kinda bugs me when playing with the talent calculator. Then again, I wonder if those 4 extra talent points are all that crucial when the way the bottom tier talent calculations are kinda lame and wonky anyway… I can already hear Ryai and Friends screaming at me now=)
Hey randomly – and I may have already missed you posting about this somewhere – did they reduce rhino size with one of the patches? Because I saw one tonight that seemed a skoosh smaller than they used to be. And then I had the wackiest bug with one I test tamed – every time I mounted and dismounted the pet would every now and then change color. So while I tamed a grey rhino, every now and then I’d have a brown one. And I documented it with screenshots – will post tomorrow. (If I didn’t have screenshots I’d be sure I was seeing things!)
Any hunter build w/o atleast 1 point in GFTT=fail
(Nevermind! I should learn to read your notes! Rhino already noted as color changer on Shardhorn Rhino page! Now if I could just find someone who’s seen a tickbird land on their rhino’s horn – I swear I saw that happen tonight!)
Ha, wow, I didn’t know that Explosive Shot didn’t trigger GFFT… Good news for my nor Surv-lovin’ self! Although I did throw my head back and go “NOOOOO!” (very dramatically) at the Lock and Load nerf. No me gusta CCing. /cry
Anyone else unimpressed with the new mounts? They don’t look all that different to me…
More assistance for SV noobs I guess. Doesn’t much matter. My ever lovin’ BM self still eradicates them. Heh.
If I am reading that right, does that mean that pets with a faster attack speed actually get punished for using rabid? I can’t really test it at the moment, but it sounds like they’ve changed it from a flat percentage to a lowering percentage to make up for the pet attacking more times. In the end it sounds like it will proc as many times for a .99 attack speed pet as it will for a 2.00. Which SUCKS for ferocity pets.
Umm, how do you get to play the PTR? I transferred my characters and downloaded the PTR and PTR Patches to my WoW Directory…. what now?
Honestly, the rabid change makes it seem startlingly unamazing. It’s sounding like they want it to proc every 4ish seconds on a ppm effect (15ppm?). If this is true, then you get the 5th and final stack around the time it runs out. Yay? This is, of course, removing frenzy from the picture, which nets you a grand 5ish seconds at maximum effect.
Hopefully I have this backwards, and they want it to proc every 2.5ish seconds (22ppm?) (cobra reflexes being almost baseline), which is actually only improving the function with those owners that opted NOT to take the talent (aka, almost every swing will grant the effect). Just a theory though.
eek. 24 ppm. Total fail.
Palla, not just that, but all the +melee haste/speed talents BM opt for, for pets, or HAVE to btw as we have nothing else viable in the tree for pure dps.
Guess they wanna try and stealth nerf bat BM hunters again.
And actually no Saranette, ranting about that is not top on my list. It’s all the censor censor censor censored bot programs using censored hunters farming censor whelps.
I JUST WANTED TO FARM GREEN AND BLACK BUT NOOO D<
/rant
…. I am a newb, but what does “PPM” mean? Proc-per-min?
Palla:
I’m not positive, but it sounds the other way around to me. In other words, the more swings in your pets get, the more chance for Rabid to go off. I’ll do some testing later tonight and find out. Hopefully its not what you said, otherwise BM just got another nice nerf it didn’t need, amirite? XD
I hope your right, Rikaku, but it really sounds like they were trying to keep rabid in check by altering it based on attack speed. From a logical standpoint, it wouldn’t make sense to increase the procs if your attack speed got faster, since that would just make fast attacking even more powerful then it is now. It kinda sounds like they are trying to ween people away from speed increasing pet abilities. That or they plan on giving pets a portion or even all of the hunters haste, which would be a tradeoff at least.
Of course, maybe they ARE trying to buff rabid, but if that’s the case, they should have just made it like demonic fury and been done with it. 100% chance on hit, 5 stacks. Or was it three…..? My memory is going….
Hrm. WHY are most of the Alliance colors PURPLE? I mean, SW is blue, which is close enough, and IF is the only one that really stands out…
Blah, anyway. I like how most of the new tourney mounts match the banners now, though my favorite is still the “old” IF one… because I love me some rams, and that one matches my character, heh. I hope I can finally get off my butt and get past the doing stuff for Darnassus and get to championing IF before TOO long.
As to the hunter stuff… more tiny DPS for SV cookie-cutters to say “ZOMG SV OR DIE”, whoopee. And I can’t wait for testing on the change to rabid.
Not sure about these changes yet..but as for the PTR..the premade characters come with a supply of water that is..well..broken. The only water/food that works right now is sub-70 level food.
Also..how do you ptr hunters feel about getting Loque from the start? (Premade hunters, I mean)
Palladiamors – re-read..it’s a tooltip change.
So is it still acting like same old, same old? Because last time I checked it just had a flat chance to proc that wasn’t based on attack speed.
How precisely are you adjusting attack speed? Bloodlust?
One thing about L&L that I’ve been noticing, that makes it not so much a nerf: L&L no longer has an internal CD. I’ve seen it proc back to back with ticks from Black Arrow and traps. Yeah, the effects that it procs on now are nerfed, but the lack of GCD is absolutely delicious.
If I had to have it nerfed, the trade-off is at least nice.
As for my comment about my pet’s damage, I’m actually quite serious. My pet’s damage comes out considerably more than our Marksman’s pet’s damage, and at the end of a heavy round of raiding, capped out over a *million* total damage from the pet alone. Sure, it’s not the masses of damage that a Beast Master’s pet is, but that’s still a considerable DOT if you look at it that way. ;)
Sorry about my er rant ‘earlier’ guys :s I just had had a bad day and those farmers were the last straw :/ sorry about that everyone.
Anyways;
‘Also..how do you ptr hunters feel about getting Loque from the start? (Premade hunters, I mean)’
Loque still has inferior DPS to a Devilsaur so it doesn’t matter imo. And PTR wise, it’s just a test realm. It’s like a private server. I mean good god half the time I’m on there’s barely anyone on. I onemanned WG on my test Drood and was like well that’s an empty pat on the back.
So yeah PTR =/= live realm. No different from when they do Arena, and tbh it might help get people who aren’t serious about Loque, to go awaaay and allow the ones who do want him, or his other ethral counterpart, STD cat, to grab n bag`em.
Back to fiddling with my test mage now and getting insulted for ‘omg ur build is crap’ for meeee.
Also, I want the mana regen of my Drood- or atleast the well efficency, I blasted out a test dummy on her and she was able to spew out wrath, moonfire, IS and Starfire for six miiiinuuutes.
Ryai usually goes oom in 2 Dx
honestly, how many people bring Devilsaurs to instances/raids? I’m curious because I’m hearing it’s discouraged due to hitbox, aggro range, and noise.
Also reading over at BRK forums, apparently the 3.1.2 LnL nerf may not be a nerf so much as a tooltip correction and that we may already have the nerf now. Prolly not though. What was also interesting was that trap dancing may still be alive in a perverse form with periodic damage from explosive trap ticks. Kinda like when you’d race to serpent sting everything before (well, anything not being CC’d)
Making the tourney daily runs over the weekend, I for a brief moment found somewhat of a groove with black arrow and was able to do some kiting that almsot felt like the classic trapdance-kite-contra I used to do. Was actually fun. I’m not digging sniper training though. It’s nice but it just seems like a concept more for marksmen than survivalists. I always subscribed to the we always need to be on our feet dodgin’, runnin’, trappin’ school of thought.
Also nice to see the disengage cooldown nerf revoked from last patch on the latest PTR build notes. This’ll really help in pvp situations, since much of our keep away was nerfed/removed last patch (frost trap, improved wing clip…)
Can’t seem to get a nice working macro these days though. I’m not trying to put everything on one button, I just want to do some simplifying when my frame rate takes monster dives on big raids (yes I know I shouldn’t play on a laptop.)
Also very pleasently suprised last night when I bought a Durotar Scorpion at the Tourney, I was expecting it to be the poop green skin like the venomtails in Durotar. Nope, it’s the GOLDEN skin, and it matches my Scorpadin perfectly!
I also forgot to add an interesting though minor issue.
The Carrion Fleshripper (the only tamable bonespider at the moment, in unphased southern Icecrown) had a humorous issue in her tooltip: when doing the Argent Tourney dailies requiring you to kill any Icecrown scurge, my good ol’ spider apparently is flagged for the daily as well if you have the questhelper-like tracking options turned on for enhanced tooltips. It was humorous, and I wonder if killing her in a duel would raise the other person’s tally of kills towards the quest.
Now I need to apologies because I reported the issue to a GM on the subject as a minor bug issue with the tooltip. In hindsight I really wish I hadn’t because now I remember, generally with pets with glitches, their response is to just make them untamable instead of getting to the root of the issue.
I’m really really sorry! Especially after seeing a seemingly non-copypasta reply email from a GM that they will investigate it.
its not just the spiders.i have a hinterlands quest and i can see it on people red gorillas in darnassuss…
‘honestly, how many people bring Devilsaurs to instances/raids? I’m curious because I’m hearing it’s discouraged due to hitbox, aggro range, and noise.’
Actually on ‘annoying’ scale, pre nerf Hydra [always complaining always, I miss that], Wasp [bzzzzzzzzzzzz and size], and Spirit Beast [ROAR ROAR ROAR ROAR from FIVE MILES AWAAAAY], the ‘saur is way down low on the list, it’s about the sqame as other pets, mean Abyss, my MC hound is louder.
But yes BEFORE some fixes, mostly when saurs were still growing huge, and even before that, there WAS a problem with the hit box, and subsequently the aggro range. Aka was doing a run on Nexus when Ryai was still lv 70ish, we got a group to farm the psycho belf for her santa hat, first two runs went fine. Then all a sudden Jareth backed up.
Jareth backed up again.
JARETH PULLED PSYCHO BELF.
Thankfully they believed me when I said I only had Jareth attack her AFTER she pulled from his fuckup, and kept her distracted/off the tank while we finished the trash.
But now? Jareth is just as good as any other pet- and he’s pulling off the most damage of my pets [seen him get nearly 1.2k pwr when people buff us both/buffs from others yada]
So gotta say, pre patch yes it was dangerous IF YOU DIDNT WATCH THEM- but all LARGE EXOTICS had the problem, not just Devilsaurs, IE when I used a tundra worm and popped TBW, the pet grew- the hitbox returned to original size.
Tho I admit it was funny seeing an exotic wail on a mob and it’s halfway across the room.
Just the usual talents, because dammit Jim, I’m a night elf, not an troll! *coughs* Anyway, it may just be that I didn’t notice. See, if we had a luck stat in game, mine would be -37, so it may just be that my rabid has a crappy activation rate anyway. *Laughs*
Well Palla it could also be a bug- I noticed on live realms FI wasn’t proccing when it should [went thru a boss fight for two minutes or so and nada even when pet was critting]
New PTR build up tonight, sounds like the LnL “nerf” has indeed already been applied and this is just a tooltip error being corrected.
This thing about pets getting two-shot’d with Exorcism in pvp is humorous though.