Lucky beta tester Vabuka has generously shared more Cataclysm beta screenshots with us!
Today we have a Deviate Plainstrider from the Southern Barrens, a Sunburst Adder from Tanaris, and a Bullmastiff from Western Plaguelands.
All three of these beasts can be tamed right now in beta. (Of course, it’s beta so things may always change.)
Patch 3.3 is going live today. The big news for most players is probably Icecrown Citadel, which seems to have something to do with the Lich King. But there’s lots more of interest, from the long-awaited built-in quest mapper to a new fishing tournament.
Most exciting for high level Beast Mastery hunters is the new Spirit Beast Arcturis, who happens to look like a ghostly druid bear but is, in every way, a proper Spirit Beast. (That’s him to the right.)
We are also seeing what is perhaps the first impact of the upcoming Cataclysm on the creatures of Azeroth as diseased wolves invade Elwynn Forest and the Thistle Boars of Teldrassil shed their pretty orange fur for a new grey look.
Thanks to safrienaer, we now have a lot more information on the ‘spectral bear‘ — the potential new Spirit Beast that showed up in the Patch 3.3 data files a few builds back.
His name is Arcturius. He is, indeed, a Spirit Beast — complete with all the Spirit Beast skill, including Prowl. Like other Spirit Beasts, he is a non-aggressive rare elite. Unlike them, he’s only level 74.
Ranshiin, in a post on the Arcania forums, brought an interesting thread on the MMO Champion forums to our attention: the wolves in Northshire Valley — the little walled human starter area in Elwynn Forest — are becoming diseased!
As you can see from this shot of Aisna with her new diseased wolf, these guys do indeed use the diseased wolf skin — which was previously unavailable before level 47, in Felwood.
Blizzard pushed a new build (10676) to the 3.3 PTR today and updated the patch notes to match.
There’s nothing particularly interesting to hunters in the patch notes, but MMO Champion did notice a new skin in the data: the Spectral Bear.
Is this the newest Spirit Beast? Stay tuned … and let me know if you see him on the PTR!
The patch notes for Patch 3.3 on the Public Test Realms have been updated. You can find the full notes on the PTR forum or the normal PTR notes page, but as usual MMO Champion has been kind enough to post a notes comparison.
So what’s new for hunters and pets? Just this one note:
Pet Leveling: Hunter pets now need only 5% of the experience a player needs to level, down from 10%.
Nice!
I was only away from my desk for a couple of hours, I swear, but while I was gone Blizzard brought the Public Test Realms (PTR) down, presumably for a new build. At the same time, they updated the PTR patch notes for Patch 3.3 with some fascinating new information.
I’m going to post the cool hunter additions. As always, you can find the complete PTR patch notes on the WoW website; in addition, I am using MMO Champion’s handy guide to the differences between the old and new notes.
*yawn* It’s too early for me to add intelligent commentary, so I’ll just post what Ghostcrawler had to say about pet resilience on the WoW forums:
We certainly don’t think pet resilience is useless. We are considering increasing it to 100% of master’s resilience to make up for the increased AE damage pets will take in PvP. We don’t want pets to explode on contact (neither do we want pet classes to be twice as difficult to kill) but we did think it was a little goofy and unintuitive that pets could just shrug off AE attacks in PvP. We’d rather make pets tougher against all types of damage than be vulnerable to some and nearly immune to others.
He doesn’t mention if this is a chance they might make for Patch 3.3, but that would seem to me to be a reasonable time to make it.
As an addendum to the Patch 3.3 PTR notes, Ghostcrawler added this comment about the changes to hunter pet Avoidance via the forums:
It is likely we will just replace the hunter pet Avoidance talent with one that increases pet dps. It is too situational to have as a talent now. Hunter pets will just take 90% less damage from creature AE the same as other pets do (meaning “for free”). We offer that avoidance as recognition that Fluffy doesn’t have the AI to get out of the fire on boss fights and likes to go in straight lines between you and a target, even if that means crossing fire.
By way of the always excellent MMO Champion we have an additional listing of hunter changes that are either unintentional and will go away or are intentional but not yet in the patch notes. These come from a comparison of client spell data, if I understand correctly.
(Technically a number of the mana changes were mentioned in the patch notes in general, but we didn’t get details on which hunter spells would be affected.)
