Aug. 24, 2008

And the Beta key goes to...

Congratulations to Chunkchunk of Altar of Storms on wining TKA Something’s Rare Beast Scavenger Hunt! Thanks to everyone who entered – I had a great time looking at all of the screenshots and only wish I had more keys to give away!

Aug. 21, 2008

Get up on this!

Thank you MMO-Champion for tidying up all the hunter push changes for this newest Beta patch.

Animal Handler (Beast Mastery): No longer increases speed while mounted, but now reduces the cooldown of your Master’s Call ability by 5/10 sec.
Aspect of the Beast: Now increases your melee attack power by 10% for the hunter and the hunter’s pet.
Bestial Swiftness is now a pet talent tree talent, and has been removed from the Beast Mastery Hunter tree.
Disengage: This ability has been re-designed. Now leaps the Hunter backwards up to 13 yards. 30 second cooldown. Disengage now also only has one rank (rank 1).
Distracting Shot: This shot now “taunts” the target onto the Hunter. The taunt effect will last 6 seconds. Distracting Shot now only has one rank (rank 1).
Focused Fire (Beast Mastery): Now increases the critical strike chance of your Kill Command by 10/20/30% while Kill Command is active. This effect can stack up to 3 times, but diminishes for each charge of Kill Command.
Improved Stings (Marksmanship): Now a 3-point talent, down from 5-points.
Kill Command: This ability now increases the damage done by your pet’s special abilities by 60%. Each attack will reduce the damage bonus by 20%. 1 minute cooldown.
New Talent – Aspect Mastery (Beast Mastery)
New Talent – Hunter vs. Wild (Survival): Increases you and your pet’s attack power and ranged attack power equal to 10/20/30% of your total Stamina.
New Talent – Lock and Load (Survival): You have a 33/66/100% chance when you trap a target and a 10/20/30% chance when you sting a target to cause your next 3 Arcane Shot or Explosive Shot spells to trigger no cooldown, cost no mana and consume no ammo.
New Talent – T.N.T. (Survival): Your Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap and Explosive Shot have a 5/10/15% to stun targets for 2 sec when they deal damage, and increases the critical strike chance of your Explosive Shot and Explosive Trap by 5/10/15%.
Pathfinding (Beast Mastery): Now also increases the movement speed while mounted by 5/10%.
Readiness (Survival): Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, down from 5 minutes.
Spirit Bond (Beast Mastery): Also increases healing done to you and your pet by 5/10%.
Steady Shot: Now has a 2.0 cast time, up from 1.5.
Surefooted (Survival) now reduces the duration of movement impairing effects by 16/25/50% (instead of resist % chance).
Survival Instincts (Survival): This has been moved to tier-2, up from tier 6.
Survivalist (Survival): Now increases your total Stamina, instead of your total Health.
The arming time has been reduced to 1 second, from 2 seconds for all traps.
Trap Mastery (Survival) is now an 11-point talent.
Trueshot Aura – This aura is now raid-wide.

And if that weren’t enough, we also get to see some of our new glyphs:

Glyph of Aimed Shot – Decreases the cooldown of Aimed Shot by 1 sec.
Glyph of Arcane Shot – Your Arcane Shot refunds 20% of its mana cost if the target has one of your Stings active on it.
Glyph of Aspect of the Beast – Increases the attack power bonus of Aspect of the Beast for you and your pet by an additional 2%.
Glyph of Aspect of the Monkey – While Aspect of the Monkey is active, each time you dodge you gain 30% increased movement speed for 6 sec. This speed does not stack with other movement speed increasing effects.
Glyph of Aspect of the Viper – You regenerate mana from Aspect of the Viper as if you had 15% less mana in your current mana pool.
Glyph of Bestial Wrath – Decreases the cooldown of Bestial Wrath by 20 sec.
Glyph of Deterrence – Decreases the cooldown of Deterrence by 20 sec.
Glyph of Disengage – Decreases the cooldown of Disengage by 5 sec.
Glyph of Freezing Trap – When your Freezing Trap breaks, the victim is afflicted with a 40% snare, recovering 10% per sec. for 4 sec.
Glyph of Frost Trap – Increases the radius of the effect from your Frost Trap by 1 to 0 yards.
Glyph of Hunter’s Mark – Increases the attack power bonus of your Hunter’s Mark by 20%.
Glyph of Immolation Trap – Decreases the duration of the effect from your Immolation Trap by -6000 sec., but damage while active is increased by 100%.
Glyph of Improved Aspect of the Hawk – Increases the effect of Improved Aspect of the Hawk by an additional 6.
Glyph of Multi-Shot – Decreases the cooldown of Multi-Shot by 1 sec.
Glyph of Rapid Fire – Increases the haste from Rapid Fire by an additional 8%.
Glyph of Serpent Sting – Increases the duration of your Serpent Sting by 3 sec.
Glyph of Snake Trap – Your Snake Trap creates 2 additional snakes.
Glyph of Steady Shot – Increases the damage dealt by Steady Shot by 10% when your target is afflicted with Serpent Sting.
Glyph of Trueshot Aura – Increases the attack power bonus of Trueshot Aura by an additional 2%.
Glyph of Volley – Decreases the mana cost of Volley by -20%.
Glyph of Wyvern Sting – Decreases the cooldown of your Wyvern Sting by 0 sec., but decreases the damage it deals by 1 to 0%.

And, a few updates from the beta boards themselves. Furious Howl, can it be upped from 20 yards?

I’m not sure why Furious Howl had such a low range. My suspicion is it just hadn’t been touched in a long time. It’s 40 now.

Have boars lost their “fun factor” now that they can no longer charge?

We actually debated this issue quite a bit. In the end it came down to a call about whether it was more fitting to boars to keep Charge or whether it was more fitting for the boar to be a tanking pet. The tanking pets were all going to get Intervene instead of Charge, since it let them be more useful as an OT, and we didn’t think it was worth the cost of making changes or exceptions to that design just to preserve boars Charging.

In the end, we decided that boars are feared because they are tough. They have leathery skin, a stubborn disposition and had a reputation for fighting on long after their wounds should have killed them. In short, they felt like a tank. We tried to keep the feeling of the old Charge with the bonus component to Gore.

It was very difficult to come up with a whole new system for pets without losing any aspect of the old system that might be important to players. We are genuinely sorry though if there is a change you don’t like.

More about the Kill Command change:

Kill Command was initially created as a reactive ability, something you hit when an event happened (a critical strike). The problem was that the event happened too often, and players just stuck it into a macro. Kill Command basically just became a flat damage increase. Players are right to assume their DPS has jumped because of shots not interrupting the auto-shot timer (it has, our tests show a ~140 DPS increase in some trials), so I think it’s fair to say the class’ sustained DPS will be okay.

Also, the level cap has been raised to 80 so expect more updates on my journey through Northrend post on the TKA Something board, and wasps are also tameable now AND there are still a few days left to win a Beta Key in TKA Something’s Rare Beast Scavenger Hunt!

Aug. 16, 2008

Win a Wrath of the Lich King Beta key

Well, I’m a day late with this announcement but I wanted to think of a fun way to give this key away. So, without further ado, I present to you The Rare Beast Scavenger Hunt. Make sure to visit the message board for all the details!

Aug. 15, 2008

Let's do the time warp again!

Past or future, there’s more hunter responses to be had from the Beta board.

Is it possible that aspects will a bar, like druids or death knights?

Not a bad suggestion, I’ll think about it. It does have issues with it though (You’d have to maintain a bunch of different hot bar setups).

What are some other things being worked on?

Intimidation – We’d like to make this instant instead of relying on the pet’s next attack.
Disengage – This is being changed in a future build. What it will do is cause the Hunter to jump back instantly 10-15ish yards to gain distance. 30 second cooldown.

What’s the plan with traps?

We definitely do want to make traps more usable. We’ve discussed a lot of different options over the years (including throwing your traps, having them turn into shots etc.) but in the end we feel we’d like to retain the unique gameplay of traps, and improve them without re-designing what traps really are.

Some changes we are working on:

- Distracting Shot will now be a “Mocking Blow”-esque taunt (so it will taunt the mob onto the Hunter for 6 sec). This will allow you to “peel” monsters to you (and thus to a trap) a lot easier than it is now. – Freezing Trap will no longer break on damage 100% of the time. It will still break on damage, but on x amount. So if the mob has a DoT on them, or the mob gets cleaved while in Freezing Trap, it won’t just immediately break. Because of this, we’re canning Bear Trap (since Freezing Trap will accomplish what Bear Trap was intended for, plus you guys have enough keybinds as it is). Note that we don’t intend Freezing Trap to be a stun, so the tuning on how much damage will break it will be important. – Camouflage – We’ll be introducing this new spell at level 80. It will give you limited stealth capabilities. A bonus with it is that you can lay your traps while Camouflaged and it won’t break the stealth, allowing you to setup your traps before a pull if desired. – Trap Mastery – This talent will be a 1-point talent now, we’ve condensed a lot of the trap talents in the Survival tree. It will do stuff like increase damage of Immolate, root the dispeller of your Freezing Trap in ice, increase the number of snakes from your snake trap, etc.

And remember the big hunter push that’s coming in Beta? Well, play around with the new talent trees to your heart’s content. Is Wrath of the Lich King shaping up to be the Year of the Survival Hunter?

Aug. 14, 2008

New build

While I may not have a ticket to Blizzcon yet (I have hopes for the ticket lottery that was just announced, but maybe I should be playing Powerball instead?) I can at least console myself with the latest Wrath build. Here’s the comprehensive list of changes to date (some of these were mentioned previously but are now “official”).

All pet families now have one unique ability. New abilities have been added for families such as bears and sporebats.
Arcane Shot: No longer dispels magical effects.
Aspects now no longer cost mana.
Aspect of the Beast: Now increases your melee attack power by 10%.
Avoidance, Dash / Dive and Cobra Reflexes are now pet talents instead of pet skills.
Bite now has no cooldown, does the same damage and costs the same Focus as Claw, so works as a Focus dump.
Clever Traps (Survival) has been renamed “Trap Mastery.”
Concussive Barrage (Marksmanship) – Can now proc from Volley attacks.
Counterattack: Damage increased by 20%, and now also scales with your attack power.
Deterrence (Survival) – Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, and now also increases your chance to resist spells by 60%. Now has a new spell effect.
Every hunter pet can learn Growl, Cower and either Bite or Claw (never both).
Hunter pets can now learn talents in one of three trees depending on family. Pets gain talent points starting at level 20 and earn an extra talent point every 4 levels.
If a hunter tames a pet that is more than five levels beneath their own level, the pet will then have their level increased to five levels beneath the hunter’s own level.
Improved Feign Death (Survival): Now also reduces damage taken during Feign Death by 15/30%.
Loyalty, Training Points and the hunter Beast Training button no longer exist. Hunter pets can now learn all skills at their level. They will get new ranks automatically as they gain levels.
Master Tactician (Survival) – Chance to proc increased to 10%, up from 6%.
Mongoose Bite: No longer requires you to dodge in order to use this ability.
Monster Slaying (Survival) and Humanoid Slaying (Survival) has been combined into “Improved Tracking”.
New Talent – Improved Tracking (Survival) – Increases all damage done to targets that are being tracked 1/2/3/4/5%.
Savage Strikes: Now includes Counterattack.
Steady Shot now uses ammo. In result, its bonus damage has been slightly reduced. Players can notice a damage increase based upon what ammo they use.
Surefooted (Survival) now reduces the duration of movement impairing effects by 10/20/30% (instead of resist % chance).
Tranquilizing Shot: Cooldown reduced to 15 seconds (down from 20) and now dispels Enrage and Magic effects.
Trap Mastery (Survival) has been removed.
Wing Clip: No longer does damage.
Devilsaur Eye now increases your pet’s attack power for a short duration instead of increasing its critical strike chance. It also provides a small amount (+5) of passive Agility.

Another interesting thing to note is that you will no longer be able to raise weapon or defense skill on the servants in the Blasted Lands, at least come Wrath.

In other news on the Beta board, there were some additional significant announcements from Koraa:

We’ll be making Master’s Call and Deterrence both base.

I’ll be interested to see what gets put in those spots although I think we’re all mentally thinking, “If only it were Scatter Shot.”

In regards to the lack of viability of stings in a shot rotation:

Bumped up the coefficient for Serpent Sting. With the mana cost changes, I think it’s come out lower than what it was before too. The other stings I think are fine.

As to the lack of mount speed scaling in Animal Handler, compared to other classes with similar talents:

This talent will be changed in an upcoming build, I do agree it’s somewhat lackluster.

Why is Sniper training is where it is, why can’t Marksmanship get a little love?

Sniper Training is in Survival because Hawk Eye is in Survival. To be honest, you can make an argument for a lot of talents and spells to be in Marks instead of Survival. Survival needs to be about more than just traps and melee. An upcoming build will have a big Survival restructuring.

Some other stuff from your post….

- We’ll change Silencing Shot to be a proper interrupt (PvE). – Trueshot Aura will now be raid wide.

Wild Quiver, Rapid Recuperation are both changing in an upcoming build. Though, I like the design of those two talents and think they just need some tweaks.

And the biggest news of all, at least at the moment.

Big hunter push on the way, will be in the build after next.

I bet all these announcements are making you think to yourself – I wish I had a beta key too! Well, never fear, my hunter friends. TKA Something will be giving away a Beta key to one lucky person so you can test all these changes (and more!) yourself. Stay tuned for the announcement about how to enter this coming Friday (08/15/08).

[Previous] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 [Next]

TKA Something