Nov. 13, 2007
Awards, parades, and commemorative stamps!
Although we’ve been talking about it for over a month, here are the patch notes for 2.3 (as they relate to hunters, of course)!
- Weapon Skill: All items and abilities that granted weapon skill have been changed. In most cases, they were converted to expertise or expertise rating. Ranged attacks do not benefit from expertise, so ranged weapon skill has generally been replaced by critical strike bonuses or hit bonuses. In a few cases, talents have been changed to other effects to avoid granting players excessive amounts of expertise.
- Pets will try to get behind their targets when engaging in melee combat.
- Dwarf: Gun Specialization now increases chance to critically hit with Guns by 1% rather than increasing weapon skill.
- Troll: Bow and Thrown Specialization now increases chance to critically hit with those weapons by 1% rather than increasing weapon skill.
- Aimed Shot (Marksmanship) now reduces healing done to that target by 50% for 10 seconds.
- Arcane Shot (Ranks 6 and above) now dispel 1 Magic effect in addition to their normal damage.
- Explosive Trap: The initial damage dealt by this trap is now also increased by 10% of your ranged attack power.
- Expose Weakness: The triggered effect from this talent will no longer use up charges of Misdirection.
- Immolation Trap: The total damage dealt by this trap is now also increased by 10% of your ranged attack power.
- Misdirection: This spell will now always be removed correctly if multiple Hunters overwrite each other’s Misdirection.
- Misdirection: If a Hunter attempts to use this ability on a target which already has an active Misdirection, the spell will fail to apply due to a more powerful spell already being in effect. This will not trigger the cooldown or cost any mana.
- Readiness: This talent now finishes the cooldown on Kill Command.
- Serpent Sting, Immolation Trap and Explosive Trap all gain additional damage based on ranged attack power.
- Serpent Sting: The total damage dealt by this sting is now also increased by 10% of your ranged attack power.
- Steady Shot: Tooltip clarified to indicate base weapon damage is used in the damage calculation.
- Trueshot Aura (Marksmanship) no longer costs mana to cast and will last until cancelled.
- Wyvern Sting (Survival) is now instant cast and has a maximum duration of 10 seconds in PvP.
- Wyvern Sting: This ability will no longer be overwritten by lower ranks of Wyvern Sting.
- Daily cooking quests are now available from The Rokk in Shattrath City! In addition to gold, you can receive random cooking reagents and new recipes as a reward for completing these quests.
- Duration of wizard and mana oils created by enchanters has been increased.
- Engineering potion injectors no longer require engineering skill to use.
- Plans for a new arrow making device can be found from Sunfury Archers.
- The plans for adamantite shells now create an Adamantite Shell Machine. The machine creates 200 high quality bullets at a time, with 5 charges per item.
- New fish can now be caught in Zul’Aman and Deadwind Pass. Recipes for preparing these new fish are obtained through the daily cooking quests.
- New recipes are available from Grand Master leatherworking trainers to make 20 slot quivers and ammo pouches.
- New recipes are available from the Honor Hold, Thrallmar, and Lower City quartermasters to create 24 slot quivers and ammo pouches.
- Black Bow of the Betrayer: The triggered effect from this item will no longer use up charges of Misdirection. In addition, the triggered effect will no longer break crowd control effects.
- Gladiator’s armor pieces of like nature from various seasons will now all meet the requirements for their shared set bonus. This means if you are using 2 pieces of Season 1 gear and 2 pieces of Season 2 gear of the same design you will now have your 4 piece set bonus.
- Gladiator’s Chain Gauntlets: The bonus damage on these gloves has been increased from 4% to 5%.
- Merciless Gladiator’s Chain Gauntlets: The bonus damage on these gloves has been increased from 4% to 5%.
- Fixed a bug in the pet sheet stamina mouseover tooltip that showed an incorrect health increase value.
Although I pulled the above from the latest Test Realm patch notes, they APPEAR to be identical to the ones that I just downloaded at 4:00am (just now, in other words). If I missed anything, blame the lack of sleep. Not mentioned in the patch are the changes to the dead zone and the change in our Arena set bonus. There are some new tameable beasts in both Zul’Aman and the re-vamped Dustwallow Marsh.
Nov. 7, 2007
Bon appetite!
With 2.3 confirmed to be going live next Tuesday, we received one last Hunter update from Eyonix:
In patch 2.3, aimed shot will not only reduces healing done to the target by 50% for a ten seconds, but we’re also reducing the shot time by 0.5 seconds.
The original post wasn’t even a page long before someone mentioned that lowering the cast time from 3.5 seconds to 3 seconds wasn’t something to really write home about, and this was the follow-up:
Yeah, an already great 11-point talent that will now have a reduced cast time and a mortal stike effect. How completely useless…
Edited to add my follow-up:
I was quick to reply to be very honest. What I meant by “already great” is that even in its current state, players are still making great use of the talent. We wouldn’t have given this talent these two improvements had we been completely happy with its effectiveness.
With that being said, these ARE great changes. To those who flame that 3.0 is still too slow, lets be reasonable. We’re simply being conservative. We may lower it further (probably not before 2.3), but we want to see effective the ability is with these changes implemented. Keep in mind too, there were other changes made for 2.3 that improve hunter viability and effectiveness in PvP.
In short, we need to see how all the changes play out before making anymore changes.
Nov. 1, 2007
V2.0
So maybe this time, for real, /castsequence, the auto shot toggle and everything will be fixed on Test prior to 2.3 going live. This just in, from Slouken:
The stuck cast sequence problems should be fixed in the next test realm update.
The hunter Auto Shot macro issues should also be fixed in the next test realm update.
Here’s hoping!
Nov. 1, 2007
Sincerity reaching out as far as the eye can see
A few new things. Hortus weighs in about Arcane Shot mechanics:
This is working correctly. Arcane shot should dispel before it deals damage.
Also, there are new vendor ammunition available from the Violet Eye (revered) that seems to close the gap between vendor, crafted and the Hyjal reputation ammo. The whole /castsequence issue that’s on Test currently, though, makes my head hurt. In a nutshell, the 'auto shot’ portion of the macro is now acting as a toggle, turning auto shot on and off. It doesn’t work this way on Live UNLESS you are using the Auto Shot button from the Marksmanship tree – within the macro, well, most of us know how that works already. Apparently, it is SUPPOSED to be a toggle, according to Slouken, when Hunters were trying to explain why the /castsequence wasn’t working:
The problem with Auto Shot is that it’s a toggle. :)
So, was it supposed to always work like this and now it’s fixed so it actually does? Or is it a bug that it’s working like this and isn’t supposed to be? I’ve got no idea, as this is the only “blue” reply Hunters have received, despite the many posts on the Test forum talking about the issue with /castsequence.
Oct. 26, 2007
Why don't we just wait here for a little while...
The 1-35 yd range is confirmed as a bugged tooltip by Drysc:
There’s a tooltip error, it should be “5-35 yards”. We want melee and ranged to be kept separate, so that when in melee attack range you should not be able to use a ranged attack. There’s some amount of 'give’ there, especially in fast paced PvP which can produce some temporary gray area but that’s fully known with this change.
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