Quick video today of the new Crane pet and the pet trick bonus ability they get, which is somewhat underwhelming but nevertheless neat (I don’t like to get too down on extra abilities that got tossed in for free after all).

At the moment in the MoP beta most of the cranes I’ve found are not tameable, and just about all of them are far more attractive than this guy — white crane and emerald green cranes. As a pet with a primary ability that is pretty much a PvP ability, I’m probably not going to be spending a lot of game time with the crane, but I gotta admit it’s a pretty good-looking pet.

MMO-C has datamined the latest beta build, which includes abilities for the new tameable hunter pets in MoP. It looks like the Quilen and Water Striders are going to exotic pets.

Here are the new abilities:

• Quilen
• Eternal Guardian: Returns the spirit to the body, restoring a dead target to life with 20% health and 20% mana. 20 yd range, 2 sec cast, 10 min cooldown. (Battle rez!)
• Fearless Roar: The quilen lets out a fearless roar, increasing the critical strike chance of all party and raid members by 5%. Instant, 45 sec cooldown.
• Porcupine
• Paralyzing Quill: Fires paralyzing quills around the porcupine, incapacitating all enemies for 2 sec, 0.5 sec cast, 60 sec cooldown.
• Goat
• Trample: Your goat tramples the enemy, kicking up an obscuring clout of dust, causing all enemies within 10 yards to have their melee and ranged attack speed reduced by 20% for 30 sec. Melee range, Instant, 25 sec cooldown.
• Water Strider
• Still Water: Infuses all party and raid members within vision with still water, increasing their spell power by 10% and their critical strike chance by 5% for 60 min. Instant.
• Surface Trot: Allows the hunter and the water strider to walk across water for 10 min. Any damage will cancel the effect. Unlimited range, Instant.
• Crane
• Lullaby: Puts the target to sleep for 4 sec. 20 yd range, Instant, 60 sec cooldown.
• Trick: You command your Crane to do a trick. Instant.
• Basilisk
• Petrifying Gaze: Turns the target into stone for 3 sec, causing them to be invulnerable. 20 yd range, Instant, 60 sec cooldown.

New Glyphs

• (Major) Glyph of Explosive Trap: removes the damage from the trap and adds a knockback.
• (Major) Glyph of Scattering: Your Scatter Shot also removes all damage over time effects from the target.
• (Minor) Glyph of Marking: Your Hunter’s Mark ability now places a bullseye on your target instead of its usual visual.
• (Minor) Glyph of Direction: Causes your Misdirection target to appear larger

Some cool stuff here, and some odd stuff. The quilen having battle rez is awesome… but then it’s other ability is 5% crit, something that hunters already provide by default. I can only assume that Blizzard will catch and fix that. I’m probably most excited about the water strider ability to let hunters walk on water — this is one of those pets that I can see almost every hunter carrying around just in case we need to take some shortcuts over the sea.

On the glyph front we have some new minor glyphs that add purely cosmetic effects, which I think is cool. Linking the ability to remove DoTs to Scatter Shot was an interesting choice, now if only we could Scatter Shot ourselves!

As mentioned earlier, the WHU guild is getting semi-serious at this point, and will be undertaking some level 85 all-hunter raiding.  Some of the details of our raids have yet to be determined.  We don’t have an established team or roles, and some individual strategies will be determined by the bosses themselves.  That means we can talk in general terms about what will be needed, even if the individual strategies will have to wait.

Disclaimer

As Frost mentioned in an earlier post, this isn’t an extension of WHU events.  This is raiding.  The level of preparedness, patience for developing strategies (and wiping) and skill will need to be much higher.  There will also, in all likelihood, be more people interested in raiding than we can bring.  We’ll be as diplomatic as possible, but will also make no qualms about making decisions in the best interests of the raid.  In my original guild, I used to tell interested raiders that fortune favored those who kept showing up, even if they had to wait for their spot on a raid team.  I usually found that advice to be true, so I will extend it here as well.

Experience & Other Requirements

Please Note: You don’t need to be in the WHU Guild to participate (though it will help us identify some of you).  Nor do you need to be a dwarf.  Any alliance hunters on the Icecrown server are eligible.  I’m undecided on cross-realm participation, but we’re starting with “No” for now, and may change that policy later on.

There isn’t a defined experience prerequisite here.  But some general raid experience is a must.  If you’re thinking of this as a possible way to get started in raiding, it’s probably not for you.  Some fights won’t necessarily be harder than a “normal” raid fight (although many will be) but it will certainly be different.  Which means that everything we need to know to raid normally has to be ingrained in you already, so that we can add new skills and tactics to our all-hunter raids.  Many of you have been doing this with the guild for a while, which is awesome.

If you’re looking for ways to prepare, practice some soloing or, if you’re lucky enough to have willing guildies, tank an instance.  Practice kiting.  Shake off the cobwebs on BM and MM (since many of us are SV right now).  Tame some pets on the list below.  Improve your gear.  And check the WHU guild calendar for other events, which happen every week.

Also, I’ll expect that you know the boss encounters.  This is part of the “general raid experience” thing.  In terms of boss knowledge, this includes ICC bosses (which is probably where we’ll start), and Cata raids.  BH, BRD, BT, FL, and (eventually, I hope) DS.  For those concerned about lockouts, we’re not going to anything higher level to begin with.  ICC, BH, and BRD are our likeliest first stops.

Raid Times

First Raid: Saturday, May 26.  5:00pm Server Time (6pm Central, 7pm Eastern).  Plan on 3 hours of raiding, variable based on attendance and progress.

Subsequent Raids: Also Saturdays, and will be announced in advance on the WHU in-game calendar and likely on the website here as well.  I’m aiming for at least once every 4 weeks, and at most every 2 weeks.

Pets

As an all-hunter group, we can have more buffs than any other all-something group.  But to do that, we need pets.  A while back, Frost wrote a pet buff guide that everyone should be familiar with.  The “Short List” at the bottom is a good starting point, with 3 additions that we’ll want for our purposes: turtle/beetle, bear, and spirit beast.  So the final list of pets that you’ll want should look like this:

• Cat (str/agil)
• Corehound – exotic (burst haste & cast speed reduction)
• Silithid – exotic (health)
• Wolf (crit)
• Shale Spider – exotic (5% stats)
• Raptor (armor debuff)
• Carrion Bird (physical damage caused debuff)
• Hyena (bleed damage)
• Sporebat (cast speed reduction)
• Tallstrider or Fox (attack speed slow)
• Ravager (physical damage vulnerability)
• Dragonhawk or Wind Serpent (spell damage taken)
• Turtle/Beetle (best survivability)
• Bear (tank pet that reduces physical damage)
• Spirit Beast (heals)

You don’t need to have every single one of those (though, ideally we all can without much effort – just some luck with the spirit beasts).  The more that each raider has, the more flexibility we’ll have with roles, assignments, and redundant buffs.

Spec

For all-hunter raiding we’re going to be leaning almost exclusively on Marksmanship and Beastmaster.  For BM, if you’re not designated as a tank (and a majority won’t be) you’ll need a spirit beast.

Remember that we value survivability over all else here (dps is always awesome, but is #2 on our list of concerns).  As such, talents like Hunter Vs. Wild become invaluable, especially for MM, where Chimera Shot’s heals are percentage-based.

• For Markmanship, here’s the default spec I’d suggest.  Marked for Death becomes worthless with so many hunters, only one person will need Trueshot Aura, and it maximizes our self-heals with Chimera Shot and through Spirit Bond.
• For BM, something resembling a traditional tanking spec will likely be our best bet (or sub in Focus Fire if you’re rocking a Spirit Beast and aren’t tanking)
• And if you must go SV (we may try 1-2 as SV to provide the buff), a funky version that dips into BM for some small self-heals is recommended.

The above specs aren’t the final word, because there’s always 1-2 points that can flip-flop with another dps talent.  The important takeaway, though, is that any and all survivability talents come first.

Glyphs

For the most part, these won’t change from the recommendations for our dps.  With a few notable exceptions.

• MM will definitely want the Chimera Shot Glyph.  More Chimeras means more heals.
• With very limited exceptions, all specs will want the following Major Glyphs: Misdirection, Mending, and Deterrence.  Everyone, myself included, loves the Disengage Glyph.  But all three of these will be too important.
• The “very limited exceptions” to the above list will be those in BM, who will have to remove one of the Major Glyphs listed to include Bestial Wrath.  Which one is eliminated will depend on the fight.  I also want to mention the Raptor Strike glyph here.  I doubt the small mitigation, especially because it requires movement and melee range, will be terribly useful.  There may be situations for it though.  Learn it and keep it in mind, but don’t use it as a default.

Consumables

• Food Buff, preferably Skewered Eel
• Flask, preferably Flask of the Winds or Flask of Steelskin
• Runescroll of Fortitude II (optional, not needed if we have the pet)
• Drums of Forgotten Kings (optional, not needed if we have the pet)
• Dense Embersilk Bandages
• Gems, enchants, etc. are expected.  Maybe not the best of everything (at least at first) but a concerted effort to be prepared.

Macros

I’m not a macro master, and I generally like to keep things simple.  However, two macros that have obvious use are pet heals, either directly healing our pet or manipulating a spirit beast’s heal.

Mend Pet Macro

/cast Mend Pet
/cast Cower
/cast Shell Shield

…Shell Shield (or its Beetle equivalent) will only be applicable for some players.  And technically, we should rotate Cower and Shell Shield so they don’t overlap.  In practice, I’ve found this hard to do consistently, and enjoy knowing they’re being cast even with some overlap.  If you want to cast them manually, or set up something like a conditional macro, more power to you.

Mend Pet, while tanking, should be cast every 10 seconds.  There are some simple ways to track this, either with cooldown add-ons or manual notifiers (I use a Power Aura).

Spirit Beast Heal Macro

There’s a lot that can be done with spirit beast heals.  Healing your pet, yourself, your focus or target, etc.  Rather than list a single macro you should use, here’s a useful link to a Petopia discussion.  It includes several variations on heal macros that you can choose from or modify.  I haven’t vetted every macro in the discussion, and it’s also from a while ago, so I can’t guarantee success.  But experiment and find what works best for you.

Questions, concerns, suggestions

• Let us know in the comments, or
• Email me at arthwhu@yahoo.com, or
• Find me in-game on Icecrown.  I’m “Arthq” in the WHU guild, and my main is in the guild Wyrmfoe and is simply Årth (the Å is alt-143…annoying, I know).

Look sharp, guys.  We have the opportunity to make some history here.  I don’t expect it will happen instantaneously, nor will it be a cakewalk.  But I have faith that with some experience and dedication, we can down some epic encounters with an all-hunter group that should have no business raiding at this level.

When we started being able to tame some of the new pets in the MoP beta, the porcupine quickly became the favorite of many hunters (myself included). Alas we then heard that the porcupine was never meant to be tamable and the fact that we could tame it was an accident due to it originally using the boar model. Hunter Taeliana started a forum post, “Porcupine is for Fite” on the topic:

Just read a forum on petopia that said the silkworms and porcupines that are part of the “boar” family weren’t meant to be tameable pets,  but they forgot to change that part when they got rid of the boar placeholder models.

Please don’t take away my porcupine.  He’s as little as a hyjal bear cub and as ferocious as Garrosh with a hangover.  Every time i see his little spiky body run out of a pack of giant dead mobs he’s tanked for me, i smile.

Ghostcrawler stepped in with some good news:

FITE PORCUPINE FITE!

We decided these animals shouldn’t be boars anymore, but they will be tameable. Silkworms can be worms. Porcupines can be their own family.

FITE SPIRIT PORCUPINE FITE!

I have to say I was a big fan of the porcupine myself. We have to see what kind of special ability they get — but my big hope is for something other than a raid buff. I’d love to see a porcupine ability that did a small amount of damage to anything that attacked it. Spec that little guy as tenacity and it’d make a great tank pet. The additional damage isn’t a problem for balance since it only applies when something is directly attacking the pet.

Or who knows, maybe Blizzard will come up with something even better. Fite porcupine!
 

Today at WoW Insider, I go over some transmogrification inspiration from hunters around the web.

We’re going to take a break from the tumult of Mists of Pandaria beta news and give some attention to one of the most popular end-of-expansion doldrums activities: preparing the new badass look that you’ll be wearing into pandaland.

Transmogrification has become an immensely popular subject in WoW. WoW Insider has a transmog resource list for general transmogrification information, and Tabana has a far more hunter-specific and extensive hunter transmogrification resources compilation over at the WHH that collects all the hunter transmog info from across the web.

Today, we’re going to take a look at some of the awesome transmog looks that hunters have put together, complete with where to get the gear you need to grab the look for yourself. … Read More.

MMO-Champion has datamined a handful of new changes from the MoP beta. None of these are huge, but there is some big fun in the mix:

• Aspect of the Beast is now a baseline skill, rather than a glyph.
• Revive Pet now resurrects your pet with full health, instead of 15% health.
• Fetch: ability that has your pet retrieve loot from a nearby corpse.
• Rhino, Boar and Hyena speacial abilities changes to 4% increased physical damage (previous bleed ability has been removed)

First of all, the change to Revive Pet is much appreciated. Nothing is more frustrating than having your pet die in one of the rare fights that has a chance of killing it, then rezzing the pet only to have the first aoe pulse hit before your first Mend Pet tick can hit and the pet dies again. We suffer enough trying to resurrect our pets with a giant deadtime in our dps, it makes sense to give us our pets back at full health (like other pet classes).

The other big fun here is Fetch! I remember seeing this ability some time ago, though I can’t remember off the top of my head where it was that we first saw it. Either way, it looks like it might finally be making its way into the beta. According to Wowhead Fetch is classified as a hunter ability, so will in theory be baseline (it could be misclassified, of course).

I’m very curious to see how it works. Will we have to select a corpse and click Fetch to have our pet gather our loot? Will we just be able to hit the button and have the pet get whatever is nearby? Will this ability work with the new aoe looting and let our pet get everything in the area for us?

I sincerely hope it’s the last option, as that’s the only one that appears to offer any advantage at all. Sending your pet to loot a single targeted corpse at a time is kinda neat, but is inferior to just aoe looting the area.

I’ve decided to take a break from crunching numbers in the beta and do a little bit of leveling. But of course I hate questing, even when the quests aren’t buggy, so I decided I’d head out and do some grinding. This also has the advantage of getting a better feel for the leveling feel of the specs. I have to say that, at least from the perspective of leveling, I have never had so much fun grinding mobs as a hunter.

I currently have BM and MM set up and was switching off between them. Both are basically just about equally good at the AoE grinding game, but I’m having huge fun with BM and for the way I’m playing, BM has a slight advantage.

The first and hugest aspect of AoE grinding is that Spirit Bond is amazing. It went from being a pointless talent to being a truly meaningful chunk of self-healing. I combine this with A Murder of Crows on mobs under 20% health to have a flock of crows around me at all times and then the occasional multi-shot to trigger my pet’s Beast Cleave and we are an AoE machine.

In order to really benefit from A Murder of Crows I have to pretty much fight in melee range. If I’m off at normal hunter range the crows kill their almost dead target (I trigger it only when a mob is under 20% health so that the cooldown resets) the crows come back to me. They seem to only join in the fight if I’m almost in melee of the new target (or if crows are still appearing — those ones seem to be more aggressive in picking targets). Thus the process goes something like this:

• Find areas with high mob concentrations
• Repeatedly shoot all mobs in range so that they all come in to attack me
• Drop the newly badass Snake Trap and an Explosive Trap
• Hit Mend Pet for safety sake
• During this time most of the mobs are attacking me
• Multi-Shot to activate Beast Cleave
• Tap a mob down to 20% and hit A Murder of Crows
• Cobra Shot to restore focus
• More Murder of Crows
• Look at all the pretty numbers flowing past
• Find more mobs

The delightful thing about this practice is that more often than not mobs are attacking me left and right. Eventually my beast cleaving pet picks up most of them. But due to the power of Spirit Bond I am being constantly healed up and never have to worry about health. If I happen to get more than 5 mobs hitting me for a while, my health might go below 75% health, in which case I can always Disengage for a quick extra heal with Exhilaration.

It’s huge fun.

Don’t get me wrong, questing is typically the most efficient way to level and you don’t need to do this kind of grinding that often, but it’s awesome fun to be able to do so. The extra self-heals will also be hugely beneficial when you have those pesky group quests that, being a hunter, you’re going to want to just solo yourself anyway.

I have to imagine that SV with Serpent Spread is likely to be even more effective at this, though with more AoE from Serpent Spread rather than Beast Cleave, you’ll have more mobs attacking you, which means you might need to Disengage every now and then for the Exhilaration heal.

Here’s a video of me playing around with masses of mobs:

Ghostcrawler made another forum appearance to discuss hunters and respond to some beta concerns:

A few points on hunters, gathered from several threads:

We don’t want for dots just to ignore crowd control. It’s a test of skill for players to decide when to dot and when to CC. However, that’s not a fair requirement for attacks that you can’t prevent, such as Piercing Shots and MM mastery. Those probably do need to pause or do no damage to CC’d targets.

We’re still tweaking focus regen. It does feel a little slow right now.

Stampede needs to appear at the target or you lose too much of the brief duration with the pets moving to the target. It also needs to have a long cooldown and short duration, because it’s an awful lot of DPS to have so many pets out. The alternative would be that the extra pets do a lot less damage each, but we didn’t feel like that really delivered on the fantasy of “opening the stable.”

We want traps to be good CC. Traps are one of the signature hunter mechanics, and we’d rather make them good than just let players ignore them and do all their CC with shots. Improving CC in this way will also give hunters better synergy with other classes in PvP, rather than the hunter’s viability being determined by how awesome their burst damage is.

We’re still looking at expertise, dodge and running a lot of PvP tests right now. We do think it’s a bit disingenuous to argue that melee are always behind their targets in PvP. Just ask any Backstabbing rogue or Shredding druid. Overall, we’re still comfortable with the idea of ranged attacks able to be dodged. It’s a little weird to argue any of this stuff based on “reality” but heroes so awesome that they could dodge arrows or bullets certainly exist in literature and cinema. If you can leap through the air towards your foe (or backwards in the case of a hunter), shield block a giant, or cast a fireball, then being able to dodge a shot shouldn’t be the thing that breaks the suspension of disbelief.

(As an aside, when I was working on historical RTS games, I read that there was some evidence that Native Americans had some skill in dodging arrows, which may have been one of the things that led to their adopting firearms, given that firearms at the time were pretty inferior to arrows or javelins in most other ways. That still doesn’t settle whether dodging arrows in a fantasy game with paladins and mages is reasonable or not.)

If it’s an undue burden for PvP, then that’s another thing (though we think the jury is still out on that), but arguing it’s not realistic is a bit… er… dodgy.

So this is mostly good news. To my eye it’s a combination of good news and news that we should have expected. I know that many hunters want to be able to Serpent Sting trapped targets, or trap targets afflicted with Serpent Sting (possibly via Serpent Spread) but frankly I agree with Ghostcrawler here. Part of the skill of playing the game is using the right abilities at the right time — it’s probably not a good design decision to let you do DoT up the world with no consequences.

But on the happy news front, I appreciate that they’re going to look at having the Stampede pets appears right at the target. I think from the flavor perspective it’s cool that the pets appear behind you and you can see them charging in — in fact it looks awesome. You could even argue that the dps loss doesn’t matter because the ability could just be designed to account for that (in other words if it takes 2 seconds for the pets to reach the target, you just increase the duration to 2 seconds longer than what you want the dps time to be). The problem, of course, is that the time to reach the target is variable depending on how far the hunter is from the target, and the way Stampede works now we’d want to close to melee to hit Stampede to maximize the dps, which makes it a pretty annoying cooldown to use to its maximum potential.

What Ghostcrawler did not address about Stampede, however, is the annoying 10-minute cooldown. I do wish they could come up with a mechanic that did not let Stampede be used in arena or affected by Readiness, but still let us use it on every boss fight. As it is now, if you’re wiping on a progression boss fight, you’ll only get to use Stampede every other attempt.

Also it looks like focus regen might get a wee little boost, which is always appreciated.

Why Dodge is a Problem

Finally dodge is here to stay, and I don’t really mind that. Hunters enjoyed having fewer stats to optimize in Cataclysm after Armor Pen was removed and not replaced with anything, and letting our shots be dodged seems appropriate. There is no real PvE downside (we’ll just have to be expertise capped). On the PvP front, however, it’s a messier issue.

In PvP you can’t just get your 7.5% expertise to be dodge-capped. Instead different classes will have different levels of dodge, and some of them get get substantially high dodge levels indeed. This means that not only will some of our dps be susceptible to dodge, but also things like Concussive Shot, Tranq Shot, and Wyvern Sting. Many vital abilities that you really need to have work (and we’re pretty much designed to have them work on command) will suddenly have a chance of being dodged. For PvP, this blows goats.

So I’m fine with our shots being dodged, if we can get a way to ensure that the must-have on command abilities are able to work when we need them to work, ignoring those dodges (I believe some other classes have mechanics that work that way).

However, what Ghostcrawler said about flavor complaints about dodge is spot on. This is a game where you get sent dragons in the mail. Don’t tell me that someone dodging arrows is going to break your suspension of disbelief.

After many emails on the subject, I’m posting these official WHU guest posting guidelines.

Warcraft Hunters Union accepts guest posts — so if you have something you really want to say to the hunter community, you can do so here. This could be anything from a unique insight into an aspect of the game, results of testing or theorycrafting data, explaining why an aspect of the game needs to change, rebutting common wisdom or common mistakes, or your hawt new transmog look.

Some examples of past WHU guest posts include:

• Pain-Free Pugging for Hunters
• Professions for the Raiding Hunter
• Synergy in Three-Hunter Environments

It should go without saying that this is not the WoW forums and we’re not going to publish just anything. It’s also worth noting that if you have a lot to say, you can always become an author over at WoW Hunters Hall. But if you want the vast armies of the WHU to get your wisdom in their RSS feed, here are the guidelines:

Guest Posting Guidelines

• Frostheim has final say. This is in no way a promise to post whatever you write, and if Frostheim chooses not to publish it that does not means that we hate you personally or are insulting you. Though I suppose it could be taken as an insult either to your topic or your writing ability. But no emotions are involved in the decision.
• Be a grown up. No ranting, bitching, tirades. If you have a problem with an aspect of the game, that’s fine. You can address that without resorting to hyperbole (Blizzard is ruining the game), ad-hominem or name-calling. Facts, data, and logic are essential to posts complaining about something. If you have a problem with a particular person, this is not the place to address it. Blogging for the WHU you have to be more of a grown-up than you do when anonymously posting comments or on forums.
• Write intelligibly. You don’t have to be an English major or write beautiful prose, but you have to know the basics of written communication. No leet speak or lol speak or emoticons. You must use capital letters appropriately, break words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. Also avoid the giant wall of text by breaking things up with lists and subheaders when appropriate.
• Bonus points for brevity. We’re not going to publish a tweet, but neither are we going to publish a novella. That said, take as long as you need to say what you need to say, but no longer. Frostheim despises getting emails that are ridiculously long (the record is over 5,000 words, by the way). Most posts on the WHU hang out in the 500-word range. Plenty are longer, plenty are shorter.

What You Get Out of It

Hey, don’t ask us — you’re the one asking to post something on the WHU, you must have a reason. Certainly the average post on the WHU probably gets more hunter readers than the average hunter post anywhere else, except possibly Scattered Shots on WoW Insider.

You will, of course, receive credit for your post including a brief bio and a link back to your blog/profile/website if you want it. However we will not link to spammy sites, including goldsellers, affiliate sites, and anything dealing with online gambling. As always Frostheim reserves the right to veto any link he doesn’t want the WHU linking to.

How to Submit a Guest Post

Just email Frostheim with the subject “Guest Post.” It is strongly advised that you first email with your idea for a post before writing the entire thing up. Even if you think your topic is hot stuff, it may be something that the WHU has already covered, or that we are currently working on. It’s worth your while to ping us before doing all the work of writing it.

If you do want to just submit the entire thing with no initial inquiry (as many of you seem to do, for some reason) then please include a brief synopsis with your post submission.

It’s Hunter Poster Friday!