Category Archives: wrath of the lich king

The Future

Edit: Good news for my non-BM hunter friends, it appears WoWHead was wrong and it has now been fixed… all hunters can get the “final tier” talents now.

WoWHead has the WotLK pet talents up.

See all those lovely talents along the bottom there?

Can’t get ’em unless you’ve got 51 points in Beast Mastery.

I think spec’ing anything OTHER than BM in the expansion would drive my OCD-ness up the wall. “You mean I can’t get those bottom talents for Tux? *claws at desk*”

But on the other hand, I keep looking at the WotLK hunter talent tree and thinking about all the new hybrid possibilities now. I’m talkin’ about the potential to have Serpent’s Swiftness and the Super Trap talents from Survival. Or heck, Serpent’s Swiftness and Trueshot Aura in an unholy union. Or Expose Weakness, Trueshot Aura, Ranged Weapon Specialization, Improved Barrage, and some points in Master Marksman.

Of course, the big question is whether these potential hybrid builds will ever outclass the new talents. But I find it so very, very interesting to think about…

Anyways! I’m sure many of you are sick of hearing about WotLK, and I do find all the news kind of overwhelming myself. So! I will go back to concentrating on playing my current characters and writing about them (as best as I can anyway; I’ve been thinking about the ramifications of having a bunch of out-dated guides on my blog… the good news, though, is that there will always be new hunters who always need Hunter Kindergarten posts. At least, I hope so, between all the Death Knights.)

Lunch Break

There is nothing more amusing than being in the breakroom at work, eating lunch and minding your own business, and suddenly hearing the girl next to you screech over the phone “I WAS IN THE MOST EPIC ALTERAC VALLEY EVER!”

Ahem.

So the new WotLK hunter talents are supposedly up on WoWHead, if you haven’t heard already. Yeah, I looked at ’em and messed with ’em a little, but you know what? Not only am I still taking the talents with a grain of salt for various reasons, but I have way too much stuff I want to do before the expansion hits to spend too much time worrying about new talents.

I want Tawyn to at least see some Tier 5 content, other than that failed attempt at Hydross, before the expansion hits. Heck, I want Tawyn to see something other than Karazhan. I always feel kind of like a newbie when I’m trying to write about raiding and I’ve never even been to Gruuls/Mags (in all fairness, I’ve tried about a million times, but I seriously jinx Gruuls/Mags and they always fill up or are canceled.)

I want Lunapike to get to level 70 and start tearing up the battlegrounds.

I want Tamaryn to get to level 70 and start Tree’ing it up (I hit 40, by the way, and respec’d Boomkin. WTB Mana Battery, PST.)

Now we get to the secondary projects, which are that I’d like Althalor to tame Humar–been camping out for days now, with no luck thusfar– and start working his way further up the leveling tree, I’d like Songlark to either start leveling seriously or at least hit 19 and become a semi-twink (my definition of a semi-twink: buy decent enough greens at the AH and put cheap enchants on them), and I’d like my dwarfyhuntergirl to start leveling as well.

But as my House-loving boyfriend likes to say, “You can’t always get what you want”, and with my time limited, it’s time to prioritize. Sooo tough to pick from my characters though… I love them all. I do think that Tawyn, Tamaryn, and Lunapike are going to become my primary projects, though.

What do you guys want to accomplish before Wrath of the Lich King?

Mixed Reviews

From the Class Panel at the Blizzard Invitational…

The shot clipping will be removed from Steady Shot, you’ll be able to use it without “interrupting” your autoshot. Hunters will be able to just smash their button.

I… really can’t tell you how I feel about this. Is it nice? Well yeah, and I bet a lot of hunters will be very happy about this. It will be a huge DPS increase, afterall. But for me, this was always one of my very favorite parts of the hunter class. Hearing that it’s going to be replaced with “hunters will be able to just smash their button”, which sounds very macro-like… I dunno. It’s almost as though they said they were going to take away pets or something. Not quite as bad, but, still. I took a certain pride in being able to manually weave and time my rotations. I guess for me, it’s not “all about the DPS” like it is to so many other people.

I will have to think on this one, and hope that there is still some way to “feel the rhythm” in WotLK. For example, maybe we’ll get a new fun shot or new abilities or something so we don’t just have to sit there and hit one button. I hope so, at least!

(And hey, there are still at least fifteen non-shot rotation things that I like about hunters. My love for the class is going nowhere unless Blizz really botches stuff up, I think.)

That said, pets are getting a bunch of super nifty exciting stuff:

All kind of pets will have their own talent tree. A tanking talent tree, a DPS talent tree, and an utility talent tree. Each kind of pet family will have its own talent tree and its own unique ability.

There are going to be new pets in WotLK.

The skill points for each pets are being changed to the new “Pet talents” and will disappear.

I’m really excited for all that stuff. Tanking talent tree? Like… one that focuses on threat generation and stuff? So I can finally have a true soloing/grinding pet? Yes please! And “pet utility”, you can’t help but wonder what that is. I’m definitely looking forward to that.

And does this mean you won’t have to tame new pets for new skills anymore? So I can keep my current three?? /happydance

Blizz’s Final Score from Pike: One thumb up, one thumb down. I’ll be sad to see my beloved shot rotation mechanics go byebye, but the pet stuff is super epic.