I kept starting and stopping a variety of posts because I’d find something to write about but it wouldn’t be enough for a full post. So, today, a stew of all those ingredients.
Achievements
There are new quest achievements that are obtainable through the new Hyjal and Molten Front dailies, so keep them in mind if you’re into that sort of thing.
Careful Aim
The change to this talent hurts, especially for MM. And, sadly, it does nothing to discourage us from starting DPS as soon as we can get away with it. It is still, frankly, a perverse incentive, but one that we just have to deal with as best we can. As before, the strategy for MM is to fire as many hardcast Aimed Shots as possible during the CA range. If you are using a Cunning pet for its raid buff, make sure to keep Roar of Recovery off autocast so you can trigger it duing the CA range (macroing it to Rapid Fire certainly works, since they’re both on 3min cooldowns as MM).
Getting Around in the Molten Front
A lot of the new pets are at the north end of The Furnace in the Molten Front. The thing is, there’s deadly fire, open air and cliff faces surrounding that whole sub-zone. The trick to getting to the spawns without dying is to hug the western cliff edge on your way past the fire.
Gear
The Lava Bolt Crossbow is a tempting buy but its droprate suggests to me that the smart move is to wait for it to go down in price, at least on high population servers. Firelands trash runs will remain popular for quite some time owing to the rep gains (think ICC trash runs), ensuring that the supply of the crossbows will be steady. The undercutting on the AH should only increase as guilds get further into the Firelands and market saturation increases. Mind you, this is just a prediction on my part, not a guarantee. On a personal note, I find it sad that the crossbow makes a gun sound, as if was designed to taunt dwarves with every shot fired (QQ, I know).
I’ll mention this again below, but keep in mind that the ilvl 358 PVP gear is now craftable. This should make it even easier for alts and new toons to reach the required item levels for heroic dungeons. Of course, you can also just subvert the system by keeping high level items of any sort for a given slot in your bags. You can even take a profitable loan from the AH in the sense that you can buy BoEs, keep them in your bags without equipping them to hit the required average item level, and then sell them off at a markup when you don’t need them anymore.
Kirix
I came across this guy while wandering around The Molten Front. He was surrounded by corpses and so, naturally, I thought “let’s do this!” I quickly hit Wowhead for some taming advice and then managed to get him on my first try. I agro’d him from one of the floating rock platforms in between The Furnace and Fireplume Peak (he pats along the western and northern edges of The Furnace). I used the rock platform so he couldn’t melee me and I used Tame Beast to agro him because I didn’t want to risk an evade bug. When he began to cast his first “you die now, chump” dot I stopped my channeling and popped Deterrence to avoid it and immediately started the tame again. There’s just enough time to finish the tame between his casts this way. I didn’t use any haste buffs, though they would assumedly give the tame more room for error.
Incidentally, if you want a fire spider but don’t want to rely on camping or random chance, there are tameable yellow and red fire spiders hanging around The Widow’s Clutch in the Molten Front. This is disappointing I’m sure to the hunters who’ve tamed Skitterflame and Anthriss, the tame challenges that share the same skins as these normal mobs.
Pet Stances
I can’t say that I’m a fan of the new stance changes, but, well, what can you do? I’ve taken to just keeping my pet on Passive and using my /petattack macro for every target switch. I’ve found this to be particularly necessary in PVP where the new Assist and Defensive stances can make my pet helpful in the way Mimsy is helpful. That is, they cause my pet to try hard but not in ways that are useful given the amount and kinds of target switching that PVP requires.
Remember that if your pet macros get too long with all the different autocast settings that you might want for various pets, you can chain macros together by telling one macro to `click’ on another with the /click command. For more on that, check out the macro guide here. Note that you can’t get around the GCD by chaining macros.
Professions
Check your trainers and recipe-sellers for new recipes. A new round of PVP gear is ready to craft, including Inscription relics and Bloodthirsty cloaks. I believe that any of the old intro-level pvp recipes that were already known have been automatically replaced with the ilvl 358 recipes in player profession windows. This is a nice touch on Blizzard’s part that will save crafters from having to buy new recipes every season.
While it’s tempting to buy up those new BoE recipes from the Firelands, it’s worth remembering that the Living Embers required for the new recipes will potentially making crafting costs prohibitive in the short term. Blizzard’s decision to not make the Embers purchasable with Valor almost ensures that you will not see many Embers up on the AH for the foreseeable future. Guilds who acquire Embers will very likely be holding onto them for some time to craft gear for their own raiders.
PVP
As stated above, Bloodthirsty PVP gear (blue season 9 set gear) is now craftable. They’re something to consider for incoming pvpers who want to speed up their rate of acquiring resilience, especially given the still-present 2piece set bonuses.
Blizzard messed up their plans for the CP->HP conversion, so I’d like to apologize to anyone who followed my tip from a previous post and stacked Honor up to the cap thinking their CP would converted rather than lost.
Other Advice
I surely didn’t notice everything there was to notice about 4.2. Do you have any additional tips for your fellow hunters? If so, please leave them in a comment below.
anyone else having a problem with both chimera shot and cobra shot not refreshing serpent sting? the nerf to AS was a big enough hit to my dps as it is!
Have not had any problem with Chimera Shot refreshing Serpent Sting.
They reduced the drop rates of those BoEs in hot fix last week!
My guesswork was based on the drop rates from this week. My AH has generally had 1-3 up at a time, suggesting that their price is either too high or the supply is good enough to keep the AH somewhat stocked. Either way, the price will adjust downward in the short term as a response. Your experience may vary, of course.
- Put your pet on passive in Firelands. They’re being slaughtered in there (…or am I doing something wrong?)
- Take skinning. Firelands is a skinning-paradise ^_^
Ive no interest in the new pets.. but its fun to find one.. tell everyone in chat its there and sit there and watch them die.. ALOT.
Yeah, it’s like watching an action movie where the spider’s the hero and the henchmen hunters are polite enough to walk up and die one by one.
So with 4.2 my old trap macro seems to function differently. I used to be able to hit it once to arm the launcher then a second time to get my targeting reticule. Hitting it again would cancel it out letting me pick another trap. Here is the macro and the trouble I’m having with it. Any ideas?
#showtooltip
/castsequence [nomod] reset=3 Trap Launcher,!Ice Trap
I used to be able to hit the button to cancel the launcher and pick a different trap, now it’s like the launcher is stuck for like 5-6 sec before I can cast a trap. So if I decide to change traps while my launcher is armed, I’m screwed.
My best guess is that (regardless of what it did before) the present check on whether the Trap Launcher buff is currently active is what is preventing you from going to another trap. You’re hitting that check on your other, subsequent macros, meaning that these other macros are not making it past the first part of their castsequences, not going on to the new trap you want.
What you can do to switch traps while the buff is active is to select alternate traps by a more direct means that isn’t inside a /castsequence line that requires going through a TL activation first. That is, regardless of what you have set for the reticle, if you activate a different trap while the TL buff is active, you’re switched to that trap instead. This works fine with clicks/keystrokes on unadorned trap icons or via mod and nomod conditionals in existing macros with an extra line added for a basic /cast whatevertrap.
Lastly, you could also work a /cancelaura line with a condtional into your macros to drop the Trap Launcher buff. However, this would just cost you more Focus, so I think the previous methods are better.
It was just always not to be able to hit the same button again to essentially drop the reticule and pick a different trap. I’m not sure what changed in the game to make this macro behave differently. I know traps were modified a bit, but anything in particular that would cause this issue. I’ve seen a few other hunters mention the issue, but hadn’t see it addressed or resolved. Thanks for the help btw! I may work a conditional into the macro, but I definitely don’t want to hotkey a launcher button and every trap type.
Sorry meant to say, “It was just always nice…”
i have vociferously advocated the viability of BM in the hands of an experienced player as raid viable etc up til 4.2, but with these recent ‘changes’ to the class, I can no longer stand behind the spec.
the pet stance issue is certainly a major frustration for BM hunters since pets are ~50% of damage done; if the pet isn’t attacking targets because it’s yo-yo’ing between them (due to MD’s / CCs etc) then it is essentially nerfed by the stance issue. but the stance issue pales when you look at the impact of the pet focus nerf. Essentially blizzard ‘fixed’ a bug which seemed to provide more focus to BM pets than intended but the result of this ‘fix’ (coupled with pet stance downtime) has been to break the BM hunter entirely. it’s like having Explosive Shot or Chimera Shot only available to MM/Surv at the beginning of every fight and and then have it on cooldown for the rest of the engagement. Focus just isn’t generating at a rate to permit ANY pet special attacks from going off, unless of course you’re willing to manage each ability individually which as we know from the limited pet action bar that blizz provides is pretty nigh impossible. especially if you also need to be constantly switching between assist and defensive and macro-petattacks while MDing and CCing… sigh.
The upshot here is that because Blizz balanced BM dps around the focus “bug” without realizing it, fixing the bug without addressing the impact on damage has broken the spec.
I’d love to hear from other BM hunters how they’re coping with these two issues.