Friday, July 23, 2010

Warcraft: Cataclysm Beta - Hunter notes

Pets

It looks like there are 5 pets in your Stable that you carry around with you. I checked with the Stable Master and i don't see additional slots other than the 5 total.

Aspects

There is now an Aspect bar on the screen to the left of the bottom action bars and your pet bar is currently moved over to the right. There are only 4 aspects now it appears (which makes sense since the mana one is useless now). In order they are...Hawk, Pack, Cheetah and Wild.

Venoms

It seems that the venoms (Scorpid, Viper and Widow) will play a huge role for hunters during boss fights. The Scorpid Venom was neat in that once you apply it, everytime you use Steady Shot or Cobra Shot it stacks the armor reduction up to 3 times for a total 12% reduction. Very neat.

I also found that it was unlikely hunters will run out of focus to the point it affects dps. Finding a good rotation is for the smarter folks out there that theorycraft this stuff but i found that in dungeons it was easy to apply a serpent sting with my pet attack and then follow up with Scorpid Venom, then use Steady Shot two times to quickly build up focus again. The tooltip said it generates 1 focus but i was seeing a weird jump of 6-10 focus immediately after the steady shot fired.