The New Tier 9

The old tier 9 armor is done with.

Finite.  Done with.  Done quick.

What were they? If I remember correctly…

I always do, by the way.

OLD TIER 9 BONUSES

Old Tier 9

2 piece tier 9 reduced your pet’s focus cost for his abilities by 50%.

Pointless, yes? Of course it is.  Since when has your pet ever needed more focus? If you’re talented properly, this should never have been a problem.

4 piece tier 9 increased the critical strike chance of steady shot by 5%.
Whoop de doo.  This is a 2 piece bonus, not a 4 piece.  Only Beastmasters really benefited from this in a big way, since Steady Shot takes up a lot of our DPS; but even then it sucks!

Happily, this aforementioned crap has been replaced.

NEW TIER 9 BONUSES

New Tier 9. See the difference?

2 piece: The damage from your serpent sting can now be critical strikes.
For marksmen, this is big.  Their stings are the most powerful out of all the hunters thanks to improved stings, making this a buff to MM damage mostly; however, everyone benefits from this.  It doesn’t increase the base damage of the sting(which makes Chimera shot sad) but it’s still going to be a visible DPS upgrade.

To be honest, this should be baseline.  Lock DoTs can crit, so should ours!

4 piece: Each time you hit with a ranged attack, your pet gains 600(HOLY SHIT) attack power for 15 seconds.
Now, this is a buff.  I don’t know what the proc chance is, but I’m betting it’s high enough.  For beastmasters, this 4 piece is going to be a strong one I predict.  600 attack power is 50 more attack power than blessing of might! Blessing of might increases Dave’s(my devilsaur) DPS by something like 200-300 dps.  Another 200-300 DPS? YES PLEASE.

It’s also and incentive for all hunters to keep their pets alive, should the marksmen and the Survivalists want the set bonus.

This is good news; in fact, I’m really happy that Blizzard realized that the set bonus was balls.  Now if they could notice a few more things(Cower bug, more stats for our pets, ammo costs, etc), I’d be set.

Speaking of things, I’m going to look at those Engineering changes later.  Stay tuned!

Skoll Lightning!

Drawn by MissMonster of Deviant art! Click for link.

I have an announcement to make.

I’m going to be hunting more than one spirit beast it seems.

There is a new spirit beast on the PTR! This is the 3rd spirit beast, which continues the tradition of 1 new spirit beast per big patch, and this is no exception.

Actually, there is one very big exception to this particular spirit beast: he’s a wolf.
I nearly died of shock when I saw this.  Apparently, he has electricity crawling all over him and his light blue fur glows with the crackle of power.  The picture does no justice to all these cool effects, so I order all of you to go drool over this video right now! Skoll in Video

He’s named after a character from Norse mythology: Skoll, the moonchaser.  Skoll chased the moon across the sky in an effort to catch up with her and eat her.  His counterpart, Hati, chased the sun for the same purpose.  On the day of Ragnarok, the end of times, Skoll and Hati would succeed in their ravenous quest and feast on the sun and the moon.

Skoll, the spirit beast, matches his namesake in almost every way.  His lightning fur matches the electricity that was wielded by Thor and other gods, so is a powerful symbol of his Norse heritage.  His fur is blue, the colour of the night he chases under.  His attack is a Moonstrike graphic, the last tie to his Norse namesake.

I, for one, am going to be camping this guy the instant the patch releases and I won’t stop until he is mine.

Loque will have to wait if I don’t have him by then, as I have bigger wolves to catch!

Special thanks to Tigerfeet for pointing out to whom the artwork belongs to(MissMonster’s portrait of Skoll is amazing, is it not? She drew a version for Hati as well!), to Mania for the screenshot of Skoll, and to zub for finding the video of Skoll in-game!