The Story So Far - Art by SleepingFox

This is the story so far in pictures. What I played, what I enjoyed the most, and how things changed. It's weird to me that I have people in my guild that know me as a monk only, and are now scratching their heads wondering what this sudden change to hunter is about. And others that know me as a priest, because that's what I played (for 6 months) when I met them 7 years ago. :)

Lae is still Lae, even though her appearance changed a bit. She started with blue skin and black hair, then she put her hair in a ponytail, the skin turned purple and the hair turned white. Then her hair became brown, the skin colour a lighter purple, and her horns evolved into the big majestic kind. But she's still Lae. Cute, but deadly. And total badass.

I can't wait to get these beautiful art pieces printed and placed on the wall in my little nerd cave room!

SleepingFox is on DeviantArt and Twitter.

Burning Crusade

Lae and Ratchet

It starts off with Lae and Ratchet, an Infected Nightstalker Runt from Azuremyst Isle. I was new to the game, and Ratchet was my very first tame at level 10. I knew I wanted a cat, because I love cats, and I found him right outside of Exodar in Azuremyst Isle and named him after my real-life cat (which in turn is named after Ratchet of Ratchet & Clank). I was a bit worried about him being "infected" though, as ideally I would like a healthy pet. ;) So that's the cute little story depicted; me being a noob and worrying about the health of my newly tamed friend.
After 4 months of playing quite a lot I finally became level 70, and worked my butt off in battlegrounds for the Gladiator PVP-gear she's wearing. She's also wearing Shattered Sun Offensive-tabard, as that event was the first one I fully took part of from the start with my server's fellow level 70s.
I played Beast Mastery in Burning Crusade.

Wrath of the Lich King

Lae and Wata

In Wrath I fell in love with my hunter over again, after having played a shadow priest for the first two raid patches. Loque'nahak (I named him Wata) is a favorite to many hunters, and he has been mine for a very long time as well. I spent so many hours flying around in Sholazar Basin, heart jumping every time NPC-scan alerted me of rares. :) For this reason it was important to me that this art piece showed "the tame". Lae is wearing tier 10; as that was my favorite set from that expansion, Argent Crusader's Tabard; after all the hours I spent up at the Argent Tournament, and Avalanche from Ulduar; one of my favorite bows in the game still.
I mostly played Survival in Wrath, but fiddled a bit with both Marksmanship and Beast Mastery as well.

Cataclysm

Lae and Skarr

The Tier 11 murloc set IS Cataclysm for me, and Skarr from Molten Front is The Cataclysm Pet as well, so here they are, in a fierce Bestial Wrath! A big thing for me that expansion, and well-documented here on the blog, was that I changed one of her professions into Engineering (The Best Profession), so of course she had to wear the Engineering goggles. :)
I played Survival when raiding in Cataclysm, and Beast Mastery in PvP.

Mists of Pandaria

Kinlai and the Celestials

I've covered this earlier artwork by SleepingFox in another post.

Warlords of Draenor

Lae and Ronja

Warlords of Draenor is taking a bit of heat these days, and I will admit to having said a few words myself as well as taking the longest break I've ever taken from WoW. But I will always love it because of all the draenei lore we got to experience, all the draenei NPCs we got to meet, and all that draenei everyday life that we got to take part in! After a long break last year, I logged on, started leveling my hunter, and fell in love with her for the third time. :) The "quest" for Gara really touched me, and I named her Ronja after my dog in real life. This is a depiction of Lae trying to cheer up the oh so sad Ronja. I think there is hope though; with time and with lots of love and affection she will eventually become a happy wolf again. ;) This was The Draenei Expansion, so Lae had to have the most draeneic bow I've ever seen!
I played Beast Mastery in the last half of Warlords of Draenor, and mostly did PvP. I cleared the first two raids as Brewmaster Monk before I took my break.

Legion

Lae, Ronja and Hati

Legion is here, and though I'm not happy with all the changes it brought, I do love being a Beast Master again, and I love running around with two pets! I think the questline for Titanstrike could have been done differently; a more emotional story would have suited us better I think. But while they try to define our class fantasy, it's our imagination that does the most important job, and I'm on board with Hati! And look how happy Gara is now, not only did she get saved by the most fantastic hunter ever, she got a new buddy as well. :)

After having placed the order with SleepingFox, I've been running around with double Mana Sabers and loving it, so I may have to try to commission more art in the future...

Lae, Katniss and Hati

Bonus - Legendary Hunter

Lae, Wata and Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury

This was my initial choice for the Cataclysm art, but I became very strict with myself about the weapons belonging to the expansion they released in. And since Thori'dal is from Sunwell Plateau in Burning Crusade, it didn't fit in! But it's also the most beautiful weapon in the game, and the only legendary bow, so I felt it deserved to be a part of the collection. In all fairness, I think Rhok'delar belongs here too, but this is going to be a neverending project if I keep thinking like that... Just take it!

Hunter auto-targeting is back! Please take it away.

I've spent all my time since the pre-patch launched cleaning up thousands of BOEs, so today was my first day trying out group content since then. I jumped into a timewalking dungeon, and was happily DPSing until a few pulls in. The final mob of the group we had pulled was dying as I hit Cobra Shot, which is instant now, and my character automatically targeted a mob in the next group and fired that Cobra Shot to them instead! I don't really like being that hunter that pulls extra mobs, so I became startled and a bit nervous. I was thinking "this doesn't feel right, is this how it always has been?" trying my best to remember. Then it happened again a few pulls later, although luckily for me, the mob I was auto-targeting wasn't in line of sight, so I quickly de-selected them. "Something is NOT right!"

I turned to Twitter, and found more hunters that had found this issue, and then I found this old post at WHU about the removal of auto-targeting for hunters in patch 4.1. And now I remember the change! And how much I liked it. And that it boosted my confidence a bit in dungeons, not longer that worried to do something stupid...

I don't know why auto-targeting is back. It could be because Survival is now a melee spec. Auto-targeting is awsome if you're a melee player! But if you're a ranged player with auto-attacks (autoshot) and only instant abilities and a pet on "Assist" it's pretty bad!

Yes, I can put my pet on "Defensive", and I guess I could try to always have my back to the next group or max range to the group we're fighting, but these are not always viable solutions.

There was a reason auto-targeting was removed for hunters back in Cataclysm, so please remove it for BM and MM again! I want to keep doing my reliable tab-targeting.

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Edit: I've tested a bit, standing 30 yards away from the testing dummy in Stormshield.

Abilities and macros that trigger auto-targeting:

• A Murder of Crows
• Barrage
• Dire Beast
• /startattack

Abilities that don't trigger auto-targeting:

• Bestial Wrath
• Chimaera Shot
• Cobra Shot
• Concussive Shot
• Counter Shot
• Dire Frenzy
• Intimidation
• Kill Command
• Multi-Shot
• Stampede (although they run in front of you, mowing down everything, so don't use it when you're trying not to pull mobs that are close)
• Wyvern Sting

Macro to prevent auto-targeting:

/cast [@target, exists] A Murder of Crows

(insert Barrage or Dire Beast instead of A Murder of Crows for those respective abilities)

I'm happy with this fix now. I'm gonna be using /startattack with Multi-Shot, and /cast [@target, exists] on the three listed problem-abilities. Hope you all are able to sort out stuff like you want to too, whether you like to autoselect targets or not. :)

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I'm playing Beast Mastery again, and my plan is to have Lae as my main in Legion. :)

Beast Mastery pruning

The last six months I've spent my time in WoW as a hunter again. Or actually, five-six hunters. I have five level 100 beast master hunters running around with a Gara of their own now. ;) As a blogger I seem to have lost my way a bit, in that I don't have much interest in making "happy posts" at the moment, and it's not until I get a negative reaction to something that I need to air it. So today's post is about the state of the Beast Mastery-hunters in the alpha, although I have no access to this alpha myself. As soon as I hit "post" on the forum, I realized I had forgotten to plead for Misdirect-glyph, but I will try to add it in later. This is what I posted:

Like many others I've been following the class changes in the alpha here on the forum and on Wowhead and MMO Champion. Since I'm not in the alpha myself, I'm not able to post in the testing forums, and it's strongly suggested that we "try it before we comment". I'm also not a theorycrafter, more a "feelcrafter" looking for fun! And I'm finding it impossible to keep my mouth shut any longer; the same issues with our beloved spec have been brought up again and again in the alpha-forum without being addressed, and now some developers have stated that the specs are mostly done, and only tuning is left. So am I already too late?

I’ve played this draenei hunter for 9 years now. She was my first character, and my main for the biggest part of those years. (I mained a monk in MOP and the first year of WOD.)

There were two big reasons I started to play a hunter back when:
1) The pet. I was entirely new to the game and the MMO-genre, and it felt safer to have a companion with me. That, and I love animals.
2) Aspect of the Cheetah. Since it took a long time to get to the level at where I could learn to ride back then (which was level 40), I was given the advice to take a hunter or a druid for the increased run speed.

Over the years I've gained several more reasons to why I appreciate this class so much; I love being the ranger with a longbow and shooting arrows on the move.

I've been through a lot with this hunter. I remember the pet happiness system, ammo, quivers, stutter-stepping between autoshots (autoshot wouldn't go off if you were moving), serpent/scorpid/viper sting, mana and actually having armor with intellect and mp5 (mana per 5 secs), volley, the MM armor pen-stacking days, old talent trees, etc. There's been so many changes over the years, and I'm happy to say that most have been good! I think the change to our resource system from mana to focus is my favorite change of them all.

I understand the reasoning behind “the prune”. After recently having leveled yet another hunter, this time as SV, I could clearly see how similar BM and SV are. And yes, even too similar. What stuck out to me the most, was how incredibly much I missed Kill Shot as SV! Other than that I've always enjoyed Explosive Shot, but all in all I could see that the two specs' development over the years had made them so alike that there is really no longer room for both of them. (I'm sure this goes for MM as well, but I haven't played that spec since ICC.)

For every hunter out there you will have a different view or opinion on everything. While I loved the change that gave us focus, someone else hated it. And while I think Hati seems like a cool idea, someone else will hate him. I hope that with the different improvements he gets with every alpha build, he will truely be a great companion in the end. While I think the artifact-gun is a bad idea that provides me with a forced class fantasy where I would have preferred to use my own imagination, others love it!
Me mentioning I have played a hunter for 9 years doesn't really mean anything. There's always someone else that played longer than me, and neither of our opinions are more important than the opinion of the girl or boy that has played a hunter for 1 year. Sifting through all these different opinions can't be easy.

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Summary so far: I've played hunter for a long time, I'm not scared of change, I understand that pruning needs to happen, and I realize that there's a vast sea of differing feedback.

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I sure stayed calm for a good while. But that stops now. I FEEL SO FRUSTRATED!

Beast Master hunters list of pruning:

We lose the 30 % increased movement speed that we had in common with shamans and druids, while they both keep theirs.
We lose our traps, while Survival keeps them.
We lose our Kill Shot. Monks also lose their execute, while warriors and shadow priests keep theirs.
Camouflage. SV and MM keep it.
Tranquilizing Shot. Druids lose Soothe too, Shamans keep Purge.
Arcane Shot. MM keeps the name. Cobra Shot is the new Arcane Shot for BM.
Cobra Shot AKA our entire playstyle rotation-wise! Now we do Kill Command + other stuff that has a CD, and weave Arcane Shot and Cobra Shot in, depending on if we need Focus or want to get rid of it. Then at boss <20 a="" and="" around.="" be="" bit="" br="" cd="" changes="" cobra="" either="" get="" hit="" it="" kill="" new="" on="" or="" our="" rotation="" shot.="" shot="" stuff="" then="" to="" use="" wait="" we="" will=""> All hunters and shamans lose many of the < lvl 40 transmog sets we’ve had available to us since the transmog system was introduced in Cataclysm. I feel it’s fair that the platewearers get access to these sets, but I hate that they’re being taken away from us.

Why do this spec need to lose so much!?! Why the movement speed, the traps, Kill Shot, Tranq Shot, Arcane Shot, OUR ENTIRE VERY AWSOME CURRENT ROTATION and a whole bunch of transmog??! Is it really necessary? What are we supposed to be happy about keeping, our pets? Do we keep anything at all that another class looses, or were BM-hunters just so awsome and loved by everyone that they needed to lose it all?

What bugs me the most by far is the rotation. We've already lost Hunter's Mark and Serpent Sting, and now with Cobra Shot being reworked and Kill Shot being removed, our rotation is changing into something completely different all together. I trust Blizzard initially, but when one of the class designers state that Focus isn’t working as it “should” currently, and then I see the comparisons to rogues and feral druids in the alpha-thread, I feel like a non-hunter has decided that rogue/feral druid is the golden standard, and that hunter play needs to change from what current hunters like into something that a feral druid or rogue would like. And then my trust diminishes! How am I supposed to feel about this, when my two least favorite classes are rogue and druid? How can the way that focus has worked for 5,5 years suddenly be wrong?

I want to quote someone on the US forum: "The feel of the hunter (Cata-WoD) is you're always doing an action, with the recent incarnation feeling very Diablo-esque where you are always building or spending your resource. Marksman has retained this design but BM hasn't for some reason and it needs it back."

PLEASE don't be done with BM, please read the feedback on the alpha-forum that so many hunters have worked hard for to provide, and please take it to heart!

I’m not sure what to do if this truly becomes new-BM. Should I try to get used to this new spec? Or will I have to reluctantly go MM and stable my dear Spirit Beasts, just so I can get a good rotation and a bow-artifact? Or should I change my class again, and try to not become so invested and involved this time around?

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Build 21655 (the newest one): http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/20743794497
Build 21570: http://us.battle.net/wow/en-us/forum/topic/20743654415
Build 21531: http://us.battle.net/wow/en-us/forum/topic/20743404341
Build 21466: http://us.battle.net/wow/en-us/forum/topic/20743164174
Build 21414: http://us.battle.net/wow/en-us/forum/topic/20742916582
Build 21287: http://us.battle.net/wow/en-us/forum/topic/20742814730
Build 21249: http://us.battle.net/wow/en-us/forum/topic/20742625219
Build 21232: http://us.battle.net/wow/en-us/forum/topic/20742734803

All hunter changes from WoD to Legion: http://www.wowhead.com/guides/classes/legion/hunter

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How do you feel about these changes? Do you like the idea of Hati, like me? Would you prefer if BM got a bow and a quiver like MM, like me? Do you think I really need to try it out before complaining? Let me know. :)