Search results matching tag 'WoW Tips'

Recommended Wrath of the Lich King Feral Druid Talents

Altair — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:24:19 GMT

There have been many changes to the druid talent tree with the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I tried to set them up to maximize the DPS of cat form, while still allowing me to tank extremely well in bear form. After looking into the talent trees thoroughly, I put together the following recommendations.

Recommended Feral Druid Talents

Pet Auto Leveling and Stabling

Altair — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:46:47 GMT

The Wrath of the Lich King brings us even more great new features for our pets. In the old game, we had to individually level a pet along with us. If we wanted a low level pet, we had to run him around and manually level him up all the way to catch up to us. Now pets will auto-level up to 5 levels below our level. For example, if you tame a lv 20 pet and you're lv 70, your pet will jump to 65 when you summon him. If you stable a pet and just leave it there, it will also auto level to catch up.

Hunters also now have 4 available slots in the stable for their pets. They can purchase these for a very reasonable amount of gold, and have a total of 5 pets (4 stabled and 1 active). This should make a lot of hunters very happy when they want to get a new pet without losing their old ones.

Making Full Use of Hunter Pet Skills

Altair — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:39:20 GMT

You may have noticed that you only have a few spaces to equip skills on your pet bar, but you will learn a whole lot of skills with the new pet talent trees. At first I thought this meant I could only use so many skills at once, but this isn't actually true. You can use all the skills you have learned at the same time. You just need to do some macro work.

First of all, you don't necessarily need to use this method as many skills can be set to automatically be used whenever possible. If you open your spellbook and right-click the skills, it will toggle a glowing outline on and off. When the skill is glowing, it will automatically fire each time your pet has a chance to use it. If it's off, you will have to manually use the skill each time you want it used. Because sometimes you just don't have enough fury to go around, I will teach you how to manually set skills to your action bar.

First open the system menu and go to macros. Create a new macro and set its name and symbol to something related to the skill. Then simply type "/cast NameofSkill" into the macro box. Just make sure the name of the skill is typed correctly and there is one space between the /cast and the skill name. Then drag the macro into your action bar and you're good to go. It's really that simple.

Wrath of the Lich King Pet Talents

Altair — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:27:23 GMT

Hunter pets have seen a major overhaul with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. The whole loyalty points system has been done away with and replaced with pet talents. If you pull out your pet and open your talent menu, you will see a second tab showing your pet's talents. After a pet reaches level 20, it will gain 1 talent point for every 4 lvs it gains. These talents work just like your talents. Each pet is set to a certain talent tree based on its species, so you can't change it's talent spec once you get it. It also only takes 3 talent points to move to the next level, where with players it takes 5.

You also no longer have to learn pet skills by taming wild animals that already have them. Your pets will automatically learn their skills when they reach the appropriate levels or gain the required pet talent points. Most pets can get up to 13 talent points, but if you are a beast mastery hunter with the exotic pet taming talent, you get a bonus 4 pet talent points.

Hunter Minor Glyphs: Glyph of Mend Pet

Altair — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:31:57 GMT

The Glyph of Mend Pet is a minor glyph that is actually really useful. With this glyph applied, you no longer have to worry about food for your pet. Hunters have to ALWAYS keep a huge supply of food on hand to keep their pets happy. If your pet dies it gets unhappy, and needs to eat. When you feed it the kinds of food it likes, it restores its happiness. If it gets unhappy enough, it will attack you or just abandon you. You can easily lose your pet forever if you just forget to bring some food along. The Glyph of Mend Pet makes it so you can restore their happiness each time you heal them with Mend Pet. This way you can clear the food from your bags and just keep them happy with the heals.

Easily Leveling Defense Skill

arceus — Mon, 05 May 2008 21:39:24 GMT

I noticed that a lot of my characters have extremely low defense skill for their level. I don't let myself get hit often so my defenses tend to be on the weak side. But I found a way to level this up very quickly and effectively while I'm not even at the keys.

First head to the Ironforge/Stormwind tram. Sit in the middle of the platform and find a move that will aggro an enemy but not do any damage. Moves like hibernate, polymorph, curse of exhaustion, work great. When you use them on a rat, it won't die, but when the effect wears off, it will run towards you and attack you nonstop. It will nip you over and over for about 1 hp damage each time. If you wait long enough, these little hits will boost your def skill.

Keep aggroing all the rats you can until you have a whole swarm of them nipping at your ankles. Now as long as you can survive a while, you can go do something else. The rats will keep boosting your def slowly. Just check back from time to time. 10 rats doing about 1 dps each may eventually kill some characters. When you come back you will have probably gained some def skill. You may also be dead, but oh well. If you want to do this without any armor on there's no risk at all of even losing durability damage.

Hunter Gear

arceus — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:50:10 GMT

Hunters rely mostly on their ranged attack power to deal massive damage to enemies. Unlike most classes, hunters gain 2 attack power for every 1 agility, making agility by far the best stat to focus on. Intellect also helps them by increasing their mana for more powerful shots, and with the right talent build, it also increases attack power. I recommend focusing almost entirely on agility for your stats. Searching for green items "of agility" on the auction house will yield good agility gear.

Easy Beast Taming

arceus — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 21:02:37 GMT

Pet taming can be really hard to do the normal way. If you are up against a really good pet, it can easily kill you instead of becoming your pet. Some of the best and coolest looking pets are elites that you won't stand a chance against. But with this nifty little trick, you can tame the wildest beast without getting a scratch.

First clear out the area around your pet. Kill all nearby enemies so they won't aggro and interfere. Make sure any nearby players know not to interfere in any way with the battle. If they do any damage to the pet at all, or heal you in any way, the taming will fail. You can't attack the pet, use any potions, or any other battle skill once the fight has started. BUT freezing traps don't count as interfering and are perfectly legal.

Stand just in range of your tame beast skill and gauge how far away you need to be. Take a couple steps closer and drop the freezing trap. Then stand just behind the trap and start the taming. The enemy will charge at you but just before it reaches you, it will be encased in ice and unable to move. Just sit still until the taming is complete and it will become your pet. Remember if you move at all, the channeling will be broken.

Sometimes taming will just fail for no apparent reason. If the pet doesn't turn around and become tame, it will go back to trying to kill you. Feign death and it should go back to where it started. Just repeat the process a couple times until it works. If it still won't work, move on to another similar enemy and try again. Be sure to feed them immediately until they are happy or they may attack you or leave.

Hunter Pets: Cats

arceus — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:28:52 GMT

As a night elf hunter, I preferred a cat as a pet. Their abilities are excellent for PVP and they attack extremely quickly. This makes it very hard for casters to use spells. In battlegrounds I used to send my pet after the main healer and just let it beat on the priest, keeping it from effectively healing the group. They had to either leave the pet to beat on him, or focus their attacks on it and not on another person. Cats are also excellent for ambushing or hiding and for chasing down enemies that run away.

Cat Stats:
Lower armor, Higher attack, Very high attack speed.
Stealth: A cat can disappear completely like a rogue. The first attack coming out of stealth will get a 35% bonus to damage. This is really useful for a night elf because it lets your pet disappear along with you.
Dash: This greatly increases your pet's run speed. Aside from being fun and saving time when you're sending it against enemies, it also is great for catching fleeing enemies and stopping people in PVP.
Diet: Cats eat meat and most importantly fish. If you have good fishing skill, you can catch food to keep your pet happy in just about any body of water you come across.

Of all the pets I came across in my travels, I decided to keep a blue frostsaber as my pet. It has beautiful hazy blue stripes and was once an elite enemy in winterspring. You can catch cats all over the world and they are all very good pets.

Night Elf Hunter Survival Training

arceus — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:17:01 GMT

When I used to run my old guild, I personally trained our Night Elf hunters to survive in the dangerous world of our PVP server. When they reached the ripe old age of level 30, I would bring them deep into the jungles of Stranglethorn for survival training. After a lot of time out in the wild, I learned well how to evade and escape even the strongest enemies. So I used to pass on these skills through a game of hide and seek.

The key to evasion as an elf is their racial ability, Shadowmeld. I personally see this as one of the most useful racial abilities. If you are an elf, it will be in your general skills tab in the spellbook. This ability allows any class to stealth as long as they are not moving. It has a lot of uses, but for our purposes, I will be teaching you how to use this to escape enemies of any level who attack you.

I'm sure you have had plenty of times when you are fighting enemies out in the wild and suddenly out comes a level 70 horde with full epic armor and nothing better to do than bully and kill poor helpless alliance. You obviously have no hope of killing him so you have to try to escape somehow, but he's got a mount and you don't. It's hopeless right? Not at all. You just need to get good at hiding.

The first thing you need to know about any stealth is that it doesn't make you completely invisible to all enemies. If someone your level gets within a certain radius of you, they will hear the stealth noise and see a shadow of you standing there. If someone is a few levels higher than you, they will see you more clearly and from further away. So if you meld in plain sight, a 70 will see you just fine and get a good laugh before killing you. BUT if you hide well enough, they can't see you no matter what.

If you jump into grass, or under a bush, your body is hidden by the leaves. Even laying down in front of mottled coloration, in a shadow, or a dip in the ground can hide your form. You want to be either in front of or behind something with lines that will hide the outline of your body that can be seen when you meld. Once you use shadowmeld, be sure to lay down (type /lay) or sit down (Press the x key) as this will make you much harder to see. When you are shorter, there is less chance you will stand out. Practice hiding while not melded and try to make it so you can't be seen. Then work on running and ducking into cover. When you get this down well, you can pick out a good hiding spot and duck into it at a full run. You want to be good enough at this to escape from attackers in hot pursuit. I used to play hide and seek with guildies to teach them to duck quickly under cover.

When you are attacked by an enemy, it helps to put a mark on his head so you can watch him on radar without turning around. Fire off a concussive shot at him to slow him down. If he is close, use a scatter shot to put some distance. As soon as you are out of range of his attacks, pop on aspect of the cheetah and book it. If you aggro or the enemy gets close again, switch quickly to aspect of the monkey so you don't get stunned and caught.

When he follows in line with you and you have a second or two between you, jump into the air and drop a freezing trap in mid air. If an enemy sees you stoop down, they will know you set the trap, but in mid jump they won't notice. Try to lead them into the trap and watch their picture at the top of the screen to see if they are frozen.

As soon as you get around a hill, behind a tree, or any chance where the enemy may not directly see where you are, jump under cover. You will still be in combat so immediately feign death to slip out of combat. Then quickly meld and lay down.

The enemy will probably hear your stealth if he gets close, but if you're well covered, he won't be able to see you. If he saw where you disappeared into, he may be able to use an AOE attack to flush you out and bring you out of stealth. But if you pulled it off when he couldn't see you, he won't know where to look. When he mounts up and runs off, go back to having fun but keep an eye out for him.