Alpha coming down, Beta going up... soon

[zedxrgal]

No invite for me yet! *gnashes teeth* But. Plenty of time.

[WerebearGuy]

I'm one of the people they forgot, as well.

Oh well, I'll just forcibly commandeer my friend's account until then.

[Smyelmdar]

I still have the alpha shown on my launcher, for both my accounts. Is that the case for anyone else?

[zedxrgal]

Oh mah gerd! It's after two!!!

What say you beta testers?????
Look at me and my impatience.

I'll check when I get home but no email yet

[Rikaku]

I still have the alpha shown on my launcher, for both my accounts. Is that the case for anyone else?

Yeah mine said that too until beta actually went live. Then it updated to Beta: Legion.

Oh mah gerd! It's after two!!!

What say you beta testers?????
Look at me and my impatience.

I'll check when I get home but no email yet

It's pretty much what you expect XD I read that today their focus on seeing how the server can handle a "massive influx of players" to simulate a launch day. Right now, it's pretty much what I expect from a beta testing that portion: lots of errors, lots of disconnecting, and world servers being down. lol

Right now only there's no character copy, so I can't even test out the transmog system for my main's massive collection of gear she's hoarded since Classic. @_@

[Jangalian]

Initial impression of Legion is a bad one. Granted I've only gotten to play snippets between servers crashing but ALL of my shots are gone except for cobra, the CD is very high, and Cheetah is a 3min cd. Additionally those new bear models look horribly out of place in game, especially in low zoned areas like Elwynn Forest. I'm kicked out for now, will update when I have more play time.

EDIT - Traps also gone. How to tame Panda tracking rares is a mystery.
EDIT 2 - all attacks are horribly weak, having a hard time making a dent in anything.

[zedxrgal]

[Rikaku]

I will say what is UNDOUBTEDLY my most disliked change of BM hunter so far.

THE YELLING.

You character yells/screams for every command you give the pet; BW, Dire Beast, Kill Command... it's obnoxious. I haven't found a way to tell my character to shut up, but its honestly so loud and annoying.

I feel bad for anyone hoping to go gnome female hunter. Their screams will haunt me this entire Broken Shores scenario.

[Wain]

EDIT - Traps also gone. How to tame Panda tracking rares is a mystery.

As BM you still have your flare and stuns. It depends on which taken you take but I use Binding Shot. As it requires the beast to move away from the bind, it's kind of infuriating as they can easily wander outside flare range before the stun goes off so then you have to wait for CD to finish and hope you can work out where they are again. Exasperating, you'll swear a lot, but not impossible.

The alternative talent is Wyvern Shot. It's instant, but I'm actually unsure if it works for mechanicals or not.

For hard-hitting tames, where you would have frozen them to avoid them beating the tar out of you, you can just pop Aspect of the Turtle and tame away.

[Jangalian]

Edit three....benching hunter for foreseeable future. Switching to feral druid/retadin. These changes are just too much.

So feral is pretty good, odd cd time for some reason and slightly squishy. Retadin is amazing, will probably be toned down before launch. The artifact quest line is harsh, probably needs tuned but the 'boss' monsters kick your butt. XD Hm so good and bad things so far...

Good - pruning. They slimmed down the classes nicely, and it works well. The world in general got a nice update and higher view spec which makes the world very pretty! Wardrobe is really great, I can now sell things that I would normally hoard and thus, more bag space! I have too much space now, hah.

Bad - Over pruning, there's too many functions missing. The wardrobe ui doesn't match the rest of the wow ui and looks horribly out of place. A lot of beta is broken and untestable, even old zones like Pandaria, the portal is gone. Hide helm/cloak now requires you to hit the transmog vendor, and not click it from your ui. The druid deer form lets anyone mount you, which is very upsetting to a person with space issues. The new bear models. Bear druids have a broken jaw, it just hangs open.

Meh - the mount/pet interface got a very minor update, with the account wide mounts/pets showing in gift boxes. It's cool, but laggy in practice. Broken Shores/Mardum feels really out of place artistically compared to the rest of WoW, maybe they have new art talent? New rabbit models are cute, but weirdly bunched when running.

[Rikaku]

Well can't really test too far. Seems for majority of us Hunters, the artifact quest is broken which kinda... traps us in Dalaran lol

My thoughts so far:

Hunter feels weak overall, but there's too many factors for me to say truly if its the class, spec, or the changes. They started me off with 680 gear, which is pretty abysmal when I'm up against Broken Shores. Broken Shores is clearly tuned to be 'hard' to give you that quest experience that you were fighting challenging mobs instead of trivial army fodder. So the combo of the two led to me getting pretty much 1-2 shot by random things during that scenario.

Pets are weak. They really can't take a beating, but pets are also borked. Pets were further along in Alpha I think then they are currently in Beta, at least thats how I feel and a few other Alpha-to-Beta hunters in chat. Might be a tuning issue, since pets also seem to be very unresponsive to my commands like Stay or Follow.

[Jangalian]

Very stressed out about the game forcing me to be a mount.

[Jangalian]

Demon hunters are amaaaaaaaaazing, all the fantastic utility of a rogue with the power of a death knight and the mobility of a druid. So great! Be excited!

[Wain]

If you weren't able to get the Hunter artifact quest, it should now be active, but oyu may need to re-log first:

https://twitter.com/Zorbrix/status/730974139238862848

[zedxrgal]

Thanks for the reports. Yeah I would not like to have just anyone ninja mount me while in travel form. That's so creepy.

[Rikaku]

If you weren't able to get the Hunter artifact quest, it should now be active, but oyu may need to re-log first:

https://twitter.com/Zorbrix/status/730974139238862848

Thanks for the update, I was able to successfully start my quest.

And yep, now I see all the reports people have had about BM Hunter. Maybe I just felt like it wasn't "as awful as I feared" in Broken Shore. But I take it back. I sincerely hope this is a tuning issue in regards to our damage and weak pets.

[Jangalian]

Thanks for the reports. Yeah I would not like to have just anyone ninja mount me while in travel form. That's so creepy.

I know right? I posted some complaints, I hope they'll listen to them! Ideally I feel like deer form should be scaling to mount speed. The cat speed is almost as high now, so deer has really lost its usefulness.

[Smyelmdar]

Yeah mine said that too until beta actually went live. Then it updated to Beta: Legion.

I have the beta now. I think for me it was a case of non-existant patience. :p

[zedxrgal]

Thanks for the reports. Yeah I would not like to have just anyone ninja mount me while in travel form. That's so creepy.

I know right? I posted some complaints, I hope they'll listen to them! Ideally I feel like deer form should be scaling to mount speed. The cat speed is almost as high now, so deer has really lost its usefulness.

The ninja mount thing by people I didn't know is the exact reason I stopped using my obsidian nightwing & druid travel form in raids. It was like "Ugh. GET OFF!" *shivers*

If I get in and that's not fixed I'll be sure to report it also.

No invite though. Ca'mon Blizz!! This would be the first beta test I've not been in! I must keep up with tradition!

[Albain]

My own beta observations. I did NOT go to broken isles, I wanted to test versus what I already knew, and went to Tanaan.

Boring. BM is so. Boring. Without chimera shot you spend so much time just waiting for something to do. I tamed some old-world pets to get the better health pools and had to keep them in tenacity to get anywhere, which I can deal with but the mind numbing rotation I really can't. The yelling is obnoxious too, I'll be modifying some .ogg files to kill THAT on Live if I bother with BM there. Overall my survivability felt about the same once I was a tenacity spec'd pet, which makes me think missing Adaption really REALLY hurts.

Survival however was a remarkable good time. Sure I face tanked sometimes even with a tank pet, but I had buttons to push! New buttons! I had interesting mechanics I don't quite understand! I was able to CAMOFLAGUE this is a big deal to me and I still have my traps, glorious traps. Pet still died too fast if I wasn't in tenacity, but otherwise my survival as Survival felt good. I was even able to tackle Vengeance without outside help and survived it.

Have not tried Marks yet because Broken Shore is broken again.