Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

We're going to take a break from the tumult of Mists of Pandaria beta news and give some attention to one of the most popular end-of-expansion doldrums activities: preparing the new badass look that you'll be wearing into pandaland.

Transmogrification has become an immensely popular subject in WoW. WoW Insider has a transmog resource list for general transmogrification information, and Tabana has a far more hunter-specific and extensive hunter transmogrification resources compilation over at the WHH that collects all the hunter transmog info from across the web.

Today, we're going to take a look at some of the awesome transmog looks that hunters have put together, complete with where to get the gear you need to grab the look for yourself.

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Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

Just about everyone who plays WoW spends at least some time complaining about it and explaining their vision of how the game could be made so much better. For some players, this occupies more time than playing the game itself.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone, which was made evident when I was glancing back through a bunch of old columns. As much as I try to focus on mechanics and divining developer intent, I can't help but suggest ways that I think abilities could be better or pointing out imbalances.

Therefore, I think it's worth taking a moment to really look at what Blizzard is doing for hunters in Mists of Pandaria and realize that the devs are trying to give us just about everything that we as a class have been asking for -- something that can be easily missed in all the hunters complaining about the MoP abilities. And for once, we have a documented way to compare what hunters have asked for against what we were given: the class feedback thread.

Join me after the cut for the MoP scoreboard.

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Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

One of the goals in Blizzard's revamp of the talent system was to take away "right" choices -- the kind of decisions in which we could calculate a mathematical correct choice -- and instead let us actually make a decision about what talent to choose for any given tier. For many of our hunter tiers, this more or less worked out, often resulting in one clear PvP talent and a choice between two PvE talents that are both potentially useful in the right circumstances.

But then we also have talent tiers like the level 75 choice, where every ability is providing us with some kind of DPS cooldown. No doubt we needed some DPS-boosting talents, but once those are in the mix, we are going to be able to calculate a right choice -- or at least a right choice for any given situation.

This bring us to Dire Beast vs. A Murder of Crows. I've done a lot of in-game testing both to measure the benefit of the abilities as well as to determine how they work and scale. And at this point in the beta, it's already looking like we have a winner.

Update: Since the time of writing, the beta has updated and the name has been changed from Call Beast to Dire Beast (updated in here) and the appearance of the beast is now based on the zone you're in.

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Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

As the Mists of Pandaria beta progresses we're beginning to learn more about how many of the awesome new hunter abilities will work, and of course we're seeing many of the inevitable changes to abilities, including happy news that the 2-second cast time on Black Arrow and lack of Serpent Spread is likely to be reverted to the current design (which also means the AoE component of the beta Black Arrow is likely going away, too).

We got a look at exactly what abilities the different pet specs will have in MoP. The design is very much in keeping with the plan we discussed last week and does a good job of helping make the different pet specs feel distinctly different (since you no longer have DPS talents for tenacity pets and tanking talents for ferocity), though there are a few abilities lost that hurt.

In fact, pets are a fantastic place to start. Let's take a look at exactly what abilities Blizzard assigned to each of the pet specs.

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Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Google is the world's largest search engine by a massive margin, enjoying a nearly 70% market share. Google processes over a billion searches every day -- searches for everything from the fate of Firefly to where to buy RPG dice to the answer to the Kirk vs. Picard debate. It even handles searches for non-geeky stuff. And of course, some percentage of those billion daily searches are WoW searches.

Google has a tremendous amount of data about exactly what WoW players are looking for online -- and if there's one thing I can't get enough of, it's WoW data. With the search data that Google makes available, we can get a unique look into how WoW-related searches have changed over time with the changing popularity of the game and what kinds of topics WoW players are searching for more than others. The Google-eye view is a unique insight into the online interest and discussions of World of Warcraft.

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Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

Thus far in the Mists of Pandaria beta, we've seen and heard tons of sweet news about the hunter class, but we've had very little news about the second most important class in the game: hunter pets.

Historically, development around new and awesome hunter pets stuff tends to happen later in the beta process, but Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has made an appearance on the forums to let us know what the plan is with our beloved companions. As he suggested at BlizzCon, we will be able to take any hunter pet we want and choose whether to make it ferocity, cunning, or tenacity. So you can have DPS turtles and tanking kitties.

But in addition to confirmation of this awesome news is a plan that many hunters are far less thrilled about: no more pet talents at all. Here's what Ghostcrawler had to say about pet talents going the way of the manhood of the elven races.

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Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

Not to go all Grandpappy Frostheim on you guys, but wow, has hunter AoE evolved a lot since vanilla days! Back then we had in theory a few AoE abilities, but in practice, we had none. Explosive Trap did poor damage, couldn't be launched, and couldn't be dropped while in combat. Multi-Shot hit three targets and was on a cooldown (and was a core part of our single-target rotation). We also had Volley, which did incredibly crummy damage, couldn't crit, and was on a long cooldown.

By Wrath, volley was a monster of massive AoE DPS on no cooldown, but all we did in AoE situations was push the one button and sit back and watch the numbers tick. While this was great for DPS, it was also fairly dull and meant that there was no skill component to AoE DPS. The worst players could manage to click Volley and watch as well as the best. So Blizzard decided to make our AoE a bit more engaging in Cataclysm and turned it into what we know now.

In Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard is once again turning up the knob on our AoE, giving us more AoE abilities than ever before. In Mists there will be a very real skill component to hunter AoE.

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Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

The beta has been out for about a week, and as you might expect, we are absolutely drowning in ridiculously awesome hunter info -- and all this despite the fact that there's still tons of hunter design yet to be done. The developers have wisely decided to scatter a bunch of bones for the support classes in the first beta build to keep them distracted and out of the developers' hair while they get to the real work of polishing the hunter class.

Still, there is so much hunter news that there is no way it will all fit in this column. I'm going to hit a bunch of the highlights -- the really awesome stuff, and the stuff we've been waiting for -- but if you're the kind of hunter who wants to know every expansion detail coming out of the beta, here are a few places that hunter Mists info is being collected:

• WoW Hunters Hall Tabana is keeping the WHH stocked with every tidbit of hunter info from everywhere on the web, including some videos of our new abilities she unearthed.
• MMO-C Hunter Thread Ren is doing a great job on the MMO-C forums of maintaining an updated list of hunter changes in the beta. Just remember not to obsess about the damage numbers there. Don't worry about DPS balance right now; it's all changing.
• WHU's Mists of Pandaria Hunter Changes I'm also collecting a much more detailed list of all hunter changes over at the Warcraft Hunters Union that goes in more depth and is being regularly updated.
• Petopia's MoP Board The fine community at Petopia is cataloging all the tamable pets that have been found in Mists.

Now, join me after the cut for the awesome info splat of the sweet, sweet hunter life in Mists of Pandaria.

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Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

During the recent Mists of Pandaria press tour event, Lead Systems Deisgner Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street gave an interview in which he revealed that hunters would be getting a stampede ability, letting hunters unleash the fury of a stable full of pets all at once.

Now, I don't want to imply anything bad about the interviewer in that segment, but in what world do you let a comment like that pass by? I know that there are some people who enjoy playing support classes, but when he wanders on talking about rogue nonsense, any good interviewer would stop him, pin him down, and start asking more questions about hunters! This is what MoP is all about after all -- hunter glory!

Stampede is the best and biggest news to come out of MoP since no minimum range, and we're left more questions than answers. In fact, when I started thinking about what I want to know about stampede, I realized it could fill an entire column. And then I realized that stampede is so awesome that it deserves to fill a whole column. So here is what we know about the ability, how I suspect it will work, and what we want to know about the ability.

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Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

As part of the Mists of Pandaria press tour, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has revealed that hunters will be getting a new level 87 ability that will let them bring out their stable of five pets all at once as a long-cooldown DPS burst ability. Here is the full quote from the MMO-C interview:

I don't think we have talked about what we are doing for the hunter yet. I think a lot of hunter players have guessed it but the hunter level 87 ability is basically you get all your pets at once for a short amount of time. So if you have 5 pets in your stable, they all come out and do damage for a little bit of time, and that's really fun cooldown for them. I think it increases Beast Master's damage by 80% while they're out, or something ridiculous like that. That's a pretty fun one.

This "Stampede" ability is one that the hunter community has been requesting for years and should provide a valuable burst DPS cooldown that will serve the class well in both PvE and PvP. We have yet to get confirmation that this ability will be available to all hunter specs, but since Ghostcrawler referred to it as a hunter ability rather than a beast mastery ability, it seems likely to be a class baseline ability that enables every hunter spec to unleash a frenzy of rabid death into their opponents' faces.

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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Filed under: Hunter, Mists of Pandaria