Hunter Talk
MAGIC
Doot DootFurniture City, Michigan Icrontian
Hey fellow huntards. We typically have 3-4 hunters in every raid so its a pretty popular class for us. Lets talk about our specs, play styles, gear, questions, comments, ideas.
I play Marksman. Currently it is a slow cast hard hitting play style that relies heavily on timing movement keeping an eye on Procs to maximize your damage.
Stats:
Crit (to 43%), Multistrike > Mastery > Haste, Versatility. Crit because like I said were big hitters, so the bigger the better and Multi because another free hit is good. Marksman Mastery increases your Sniper Training % damage.
Play:
Sniper training is a buff we gain from standing still for for 3 seconds. It starts as a 4% bonus to Damage/Range/Crit. Once you move you retain the buff for 5 seconds, but must stand still for three seconds for the buff to reapply. So, the best approach is to move in 2 second bursts to maintain up-time on sniper training as much as possible. Use disengage, move in bursts when you need to, and think ahead so you can reduce your long travel times that will cause the buff to fall off. Getting good at this can easily take you from a 16-17k dps hunter to 20k+.
Careful Aim give us 60% increased Crit against targets over 80% health and or during times when Rapid Fire are active. This is important because during these times, if you are capped at 43% Crit, you will have a 100% Crit chance with Steady Shot and Aimed Shot. In this situation you want to abandon your normal rotation/priority and only use Steady Shot and Aimed Shot and Chimera Shot.
Trinket/Megawatt Procs are something to be aware of. With Careful Aim it is possible to achieve 100% crit, so it is inefficient to use Rapid Fire while you have a Megawatt proc active.
Comments
Priorities:
1) Chimera Shot
2) Kill Shot
3) Crows
4) Glave
5) Aimed
6) Steady
Like I said above these priorities are for times with Careful Aim is not up. In those circumstances you should do 1) Chimera 2) Aimed 3) Steady.
Cast Rapid Fire on cooldown, but I prefer to wait for Crit Procs to fall off before I cast it so as to not go over Crit cap.
For trash and bosses with many adds I swap Glave Toss for Barrage. Swap Aimed shot for Multi-Shot if there are more than 3 targets below 80% health. If anything is above 80% continue single target rotation on them and Kill Shot anything below 30%.
Aspect of the Pack, always.
Gear:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/kelthuzad/Bilthar/advanced
If you are having a tough time gearing up, go Engi. Go Engi if you arent. You can make a Ilvl 660 gun, and 665 helm that are perfectly itemized.
In my own experience stick to your stat priorities as much as you can. I had 661 Warforged boots with Haste/Versatility and my DPS went down slightly compared to my Heroic 630 Crit/multistrike boots even with the increased AGI. Test gear, dont just go for Ilvl.
Follower Missions can give you some perfectly itemized pieces that aren't available anywhere else.
"of the Savage" are Crit/Multistrike pieces you should look out for on the AH.
This is all for Marksman. A lot of hunters run a Survival Spec as well and try to gear for both so they can easy swap back and forth based on the fight. For Multi add/high mobility fights people prefer Survival. I have tried Survival but have not come close to being able to keep up with my Marksman in it. I'd really like to hear form some folks if you play Survival and have some tips.
I personally prefer Survival and Beast Mastery. Since my hunter is Horde you probably won't see him in-game, or if you do it will be at the other end of his barrel/bow cause I like to PvP with him. You can check him out here.
Survival: the DoT cannon. The main abilities for Survival all apply DoTs of various strengths and lengths. Black Arrow, Explosive Trap (spec perks boost the damage and allow you to keep this up 100% of the time if you are able to stay in range), Explosive Shot, and Serpent Sting coated Arcane and Multi Shots (the latter is part of why Surv Hunter's do well on AoE segments.)
The secondary stats for this spec are multistrike>crit>haste. Surv hunters get a boost to multistrike passively. This compounds with all the ticks of damage from the many DoTs.
The basic Surv rotation is Black Arrow>Explosive Shot>1 Arcane Shot>Talents>Explosive Trap. This applies all your baseline DoTs before you have to reload your Focus. When Lock N' Load procs (chance from Black Arrow damage) you want to space apart the free Explosive Shots so as not to waste the potential damage since hitting the same target with multiple Explosive Shots only reapplies the initial damage and restarts the DoT. Depending on where my focus is at I'll either throw in a Cobra Shot then use the next charge or another 2 seconds worth of other abilites, say 2 arcane shots, 1 arcane and crows, etc.
Personally, to go with the mechanical theme, I go with Murder of Crows and Exotic Munitions to apply even more DoTs. The other talents situational and personal preference. Since I PvP a lot on my hunter I'll typically adjust to the battleground or whatever I'm doing (Arathi Basin's cliffs + Powershot or knockback trap = hilarious). There is no real damage bonus from glyphs for hunters so I glyph according to the content I'm running.
I prefer this spec for PvP as a remnant from the old talent system in which there were some nice PvP bonuses in this tree that I liked. Now those bonuses are either baseline or in glyphs so really I could go whatever spec I want for PvP. I like to jump into battlegrounds a lot and I feel that Survival is good in battlegrounds so I stick with it. If I swap my focus to arenas then I'll probably swap to Marksman for the better self-healing and better emphasis on basic attacks instead of DoTs.
Beast Mastery: I use this for single target PvE and solo content. The solid and constant damage from me and my pet and all the cooldowns are good for most PvE Boss situations. A good BM Hunter can be like having 2-3 extra people on hand in terms of utility. With the right glyphs and sometimes pet, I act as DPS and Healer, while my pet is Tank and DPS. I can solo most on par content designed for 3 players and some 5 players. and aside from certain mechanics, older content is a breeze.
Personally I view Hunter specializations as follows:
Marksman: Great for smaller and or damage focused PvP and good at PvE.
Survival: Strong AoE and strong DoTs. Great for Big PvP and add heavy PvE.
Beast Mastery: You and your pet against the world! (Excels at solo ventures but good all around for both PvE and PvP.)
Note that if Blizz is doing their job and nothing is broken then you can play whatever spec you prefer at whatever content you prefer. You just need to know how the differences in spec add up to changes in how you play against what content.
I saw the thread title and was Like " Yay a hunting thread for us outdoors men" Yup I am disappointed and wrong
I use bm 100% n swap back n forth between the top DPs for pve
Marks burst DPS ftw. AKA I haven't raided since AQ40