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The Art of War(craft): Must-have PvP talents for hunters in 4.0.1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Art of War(craft), covering battlegrounds and world PvP, and Blood Sport, with the inside line for arena enthusiasts. Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? Battlemaster Zach Yonzon, old-world PvP grinder and casual battleground habitué, rambles on about anything and everything PvP. We don't have much time before Cataclysm hits, so let's get down to business. We've talked about some optimal talents for death knights and druids for PvP, so now we turn our attention to hunters. Hunters have always had a tough time in arenas, not necessarily because the class was broken but because the format simply wasn't conducive to the hunter playstyle. It got so bad, in fact, that Blizzard designed an arena -- the Ring of Valor -- specifically to benefit hunters. On the other hand, hunters have always lorded it over in the open expanse of the battlegrounds. The good news is that battlegrounds will be cool again. Well, they've always been cool in my book, but soon they'll be rewarding cool gear, too. That means hunters will once again feel like PvP gods (without needing the help of an enhancement shaman). There's one big change to hunters in Patch 4.0.1 and that's the change in resource from mana to focus. The difference with the way focus behaves is that rather than a resource well that pays for spells and abilities (mana), hunters have abilities that generate focus in combat such as Steady Shot and Cobra Shot, and then a whole load of focus dumps. In a way it's like death knight runic power or warrior rage without the decay. This means you'll always want to have nearly full focus but never gain focus that will simply slough off because you're over your maximum. It's a careful balance of gaining and spending, although focus regenerates at a steady rate.
Scattered Shots: Transitioning to hunter PvP
Welcome to Scattered Shots! Filling in for Frostheim for this post is Basil Berntsen, also of outdps and the Hunting Party podcast. Hunter PvP is fun. It's a lot of fun. It's also something you can jump into any time, compared to raiding where you have to be in a guild that is managing to continue running content. A lot of people are getting into it for the first time but are having trouble getting started. Start with the gear The average hunter with a bit of PvE experience and gear will queue up for a random battleground and get mulched. Hunters are almost as squishy as mages, and until you get some resilience, you're going to die a lot. The best thing you can do while you're in this state is to use your cooldowns to extend your death, stick with healers and do as much damage as you can before you croak. Hunter damage is insanely high -- the phrase "it goes to 11" doesn't begin to cover it. The problem is that if you can die to a single warlock DoT, you won't be able to apply this pressure for long.
Scattered Shots: PvP basic stats and specs
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week, Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the hunter class. Got hunter questions? Feel free to email Frostheim. After a long and frustrating night of progression raiding, you may find yourself thinking, "You know, screw this dragon. It's my teammates that I wanna kill." There are few sensations in this life quite as satisfying as slaughtering other players, kiting weepy melee and glorifying in the lamentations of their menfolk (because believe me, it's the menfolk who do the lamenting in PvP). We're going to start paving the road to lamentation today with a look at how our stat priorities change for PvP and an overview of how the three hunter trees look in a PvP environment. And yes, we'll have some sample PvP specs, too. Join me after the cut as we learn to exalt in the misery of others.
Things don't look pretty for PvP Hunters in 8926
The best thing you can say about Hunters in Wrath in this Beta build is that we still have the new Disengage, at least for now. In this build, most of our new PvP tools have had much of their new functionality removed or greatly scaled back in this build.
Wrath Beta Patch Notes: Hunter
By now, I am sure you've heard that the Wrath of the Lich King Beta is going live and the patch notes are up. There's a rather extensive section devoted to Hunters on this iteration. We have a few more insights into the pet talent trees that were announced at the Worldwide Invitational, as well as a few changes to existing talents and a nice Steady Shot buff.
Best arena hunter in the world now banned?
I'm still not sure what to make of this, but according to a number of very upset hunters on the official forums, Blizzard has handed a permanent ban to a player known as Megatf, said to be the best arena hunter in the world. His Armory does in fact show him as being #2 in his battlegroup (Reckoning) for 2's, #1 for 3's, and #1 for 5's, so even if he wasn't the best in the world, the guy knew a thing or two about PvP. The ban is popularly attributed to Megatf's having posted criticism of how Blizzard has handled the Hunter crisis in arena. It's certainly tough to argue that hunters are doing well; they are the only class that is underperforming in all three brackets, even by Blizzard's standards and months after the introduction of an MS-debuff to Aimed Shot.A player called Macrospamftw (yeah, I laughed) insists it's because Megatf was posting content and links that contained keyloggers, which sounds a lot more plausible than mere criticism (let's face it, if CM's banned people for that, the official forums would be a ghost town). But the player Guinevere counters by saying there were no links in the banned posts. Poking around a little more resulted in additional details: Megatf often posted while tipsy and was prone to foul language. That's certainly more than enough for a forum ban, but a permanent one?Megatf does seem to have vanished from the forums completely. Not only are the threads in question gone, but according to the hunters, Megatf's popular post on Hunter PvP has also disappeared. Do any of our readers know what's going on?
