So I have a friend that I used to do arenas with. At the time he was playing a duid on our 2v2 team. We did pretty well, considering I was a hunter, the whipping dog of BC arenas.
As you know, I’ve been focusing on raiding as much as possible, but the other day my friend brought up the arena team and we decided to give it a go. After all, it’s not like it takes much time.
Of course he plays a mage now at 80, so our team has no healer. Do we need a healer? Hell no!
And I have no pvp gear. Do I need resilience? Hell no!
Well, maybe it would have helped.
I have a huge pile of Emblems of Heroism that I can spend and went to get some starting pvp gear… but it was total garbage. I mean crap. Sure I got some resilience, but almost no stamina gain and HUGE losses everywhere else (like 170 AP to 70 AP). I appreciate the re-weighting of resilience, I think it’s a good thing. But that means I’m pvping in my 25-man raid gear.
Back in BC I had mostly Brutal Gladiators gear with well over 400 resilience. Now I have only the resilience on my pvp trinket. Ouch.
So I died fast, and I was always targeted first over the mage. SV seems good for pvp, even though I have no trap or melee talents. I do have Aimed Shot, which is a must, though I did notice a lot more double dps teams than back in BC.
So at the end of the day we were 6-4, so a very slight gain. As expected I found that disengage wasn’t terribly useful and we were ganked like crazy by melee teams, just like before. Deterrance was actually very useful though, on those occasions where I wasn’t stunlocked to death.
So we’ll see how things progress in the weeks ahead. I’m done with gear I can get with Emblems of Valor, so maybe I’ll start buying the better pvp gear with that soon.
I totaly feel you.. send loads og marks on the pvpgear. turned out i got robbed, becasuse it was crap
Hope you do well in arena. Are you going to try ot different specs and pets?
best spec for survival hunter to do pvp, about the talent, cycle shot, and macro if needed?
SV is best spec, hands-down.
Talents are pretty straight-forward. Forget about Hawk from BM tree… You should NEVER be standing still long enough to care about your auto-shot. Specializing on Black Arrow and Serpent Sting to compliment your all-important Explosive Shot is your goal, here. Also grab yourself Aimed Shot for the added instant and to thwart healing.
Bind your disengage and scatter-shot to a macro so your disengage is actually worth a damn. Key-bind your Freezing Arrow to a key so you can get in the habit of launching it on the fly in place of your Black Arrow if Wyvern Sting is down or gets negated (it can save your buddy or yourself, trust me).
There really is no shot cycle, to be honest. It’s all improvised, and remember, as a PvP Hunter, you are always on the suicide missions. Wyvern Sting the healer then Freezing Arrow him when he trinkets out (and hope nobody on your team knocks him out of that). Serpent Sting everyone else. Bring an Arms Warrior with you to pop the Pali’s bubble. Fight, kill, and use Feign Death to drop targeting on you. The rest is practiced habit, instinct, and luck.
Equipment should focus heavily on crit rating, stamina, and resilience in that order. Gems should increase crit rating, stamina, and then hop between AP/Agil depending on what you get your hands on.
Nutshell, yes, but it’s the basics.
I would like to note that BM is not completely useless in PvP, not at all. I say SV is best spec hands-down because it simply is. BM can not compare to the damage output directly, but it does have many other advantages.
As all of us know (or will learn), Bestial Wrath+The Beast Within is by far the coolest damn combo on the BM tree. Back in the day when it was worth it to rock a 50bm/21mm ‘cuz you could reset Bestial Wrath’s cool-down with Readiness, BMs were very intimidating on the field. Unable to be stunned (Forget you, Pali! Forget you, Warrior! Hah!), unable to be locked in place (Frost Mages? Other hunters? Pshaw…), unable to be feared (Priests and Locks get real-life counter-feared), unable to be slowed, or in any way stopped for almost 40 seconds. And after that, you have your “what-have-you of the Horde” to trinket out of it, and if you’re an alchemist there’s other little tricks. They made sick flag carriers, and as you know, 40 seconds of straight DPS from a good BM and his pet will chew through any plate.
However, Readiness no longer can affect Bestial Wrath+The Beast Within. Still, Bestial Wrath on its own is friggin’ nice. BW+TBW, Trinket, Free Action Potion or equivalent about 5 seconds after you trinket out, that combo is still heavy on its own. And, having a pet that isn’t just an extra trick for your bag (slowing, spell-interrupt, poison, etc), but is a heavy portion of your DPS… that’s nice.
I have a buddy I rock around the PvP fields with. He goes by Zuljad. That’s one sick PvP Hunter. We go on our 2-Hunter Death Duo a lot. For a while, I was trying to make MM work on PvP — long story short, it doesn’t. He was easily averaging, with little effort apart from Paladin run-ins, 380k damage per WSG match. I, with effort, was averaging 180K. Same amount of honor kills, usually a few more killing blows, but far less damage. However, I recently switched over to SV myself (my favorite, always will be, no matter how Blizz may bastardize the class), and even being rusty, I’m only 10k damage or so less than him, maintaining more killing blows, and stacking a few extra honor kills on my score.
Anyway, the point to that. Back in the day, Zuljad was a hard-core BM hunter. In fact, he started going BM, and never switched out. He just stayed there, making heavy use of that spec. He was, by far, the sickest BM hunter on the PvP grounds. When Death Knights came out, and us non-DK using (non-cheating *cough*) WotLK accounts were faced with these mysterious behemoths that could pull us in, had pets, wore plate, cast spells, had lock-style DoTs, had AoE attacks, and wielded massive two-handed weapons… well, we faltered at first.
The massive influx of DKs into the battlefields made life very hectic for a well-trained hunter, but for an adaptable one who knows that every class has its answer, and that answer is nine-tenths of the time a Hunter, Zuljad and his Pet immediately set to work tearing holes through their plate and finding work-arounds to their attacks.
The first and most obvious answer is Disengage+Scattershot vs Death Grip. ALWAYS macro Scattershot to a Disengage, even if you make it a seperate Disengage button, so if your Disengage only gains you a couple meters of distance, you have a couple seconds to back off before they can react.
The second answer is Concussive Shot and Frost Trap, to keep them at bay until they get another Death Grip up. If you have your DPS rocking and you already have exhausted one of their Death Grips, by the time they hit your Frost Trap you should already have taken a chunk out of their health.
The rest came with time, but Zuljad was the first Hunter I’d personally seen in PvP that DKs could not take apart. His pet and ability to stay the Hell away from them just murdered them. When we were teamed up, we could take 2v2 vs DKs and wreck the Hell out of them. By the time we finished one, they had one of us about dead. Usually me. So, Freezing Trap+Bandaging twice, and we were set to murder the next one. This cycle worked like seventy-five percent of the time, easy.
Ugh, I’m rambling. Cool.
I go BM for BG’s just so I can put my devilsaur on Aggressive, wave goodbye, spam Mend Pet every now and then, and quietly wait for him to rack up about 60% of my damage. It’s fun knowing that even if I haven’t seen him for 20 minutes, he’s off wrecking sh*t somewhere while I play like a turd and just try to stay alive.
Very nice sharing. Thank you…