Trap Nerf & SV TalentsFollow

Judging from the many posts given on these boards as well as the O-Boards, it's apparent that hunters have forgotten the true arts of CC. I've seen a lot of complaints, and rightfully so. I was outraged when I first expiremented after the patch. I thought it was a glitch at first, then realized that sure enough they took out the art of Double-Tripple-Quad Trapping. It's taken me this long to come to terms with the nerf and to actually write something constructive for the rest of you hunters out there.

I've seen my share of nerfs for us hunters, but this by far hit me the hardest. I pride myself in keeping my groups alive, I've built a reputation around it on my server, and then this comes along. However it made me realize something. I was relying a little to much on my traps. I use all sorts of ways to CC things, but I relied solely on my traps for the most part.

Although trust me when I say this, I would gladly give up Dispelling Arcane Shot, and MS Aimed Shot for the ability to trap more then 1 target at a time again.

Survival & You
Now for those who complain that their SV talents are wasted, they aren't.

Readiness - Other then being an O-S**t button, I rarely used this ability. But then I began to work with the talent more and more, and found that it is quite handy to have.

Readiness is your plan B. When everything starts to go wrong you can start a new with Readiness. Your trap resists twice in a row, you need a 2nd Wyvern Sting, you need to pop out another Misdirection on the off-tank, etc. Readiness also pops your Deterrence, which can be a life saver.

That's not to say that you should get this talent, by all means, I find I do better without it. But I wanted to expirement the full aspects of the Survival Tree and how it related to hunters. Plus I wanted to trap 4 mobs at once to show off =D

Clever Traps - Still a very useful talent. We may only be able to trap 1 target at a time, but he'll definately be on ice a lot longer. Please do not negate this ability just because we can't double trap anymore. Any form of CC always helps, even if we can't do all the things we used to.

Trap Mastery - In a raid situation this proves to be less useful because normally you have a warlock with you who can lay a Curse of Elements on the mob you wish to trap to make it stick a little easier for you. For group play this talent does prove to help a bit more against mobs that you know always resist your traps.

Resourcefulness - Combined with Clever Traps this makes trapping so much easier. Having a 26 duration with a 24 second cooldown is perfect, since it takes about 2 seconds to arm our traps the mob can stay frozen forever.

Before the patch, most of us would do the same thing. Lay a trap down, wait for CD, trap mob, move a bit over, and lay another trap. Either to trap another mob with, or wait till our first one broke free.

With the new patch this proves to be a bit of a burden. If you manage to pull aggro, or something gets feared into the trap next to you, your first trapped mob will break free.

With Resourcefulness and Clever Traps you can stand directly on your trapped mob with little worry and keep them constantly trapped. After all we can only trap 1 at a time anyway.

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I stop here because these are the main talents everyone is complaining about when it comes to the nerf. We have many ways of CCing, and if you need a reminder click on the link in my signature for CC done by a hunter (ignore the traps part though as it doesn't apply anymore =P ). I will admit, this patch has made it harder on me to CC multiple mobs, but it is not impossible as a hunter, and if anything it puts my skills to the test.

Wyvern Sting, Wing Clip, Scatter Shot, Concussive Shot, etc. The list goes on. I use every talent I have to keep things from killing the rest of my group, and I will continue to do so no matter how many times they try to nerf our abilities. So please, for those that are Survival don't switch, and for those that were thinking about going Survival continue your course. To me it is still the most rewarding talent tree there is for a hunter.

I completely agree and I've made my concerns well known to blizzard. I hope they bring it back by all means.

However you have to realize the superiority of our traps. The main thing that made our Freezing Trap stand out, even more so then double trapping, was the fact that we can trap almost anything that can be sheeped, shackled, or banished (yes there are exceptions).

What further set us apart was also the fact we could do it consectively to multiple targets. To fix this so called "Bug" was uncalled for. Why did they not make this change when they increased our cooldown on the traps, or made them useable in combat? When did this start to become an issue?

Again there are already posts about this nerf, my previous post is only shedding more light on what exactly SV brings to the table aside from being able to easily double-tripple-quad trap. As most of the complaints seem to be about how SV is now a wasted talent spec (granted not from the norms around here but the majority of posts complain about this more then anything else).

??? huh? 2.3 didn't affect chain trapping at all. It affected trapping multiple mobs at one time. I have no problem keeping one mob chain trapped for a duration of a fight, the tank I regularly group with sometimes goes for sheeped mob before my ice trapped mob if it is closer to him, because he knows I can handle chain trapping it.

But as for your question about being resisted, I haven't noticed much difference in the resist rates. I think you just are having bad luck or maybe are over exaggerating on how often you really are being resisted.

I know I do that sometimes, if I am resisted 2 or 3 times in a row or even a couple times through a span of a half an hour, to me it seems like everything is being resisted, because when traps go smoothly it just slips from my mind, but when it is resisted it sticks in my head long after the incident is over. So in my mind it felt like everything was being resisted, but really it was maybe 3 or 4 fights in an entire run. But then again I'm not running heroics on a regular basis either, and those mobs do have a higher resist rate then regulars.

I am going to have to respec to SV by the end of the year... and I never thought of that.

Immediatly I thought of Hydross. Now people can open up a can that much earlier :D

When running Ramparts the other evening with my guild I was able to chain trap without issue. The first trap only breaks when the second trap is triggered, not when it's dropped.

I agree... and that's why, even though I was tempted to go BM right after the change, I still stuck with SV: I still see the utility of it as very positive. Plus, I love Scatter and Wyvern for those "oh crap!" situations.

It took skill to double trap before and will take even more skill (and no bad luck) now to avoid having a roaming mob break the first trap... that's really where this double-trapping change hurts most.

BM still has some tricks to play with as well when things go wrong.

Here is what I usually do, when for some reason my trap is broken. Send my pet to attack the mob attacking me, and use Growl+Intimidation,. Once Intimidation lands send my pet to attacking the Kill focus.

The growl and intimidation should be enough threat to have the mob targetting my pet instead of me. And since my pet is over at the group fighting the main target, the mob will head in that direction.

Once Intimidation has worn off I will use Distracting, Arcane, Auto. Which should be enough to get the mob back to me. Once he turns my direction a simple Concussion shot to slow him down.

By the time the mob gets back to me, either the main target is dead and that mob will be killed next so the tank should be heading for it to gain aggro, or my trap is off of cooldown and you can simply re-trap the mob.

It's really just a back and forth form of kiting. With 3 seconds of intimidation, maybe 1 or 2 seconds of run time from me to the main target, then another 2-3 seconds run time from the main target back to me, offers plenty of time to get the cooldown on Ice Trap, or for the tank to take over.