Pseudo-philosophical Ponderance: Did playing a hunter make me careless? Or was I careless to begin with and thus drawn to playing a hunter?
My trusty ol' hunter dinged 58 and entered not too long ago, and suddenly I find myself needing to actually Learn2Play. I can no longer get away with:
>Running around in several hysterically underlevelled pieces of rogue-stat armor...
>Letting my Pet do the heavy lifting while I read a magazine or watch TV, auto-shooting mobs...
>Automatically disregarding any mail gear with Int or MP5, or without massive amounts of Agi and/or AP as Shammy gear...
I'll cop to a lot of my struggles being attributable to my under-developed understanding of class mechanics... but it also has a great deal has to do with gear. Unfortunately, my downtime here at the office doesnt give me the opportunity to work on the latter issue... so I'll have focus on the former and brush up on the theorycraft side of things. :)
My question(s)...
Is there a general benchmark or ratio as far as the amount of Mana/Regen vs AP/AGI I need to be effective? I looked at the stickies, and the 7k HP/6.25k MP/20% Crit/1650 AP pre-raid benchmarks seem like a solid goal, but that's all months away (have 2 70s and 2 other levelling alts sharing my time with this hunter).
Aside from those linked in the stickies (http://tkasomething.com/hunterguides.php, etc)... are there any general hunter strat guides/blogs people can recommend? I've been a fan of petopia and good intentions since before TBC came out, but I'd really like to find a site that deals with more basic class mechanics (not just pet stuff), and maybe is not so focused on Kara and beyond. Kindof like tankspot.com is for Warriors/Pallies/Druids.
I appreciate any advice, assistance, tips, etc.
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Since you are lvl 58, I'll assume you're having problems fighting mobs in Outland. That first couple levels in HP will make most people doubt their ability until their gear catches up.
Most of he mobs you fight are grouped close together, with wandering patrols (not too mention those $%$#% felreavers) that sneak up on you. By the time you get a bunch of the initial quest reward gear, you'll be amazed at how much easier it will become. Be patient, bring alot of bandages, food, healing/mana pots.
Most of he mobs you fight are grouped close together, with wandering patrols (not too mention those $%$#% felreavers) that sneak up on you. By the time you get a bunch of the initial quest reward gear, you'll be amazed at how much easier it will become. Be patient, bring alot of bandages, food, healing/mana pots.
I am not really sure where to point you for general theory craft besides this site, it's where i've been getting all of my information since I started playing and I think i'm doing pretty good (2nd ranked raid hunter in guild and we have 10 Hunters and 2nd on DPS charts).
The only things i can say about your play style though is that Hunters are a hybrid class, so we need to have suffiecient numbers in more than a few stats to be competitive damage wise and just surviving. I'll break it down a little bit using what i know from my experiences and some theorycraft (sort of)
Hunters are essentially a physical damage dealing class that uses mana to do everything. This means that mana, mana usage, mana regeneration and mana pool are as important to us as armor is to a tank; yeah you can do it without it.... but you're gonna suck REALLY bad.
Stats (Agi, Str, Stam, etc...) in order of importance for a Hunter normally goes like this: Agility, Stamina, Intellect, Spirit, Strength. Some will switch a few around... like me who put intellect above Stamina but I'm in a good guild with good tanks and healers and I know how to manage my aggro so Stamina isn't as important to me as it would be to a Hunter who does more PvP or needs the extra Health in PvE situations. Agility is always first (except for harcore PvP, but that's another discussion entirely) because Hunters get the most benefit from that one stat. It increases Attack Power, 1 Agility = 1 AP, it increases Armor, 1 Agi = 1 Armor, it increases dodge %, don't know conversion, and increases crit%, 40 Agility = 1% crit.
Intellect is next on my list. Hunters need mana to do the damage, no mana = horrible damage, more mana = more skills, more damage in long fights among other things. Hunters don't need a lot of mana to put up big numbers, we need mana to keep our big numbers up in long fights, so most Hunters use about 200-400 mana every 2-4 seconds, meaning a normal shot rotation takes about 2-4 seconds and the shots and skills used in that time take 200-400 mana. Thats all the mana we need to do our damage, but obviously we need to do it more than once so the bigger the mana pool and higher MP/5 we have the longer we can keep up our shot rotations, healing our pets and using Feign Death to drop aggro.
Stamina is a no brainer, more stam = more health = more survivability, this is all really up to you and how comfortable you are with your skills and your party/ raid. If you think you need it, get it, if you think you don't, don't get it, you'll know whether you need it or not based on how often your taking damage in figths.
Spirit is a wasted stat for Hunters because of how it works. Spirit uses the 5 second rule (mana regen doesn't start taking effect until 5 seconds after your last mana using skill/ spell) and Hunters fire mana using shots a LOT more often than ever 5 seconds, so unless you plan on doing crap damage and farming REALLY slowly and loading up on Spirit to keep your mana up.... just get about 50+ Mp/5, put up Aspect of the Viper, and don't neglect your Intellect stat and you should be fine.
Strength should never EVER be seen on your gear. Granted some pieces with Strength on it will have enough other stats to make up for it, but those pieces are all Epics, and there is always an alternative. Just don't look at a piece and get it for the Strength.
Other Stats like +hit, +crit, MP/5, etc need to be looked at on a finite value system to make sure you don't over gear for it and cut back on stats that would be more beneficial to you.
+Hit is capped at 142 I believe, or +8.9% chance to hit (this is because raid bosses are flagged as lvl 73, which need +8.9% to never miss) anything above that is useless. Don't go totally out of your way and drop your stats too low to get this number but you should be able to get it to about 100 hit rating without even TRYING to gear for +hit once you start getting gear from Kara.
+Crit looks nice, but is a bonus/ wasted stat for Hunters. If you're trying to get your crit% up, get the crit rating from trinkets or use Agility to get the crit%, you'll get far more benefit from the AP, Armor, Dodge and Crit bonus from Agility than you will from pure crit rating. This is not to say that if you see a nice piece of armor (legs, chest, feet, etc...) that you should pass it up, just makes sure that the crit is not the ONLY reason your getting it and don't use crit gems. Get your crit% to about 25% unbuffed and you will be fine (SV Hunters will naturally have more than this due to how they gear with almost Agility exclusively, so just remember that)
MP/5 is awesome, but you only need about 40-50 MP/5 for it to be effective, and you can get that without trying too hard, most of the gear you will want/ find in Pre-Kara lvl 70 dungeons will have MP/5 on it anyway and you will need to use at least 1 if not 2+ purple gems to get the Mete-gem Relentless Earthstorm Diamond to activate and the Infused Nightseye (+4 AP and +2 MP/5) works quite nicely.
This is turning out to be a longer post than I intended but I hope it helped a little bit. Use Aethiens Pre-Raid gearlist to get more finite values on other stats based on your build, but always remember that as long as you're having fun and doing your job in a raid/ group no-one is going to care about your stats.
The only things i can say about your play style though is that Hunters are a hybrid class, so we need to have suffiecient numbers in more than a few stats to be competitive damage wise and just surviving. I'll break it down a little bit using what i know from my experiences and some theorycraft (sort of)
Hunters are essentially a physical damage dealing class that uses mana to do everything. This means that mana, mana usage, mana regeneration and mana pool are as important to us as armor is to a tank; yeah you can do it without it.... but you're gonna suck REALLY bad.
Stats (Agi, Str, Stam, etc...) in order of importance for a Hunter normally goes like this: Agility, Stamina, Intellect, Spirit, Strength. Some will switch a few around... like me who put intellect above Stamina but I'm in a good guild with good tanks and healers and I know how to manage my aggro so Stamina isn't as important to me as it would be to a Hunter who does more PvP or needs the extra Health in PvE situations. Agility is always first (except for harcore PvP, but that's another discussion entirely) because Hunters get the most benefit from that one stat. It increases Attack Power, 1 Agility = 1 AP, it increases Armor, 1 Agi = 1 Armor, it increases dodge %, don't know conversion, and increases crit%, 40 Agility = 1% crit.
Intellect is next on my list. Hunters need mana to do the damage, no mana = horrible damage, more mana = more skills, more damage in long fights among other things. Hunters don't need a lot of mana to put up big numbers, we need mana to keep our big numbers up in long fights, so most Hunters use about 200-400 mana every 2-4 seconds, meaning a normal shot rotation takes about 2-4 seconds and the shots and skills used in that time take 200-400 mana. Thats all the mana we need to do our damage, but obviously we need to do it more than once so the bigger the mana pool and higher MP/5 we have the longer we can keep up our shot rotations, healing our pets and using Feign Death to drop aggro.
Stamina is a no brainer, more stam = more health = more survivability, this is all really up to you and how comfortable you are with your skills and your party/ raid. If you think you need it, get it, if you think you don't, don't get it, you'll know whether you need it or not based on how often your taking damage in figths.
Spirit is a wasted stat for Hunters because of how it works. Spirit uses the 5 second rule (mana regen doesn't start taking effect until 5 seconds after your last mana using skill/ spell) and Hunters fire mana using shots a LOT more often than ever 5 seconds, so unless you plan on doing crap damage and farming REALLY slowly and loading up on Spirit to keep your mana up.... just get about 50+ Mp/5, put up Aspect of the Viper, and don't neglect your Intellect stat and you should be fine.
Strength should never EVER be seen on your gear. Granted some pieces with Strength on it will have enough other stats to make up for it, but those pieces are all Epics, and there is always an alternative. Just don't look at a piece and get it for the Strength.
Other Stats like +hit, +crit, MP/5, etc need to be looked at on a finite value system to make sure you don't over gear for it and cut back on stats that would be more beneficial to you.
+Hit is capped at 142 I believe, or +8.9% chance to hit (this is because raid bosses are flagged as lvl 73, which need +8.9% to never miss) anything above that is useless. Don't go totally out of your way and drop your stats too low to get this number but you should be able to get it to about 100 hit rating without even TRYING to gear for +hit once you start getting gear from Kara.
+Crit looks nice, but is a bonus/ wasted stat for Hunters. If you're trying to get your crit% up, get the crit rating from trinkets or use Agility to get the crit%, you'll get far more benefit from the AP, Armor, Dodge and Crit bonus from Agility than you will from pure crit rating. This is not to say that if you see a nice piece of armor (legs, chest, feet, etc...) that you should pass it up, just makes sure that the crit is not the ONLY reason your getting it and don't use crit gems. Get your crit% to about 25% unbuffed and you will be fine (SV Hunters will naturally have more than this due to how they gear with almost Agility exclusively, so just remember that)
MP/5 is awesome, but you only need about 40-50 MP/5 for it to be effective, and you can get that without trying too hard, most of the gear you will want/ find in Pre-Kara lvl 70 dungeons will have MP/5 on it anyway and you will need to use at least 1 if not 2+ purple gems to get the Mete-gem Relentless Earthstorm Diamond to activate and the Infused Nightseye (+4 AP and +2 MP/5) works quite nicely.
This is turning out to be a longer post than I intended but I hope it helped a little bit. Use Aethiens Pre-Raid gearlist to get more finite values on other stats based on your build, but always remember that as long as you're having fun and doing your job in a raid/ group no-one is going to care about your stats.
If you're having troubles at level 58 and have just got into OLs, I would suggest getting some consumables to get you through it.
For MP5, get some mana oils... even the cheap low level ones.
Get some elixirs too. +agil/crit and +int/spirit are always nice.
Get a few scrolls if you can as well. They are usually pretty cheap in the AH.
Other than that, keep working at it! Do the first OL quests ASAP. They'll give you the starting gear you need to get you moving at a faster speed. Otherwise, buy up some gear at the AH. Its usually expensive, but it sounds like you should have a fair bit of golds already with the 2 70s, so it might not be so bad.
Also, MP5 for hunters was kind of gimped because it bases the MP5 on intellect now as well, not just spirit. You probably saw your mana regen go down.... this is why.
Also wanted to address this:
Spirit is a wasted stat for Hunters because of how it works. Spirit uses the 5 second rule (mana regen doesn't start taking effect until 5 seconds after your last mana using skill/ spell) and Hunters fire mana using shots a LOT more often than ever 5 seconds, so unless you plan on doing crap damage and farming REALLY slowly and loading up on Spirit to keep your mana up.... just get about 50+ Mp/5, put up Aspect of the Viper, and don't neglect your Intellect stat and you should be fine.
Spirit IS a wasted stat, but at level 58 you don't have aspect of the viper, and your arcane shots are 6 seconds between each other. Learning to use your other abilities you usually use before your first arcane(poisons, hunter's mark, etc) means you'll get at least one tick of MP more per fight.
Not saying that using poisons is good at level 58, I'm just saying that not casting between your arcanes is a good idea to keep your mana up a bit longer.
For MP5, get some mana oils... even the cheap low level ones.
Get some elixirs too. +agil/crit and +int/spirit are always nice.
Get a few scrolls if you can as well. They are usually pretty cheap in the AH.
Other than that, keep working at it! Do the first OL quests ASAP. They'll give you the starting gear you need to get you moving at a faster speed. Otherwise, buy up some gear at the AH. Its usually expensive, but it sounds like you should have a fair bit of golds already with the 2 70s, so it might not be so bad.
Also, MP5 for hunters was kind of gimped because it bases the MP5 on intellect now as well, not just spirit. You probably saw your mana regen go down.... this is why.
Also wanted to address this:
Quote:
Spirit is a wasted stat for Hunters because of how it works. Spirit uses the 5 second rule (mana regen doesn't start taking effect until 5 seconds after your last mana using skill/ spell) and Hunters fire mana using shots a LOT more often than ever 5 seconds, so unless you plan on doing crap damage and farming REALLY slowly and loading up on Spirit to keep your mana up.... just get about 50+ Mp/5, put up Aspect of the Viper, and don't neglect your Intellect stat and you should be fine.
Spirit IS a wasted stat, but at level 58 you don't have aspect of the viper, and your arcane shots are 6 seconds between each other. Learning to use your other abilities you usually use before your first arcane(poisons, hunter's mark, etc) means you'll get at least one tick of MP more per fight.
Not saying that using poisons is good at level 58, I'm just saying that not casting between your arcanes is a good idea to keep your mana up a bit longer.
For theorycrafting, http://elitistjerks.com/f31/ is a great place to go (class mechanics forum). Lots of information there that *generally* won't leave you wanting to scratch your eyes out afterwards. Check it out.
Thanks to all who replied.
Guess I could have included a little more info, but wanted to keep it at a reasonable (for me) length.
I managed to get him to 61 in HFP. First few quests around Thrall were, of course, a walk in the park, and I upgraded several pieces of gear. Unfortunately, if I had it to do over again, I would have made some different decisions on rewards. Went into those first few quests assuming I was home free stacking my white DPS stats and passed on some gear with INT and mana regen. It wasnt until I was 60 and having to go to ZethGor and other such places that I started to feel the pinch. The last 2/3 of a level (to 61) was a real chore.
My other 70s are on different servers. So this toon is on a budget. Fortunately, he's an Alch, so I can make many of my own consumables. But its becoming more and more clear I cant afford to penny-pinch my way to the next quest reward gun. Time to buy an upgrade.
I also reviewed some things... I'm fairly certain I let my pet's skills fall out of date. The last 15 or so levels in Azeroth went by so fast it never occured to me to stop for that kind of thing. I dont think I can tame the HFP mobs for the max level skills yet (Cat w/ Claw, Bite and Prowl), but I need to go back to the old world and make sure kitty has the tools he needs to make both our lives easier.
Guess I could have included a little more info, but wanted to keep it at a reasonable (for me) length.
I managed to get him to 61 in HFP. First few quests around Thrall were, of course, a walk in the park, and I upgraded several pieces of gear. Unfortunately, if I had it to do over again, I would have made some different decisions on rewards. Went into those first few quests assuming I was home free stacking my white DPS stats and passed on some gear with INT and mana regen. It wasnt until I was 60 and having to go to ZethGor and other such places that I started to feel the pinch. The last 2/3 of a level (to 61) was a real chore.
My other 70s are on different servers. So this toon is on a budget. Fortunately, he's an Alch, so I can make many of my own consumables. But its becoming more and more clear I cant afford to penny-pinch my way to the next quest reward gun. Time to buy an upgrade.
I also reviewed some things... I'm fairly certain I let my pet's skills fall out of date. The last 15 or so levels in Azeroth went by so fast it never occured to me to stop for that kind of thing. I dont think I can tame the HFP mobs for the max level skills yet (Cat w/ Claw, Bite and Prowl), but I need to go back to the old world and make sure kitty has the tools he needs to make both our lives easier.
baveux wrote:
Get a few scrolls if you can as well. They are usually pretty cheap in the AH.
Guess people have found out that that scroll stacks with foodbuffs.
Ya, that sucks scrolls are not cheap, but honestly, i dont remember the last time i bought some. With 3 70's, i always seem to pick them up places. Something else for scrolls, doing the one netherwing daily where u have to shoot the guys flying off the islands, i seem to get alot of scrolls off those guys, usually 2-3 before i complete the quest. But just keep an eye out on the ah, they may be 3g, but i can guarantee that someone is putting up a stack for 5-6g, then those are being bought and resold. I do the same thing, at this point in my wow career, i just throw stuff up, and let my auctioneer set the prices, almost everytime, everything i list is significantly underpriced,(my auctioneer DB is 2 years old)but i dont really need gold so as long as i dont have to look at it im happy.
wow, didnt mean to send this OT :( so to the OP, just hang in there, your gear will catch up. And the others gave good advice.
wow, didnt mean to send this OT :( so to the OP, just hang in there, your gear will catch up. And the others gave good advice.
One thing you can do to add to your MP/5 is get the Magister's Armor kits:
http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=25652;source=live
They can be a little pricey, but they can lower your downtime.
http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=25652;source=live
They can be a little pricey, but they can lower your downtime.
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