3.0.2 Hunters - A PrimerFollow

I wrote this for the hunters in my guild, but as my server's down I decided to crosspost it here. Mostly for feedback/changes, but also in case you want to use it whenever we update the FAQ.

I'm writing this mainly not for the hunter mains in the guild. Most of you will know this stuff already, but for alts and non-hunters who would like to know some of the more important changes in our class.

Pets
Lets do this first as this is probably the biggest and most noticeable change. Pets have been given a huge overhaul. Think of them now as 3 new player classes. A tank, and 2 varieties of DPS. They now get talented like players. the trees are a little as follows.

Tenacity: (aka the tanking tree) Pets with this tree make very good tanks, certainly a lot better than you'd expect from a pet. They are certainly capable of tanking a normal instance. The hunter skill required to have his/her pet tank effectively while they DPS is quite challenging, but also quite fun. Gorillas deserve special mention as they were buffed quite heavily and now function similar to Paladin tanks. Not quite as good at holding AoE aggro as Pallys, but frankly, not far off!

Examples of Tenacity pets: Bears, Warpstalkers, Gorillas

Ferocity: (aka the burst damage spec) Pets with this tree will probably be your best friend for raiding or PvP. They specialise in what the old 'good' pets did. They hit hard, except now they hit even harder.

Examples of Ferocity pets: Cats, Devilsaurs, Moths

Cunning: (aka the specialist damage tree) Another damage tree? It's quite hard to explain, but basically, at first glance it looks like these guys would do less DPS than a Ferocity pet but make up with it by having utility skills. But that's not quite true. Both trees are very good at DPS, the main difference is Ferocity is the 'basic' DPSers tree. If you want your pet to hit things hard, pretty much every talent in there will help with that.

Cunning pets can also keep up in DPS, but you need to be a little more aware of what you're speccing for, so I guess they're the more 'advanced' DPS pets. For an example. Ferocity talents read like "8%extra damage" or "3% extra crit" does exactly what it says on the tin. Cunning talents read like "35% extra damage when your pet is at less than 35% health" and "30% more likely to crit when target is below 25% health" (note: these aren't the real talents but they give you an idea of what they're like) So Cunning DPS is certainly viable, but somewhat situational.

Examples of Cunning pets: Silithid, Bird of Prey, Chimera.

Exotic Pets
51-point BM Hunters got these to play with. If you see a hunter with one of these pets, they have to have taken this talent. The rest of us can't tame them.

Devilsaur, Core Hound, Chimera, Silithid, Rhino, Spirit Beast, Worm

Pets in general are now a much bigger part of a Hunter's DPS than they were pre-patch. Especially for BM Hunters obviously, but in all trees having your pet die is a pretty massive DPS gimp, so Hunters need to be able to micromanage their pets so they don't die, and healers need to treat pets as being a bigger part of the group than before (not a problem in this guild happily) Especially if said pet happens to be tanking your instance! :)

The Talent Trees

**Work in Progress**

A lot of experimentation is still going on, but this is the basics of things you might've noticed when grouping with Hunters lately.

Expose Weakness no longer affects the whole raid.
Trueshot Aura does.
All trees have quite nice group buffs.
So do some pets.

Kill Command no longer has a trigger. It just has a 1 min cooldown. Fire it every time it's up.

Shot Mechanics
This won't really be as interesting for non-Hunters, but for the rest of us, this is big! Auto Shot is now unlinked from your specials. What this basically means is you no longer need a degree in math to maximise your DPS. Shot rotations are something I encourage all of you to try out for yourself as they are still very much being debated in the Hunter community as to which is best, but if you want a quick 'skip-to-the-end version of what some other Hunters are doing...

BM Hunters: Steady Shot (yes that's it! Autos will weave in automatically creating something similar to the old 3:2 rotation Don't forget your Scorpid Sting on bosses.

MM Hunters : Steady Shot, weave in Multi and Aimed Shot, and work your stings to maximise Chimera Shot, which you will fire whenever it's up.

SV Hunters: Serpent Sting, followed by Steady Shot using Arcane, Multi Shot and Explosive Shot whenever Lock and Load procs.




Edited, Oct 30th 2008 6:14pm by Rasen

Just an FYI Moths are not exotic.

You can also weave in Multi-Shots and Aimed-Shots in for added damage. Don't forget that when the expansion hits, we also receive Kill Shot.


Might do well to note that you need to apply a Serpent Sting for Lock and Load to proc. What SV hunters want to work on is throwing in Multi-Shots (possibly Aimed if they spec'd that way but that's after the expansion), as well as Kill Shot (when the expansion comes out).

Of course Kill Shot only works when the mob is 30% health and lower, but it does great damage for any spec, BM, MM, or SV. When you receive this shot, try to weave it in as much as possible.