OutDPS!

‘Sup folks! Today we’re going to discuss the popular hunter team compositions. Disclaimer: There are a ton of comps that qualify as “viable,” even for a statistically weak class like hunter, but you need to be with competent players. I don’t even have experience with most of the comps I see hunters 2.7k+ with, and could never match their ratings without a season’s worth of practice. The most important thing to remember with arenas is that, like in raids, Blizzard wants you to bring the player, not the class, so don’t spend all your time chasing the new “flavor of the month” or you’ll never have any fun. I think I’ll limit today’s discussion to 3v3.

One last comment before I get into the discussion. Going up in rating often requires you to respec/reglyph to counter the teams you may be facing a lot. If you’re not willing to spend a lot of gold, don’t expect to break 2500 easily in any bracket. Experimentation is key, and I’d much rather you’d read what I have to say, decide that it’s crap and find your own style than take my advice and never deviate from my spec/glyph/comp suggestions or ever try to think for yourself.

Marksmanship has some particular strengths, including interrupts and controlled burst, while survival gives you less control and more sustained damage, with fewer prerequisites to your damage than MM forces on you. Because of this, no matter what comp you may be running, survival will be stronger against cleave teams who don’t give you time to setup (and frequently have healers who can dispel poison), but MM will help you a lot against caster teams like rogue/mage/priest (RMP), rogue/lock/shaman (RLS), and spellcleave (any 3v3 team that consists of two caster dps). Being able to switch back and forth between specs can be handy, but it’s not as useful as it once was because Blizzard recently made it impossible for you to face the same team twice in arenas within a 2 min time frame. Once the two minutes has elapsed, you are eligible to play them again, however.

Without further ado, the comps:

Hunter/Ret Paladin/Resto Shaman
This comp has been popular ever since 3.0, when hunters and ret paladins got a lot of strong buffs. This comp works best with a MM hunter by far, but cleave is just so popular these days that you can get by with survival too. Basically your goal is to end the game in the first 30 seconds, which is why you can afford to skip a lot of the mana efficiency talents in the MM tree. This also makes all the longevity that survival affords you mana-wise useless, another reason to avoid speccing surv. You should be looking to burst someone down quickly every game, with short-duration crowd control like scatter/repentance going out on the healer as soon as the fight starts. The nice thing about this kind of CC is that it all has such short duration that the enemy healer will probably not trinket out of them, and if they do, you can hit them with a trap or a hex.

This comp has no ability to outlast because resto shamans are very squishy and run out of mana fast. If your paladin is slow with the dispels, hand of sacrifice/freedom/protection, or can’t divine shield properly, you will suffer for it. Try and bring every fight out into the open. If your shaman is running behind pillars to hide from the other team’s dps, they might just chase him back there, and out of your line of sight. Avoid this at all costs by fighting out in the open. Even if you’re more exposed, you should (but not always, because this game is awesome!) be able to outdps [ed: I see what you did there- nice] the other team, at least in the first 30 seconds. Make sure no one on your team is shy with his or her cooldowns. If you’re fighting a warrior or shaman, have your paladin use seal of corruption, as they can’t get away/get rid of the dot stack easily. For everything else seal of righteousness will suffice.

This comp also works fairly well with a priest or druid, but priests and druids can occasionally fall into the trap of being too defensive, which will not work for this comp. If you want to use one of these healers, they need to realize that they are there to CC and even dps the other team, as well as heal. Shamans can’t really afford to assist in the dps, but they compensate for that with bloodlust/heroism.

Hunter/Warlock/Resto Shaman (or druid)

This comp was great in season 5 because hunters could keep their partners alive with the old roar of sacrifice. They finally gave this ability back to hunters in a watered down form, but Hunter/Lock/Shaman still isn’t back yet. Shaman just don’t have the longevity in terms of mana, nor the survivability. Replacing the shaman with a druid can be very successful, however. I have seen a high 2800 Hunter/Lock/Druid team, and plenty of people play locks and druids so you should be able to find partners to try out this comp (if you can persuade them to play with a hunter instead of a warrior). The team put out a video, which you can find here.

This particular team runs with the hunter as MM, which works for them because they coordinate their interrupts very well. The hunter also has impeccable positioning at all times and knows when to CC and when to burst. If you feel you can achieve this level of coordination, I would give the comp a shot. Running as survival would give you more margin for error dps-wise, but you would not be able to setup the cc and interrupt-chains that you otherwise could with readiness and silencing shot.

Hunter/Holy Paladin/DK

This comp is very straight-forward. Anyone who watched MLG Columbus knows that the strat is pretty simple: find the clothie and kill it. Beast mastery was a popular spec for hunters running this comp after that tournament, but survival will get you way more mileage against cleaves. I can’t advocate MM in this comp. Hunter/DK synergy in general is bad, and you can expect to lose to warlock teams unless you spec BM and burst them down quickly. I would suggest the paladin not speccing prot/holy for this. DKs have gone through a lot of changes lately so I can’t really suggest what might work best for the DK in this comp, except perhaps to find a warrior partner instead of hunter :P.

Hunter/Enhance or Elemental Shaman/Druid

I think this comp is an underused one that will see a lot of action in s7. Hunters and shaman have a lot of offensive capability, and druids have a lot of defensive capability, so there’s plenty of synergy here. I’ve played the comp a lot with an ele shaman, and it was insanely fun. I would suggest being SV for this comp, although if the spellcleave is getting on your nerves you can always swap to MM. My shaman used to split off dps from me on occasion and then call for an assist and we would kill things that way. I didn’t play this comp as much as I would have liked, and I’m really interested in trying it with an enhance shaman. As long as you pace yourself and don’t go for the early gib game after game you should be able to pull out those wins against any team you face. Rogue/lock/shaman as always will be a problem, and I can’t remember who exactly we focused, but ele shamans excel at killing rogues. You can’t go wrong by forcing cloak of shadows and then killing him. Make sure to keep the warlock locked down with interrupts. If he gets any casts off at all, you will pay for it dearly.

Hunter/Warrior/Druid

I’ve been running this comp a little bit lately in the 2100 bracket with a prot warrior and resto shaman, and I think it has a lot of potential with a resto druid, at least. The prot warrior can absolutely lock down any melee while you melt the caster, and then all you have to do is coordinate a switch when someone is low and the healer is CCed. The warrior obviously has to have a full block set with all the PvE gear that entails, but this comp can be a lot of fun. Against warlock teams, you will want to train them hard [ed: this means focus fire on one target, in this case the lock] without chasing them behind pillars, and switch to their melee or healer until the lock comes back out. This comp also requires your team to be clumped up to take advantage of the warrior’s shockwave and improved spell reflect. Use shattering throw and improved disarm to time a huge burst on someone, as well as concussion blow, but this set up is more about outlasting so your warrior should use cooldowns for control before he uses them to line up burst opportunities.

That’s it for now, folks. Next time we can discuss more specific arena strats, or 5v5, or whatever else you want to talk about. Let me know!

-Jurgwena