Sometime early in s6, hunters looked at the talent hunter vs. wild and thought to themselves, what if I gemmed and enchanted completely for stamina? The desire to make a gimmicky kind of build work is understandable given how successful, in WOTLK alone, stuff like shadowfrost DKs (a phenomenon that appears to be making a comeback in the aptly named sfrost 2.0 spec), fan of knives rogues, and other specs were. These builds revolve around pressing 1 or 2 buttons and completely overwhelming the opponents with damage. Unfortunately for hunters, if there is a truly effective, gimmicky build out there, it has yet to be discovered. Today I will explain why stam-stacking isn’t worth it. The proof, I hope, is in the pudding. But first an explanation:
Hunter vs. wild can, at obscene levels of stamina, result in no net AP loss, and even a gain if you are a JCer/LWer. I have seen people reach 32k hp unbuffed in s6, and the sky’s the limit with the new gems and s7 gear that will be released soon. What you do end up sacrificing is crit, dodge, possibly some resil, and a huge chunk of self-respect. The purpose of stacking stam was to make the prospect of attacking you so unappealing that the other team would just ignore you and let you dps. So good so far, right? Not quite. Let’s see if we can poke some holes in this reasoning.
Reason 1:
If the goal is to improve survivability, is stamina really the answer? Hunters rely on short duration, activated cooldowns to keep themselves alive in a tight spot. Witness deterrence, disengage, master’s call, scatter shot, silencing shot, and feign death. Hunters have almost no passive defenses except for survival instincts, which is so pitiful they had to tack on a dps component so that we would even take it. Up until WOTLK, our mobility was crap, and it would remain crap today if not for master’s call and disengage. If you look at all of these talents, the only reasonable conclusion is that Blizzard intends hunters to survive by managing their cooldowns and their positioning. Stuck in place with melee bashing you? Master’s call. Mage frostbolting you? Feign death. Rogue chasing you across the bridge on Blade’s Edge? Disengage away.
Reason 2:
“Well, Blizzard intends a lot of things that never really come out in their actual design. Maybe stam-stacking really is the way?” Frankly, the classes that dominate us the most (mages, rogues, and warlocks) can make mince meat of us with or without the extra 7k hp buffer that stamina stacking affords us. The fact is if you get kidney shotted out of los of your healer with a warlock chaos bolting you, you are dead no matter what. Not to mention the fact that if you are gemming and enchanting for stam, you may be skipping some resil gems and enchants you’d otherwise have. Resil is the only reliable way to improve survivability, outside of playstyle. Again, not a huge factor considering there are stam/resil gems, but it’s something to consider.
Reason 3:
“I stack stam and never get focused, I’m doing way more damage than the lowly 24k hp hunter who gets killed, right?” Wrong. You could be doing as little or less damage as the dead hunter, because the other team opted to CC you instead of kill you. Even if your ploy to get them to leave you alone works, without using your abilities actively to avoid incoming CC, you’re just as useless as the hunter who got focused. Once you’ve run out of cooldowns to escape being CCed, you’re then vulnerable to attack, and as we saw in reason #2, a little extra HP won’t save you once your cooldowns are finished.
Reason 4:
“I think this is a creative use of game mechanics. You should stop hating.” Well, if this was a really creative use of game mechanics on the order of a rogue speccing deadly brew and throwing specialization and spamming fan of knives the whole game, why isn’t blizzard planning to nerf it in 3.2.2? Seriously, if it was that abusive, and really worth respeccing/regemming in order to take advantage of it, wouldn’t the nerf bat be hovering over it? Stam-stacking isn’t as flashy as fan of knives, and it’s not very creative, since all you’re doing is trading damage for survivability, but we are a dps class. We win by doing damage, and we lose when the pressure we put out is so low that the other team’s dps can nuke us freely/the other team’s healer(s) can CC us freely. Gimping your dps stats sets the bar even higher for yourself, when it’s already quite high for all non-rogue/DK/mage/warlocks.
At the end of the day it’s your choice how to spec and gear yourself. When it comes to damage dealing and surviving in PvP, there are words much more important than stamina. Words like cooldowns and positioning. And positioning doesn’t mean los-ing the enemy team while dots are ticking down on you and your healer is trying to figure out where you went. Positioning usually just means dpsing from a place where your healer can reach you easily without exposing him or herself. Hunters need to get down to business and learn the basics of arena before they worry about the newest fad in gemming or gearing.
-Jurgwena
Euripides
jurgwena
lemli
eidotrope
pherra
femaledwarf
Shadowstreak
Very interesting post there, keep it up ;]
Jurg. I have a related question, sort of. It’s along the lines of gemming/speccing for pvp and in a way pve. I hear people saying use AP if your BM and Agi if your SV, and Marks I believe. The argument was that pets benefit from AP not Agi but I was under the impression that since Agi gives AP wouldnt it kind of be…well the same? or is the logic purely in place because of the 1 to 1 ratio that Agi gives AP and AP gems being double the agi ones?