OutDPS!

So, for anyone who didn’t check MMO champion this weekend, there was another MLG tournament (3v3 arena). eMg won, running alternately BM hunter/Enh shm/Disc Priest and BM hunter/Enh Shm/Holy Pld. Grats to them on a job well done, but I have to say the stars really aligned for them. Only 1 RMP made it to the final round of the tournament, and they were eliminated almost instantly. Why that happened and what coL (team complexity) could have done about it is fodder for another post. There were several world-class RMPs at the tournament, however, and more of them didn’t advance mostly because the RMPs were feeding on each other while the cleaves fed on them. coL proved themselves the best RMP-killing RMP team at the tournament, but they struggled the whole time against the cleave teams. The korean RMP, Button Bashers, had shown themselves adept at beating cleaves, and would have flourished, had they only qualified for the final round by finishing top 4 in round robin play. Unfortunately, the other RMPs mostly farmed Button Bashers, and all of Orangemarmalade and Numberone’s heroic play against the cleaves was for naught. SK US has proved cleaves beatable, and rarely struggled to beat hunter teams in the past, but they couldn’t advance either. So the lack of all these RMPs that would have really punished eMg in the last round really helped them a lot. They also lucked out by fighting e6tence in the finals, a Spanish team that tried to run a lot of comps, including eMg’s own comp (in the finals, no less) against them…why they thought they could beat eMg at their own game is a mystery to all of us, I’m sure.

In any case, I’m sure those of you who saw the tournament are now wondering whether hunters are really as bad as some of us make ourselves out to be, or if hunters (or BM spec, at least) has potential at a high level of arena play. Well, there’s no short answer to that question, but I’ll try to be brief. Hunters do better in tournaments than they do on live because they can generally figure out what comp or comps their opponents will run in advance, and plan for it. If you watched the tournament, both Twixz of eMg and Siler(sp?) of e6tence, who got on a hunter several times, switched pets a lot. Worm for cleaves, Core Hound for caster teams. This kind of thing isn’t really possible on live, because it’s hard to know what you’ll be playing in advance. But hunters can do really well on live already, if you haven’t noticed.

So what’s the deal? Why are so few of us glads/rank 1s? The bottom line is a lot of our abilities that should be off the gcd aren’t, and a lot of the others are buggy or generally unreliable. RoS not making you completely crit immune, deterrence being ineffective against ranged attacks and spells that were in the air when you cast it, entrapment not actually doing what the tooltip says it should do even after 3.2, etc. The list really does go on. Not to mention the fact that the best players often see so few teams running hunters, and decide that they aren’t going to run with hunters either. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point. We really are shut down easily, especially on really poorly designed maps like Dalaran Sewers, and we’re so susceptible to CC that it blows my mind, so I can’t blame all the pro players on live who won’t group with hunters.

As for eMg, a lot of people are wondering if “Beast Cleave” or the comp(s) eMg ran at the tournament really are viable. Well, to be perfectly honest, no one knows. I planned on trying out eMg’s comp, with small variations, well before I even knew that MLG Dallas was happening (seriously, I did!). Not that it matters. My point is I think the comp has potential, even if it’s a longshot. In any case, Blizzard failed to kill cleave with patch 3.2, and if you can’t beat ‘em…well, you know what to do :). One advantage that playing on live gives “Beast Cleave” is that the hunter has the option of speccing MM. On the tournament realm, the only ranged weapons that are available never received the dps increase that was given to all 226+ ilvl weapons several months ago. This hurts MM dmg quite a lot, seeing how it’s almost all based on weapon damage. On live, however, this is a nonissue, so it should be possible to beat even really good RMPs with this comp, something eMg notoriously failed to do at the tournament this weekend (their comp went into the tournament being touted as the “RMP killer”. Whether they picked the moniker themselves or some errant shoutcaster applied it to them, I can’t say for sure). Of course, if the hunter is MM, the cleave would no longer be so beast-y, but sometimes we all have to make sacrifices…

I also plan on playing the comp a little differently. Hunters and Enhance shamans definitely don’t have unlimited mana, but they aren’t as limited by mana as mages/shadow priests/moonkin druids, so perhaps the Beast Cleave can be run as more of an outlast setup. This will require heavy CCing, something that should be doable with a druid healer instead of paladin. I should add that I think the comp is definitely viable with a priest healer, but your ability to outlast the other team’s mana would be seriously diminished.

Now, with s7 beginning after maintenance on Tuesday, we have a lot of work to do, don’t we? That’s right, we have to farm honor, get our gems and enchant mats together, and figuring out exactly how we’re going to reach the hitcap this time around [ed: there will be a full featured gearing post coming soon]. I would look at all the available options. For instance, check out the WG items. There are pvp trinkets that give you hit/crit/AP as well as resil, and I have all 4 for diff situations. In WG, you can buy pants with hit rating, and with emblems of triumph you can buy a trinket with 128 hit rating on it (activated for 1k+ AP). Explore all your gearing options, while keeping 3 general rules in mind: Always be hitcapped, I believe 164 is the magic number (5%); try not to go to below 700 resil; and be creative when it comes to enchants. For instance, I bought 2 bracers so I could put 50 AP on one and 40 stam on the other. I also bought 2 of the resilience necks and cloaks, 1 each with hit and crit, which gave me a lot of flexibility when it came to gearing.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with BGs. On the one hand, I have fond memories of my crew that used to run organized BGs at 60 (and helped me get high warlord), and on the other, I find myself dreading the honor grind I am forced into with every new season. But with S7 beginning in less than a day, I’ve decided this season I’m going to make a change. I’ve been grinding BGs all week getting honor capped and using honor to buy gems and getting capped again, and with the right mind set I find I’m enjoying it. I make it my object to get as many KBs (killing blows) as I can, and this is actually doable as a hunter. The trick is to put on your pve gear, but use all the crit/resil pvp stuff you have in place of your hit gear. My gear is probably average compared to the typical hunter who still raids these days, and I find myself, after I’ve dropped down to about 180 hit rating, with like 5100 AP and 44 crit or so. Spec MM and get all the damage talents + scatter shot, entrapment, and LnL and just own people from 41 yds away. 10k Chimera shots never get old, especially in AV where you can 1-shot all the lowbies trying to level up since the patch.

Happy grinding folks,
-Jurgwena