What exactly is the right mindset? Well, you have to approach your games with the analytical skills of the scientist. Sometimes FRAPSing games can be helpful for review, but this can be hard to watch between queues, so you also want to cultivate the ability to vividly playback in your mind as much of the game as you can remember.

But first, let’s talk about the analytical part. Every time you go into a game, you want your whole team to be on the same page as far as the strategy. Once you’re inside the game, everyone has to be committed to what you plan to do, and there can be no second-guessing each other.

Once the strat has been settled on and the game played out, then you can sit back and try to figure out what went wrong. Even when you win, you probably made mistakes, so figuring out why you won is just as important as figuring out why you lost, unless you’re absolutely positive you will NEVER see that team again because you beat them so thoroughly they all deleted their character :P. If you lost and think this happened because of poor execution, then you should discuss this with your teammates and try the same strat again. If you executed perfectly and still lost, it may be time to modify the strat.

Of course, other factors such as RNG (a fancy term for “luck”) and gear exist, which can play a role whenever there is a large disparity. It’s usually not as big a deal as people think, however. You have to try and isolate what the major factors were in the outcome of the match- most people will do this naturally, but if you don’t discuss it on vent, your team will never be able to benefit from experience!

OK, so you discuss everything, you watched the replay, you know exactly what went wrong… or do you? Because everyone can only watch their own screen (and usually not even everything that happens on that screen) what happens is everyone gets a different perspective of the match. You must realize that you can’t see everything that happened, but one of your teammates probably did, so ask them to find out what was going on.

Aside from that, your responsibility is to keep track of as many things as humanly possible during a game, if for no other reason than it increases your chances of figuring out what went wrong. Importantly, you are not perfect and you can not have seen everything- there are multiple viewpoints and sometimes they are both at least partially correct, so be patient.

-Jurgwena

For anyone who missed it, a beast cleave team just won another 3v3 tournament last Sunday night, so I’m sure the excitement surrounding this comp, on the forums and elsewhere, has been renewed. This comp really thrives on the TRs in a way that I don’t think it can on live, Toez’s team notwithstanding. The reasons for this are myriad, the main one being the skill cap required to play a holy paladin in a non-TSG comp.

The amount of CCs and interrupts flying around with all the variations of wizard cleave that exist means you need a paladin who can predict damage on teammates and stay out of the line of fire simultaneously. As someone who has played with Toez extensively, I can tell you that he does this as naturally as breathing. For most others, it is a struggle, and any slip-up will result in drastically reduced chances of victory. Another problem is the gear that is currently available. Casters are hitting levels of haste that are nothing but fever dreams on the TR. CCs that are interrupted in s5 gear will go off in s7/ICC gear, no problem. So with an excellent shaman, who can predict the casts and interrupt the right thing consistently (remember a spellcleave has 3 different people casting) you have a chance at high rating. In addition, trinkets like Reign of the Dead increase caster burst substantially, whereas casters on the TR have nothing like that to count on. One final, less significant reason is the prevalence of melee cleaves. There are very few of those around these days, but probably more on live than there are on the TR, and they trash hunters with little difficulty.

I don’t want to trash anyone’s hopes regarding beast cleave, just keep in mind these factors, and the fact that you can change comps on the TR (which the winning team did several times). It’s a fun comp to run, but it’s very gimmicky and stops working reliably when people begin to adapt to you.

The next comp I’ll discuss I have a little more familiarity with than I do with beast/turtle cleave. It is hunter/elemental shaman/holy paladin. It’s a very straightforward comp, it basically gives you the option of training mages (something most hunter comps can’t afford to do). It REALLY struggles with warrior teams. Your only real chance of beating a team with an arms warrior is to blow him up in the first 5 seconds before his healer(s) can react. Double healer teams will actually let their warrior die, and the warrior is more likely not to shield wall because he thinks he has 2 healers spamming him, but once they are wise to your strat, well, you can figure out what happens to your chances. Still, the blitzkrieg usually works the first time on most wars, just drag him out of los after the charge and make sure your entire team is nuking him. Use a pve dps rotation (in other words highest damage shot first, even before aimed shot), because the whole point is to kill him before he catches a heal. And then it’s time to queue dodge ;). A holy paladin who can manage his mana well (or has Solace of the Fallen) is necessary for this comp.

The next comp I want to discuss is the one I’ve been running most recently, and is really the only comp I’ve ever truly enjoyed in 3v3 (and I do mean ever. It is hunter/ret paladin/resto shaman. I’ve been running with a prot-ret paladin, which has very strict gear requirements (read: must have gold and a pve guild), and it has been incredibly fun. Prot-rets have great survivability, one huge advantage over normal rets (although the comp is decent with a plain ret paladin), and the damage difference isn’t noticeable. You lose repentance, of course, which doesn’t really matter considering it shares diminishing returns with hex and freezing trap. Prot paladins use seal of corruption, which means they can do devastating damage on anyone who has a max stack of corruption on them.

In a nutshell, you can beat any warrior team very easily. To put this in perspective, with a prot-ret paladin, out of ~150 games, we lost to a team with an arms warrior once. We also beat them the second time we played them, so yeah. The flipside is good spellcleaves and any run of the mill RMP will give you a run for your money. The trick is to focus whoever you and your paladin can stick on the best (i.e. not mages) and interrupt healers. Interrupting healers, rather than whoever is trying to CC you, means that your dps target will very quickly have to go defensive and will therefore stop trying to dps you. This is the ideal scenario, at least, even though the remaining dps will just be training you mercilessly and your hp will spike the whole game. Things get really hairy if you try to attack something that has outs, though, like frost mages, paladins, warlocks with a properly placed demonic portal (the counter to this being charging the lock and fighting him on top of his portal).

If you ever find yourself in a position where you can’t dps your preferred target but someone on their team is still dpsing you, you can always try to gib the dps that remains in range, but be ready to jump back to your first target immediately. With this comp you can’t survive long enough to run two people out of defensive cooldowns, especially where classes like rogues and MM hunters who have several rounds of cooldowns are concerned. So pick a target, change off when you have to, and get back on it as soon as possible. For warrior teams, you should never really need to get off him, unless he’s prot and very good, in which case if the initial gib doesn’t work, the next game (you will have lost the first one by this point) just kill his hunter. Your shaman must be on top of interrupts on the healer, make sure you coordinate your own interrupts with him if you’re not interrupting your dps target, and you should do fine.

Again, the comp works fine with a normal ret, but rets go down pretty quickly, and most of them won’t even glyph salv, further reducing their survivability. Suffice it to say prot-ret is preferred. I know I”m gushing, but prot-ret paladins really do seem to solve all of a hunter’s problems in arenas. Your only weakness will be lack of snares, but if your ret judges justice and you have concussive barrage and spam concussive shot when an opportunity presents itself you should make do just fine.

Remember, the keys to arena are remembering to do these things: making a focus target at the start of the match; coordinating your interrupts and CC with your shaman; and sacrificing/deterrencing early. Don’t let your shaman get opened on without having your pet in LOS of him to sacrifice, and never let a warlock get a UA/immolate off. Your paladin must SPAM dispels to get fears and polys off (sometimes you will get feared out of range of tremor and dispels, but if it happens at the start of the match don’t be afraid to trinket, you really don’t have time to eat a full fear if they try to kill your shaman).

That’s all for now folks, stay tuned for a forthcoming pvp video!

-Jurgwena

As we should all know by now, IoC is won by defeating the opposing team’s general or running them totally out of resources. The latter method of winning is almost impossible and should never be attempted. If one were forced to attempt this by mysterious and unimaginable forces, I would suggest capping the oil refinery and quarry and trying to defend them, because they act like the mines do in Alterac Valley and award resources to whichever team controls them. These 2 nodes have a much more important function, and that is increasing the siege damage you do. Even if one is trying to win by the standard method of breaking down a wall and killing the general, I wouldn’t expend too much effort in capping these nodes. Checking to see if one of them is undefended and capping it over if it is would the most I would do. This isn’t to say they aren’t useful, it’s just that there’s more useful things you can do (see below).

The other 3 nodes all help you break down the opposing team’s wall more directly. The dock and workshop give you vehicles. The dock’s vehicles are much better, so you should try to cap the dock at all costs. If you fail to capture the dock, then wait till the other team captures it and suicide attack their glaive throwers until they have none left. Then try to recap the dock and use your glaives on their wall. Please don’t touch the glaive if you’ve never done it before, as you will drastically reduce your team’s chance of winning. Simply hop in a catapult and send yourself into the enemy keep and grab bombs from the pile to sabotage the keep’s defenses from the inside. If you think you can handle the glaive thrower, then get in one and start shooting down the west wall of whichever keep you’re trying to get into. Be aware that the glaives have huge range and you should take the time to position them in a place that is as far from the enemy keep as possible. You should also try and put your glaive in a place where it can’t be attacked by people who are hiding behind a hill or under a bridge and shooting through the terrain. The glaives have very low hp so all this effort is crucial to your success. Try to encourage your teammates to defend the glaives once you have them.

Now, the workshop is useless because the dock’s vehicles are way better, but how about the hangar? The fact is that by using the hangar to get your entire team into the enemy keep at the start of the fight, you can bring down a wall faster than you would using any other means. However, this requires a lot of coordination and so I wouldn’t bother with this strat unless you have an organized group. Also, controlling at least one of the 2 nodes that enhance your team’s siege damage would be useful if you really wanted to pull this off. Unless you are in a team that is group queuing this BG, I would never ever ever bother with the hangar, as it is a complete waste of time in a pug.

If you like to defend, then you can hop in the turrets that line the ramparts of each keep. Trying to kill these turrets is futile because any friendly player can make a turret respawn with full hp instantly simply by right-clicking it.

That re-sums up Isle of Conquest!

-Jurgwena

The number one thing to remember about positioning is that no matter how good a reason you had to “line of sight” (or LOS) your opponents (and in the process, your teammates), it was a mistake unless you told your teammates that you were going to do it. If you prepare your teammates for a move, then it’s on them to execute it well, but if you don’t call out in advance what you want to do and what you want them to do, then it’s your fault when the shit hits the fan. It sounds easy enough, but most people won’t bother to cue their mic to let everyone know where they’re going, and that’s a huge problem. But more on this later.

There’s really two parts to positioning: defensive positioning and offensive positioning. I’ll talk about defensive positioning first, but allow me define my terms.

Defensive positioning is any movement you take towards a position in order to mitigate the damage you’re taking (or to heal up), whereas offensive positioning is any movement or configuration you and your team takes in order to get a kill on someone. Defensive positioning is the kind of positioning that’s easier to plan in advance, and it becomes a big deal when your healers, in particular, have to make a decision between being in LOS or not. If there’s a serious threat to them when they’re in LOS, such as being mana burned or polymorphed or whatever, then defensive positioning becomes crucial. Your healer should be letting you know that he will be behind such and such pillar healing until he has to run back, so if the pressure gets too intense you know where to fall back to. This was really important in BC where games were slower paced and mana was paramount. Nowadays, it’s not that big a deal unless you’re one of the 20 people on every battlegroup who really takes 2s very seriously. This isn’t to say you should never change positioning during a fight except to facilitate a kill, but it does mean that defensive positioning is something you REALLY don’t want to overthink. Because there is rarely time these days to retreat back to a safer place (and, on some maps, rarely a safe place to retreat to) without totally sacrificing your ability to put pressure on the other team, 95% of the time it’s best to just make sure your whole team is in LOS of each other, especially in 5v5. Outranging or LOSing your healer for a split second in 5v5 will cost you the game. Sometimes, as much as it might kill you, you just have to trust your teammates to do their job locking down the other side’s dps :P

There’s much more that can be said on defensive positioning in particular, but the only additional comment I will make here regards a mistake I see healers make all the time in 2v2 and 3v3. They tend to panic when a teammate outranges or LOSes them, so they will abandon the pillar they were using to LOS the other team, and come in range of everyone just to get a shield or a heal off. THIS IS NOT GOOD. The healer should see what his dps is doing and where he’s going, and call him back when he’s obviously going too far. It seems so simple, but it so rarely happens. Tunnelvisioning is bad, but healers (like parents who spoil their children too much) encourage it by bending over backwards to keep their teammates alive. As weird as it may sound at first, healing is only part of what a healer does in an arena. He also has to avoid being casted on as much as possible, or being caught out in the open and trained down.

Offensive positioning is a complex issue, and even more complex for hunters so stay tuned at the end for more on that. What you want to do in every game is decide whether you can afford to let the other team come to you. On the one hand, if you wait for them to come to you, you can set up all you want and come up with contingencies for whenever the shit hits the fan. On the other hand, if the team you’re playing needs time at the start of every match to setup and decide how they want to tackle your team, then it comes down to whose planning and/or team composition is better. If, however, you have absolutely nothing to gain by sitting around and waiting for them to attack you, then you can just say screw it all and run in to fight on top of them. I would encourage the latter strategy if your composition has a lot of spammable cc, but obviously this is very subjective advice and sometimes the only way to figure out what you need to do is to lose a couple times. [snip-see comment section for revised example]. So you need to decide with your team on a case by case basis what the best way to tackle any given team is. Just make it clear to your healer that he isn’t a dps class and should really avoid being right in the middle of things when the fight gets underway :) they seem to forget this fact on a regular basis. The other thing I would caution everyone on is chasing people behind a pillar. Sometimes it’s a great idea, sometimes it’s not, and there’s no reliable gauge for predicting the right choice. Just make sure everyone knows if you want to chase or if you don’t, and if you don’t, be ready to find the next target.

Hunters need to be especially wary of positioning. It can be the pivotal factor against any team we play, more important than differences in gear, skill, and coordination combined. If you run with only 1 healer in 3v3, and 2 in 5v5, then you really want to bring every fight into the open as much as you can. Pets can be hard to micro-manage, and if your healer is LOSing you, he’s probably also LOSing your pet, which will make it difficult to get a roar of sacrifice out in time. In 3v3 if you have a priest or shaman healer, you really want your healer to stay mounted and have him be ready to run as far from the opposing team’s melee as possible. Hunters have notoriously bad peels, and it can be hard to get a warrior or rogue off your healer once he gets on. Additionally, when we are being focused by melee teams, our inability to shoot in melee forces us to kite, but our desire to avoid taking damage prevents us from merely kiting back and forth in a tight formation. Our natural inclination is always to just go really far in one direction until we have to turn around, but it’s important that this impulse be resisted. I can’t tell you the number of times I died right out in the open when my healer was in LOS of me because I dipped out of range for a split second. Disengage is another 2-edged sword (like all of our pitiful excuses for defensive cooldowns) which often takes us farther than we’d like to go, or into random objects that block our path, or off of ledges taking us out of the fight for awhile. Kiting in a sort of small triangle formation is what I’d advocate for in any bracket above 2v2, so that the risk of errors with disastrous consequences can be minimized regarding range and LOS.

Chasing is always dangerous for a hunter, but especially so in dalaran sewers. Attacking someone who is humping those boxes is a good way to get feared/polyed/novad, or swapped to once you’re out of LOS of your healer. On RoV you want to be hyper-aware of the pillars and which ones are going up/coming down. The second a pillar goes down, you need to be ready to find a target and kill it, because once your target gets back to a pillar you’re screwed. Alternately, if you’re being focused, you need to know where to run. The most important thing hunters should remember is that having targets run out of LOS is inevitable, but you MUST be ready for it and switch to another target once your first one escapes (or agree that your teammate is going to chase, and you are going to bide your time).

The ultimate goal of this post was to express to you the importance of making your intentions explicit over vent. All the thoughts you have in an arena regarding who you’re going to burst, cc, and kite/LOS should be mentioned so there is no duplication, and therefore waste, of effort. I still don’t call out my scatters, it’s a terrible habit but I find it so hard to kick =/. Good luck guys, I wish you all success with a fun but tricky class.

-Jurgwena

The Rush:

People often do this at least once in their lives to get the achievement for winning AV in 6 minutes or less. The shortest I’ve seen was a 5 minute game. The strat is very straightforward: you just convince everyone on your team to rush for the general as fast as possible. Just make sure you bring a pair of competent tanks and healers with you, because there’s no guarantee you’ll find any useful pugs in the game you join. Unfortunately, winning AV this way makes for really bad honor. You might get 400-600, tops, whereas during AV weekend I’ve gotten 2600 or 2700 honor for a single game. I suppose if you are honor capped and just wanted AV tokens you could try doing this repeatedly, but I’m pretty sure either the pugs who were helping you would lose patience after awhile, or the opposing team might catch on and try to stop you, at which point it would be come almost impossible to recover once your force has been routed once. Without controlling any graveyards, you would probably be ported back to your base and be stuck in a turtle match.

The Stranglehold

If one really wanted to ensure victory and try to maximize honor in this BG, you could get a couple friends and go defend galv/balinda, and then recap everyone’s graveyard and tower in the wake of your opponents as they rushed down to your relief hut. With a dedicated group of 4 or 5, this isn’t hard to do at all. The downside of this method is that the game can turn into a turtle. Of course, if your team is on the ball and everyone who isn’t helping you is playing good offense, then the game may only take 15 mins or so. Just be patient, and once you’ve hamstrung the other team’s offense, go to whichever tower they still control that’s nearest to the field of strife, cap it, and guard it until it’s a flaming heap of stone. Then go to the next one down the line, and so on and so forth until the enemy is ~200 resources, at which point you can afford to try for the general.

Cheers,
Jurgwena

• The first thing you should do every time the gate opens is make a focus target. Even if you have to change your focus mid-game, at least make one at the start to get in the habit and remind you during the game to pay attention to more than just your main target.
• Learn to be patient. Sometimes you will come up against a team that you can’t see how to beat right away. Just play as you would normally and wait for them to slip up. Once someone on their team does something dumb, like trinketing a snare or popping Avenging Wrath, you can capitalize on it. Likewise, avoid making stupid decisions just because you think you can’t win. The other team is waiting for you to do something stupid too :)
• Call out all your cc. By this I mean you should tell your teammates before you use one of your cc abilities, so that you don’t overlap CC and waste diminishing returns. You should also call out for a dispel when you are cced. People seem to think it’s shameful to get cced and they keep quiet on vent. True skill is knowing you’re about to get cced and giving your teammates a head’s up so they can dispel you. Note that I didn’t say “call out when you are cced,” I said “call out for a dispel when you’re cced.” Your healer will probably be busy healing while you’re being cced, and if all you say over vent is “sheeped…” he might not be able to make the logical connection that he needs to dispel you right away. Top-notch players will be able to understand what you really mean, but if you have someone that good on your team then you probably don’t need my advice :). So make sure to call out for a dispel specifically.
• Skype > Ventrilo
• Get in the habit of asking your teammates when their major abilities are up like repentance and death grip. If your teammates are just using abilities like this whenever they see fit, it will be hard to take advantage of them, and you will lose to teams that can coordinate better than you. Make it clear to your teammates you aren’t just subtly reminding them to use that ability, that you really want to know if it’s up so that you can organize some cc and get a kill somewhere.

And that’s it! Anyone who can regularly implement these 5 steps in arenas will see a big jump in ratings, guaranteed. But it takes time, so learn to be patient, and don’t try to make excuses.

-Jurgwena

I’ve been having a ton of fun in arenas as MM, especially in 5v5. I’ve been finding readiness to be invaluable in locking down pesky casters like mages, locks, and ele shamans, however knowing which spells to interrupt can be tricky. Always try to get the lava burst, but if a mage is casting on you, it’s better to interrupt him when he tries to polymorph your healer and just tank the frostbolts. If a mage is casting on your healer, however, just interrupt the bolts to help keep your healer alive, because you can feign death or deterrence when he tries to sheep you. Warlocks are tricky, too. Interrupt the fear, or the chaos bolt. You have to play it by ear, but it’s going to take the help of a teammate to keep a warlock locked out. Warlocks can just fear us and go wild, so putting a hunter alone against a warlock never works.

I’ve also specced some talents that in the past I’ve gone on the record defaming. I now swear by such talents as wild quiver (it never occurred to me until I learned recently that this ability ignores your target’s armor) and concussive barrage now- I find them invaluable when it comes to burst damage and kiting, respectively.

Lately I’ve been having a really rough time in arenas with all the spell cleave teams. I’d say you should be at 900 resil to compete against a spell cleave team. Also, using a pet with roar of sacrifice is now necessary with all the burst that people are capable of. One thing to realize about the spell cleave teams is that they will ping-pong from target to target until their opponents run out of cooldowns to escape or defend themselves. Try to use roar of sacrifice as quickly as possible once you know the casters have picked a target. If you wait too long, chances are they will just switch off and hit someone else (probably you) and your roar will be wasted. If you want a clue to who they will hit next, see who is stuck in a polymorph or a fear. Chances are they will load up on that person, because he won’t be able to get behind a pillar or pre-heal himself.

Some advice for hunters with established teams: use one of your brackets for points and use your other to teamhop. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing different comps with different people, even in the same day. It’s really fun to play against the same team and lose to them with one comp and defeat them with another. Teamhopping always helps me enjoy arenas more, and it prevents me from taking myself and my ratings too seriously :)

I’ve been playing on a lot of teams with DKs lately, and I have to reverse myself on another opinion I’ve been known to express, specifically that DKs and hunters have no synergy. In fact, a hunter’s main problems are casters who can dps with two schools of magic and melee who sit in our deadzone, and DKs can help us against both with stuff like anti-magic zone, mind freeze, ghoul stun, death grip etc. A DK’s main weakness is being snared, and we can help them out with master’s call. Obviously, you can’t just pop all these cooldowns at once, so get your DK to call for snare removal, and get in the habit of coordinating your interrupts with him.

One final note, for anyone looking for any insight on the next flavor of the month hunter comp: hunter/shadow priest/healer is getting popular and will be buffed a ton in 3.3. Find a shadow priest and a healer and have fun! I’d recommend survival for this comp if you want to run it. If you want to know how to beat it, wait till you’re all dotted up then run behind a pillar and get healed up before re-engaging. Once the shadow priest gets dots rolling you’re in for a world of hurt. If your healer can’t top you up even after you’ve LOSed the priest/hunter, try CCing the priest. If they are using a paladin healer, CCing the priest won’t work well so you’re just going to have to train him to keep him locked down, but if they have a druid or shaman healer you should be able to keep the priest stunned/feared/slept/scattered/silenced/trapped the whole fight. Shadow priests run out of mana quickly, so just drag the fight out and you’ll win. Whatever you do, do not underestimate this comp, it does sick damage.

-Jurgwena

This is the one battleground that really rewards zerging. Sometimes a small organized group will queue into EotS and just travel clockwise from node to node, capping them over in a few seconds and sweeping up all the pugs in its wake, and there’s no way for the opposing team to resist. Most of the time, however, people just kind of do their own thing, as they do in all the battlegrounds. If you’re reading this, you want to know what I think is the best thing to do.

Well, I’ll tell you straight off that holding nodes is the most reliable way to gain resources, and the flag in the middle is more or less a distraction. You should be spending all your time either defending your nodes or assaulting the enemy’s, but because EotS rewards zerging, you should prioritize whichever task more of your teammates seem to be doing already. However, since puggers liken EotS to Arathi Basin in their minds, both sides will often cap 2 nodes apiece and then duke it out for the most flag caps. I won’t lie to you: some games will be decided by who caps the flag the most, but that doesn’t undermine my assertion that holding nodes is paramount. Far from it: the games that are determined by flag caps are long, and the outcome is always unpredictable. A pug that tries to control center could lose control of it at any moment, and just because your side got 3 early flag caps doesn’t mean some foolish lone ranger on your team won’t capture the flag while the enemy holds the center, and cost you control of the flag permanently.

This leads me to my single biggest point of advice for anyone playing EotS: if you have to play the flag cap game, do not cap the flag while the enemy controls the center! Said another way: if you don’t have a teammate in the middle ready to grab the next flag, then just hold onto the flag until you do. Think of it as a relay race, if that helps.

The way to win quickly and safely is to go to whichever node seems least defended, and either defend it if it’s yours and it’s being attacked, or attack it if it isn’t yours yet. As I said, try and go with the flow: if your teammates are all rushing Mage tower, help them until it caps over to your side and then go back to Fel Reaver and make sure you aren’t losing it the same way the other team lost Mage.

I have to caution you against playing EotS just like AB, though. Defending can be achieved by just a single player in AB and can turn the tide of a game. Defending a node in EotS is simple math: if you’re outnumbered or you can’t kill the enemy fast enough, you won’t get it back. So don’t waste your time running from node to node trying to protect them or get them back against overwhelming odds. While holding people off a node in AB is doable as long as your health bar lasts, it’s pointless in EotS when you could be helping your team cap another node somewhere across the map.

Similarly, trying to assault a node solo can be a waste of time unless you’re merely trying to stall the enemy’s resource gain (it only counts as stalling their resource gain if they’re trying to cap the flag, because they are getting resources based on the number of nodes they control, and capping one of theirs reduces the resources they gain, as well as the number of places they can safely take flag). After all, they could just send 3 guys to the node you capped over, kill you and recap it instantly. For this reason, if your team is in control of 2 nodes as well as the center and is capping the flag repeatedly, you would do much better to defend the nodes you already have, or the flag carrier, or the center (whichever seems to be in more trouble).

Also unlike AB, there are no nodes that are more preferable to control. Just hit them wherever they can’t fight back with as many people as you can get to help you. You also shouldn’t feel obligated to defend it once they send overwhelming reinforcements to get that node back. Since one node is just as good as another, there’s nothing to be lost by just moving on to capture the next one down the road, and nothing to be gained by valiantly defending your node against unrealistic odds and then spending 30 seconds waiting for a res.

Some of my fondest memories in this game happened in this battleground, and I’m crossing my fingers that rated BGs make some of this info relevant once again. For those who missed it, by the way, all flag caps in BGs are now 8 seconds, and this change will end up being very important in rated Arathi Basin. The difference between 10 and 8 seconds may not seem like much, but the new, reduced window of opportunity for interrupting a flag cap would have made a difference in nearly every organized AB game I played at 60, and I have a feeling it will again when the new level cap is 85.

Arathi Basin isn’t really about the battles (although whoever can capture the blacksmith at the start has increased their chances of winning by a ton), it’s more about strategy and defense. This is why pugs take so long in this BG- nobody defends anything, so every node gets capped and recapped 3 or 4 times which cripples resource gain. If you really want to win AB, you need to follow these tips:

1. Look at your map.
2. See #1.

This is really the most crucial thing to do: see what nodes have been left unguarded by your team, announce that the node is empty in battleground chat, and then go look for weak points in the enemy defense. More on this later.

When you first walk into Arathi Basin, you want to try and get everyone on the same page. Try and explain in /battleground that Lumber Mill and Blacksmith are the most important nodes [ed: I have macros for this :)]. Everyone knows that holding 3 nodes is the safest and easiest way to win AB, but what the casual pvper often doesn’t realize is when you control both lumber mill and blacksmith in conjunction with the farm or stables (and the farm is preferable, sorry alliance!), it forms a triangle of indefatigable strength! Depending on your faction, you basically get the farm or stables for free, and should be defending them as they represent early, easy resources that you might desperately wish you had in the late game. The mine is a terrible node (of course every horde side I’m on zergs the mine for whatever reason- I call this the gold rush) because it’s really far from the other nodes, which means it’s hard to reinforce in a timely manner, especially with the new 8 second cap time. The mine is also at a much lower altitude than everything else, which makes it impossible to keep track of enemy movement around other nodes while guarding the mine. The blacksmith, however, gives you perfect visibility, as well as easy access, to almost all the other nodes, or at least the approaches to all the other nodes, and similarly the lumber mill affords you a great view of the fight and easy access to farm and stables, as well as blacksmith via parachute cloak/slow fall/levitate.

As a pugger, however, what exactly can you do to contribute in this battleground? The main thing you can do is avoid getting tied down at any node (or in between nodes /shudder). When defending a node, you should be in the fight only as long as it takes to make sure that the attackers don’t outnumber the defenders and then you should FD, mount up and prepare to fend off the next assault, or make an assault of your own. Back at 60 I used to yell at my teammates nonstop (I was the raid leader, so I was allowed to be obnoxious) to mount up and get ready to rush off to the next node that the alliance were preparing to hit, because the worst thing that can happen to you in Arathi Basin is getting stuck in a protracted fight to defend or cap a node, while all the other nodes are being assaulted/defended around your ears.

If you’re not in a defending type of mood- and believe me I can sympathize- you should look for holes in the enemy’s defense. If your side is down resources and the other side has 3 nodes, but in an awkward combination like lumber mill-blacksmith-mine or stables-blacksmith-farm, then they can’t reinforce the wing nodes easily. Figure out where the opposing team is concentrated (humanoid tracking ftw!) and head the opposite direction. If they’re all clustered at the farm, hit the stables. Lumber mill? Get the mine.

If you love to 1v1 or 1v2, Arathi Basin can be your best friend, because so often nodes are left guarded by just a player or two. Although 1v1 isn’t the hunter’s specialty, if you’re wily enough you can get a capture against just about anyone. Try and think like a rogue: bait your opponent into using his trinket and then trap/sleep him and cap the flag. If you’re an engineer, you get a mind control cap (dismiss your pet first) and frag belt at your disposal to ensure success.

Persistence is the name of the game here, folks. PvPers are just like other people: they have short attention spans and aren’t going to try very hard when it’s only a few tokens on the line. Say you’re trying to deal with a druid at the lumber mill who gets reinforced from the farm and you are killed ignominiously after blowing all your cooldowns and a health pot. Don’t get frustrated and afk at the stables, ride back up to the lumber mill because chances are all those guys ditched the node as soon as your corpse was looted. Not only that, but you should have been able to figure out the first time how many people are actually guarding the node, which is invaluable info.

Never assume you are only up against what is visible when you first ride up to a node. Rogues (and if you’re horde, night elves) are everywhere, so keep a flare under you and look for any opportunity to freezing arrow.

Most importantly of all, do not fight away from the nodes! This is a complete waste of time. Even being faced away from a flag can result in disaster, so try to pan your camera back even while shooting forward so that you can keep your eye on things. A hunter should really be able to watch over 2 nodes at once, 3 if he has the trifecta of resource nodes, the farm-lumber mill-blacksmith.

That’s it for now everyone!

-jurgwena

Head and Shoulders

To begin with, I’ll address the resilience head and shoulder enchants. I wouldn’t use either of these unless you really need resil for arenas and can’t get close to your target yet. If you have 4 pieces of arena gear and most of the offset pieces, however, or you’re just doing BGs, then you should have the ebon blade helm enchant and hodir shoulder enchant on your pvp gear.

Chest

I would use 10 stats because stamina, intellect, and agility are all great stats for pvp hunters. 20 resilience is fine also, you have to make that decision for yourself.

Wrists

I would use 40 stamina if you arena as survival. Because of hunter vs. wild you get some dps returns from the stam, and it scales well with survivalist. If you’re marks, you will need all the attack power you can get and should rock the 50 AP. Also, MM hunters don’t need stam as much because of their extra cooldowns.

Weapons

For a two hander I would always use massacre, and for one handers I would use 65 AP on one, and a titanium weapon chain on the other.

Boots

You need tuskarr’s vitality for the extra movement speed (and you can get a second pair of boots to put nitro boosts on if you’re an engineer).

Legs

Survival hunters could consider 55 stamina and 22 agility, but marks should definitely use the 75 AP/22 crit one.

Gloves

You really should have 44 AP if you’re marks or beast mastery, and 20 agi if you’re survival. Unless you are an engineer, in which case pyro rockets are your best friend.

[day late brain fart edit follows, thanks to Nakaya for the reminder]

Cloak

There’s obviously the 22 agility option, or if you’re an engineer you have a parachute cloak enchant that provides agility and has great synergy with disengage (not to mention getting you out of tight spots while doing hodir dailies!). There is another really good enchant that some hunters may not have considered using on their cloaks before, and that is the spell penetration enchant. It provides 35 spell pen and is invaluable in reaching any MM or SV hunter’s goal of 75 spell pen.

Gemming

As far as stats and gemming, you want to consider your spec(s) before deciding what to focus on. If you only like survival, or you only like marks, or you are sorta cool with both but definitely hate BM, then you should really focus on agility. At least in red sockets, slap 20 agi gems in there. If you’re low on stamina for whatever reason (generally 20k hp or less unbuffed is low) you might want to consider stamina gems for blue sockets. If all you do is BGs, then you can certainly get away with 20k hp or less and might as well stuff more agi gems into blue and yellow sockets.

One thing any MM/surv hunter needs to consider is Spell Pen gems. 75 is the magic number anyone who wants to arena should have. Even if all you do is BG I would consider having 75 spell pen, because you can lose a ton of explosive shot/chimera shot/arcane shot damage to a druid with mark of the wild, a paladin with fire resist aura, or a mage with mage armor. For arenas I would also use yellow sockets for resilience gems. 900 is the number I would shoot for when it comes to resil, give or take 50. If all you care about is BGs, then you can get by with just the resil on your offset pieces + 2pc pvp gear. 600-700 is more than enough. As I always say, positioning and cooldowns will save your life, not gear, and in a BG when you’re getting focused by 10 people nothing will save you.

If you think you might wanna try BM, then you need to go with AP gems of course, and this style of gemming also lends itself to the MM spec, so you can make MM your offspec without needing to regem continually.

Always be hitcapped on a level 80 target (164 hit rating). Don’t be afraid to spend points on hit talents to get to this number. If you can’t get 164 hit rating without making major dps sacrifices, just get focused aim. If you find yourself 20 rating under or 30 rating over, consider adding a hit gem (and swapping out a hit item, if necessary). I usually grind out enough honor for both the hit and crit pvp offset gear because it gives me flexibility, but this season I seem to have discovered a sweet spot using both crit pieces so I may not have to do that.

Interface and Focus

Make sure you hotkey everything. I’ve spoken about this before but I can’t emphasize it enough. All your pet abilities, including pet commands like stay and follow and passive, should be hotkeyed. Use mouseover macros for really important cooldowns like Master’s Call and Roar of Sacrifice (see the keybinding section of this post for more details).

Whenever you pvp, try to keep an line of sight object handy. A feign death will interrupt a polymorph if you’re fast enough, but the mage can simply retarget you and try to poly you again. You could deterrence, or you could jump behind something and wait it out. This takes a lot of presence of mind, but if you can make it second nature you will profit. Always consider the ramifications before chasing someone behind a pillar or behind enemy lines. If you’re going to expose yourself, make sure your healers know, and be ready for the enemy to try and turn the situation around on you. Often people try to get hunters to chase them around corners only to surprise attack them from melee range. Avoid this at all costs unless you have informed your team and they are prepared to support you.

Always have a focus target. If I’m BGing with a partner, I will make them my focus so I can keep track of them more easily. If I’m arenaing, picking a focus target will be the first thing I do. Train yourself to keep track of your focus. Don’t just watch your focus and wait for him/her to start casting, but keep track of your focus target’s physical position on the map. This kind of information is important so that you can land a clutch freezing arrow, or so that you aren’t surprised when you spam Scatter Shot or Silencing Shot and it won’t go off because your target is out of LoS.

Pets

As far as pets, you have plenty of options. For BGs I like the wolf and spider. Spider is great for catching people as they try to run by on their mounts, and my spider has gotten me out of plenty of tight spots with roar of sacrifice and roar of recovery. Wolves are good for the same reason they’re good in pve: they can buff you really well. More details about pets can be found in this post.

-Jurgwena

Of course, I’m sure you all saw the bestial wrath change. Unfortunately, this is a pretty big nerf for pvp, but of course a buff for pve (I’ll let Euri discuss that). If you have been enjoying BM spec lately, just read on, but if you never want to spec BM or want to prepare for the nerf, skip down a couple paragraphs and I’ll talk about the comp I’ve been running as MM.

Zoo Cleave!
I started running with an enhancement shaman in 3s, and it was not the cakewalk I was hoping it would be. We probably had the most success with this comp when I was BM and we had a holy paladin healing. We tried it with a resto druid and it didn’t work nearly as well as I’d hoped. However, with a priest the comp got a bit stronger vs. the caster teams, and a bit weaker vs. the melee cleaves. Without further ado, let’s discuss the strats, strengths, and weaknesses of the Zoo Cleave.

Enh shaman bring a lot to the table besides bloodlust/heroism. Their wolves have a stun which is great for interrupting healers or locking targets into place, or both. They last so long and the stun goes on DR so fast that it can be worth it to switch them around to keep your enemy off balance. Of course, you need a shaman who can really micro-manage those pets well, which is somewhat rare. They can drop earthbind totem which will remove snares from every party member in range (this will not remove roots like frost nova, however). Earthbind totem in conjunction with frost trap will allow your healer to kite melee really well, but the healer has to be aware of your trap’s location and prepared to use it. Fire nova totem can be used to stun enemies, assuming they don’t kill it, and of course enh shamans have tremor totem and cleansing. It’s very important that everyone on the team stay in range of the shaman’s totems, and the shaman must be ready to re-drop his totems at a moment’s notice to dispel a fear or other cc like wyvern sting. One more comment on enhancement shamans: They are commonly believed to be the most anti-caster class in the game because they can wind shear every 6 seconds and drop grounding totems, as well as stun with wolves etc., but they are also very susceptible to stuns, and while stunned they can have a hard time keeping up with interrupts. Be patient with your shaman, because he has a very difficult job.

Who exactly should you be focusing in your matches with an enh shaman at your side? Well, mages do not generally have a hard time kiting melee, even enh shamans, so don’t fall into the trap of trying to zerg a mage. Warlocks however have much less mobility and attacking them is never a bad idea. Warriors and DKs aren’t bad targets, but against Pld/War/DK we generally focused the warrior until he shield walled, and then got back on him when shield wall was down. If you pressure a warrior and keep him in defensive stance, he loses a lot of damage, whereas DK dps can’t be slowed down quite as easily. That’s not to say you should ignore the DK, however. If he presents himself then go after him hard, just don’t let the warrior train your healer for too long. If you have a priest healer, Pld/DK/War will probably beat you every time. Your best bet is to zerg down the warrior as fast as you can, but don’t expect to be very successful. It’s just a difficult match up. If you have a paladin healer on your side, then beating this comp is much easier.

Rogues are always great targets because wolves can stun them and negate evasion to some extent. If you’re fighting Priest/Mage/Rogue or Priest/Ret/Rogue, I would definitely go after the rogue no matter what healer you have. Just realize that your pressure might be low until he runs out of evasions. Do your best to time aimed shot with stuns on the rogue so they don’t miss randomly.

I would always use a pet with roar of sacrifice, but I know some hunters prefer a core hound, and if you have the patience to level one then it’s not a bad idea. The debuff helps your team vs casters quite a lot. Personally I just grabbed a jormungar [ed: just one?] from Storm Peaks for the armor reduction debuff and settled for some rough games against cloth teams in return for easier games against melee cleaves.

If BM isn’t your thing

I would suggest teaming up with a warlock and a priest or druid healer. The comp is very fun (the warlock can be dest or aff, have him go with whatever he’s most comfortable speccing). Definitely spec MM and grab all the talents that in the past I’ve told you to ignore. I did something like this and haven’t looked back. Talents like piercing shots and wild quiver satisfy the PvE-er in me, and the slight added utility that conc barrage brings can be handy on the bigger maps like Blade’s Edge and Nagrand. The loss of health from not speccing survivalist hasn’t affected me that much. Hunter survivability really hinges on proper cooldown management and positioning, as well as finding ways to kill the other team before they kill you. Try and keep frost trap down as much as you can, but don’t be afraid to try and stick someone with a freezing arrow. We lost plenty of games to other hunters CCing my healer this way, and some games we just couldn’t put out any pressure until we got a really good CC chain going with scatter shot and freezing arrow. Generally we focused rogues and CCed mages/locks, but your warlock has to be really baller with his use of curse of tongues and fear. Don’t fall into the trap of spending too much time CCing a healer and leaving their dps to go free on you or your teammates. You don’t have nearly the same ability to lock down your target that a rogue or mage does (a warlock’s more common partners in arena) so you have to compensate by keeping the other’s teams dps incapacitated in whatever way you can.

That’ll do it for now, folks, as always leave me some comments if you have any further questions.

-Jurgwena

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

To really enjoy 5s, you need to run with a balanced set up. What does that mean? It means you should probably stick to a setup with 3 dps and 2 healers. Damage in WotLK is easy to come by, so running with 4 dps is redundant these days. 2 dps teams aren’t viable, in my opinion, for the simple reason that you won’t find 3 good healers willing to run a comp like that. WotLK has given every class a viable dps offspec, something that wasn’t true in BC, so there are simply fewer healers running around. That theory may be totally wrong, but the fact is that in over 500 games of 5v5 this season I haven’t run into a single triple healer team.

That said, what kind of classes do you need? A disc priest is a must. Pain suppression and dispels are too important. Alongside a priest, however, you can run any kind of healer you want (except another priest). I’ve seen high rated teams that ran with a resto druid as a second healer, and I myself have played with a second shaman and a second paladin healer on my own charter this season, so I know those are viable. Whatever his spec, you should have a paladin as well. Beyond that, I would take advantage of the best players you can find of any class/spec (except shadow priest or feral druid, as both of these are locked down too easily in a 5v5 setting).

I’ll talk more about comps in my next post. For right now I want to discuss what the hunter’s job is in 5s. The task, when typed out like this, seems pretty simple: Keep aimed shot up, do as much sustained dps as you can, land your interrupts and CC when they’re most needed, and don’t get gibbed. 5v5 in reality is so hectic that it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and forget to do your job. Doing sustained dps is important, but you can’t lose sight of your other responsibilities, which are equally important. If you’re doing everything right (meaning paying attention to your focus target, to your teammates health bars, and to your pet’s location/HP at all times) you shouldn’t even have enough attention left over to see what kind of damage you’re actually doing. After a long night of 5s when my team has done well, I honestly struggle to remember what kind of numbers I was getting with explosive shot/aimed shot. I’d like to be able to then compare my performance with other nights and other hunters, but I frequently can’t remember a single number. This is good, because it means you were keeping track of all the other, more important stuff.

While you may not be able to enjoy the huge numbers you’re undoubtedly getting with full buffs against debuffed targets, it doesn’t mean that 5v5 isn’t rewarding. Chaining a wyvern sting after a scatter shot the second your focus target comes out of a fear is even more rewarding than kill shotting a mage for 11k, trust me. Topping the damage meter at the end of a game is great, but doing that while using roar of sacrifice on the cooldown, feigning out of polymorphs, and keeping all your traps down is even better. I would always advocate for survival spec in 5s, unless your team has no CS or spell lock (i.e. no mage or lock), in which case you should be marks. MM does take more of your attention away from your other tasks because the damage rotation is more demanding and you have two sets of cooldowns to manage (not to mention the reduced mana efficiency), but the spec is certainly viable. Survival will do the most overall damage, however, which is important for those fights which drag out until the healers run out of mana, and has a simpler rotation, which means it won’t distract you quite so much from your non-damage duties.

Coordination in 5v5 is huge. Hunters don’t have enough reliable CC that they can keep someone locked out for a long period of time. What hunters do have, however, is shorter duration CC that makes a great filler while the CCed target is on diminishing returns from something like polymorph or fear. You need to work with your teammates to make sure a dangerous caster like an elemental shaman, warlock, or mage is locked out for as much as possible. Vent shouldn’t be raucous, but there should always be at least 2 people talking at once, and you will have to learn to process the information streaming through your headset.

The most important thing that needs to be done over vent is the calling of targets. People often criticize 5v5 as a zerg fest, but really you can’t just pick one target and train it from start to finish, unless you are playing in the 1400 bracket. In 5v5 you want to take the path of least resistance when it comes to dps. Being ready to switch targets at a moment’s notice is crucial. Spending any amount of time, even a few seconds, dpsing a target that’s shield walled, pain suppressed, or BoPed can cost you a match. 5v5 isn’t a zerg fest, but it is fast paced and games can be lost or won at the drop of a hat. Having a competent player who can call targets is important (a hunter can do this), but having reliable teammates who can also pay attention to opponents who have exposed themselves, or lost the protection of a major buff like divine shield, is even more important. What must be avoided is 3 people all calling different targets. When emotions run high this can happen, even to experienced teams like my own, and it is a disaster. You can’t always prevent this, but as your team members build trust between eachother, you will find a flow that works and it will become less of a problem. Being patient and willing to stick it out is key. The actual target being called isn’t even that important; the most important thing is that everyone is on the same page, and everyone is dpsing the same target (unless splitting dps is your goal, something with which my team has only rarely had success).

Your healers, likewise, need to be focused and coordinated. Overlapping a pain suppression and a bop would be a disaster. The healers should always know who is going to blow their major defensive cooldown first, and should always be announcing when they’re drinking or dpsing or whatever they’re doing that isn’t healing. This kind of stuff sounds obvious but games really hinge on minor things like this. Just yesterday my team was queuing 5s and our holy paladin went down to 1%. He managed to escape behind a pillar, but we were unable to get any pressure out on the opposing team until someone realized the other team’s holy paladin had already DSed (and that it had faded). We immediately switched to him and were able to kill him. I later talked to the priest on that team, who told us that he’d had no idea his friend had already used DS, and this minor communication glitch cost them the game.

Somewhat harder to coordinate is when your paladin or priest should pop that cooldown prematurely, in order to save someone’s life from unhealable burst damage. This type of action can’t really be planned out. It is an instinctual thing but when facing an uncommon comp like 4 dps or something, you should talk to your healers about not waiting to pop a big defensive cooldown. Any kind of delay can be devastating.

I’ve gotten rather far afield at this point, so I’ll end by recapping what a hunter can do to carry his weight. Keeping aimed shot up at all times is key. Doing as much damage as you can while keeping your utility spells like traps, scatter shot, and wyvern sting on cooldown is key. Micro-managing your pet is key, especially now that roar of sacrifice is potent enough that it can stop an assist train in its tracks, if used a timely manner. Knowing when the elemental shaman is casting flame shock on you is important because then you know there’s a lot of incoming damage with your name on it. Sometimes you may not have the elemental shaman on focus, however. What to do? Well, after awhile you will get an instinct about these kinds of things. Staying near a pillar can save you from an elemental shaman, but hiding behind one with a warrior on you can be dangerous if your healers don’t know where you are. Communication is key. Situational awareness is key. And practice makes perfect. Good luck, folks!

-Jurgwena

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

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

Hi guys, today we’re going to talk about speccing a hunter for arenas. I will concern myself mostly with 3v3 and 5v5, I will deal with both marks and surv but not beast mastery, and I will address pet talent trees at the end.

Survival

My spec no longer varies for 3v3 and 5v5, but it used to. I’ll go over my talent spread for both brackets when I’m playing survival (which is most of the time now), and in the process you’ll learn a little bit about pvp philosophy. These days I prioritize dps over everything. Anyone who has checked my armory knows I abuse the hell out of pve gear, and I’m not ashamed. Hunters got a raw deal when the “burst damage” cards were dealt, and I do everything I can to compensate for this, including maxing talents like improved hunter’s mark and improved tracking. You don’t have to max these, but I would recommend always putting at least 4 talent points in improved tracking. You may have noticed I don’t max hawk eye. I find 41 yds unnecessary in arenas as the area in which most fights actually take place on most maps is pretty tiny. I do occasionally have a hard time getting in range of healers to scatter them, however, so you can definitely make a case for maxing this talent.

If you do a lot of 5v5 and not much 3v3, you can afford to put just 1 in survival tactics or skip it completely (as long as you’re glyphing disengage), you should absolutely spec point of no escape, you should avoid deflection at all costs (I rarely get disarmed in 5s), and I would try to find room in your spec for master tactician, because there’s always time to stand and nuke. No matter what your bracket is, I would always get trap mastery and resourcefulness (max them both) and avoid surefooted, savage strikes, noxious stings, and sniper training at all costs. There are better places to put your points, period.

For those who 3v3 the most, I would suggest that you always have survival tactics maxed (and keep glyphing disengage), and don’t be so hung up on master tactician. It’s a good talent for dps, but 3v3 can be frustrating from a dps standpoint. The games often end in 30 seconds, it’s hard to pretend you’re getting your money’s worth. Consider deflection (and even counterattack, if you think you’ll remember to use it) if you love using a 2-hander, but I rock my 1-handers and a weapon chain for 3s. Using 1-handers also lets you eke out a little more resil, which is key in 3s. Things get dispelled more often in 3v3 relative to 5v5, so you can afford to drop improved hunter’s mark (likewise, if you do 2s I wouldn’t bother with this talent), and in 3v3 I would opt out of point of no escape unless you play with a melee partner. That said, there aren’t many other places to put these points if you’ve already maxed imp tracking and hawk eye and whatever else, and point of no escape is only 2 points. Trap mastery, T.N.T., and lock and load are all must-haves no matter what, and if you love to 2v2, I would always get counterattack. That pretty much sums up my advice for speccing survival. On to marks!

Marksmanship

There are two general ways you can go with your MM spec, based on how much you use hunter’s mark. If you believe hunter’s mark is your bread and butter, as I do, then I would spec something like this. There’s a lot of options in the MM tree, but so many of them are random number generator based talents that are meant to boost pve dps, like piercing shots, improved steady shot, and wild quiver. If you like them, you can take points out of concussive barrage, trap mastery, or efficiency to get them. I would hold on to the efficiency talents, however, because MM is more mana intensive than ever now that we can drop 3 traps at once. Trap Mastery really isn’t that crucial for MM hunters, but I would probably spec into it since hunters are always dropping frost and nature traps these days. I don’t feel comfortable saying it’s better for 3v3 than it is for 5v5 or vice versa, because it’s only as good as your trap spells are. Because traps can be situational, this talent too is situational. I don’t really like piercing shots that much, but I could see a use for it if you run comps that rarely ends games in the first 30 seconds. Improved barrage, it should be noted, has a lot of synergy with piercing shots, so don’t be afraid to put a point or two in it along the way.

If you never use hunter’s mark, you could skip improved hunter’s mark and even neglect marked for death (I’m not sure how anyone can justify skipping MfD, but I know some people do), and end up with something like this. This gets you a lot of the RNG talents, which some people (who are surely in the minority of pvp hunters) prefer, and it saves you from wasting talents on an ability that you aren’t using anyway. As an aside: If you look closely at marked for death, you’ll see it grants you a bonus to crit damage whether or not hunter’s mark is active on the target. Even people who don’t use HM would do well to spec this talent.

As with survival, if you are 5v5ing mostly, you can skip survival tactics and just dump the points into efficiency, which is never a waste for MM hunters. You can also dump all those extra points into focused aim and ditch some hit gear. I’m not good at math so I can’t tell you whether the damage increase is worth not using hunter’s mark much, but skipping improved hunter’s mark (and/or MfD) definitely gives you lots of options.

Depending on how much you’re getting focused, you might want to ditch points in improved tracking and put them in survivalist instead. MM hunters generally keep themselves alive through use of cooldowns rather than reliance on passive defenses like HP and resilience, but stam never hurts.

Pet

That does it for speccing yourself, now how about speccing your pet? That’s quite easy if you love tenacity pets like I do. The spec doesn’t vary much and you have enough points to get just about everything you could possibly want for pvp. This is the spec I prefer for my gorilla and you’d be hard pressed to convince me to change it. For my crab, however, I do spec into charge, for the obvious synergy it shares with pin.

Ferocity pets are as simple to spec and I’m not going to waste time giving advice about them. Anyone who uses one of these in arenas obviously doesn’t care much what abilities his pet has, he just wants to see big numbers.

Cunning pets are tricky. On the one hand they have a lot of situational talents that can turn them into dps machines when the stars align, but they also have a lot of defensive talents that you need to spec into if you want to keep them alive. This is what I would spec for situations where your pet is getting focused relentlessly. As you can see, it’s not possible to really get all the bread and butter cunning pet moves like roar of sacrifice, bullheaded, and roar of recovery at the same time. This is the main reason I don’t use cunning pets.

In case you didn’t know, cornered reduces the damage your pet takes by 60%+ when it’s below 35%, not just its chance to be crit by attacks. This makes it a very nice talent. Now if only mages and locks couldn’t bring it from 50 to 0 in a second… If I wasn’t worried at all that my pet was going to die, I would do this with it. This way you get some damage and utility, and if you’re lucky, it’ll catch some heals. Until heart of the phoenix (or blood of the rhino), is available to all pets, I will stick with my gorilla and my crab.

-Jurgwena

Isle of Conquest combines elements from all BGs and world PvP. It also will drain your computer’s resources badly if your comp is 4+ years old like mine, so be ready to turn off iTunes after you zone in.

What you need to know is that there are 5 nodes that can all be captured by the time-honored Arathi Basin tradition: interacting with a flag graphic for 8 seconds (in AB it used to be 10 secs, but flag captures in all BGs that aren’t instant are now 8 seconds). Two of them contribute to your honor gain (something that should be irrelevant to you, since you’re pugging this BG) and can be safely ignored reinforcements: The Quarry and the Refinery. The other three, the Workshop, the Docks, and the Hangar are more useful for accomplishing more goals, and are way more fun.

The workshop provides you with demolishers and one siege engine every few minutes, which, when destroyed, has to be repaired by NPC engineers before it’s usable again. The Docks provides your team with different, much more interesting vehicles which I’ll address shortly. The Hangar, probably the coolest thing in the whole BG, is a node that grants you access to your faction’s airship that does laps around the map. If you time it right, you can infiltrate the enemy keep by leaping from the airship as it makes its rounds. The airship also has gun turrets that you can operate in order to fire on the hapless players below, although you’ll have to turn up your video effects to be able to see all the way to the ground. Yes, you really are that high up.

Your keep also has a flag which can be captured, but it is not assailable until at least one of the keep walls have been broken down (correct me if I’m wrong on this). Once your keep is captured, your team will no longer spawn there and your general is vulnerable, so don’t let the other side control it for too long.

Capturing the Docks grants you access to two vehicles whose like you have not seen outside of this BG. The glaive thrower does decent siege damage and can spray glaives at short range to fend off foes, but its biggest asset is its range. It can hit your enemy’s wall from out of range of the turrets that line the ramparts, so take advantage of this next time you’re riding in one. Don’t be afraid to jump out of the vehicle to defend it from enemies, however, as it doesn’t have a lot of health. The other vehicle, the catapult, should be familiar to anyone who’s ridden shotgun in a demolisher in Ulduar, because you can use it to catapult yourself a great distance, even over the enemy’s walls. It also has a sweet little ability that puts the whole vehicle into stealth mode and makes you move very quickly (like a blademaster in Warcraft 3). It’s utility is questionable, but it’s fun factor is undeniable. It has no true offensive abilities though, so be warned.

The most important nodes by far are the Workshop, the Docks and the Hangar. Anyone who has seen a map of the BG knows that these nodes are spread out evenly across the center of the map, so trying to hold all 3 is probably futile. You want to focus on the workshop and 1 of the other nodes, because this will leave you the freedom to head back to the keep to defend it from attackers when necessary. And remember, the airships themselves aren’t that useful, at least in my experience. Being able to deny the enemy access to it is good in theory, but because Isle is exclusively a PUG BG (what BG isn’t these days?) you don’t exactly have to worry about coordinated land and air assaults on your keep. If people are trickling into your base from the air, it shouldn’t be hard to pick them off from the safety of your courtyard, where they can’t be reinforced from their allies outside the walls. The danger is that your enemies use the bombs conveniently stacked inside the courtyard to sabotage the walls from within. Pro tip: a lot of people try to blow up the gate that blocks access to the building in each keep where the general is housed, but this is in fact futile as it does not take damage of any kind and opens on its own.

The key to winning this BG is to avoid getting distracted by all the fun stuff you can do, like riding the airship around, and to focus on what’s important, which is draining the other team of its resources. You do this by killing enemy players. Try to make sure you always take out at least two opponents before you die, as that’s the number one way to do your part in such a huge (40 on 40) battleground.

If you drop into your enemy keep from the air, grab some bombs and set them off near the walls. If you’re attacking from the outside, try and defend your side’s siege vehicles, and if the other team captures the Docks and/or Workshop, try to get them back ASAP, because there’s no more effective way to break down the walls than siege tanks and glaive throwers.

As always, let me know of any necessary corrections or useful additions in the comments!

-Jurgwena

Death Knight:
1 – Deterrence after a disengage. Most DKs will waste their Death Grip on it and you will make a clean get away. Make sure he’s snared before you jump or he’ll catch up fast, though.
2 – Kill gargoyles. We’re probably the only class that can do this easily for the time being, thanks to our plethora of instant ranged attacks.
3 – Disarm them. They will eat the full duration every time.

Mage:
1 – Kill Water Elementals.
2 – Use gladius (/target arena1, arena2, etc) to re-target mages after they pop Mirror Images.
3 – Distracting Shot one of his pets if you’re about to eat a polymorph.

Rogue:
1 – Feign Death whenever a rogue vanishes on you. He won’t be able to cheap shot until he re-targets you, and in the time it takes him to do that you should be able to re-flare yourself.
2 – Don’t DPS a rogue who has evasion up unless there’s absolutely nothing else to shoot.
3 – Try and intervene yourself a second or two after getting cheapshotted: as long as your pet stays in range (5 yards or so) the rogue might end up kidneyshotting it instead.

Warlock:
1 – Destruction warlocks can’t do anything without Immolate up. Interrupt it with anything, including Wyvern sting, and if he’s casting it on you and you can’t interrupt the cast then you might as well deterrence it, since his Chaos bolt will ignore Deterrence.
2 – Even if he does get the immolate off, unless you’re at full hp with heals incoming you should deterrence anyway, because you might get the Conflag at least.
3 – Don’t get mad when locks kill you. They counter us harder than anything except paladins.

Paladin:
1 – You can intervene judgements and Hammer of Wrath, but deterrence is useless against these spells, because they count as ranged attacks. Do not save deterrence until 20% against a paladin, ever.
2 – Scatter and Silencing Shot don’t last long against these classes. If you’re trying to scatter one into a freezing arrow, but you can’t get the freezing arrow off immediately after scatter shotting, don’t bother, because he will run out of it.
3 – Don’t get mad when paladins kill you. They counter us harder than anything except warlocks.

Shaman:
1- Tranq Shot resto shamans on the cooldown.

Priest:
1 – Kite his shadowfiend.
2 – Viper Sting on the cooldown
3 – Use Wyvern Sting early, you can force a trinket/wotf usually.

Other Hunters:
1 – Kill them, deterrence is useless against you.
2 – Kill their pets, they can’t protect them, and once they have no pet, see #1.
3 – Intervene yourself.

Druid:
1 – Viper Sting on the cooldown, it makes them waste GCDs.
2 – Scatter when Abolish is about to fade, this lets you Wyvern Sting them safely.
3 – Scare Beast feral druids on the cooldown. It’ll force them to waste cooldowns or mana to interrupt/cancel your cast.

Warrior:
1 – You can use Deterrence to negate a Charge stun, Intercept, or Bladestorm.
2 – Remember all those guys who would sit in our dead zone during BC? well warriors still have one, and you should abuse the hell out of it so they can’t charge or intercept you.
3 – Warriors can heroic throw and overpower right through deterrence, so don’t wait too long to use it.

I hope these tips and tricks help. If you have your own, post them in the comments section and we can update this post with them. The number one piece of advice I can give to up and coming hunters in pvp is use deterrence early. Deterrence is not like Divine Shield, and it shouldn’t be treated that way. It will not save you if an affliction warlock or dk or warrior gets you to 20%, so use it early.

-Jurgwena

The fairly anemic hunter notes this time around are changes that aren’t clearly good or bad. They’re changes in the true sense of the word, in that they change the way we will play our class. What was good and bad before no longer really applies. For instance, snake trap was bad before, but now its usefulness is irrelevant, because we can use it on the cooldown without locking us out of frost traps. Without further ado, the official hunter patch 3.2 notes:

Hunters

* Aspect of the Cheetah: Can now be learned at level 16.
* Deterrence: This ability now allows the hunter to parry spells and attacks from behind as well as in front. Now has a new visual spell effect.
* The time that traps will exist in the world after being put down has been reduced to 30 seconds, down from 1 minute.
* Frost Trap: Will no longer “fizzle” on targets immune to snare effects, however Lock and Load will not succeed when using Frost Trap if the target is immune to snare effects.
* Snake Trap: The Mind-numbing Poison effect has been reduced to a 30% increase in casting time, down from 50% to match similar effects.
* Traps now have separate 30-second cooldown categories: Fire (Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap and Black Arrow), Frost (Freezing Trap, Frost Trap) and Nature (Snake Trap). A hunter can have one trap of each category placed at one time.
* Talents
o Beast Mastery
+ Catlike Reflexes now also reduces the cooldown of your Kill Command ability by 10/20/30 seconds.
o Survival
+ Entrapment: This talent no longer works with Immolation Trap or Explosive Trap.
+ Lock and Load: Now has a 22-second cooldown. The Lock and Load effect cannot be obtained on targets immune to snare effects when Frost Trap is used.
o Pets
+ Roar of Sacrifice: Redesigned. This ability can now be used on any friendly target to make that target immune to critical strikes, but the hunter pet takes 20% of all damage taken by that friendly target. Cooldown is now 1 minute, up from 30 seconds.

The deterrence change is one of the few unambiguously helpful changes. It does not, however, mean that deterrence will now protect us from ranged attacks or Chaos Bolt. (Aside: you may have noticed that Paladin judgments are now all considered melee attacks. They will still not be affected by deterrence, however, because they are un-dodge/block/parry-able.) Traps will now fade after 30 seconds instead of 60, but that’s no big deal for arena PvP. Frost trap no longer fizzling is the best news ever, and the fact that lock and load doesn’t proc anymore if the victim was immune to snares should be a non-issue, because we no longer have to save our cooldown until freedom or anti-magic shell or whatever fades, and we can still proc LnL from Black Arrow if we’re lucky. In the case of all the trap changes, I feel comfortable declaring that the pros far outweigh the cons.

I’ll make one point about Lock and Load and then move on to the Roar of Sacrifice changes. I heard a rumor on the test realm that snake trap was proccing LnL. Based on these notes, I think it’s safe to say that that change was a bug and if it hasn’t been fixed for the patch then it probably will be soon. The bottom line is that we will now get LnL procs at least as frequently in pvp as we could before, with the potential to get more procs (unless we’re really careless with our traps and debuffs).

Now for Roar of Sacrifice. The change may seem like a buff at first glance, because hey, we can use it on party members again, right? Not so fast. It seems to be a reworking more than a buff. In the Nightmare That Wouldn’t End season 6, I used Roar of Sacrifice to mitigate all of the formidable burst damage that players in WOTLK can bring to bear on me during a hard switch. In those crucial few seconds before my healers could swap to me and begin shield/hotting/healing me, Roar of Sacrifice was my shield. It made it so easy in fact, that I have been able to get away with wearing very little resilience (500 to 600 usually, sometimes even less), because RoS provided such a huge buffer. Now, however, I can’t just blindly RoS myself on the cooldown, because when I use it it will be gone for one minute, and my party members are outta luck if our opponents perform another switch. Not only is our survivability hurt by this change, but the effect of resilience has been nerfed in that you now require 15% more resilience to mitigate x% of incoming damage, relative to last season. So we’re taking a hit to our damage on two fronts (resilience now mitigates all incoming damage, not just dots and crits, and we can’t afford to use as much PvE gear). Now I hope you see why people are so unenthusiastic about these notes.

I hate to say it, but these changes mix a lot of fixes that should have been implemented a long time ago (pets gaining resilience, etc.) with changes that seem solely designed to help us level out the playing field in arenas. What do I mean by that? Well, Blizzard noticed that cleave teams and Priest Mage Rogue (PMRs) are pretty much the most popular 3v3 comps these days (and 3v3 is all they care about at this point, let’s not kid ourselves). So now we can drop a frost trap on the cooldown and it will go off guaranteed, and it will behave like an elemental shaman’s earthbind totem and root everyone in range?! Cool! Except frost trap’s tooltip said that’s what it did for an entire season, when it did nothing of the sort. I guess it just wasn’t a big priority before the rebirth of Cleave. So we can deal with those pesky melee teams better, and we can shut down any mage’s shatter combo with RoS. You heard it here first, folks, we’re the PMR killers! Not really, but RoS really seems like it was changed for the sole purpose of hindering mages and rogues (incidentally, the only two classes that can crit reliably these days).

How do I feel about being Blizzard’s tool? Well, I wish the responsibility came with a few more perks, like a trainable version of counterattack or a shorter cd on master’s call, and I wish some of the changes didn’t skew so heavily in favor of the one tree which is, sadly, the least fun of our two viable trees to play. But hey, if it means another hunter winning an arena tournament, I guess I can deal.

-Jurgwena

We are in the final two weeks of the season- make your arena point spending decisions accordingly, and don’t forget that you can dump excess points into Arena commendations at a rate of 100 arena points for 2000 honor. Five of these left in your inventory will carry over to season 7, so stock up. If you are wondering how close your personal rating must be to your team’s actual rating, the answer is that you must be within 100 points, and to get gladiator your team must be in the top 0.5% of all active teams in that bracket. Arenajunkies.com has estimates of what this translates to in terms of ranking on their forums. Search for your battlegroup’s specific forum for the relevant post.

That it’s for now, check back soon for my next post and don’t forget to let me know what you really want me to write about. I’m writing for you guys, and if you don’t leave me comments I’ll just keep going off on tangents until Euri finds his absurdly long shepherd’s hook offstage.

Hey everyone. As promised, this article will explain how to craft the perfect arena UI. To get ready for this article, I downloaded some new mods and totally redid my own UI.  For starters, I want to discuss what mods you should be using, and then what your UI should do for you. After that I’ll address more specific tips that will help you get the most out of a UI, and then at the end hopefully we’ll have time for a quick discussion on keybinds.

Mods

I find Gladius to be the only really indispensable mod for arenas.  With it you can see if your opponents have their trinkets up or not, when they are under the effects of crowd control, silences, or Aura Mastery, and what their health and mana totals are. You can also set anyone as your focus with one right-click. The most important thing of all that Gladius (or proximo- they’re interchangeable in my experience) lets you do is target an opponent with a keybind.  But more on that later.

There are other mods you can use, like quartz, which give you a customizable cast bar for yourself, your target, and your focus frame.  I arena with a priest who sets his cast bar to stretch right across the middle of his screen, from the left side of his monitor to the right.  Afflicted is another mod that many people use which will show you all kinds of things; including which enemy is casting what spell on who, and the cooldowns of the other team’s abilities (especially interrupts).  NECB will show you DRs (diminishing returns) and is very useful for a class with multiple crowd control abilities that all share DRs, such as hunters.  There are others, but I want you all to know that out of these, I get by with just Gladius and ForteXorcist, which tells me when my trap is about to fade, among other things.

What should a UI do for you?

If you recall my first article, I said that you should only use the macros that you find useful, and that’s true with UI mods as well. Some people need a UI to be aesthetically pleasing.  For others, looks are not important at all. I think human beings are hard-wired to prefer beauty over ugliness, and playing with an ugly UI like the default UI probably takes a hidden toll on your psyche if you use it for very long… [ed note: that explains a few things- ow, my soul]

I don’t care about aesthetics that much, but I certainly don’t use default frames, and I like clean lines and smooth textures.

A UI designed for arenas does need a few specific things. You need to be able to see:

• Your target
• Your target’s target
• Your focus
• Your focus’s target
• Your party

All the frame addons I’m familiar with (ag_uf, Pitbull, Shadowed Unit Frames) will support all of these. So will the default UI, but these let you put these frames wherever you want, color the bars according to class, modify the size and location of cast bars, and so on. I installed Shadowed Unit Frames recently as it’s billed as the frames addon for pvp, but before that I used pitbull and only had a couple complaints with it (waaaaay too many options, and way too hard to use).  I think SUF strikes the right balance between accessibility and flexibility.  You can customize most things a reasonable person would want to customize, but you aren’t swamped by choices, and it’s simple to configure.

The most important thing an arena UI does for a player is let them filter through a lot of data to quickly learn when they need. I like any UI that enlarges the icons of my debuffs on a target, and lets me increase the size of castbars. I especially like Shadowed Unit Frames (other mods may do this too) because it will hide the castbar when your target or focus or party member isn’t casting. That means that there is a much larger contrast between those frames when that player is casting and when they’re not, so it’s easier for me to notice. Another good feature is that it lets me put buffs and debuffs on any side of a frame. This is great because I don’t care about my party’s buffs so can put them off to the side, but their crucial debuffs, I put on the bottom or the right where they’re more obvious. The key for you, reader, is to figure out where your eyes are inclined to seek out buffs.  Are you used to seeing your target’s buffs on top of the frame with debuffs on the bottom?  Then set it that way.  In an arena, you have very little time to react, and you don’t want to waste any time looking for things.

click for full size

This is a slightly dated screenshot of my UI. In it, I’m still using pitbull, but even with Shadowed Unit Frames, all my frames are in roughly the same position.

All the arena mods, focus frames, and cast bars are for naught if they aren’t positioned somewhere that is easy for you to see.  I place Gladius between my pet frame and my target frame. This gives my eyes easy access, as I’m mostly looking at my target in an arena anyway. My focus frame is off to the right, but I have trained myself to pay attention to that part of my screen too, because you can’t have every frame smack dab in the center.

My UI does have a lot of clutter, but it works for me because hunters are a ranged class, and we don’t need half a monitor’s worth of space to be free and clear for us to watch an entire fight. As long as you aren’t wasting space with mods like Omen and Recount that have absolutely no place in an arena UI, you should be fine.  And don’t be afraid to expand or shrink (but especially expand) the size of any bar, frame, or buff/debuff list. If it works for you then do it.

Keybinds

Now, a word about keybinds. Hunters have a lot of binds to begin with, but our life has been made easier by the dual spec changes, so don’t complain. Keybinds are very personal, just like your macros and your UI. Furthermore, I expect you to be as creative in finding keybinds for focus Wyvern Sting and focus Viper Sting as you are in Ulduar when it’s time to kite Mimiron’s fire.

I once fought an arcane mage who had keybinds that allowed him to cast all his dps abilities like Arcane Blast, Arcane Barrage, and Arcane Missiles on his focus target.  He would have me targeted, but he’d be dpsing my healer. (Disclosure: We lost. A lot). That’s the kind of simple tactic that will get you wins (and is an article for another day). My point is that if you use an ability in arenas, you should have at least one keybind for it, and sometimes two.  You would do well to keybind macros that let you hit your focus target with stuff like Scatter Shot, Silencing Shot, Wyvern Sting, etc.

The other thing you want to do is keybind /target arena1, /target arena2, /target arena3, /target arena4, and /target arena5.  With a mod like Gladius, this will let you target the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth player (from the top) on the other team in an arena.  You can also go into your keybindings menu and do the same thing under “Gladius”.

You should have your strafe buttons keybound (mine are “Q” for strafe left and “E” for strafe right, but you can use “A” and “D” or whatever), and you should use them almost exclusively to move around (which can be done by holding down your right mouse button). The only exception to this is when you have activated Deterrence, at which point you may need to use “S” to back up. We are probably the only class where “s-keying” is acceptable, but if Deterrence isn’t up, you better not be doing it!

Ok, that’s it for now guys. Next time we’ll take a break from the arena scene and take a look at tips and tricks that we can use to counter each class in a pvp setting. If you have any requests, leave a comment. Bye for now!