Murphy's Law or some such variation of it. It only resists when you really, really need it.

I dont think he was saying using salvation makes FD not resist.

Ooh A challenge, I must level a hunter to try and master their dps.

I think you missed the point there. I was saying FD can resist (as in my example it left me out to dry), while salvation is a guarantee.

NM, just looked like you were saying it's easier to FD with salv on o.0

I'm contradicting!

Raid-specced MS Warriors have a similiar mechanic in slam, as it needs to be timed to start exactly after your white swing hits, and missing this mark will reduce your damage a lot by delaying your next white hit.

Also, after the slam GCD we can add an instant attack, unless haste proccs push our attack-speed below 2.5(+latency), because with faster attackspeed than 2.5 the instant attack GCD would prevent us from starting the next slam in time.

You can't get rank 4 from a scorpid in outland. You have to go back to azeroth and tame a lower lvl scorpid for rank 4. I got it from the yellow scorpids outside BRM near the kiting demon for the rhok quest.

I should clarify, I already have rank 4 from a scorpid, I just can't get the SMV scorpid to use it. Only has rank 5 in its spell book.

In that case, you'll have to un-train the poison skill, then teach them just rank 4, I beleive this can be done at a pet trainer.

(If not, you'll have to tame another scorpid, but I doubt that's the case)

Yeah, you tame the 56, or whatever level it happens to be, Azeroth scorpid for rank 4. Then you have to untrain all of your current scorpid's skills to re-train the lower rank.

Spiritwolfs new UI

I suppose as an x-Enh Shaman who has also played a Fury and Arms War I could take issue with this but I also have a 70 Hunter and know the challenges they face so I'm not sure how to even equate the differences between such classes. I think the main thing is that the Hunter class really can be so forgiving in so any different ways, in addition to having just a huge population, that when it comes time to separate the wheat from the chaff there is a huge gap.

My Hunter is on the other faction so I don't do as much with him as I would like sometimes but even still when I have done runs with him it's often ends up being very odd. Some rogues getting confused when they post something other than a SWS damage meter and then me having to correct them saying that they are not including my pet damage. "So, your pet does not really do much." <Post SWS Meter> "What? Your hacking!" The group leader not realizing that if I'm assigned to trap a mob I'm going to keep it chain trapped until everything else but it is dead if need be. And just generally trying to understand other Hunters when I ask what their shot rotation is and they respond with, "What?"

I suppose having always been pretty solo orientated, due to as I said my Hunter being my "other faction toon" I ended up loving the BM spec for it's outstanding solo capability. So when BM came into it's own I didn't have huge attachment to MM being the only DPS spec. In fact I really view Hunters as having it pretty damn good now with all their specs being so viable. Were my Hunter to be my main I think I could have the time of my life figuring out what spec suits each fight best and trying to then tailor that to the raid schedule.

No, you do not have rank 4 poison if you have trained just level 5. Every single individual level of a skill needs to be learned separately, so find a scorpid with level 4 poison, domesticize him, learn its skill and then teach it to your pet.

Actually i do time my shots the same way as weird as that sounds. I am using a bow and i did that even before TBC and before i even heard about shot rotations. I dont use a macro simply because it takes away the feel of the game for me. The only problem arises when another hunter with a bow is shooting near me but if i get a few shots right then i get into a rhythm and i dont even have to hear the bow firing anymore. Its all about rhythm like dancing. Hehe.

As for the ppl who say hunters cant dps, i have been in the top 3 dps in my guild for the past year and a half. 90% of the time i have #1 spot in dps during boss fights. So its not about the class its about putting the effort to learn how to play it.

Here is a WWS thread from our first Gruul Kill and the tries before that, mind you that in our last try when we killed him my pet died after gruul killed the OT at around 30%. Wow Web Stats. I also dont use poison rank 4 as i dont think it was intended to be used like that from Blizzard.

PS: I know i still need to change my enchants and gems but i am waiting for a few drops before that.

My highest level hunter currently is lvl 38 (and likely to stay there - he's enjoying WSG too much), so there's little risk of me running into the Quest for the Perfect Raid Pet [70D].

But, what would be the reasoning behind teaching your scorpid a -lower- rank poison for more effectiveness ?

The length of time that the poison is up. Rank 4 is 10seconds, IIRC, while Rank 5 is only 8, giving the scorpid that much more of a chance to renew the stack. If the stack gets lost or not renewed, then all the benefits that the poison got from blowing all your trinkets is lost as well. As long as you can keep the stack up and refreshed, you can keep the benefits.

But I wouldn't worry too much about this. They'll be fixing it soon, it's exploity at best.

It's quite funny really, as people have said, hunters are so easy to "play" but very hard to "master". The class has a buttload of "features" that really makes your mind boggle. Anyway, my experience being a hunter post-Steady is as follows:

If ally you need to worry about is single-target max dps, pet positioning not withstanding, it's actually easy! As BM (well, with SS) you wave steady shots between every auto and you're done. Without SS, it gets a bit more iffy, but it's an okay rhythm to find and maintain It's more annoying than a frost mage, but I do find *this* bit easier than my warlocks five dots that have four different uptimes to maintain. It isn't hard, it just tedious beyond belief for both classes.

But, well, hunters aren't done at this point. Add silly threat mechanics (FD is stellar, the problem is that 100% threat production is immense, the fact that BoS is only needed if FD gets buggered, autoshoot does enough damage that "just autoshooting" isn't an option always, /dance is nice...), silly pet positioning work (no, you do not reach Tidewalker by going via Chromaggus dear pet), and things like scorpid sting. The first time I saw scorpid stings change I was all woot about it, then I looked at the duration and I wondered what they were smoking. With everything else the hunter has to manage, yet another 20s timer to watch is just bloody awful.

Most of the class feels like this to me. There are so many variables, so many things to keep track of, and you need to stare at Omen/KTM, you need to stare at Quartz, you need to stare at the boss, the pet, the tank and pop misdirect. And then IAotH procs, DST procs and everything goes tits up -- and just as they wear off, hey, shammy love! Oh, and you just got another 200ms of lag, I'm sorry, did you really want to provide DPS today? Awe.

In the end though, what really gets to me though is that doing top notch DPS as a hunter is on a different level than any other game mechanic in the game. I wouldn't mind it being this way if other classes had similar requirements and constraints. They don't. Why should one class require so much more work to pull off its potential than every other class? *That* is what really bites me.

This game in general seems to apply to those that are lazy and don't understand how to truely play their class. This is the predominant reason why such a small percentage of people are actually in Black Temple/Mount Hyjal.

From personal experiance, if you know the auto/steady rotation properly and you hit your trinkets then you will generally do well on damage. My guild is currently on Gurtogg/Azgalor and we have hunters consistantly dominating our meters. Now granted our melee isn't geared to full with the haste gear yet: rogues, hunters, and fury warriors dominate our WWS/SWstats reports. From recruits to even people that I have played with in game, laziness seems to be the main hindering factor in hunters.

I reviewed a WWS parse of a hunter in my guild that had been with us for over 2 years. He only used Beastial Wrath and his 2 minute heroics trinket 2 times in a kael fight. This shocked me as you can easily use it 6 to 8 times in that fight to maximize your damage. I just couldn't believe that someone who played the class for so long didn't actively use trinkets or cooldowns(which is probably the most basic form of enhancing dps in my opinion). Now, having talked to this person about it, it turned out to be laziness that stopped him from using these cooldowns. Just being too lazy to hit the binding for that cooldown/trinket(or clicking the button for all I know) caused this person to do noticibly less damage then all the other hunters in that fight.

Overall I do agree though with Blizzard not outlining the various aspects of hunter dps well at all anywhere in game, but this can be said as well for other classes. There is a gimmick for many classes that only comes with time but with hunters, some are too lazy to even attempt a real rotation. This prevents them from ever learning to play better and learn the rotation.

At least for my original server, Terenas, the hunter class was the most populated when guilds were forming to raid Molten Core and Onyxia "back in the day". Many of the people that originally played hunters rerolled to priests, druids, warlocks, and even tanks. I know of at least 10 people who rerolled and still raid today as their "new" class. It almost seemed like most of the people with aspirations of raiding and that had skill in playing this game rerolled another class and left the thousands of other hunters to fight over a few spots in raiding guilds. This drained a lot of the skill out of the class, leaving only the lucky few who got in the guilds to learn how to play the class. The rest of the hunters floundered about rolling on Rend's dagger in UBRS and spamming trade about chuck norris. They have now leveled to 70 and still don't know how to play their class. Thus, the stereotypical hunter is born.

In my honest opinion the hunter is not a difficult class at all to play. You just have to be knowledgable of a few small details(like every other class) and execute correct rotations. Many refuse to learn because they have sucked for so long at the class that its the only way they know how to play.

All encompassing generalizations are barely correct at best and pretty far off target at worst. To say that people are lazy and or don't understand their classes results in a lack of endgame raiding falls under the worst. Not only is it far off topic of this thread, borderline trolling IMO, but ignores a whole host of dynamics like guild/server dynamics, timing, and the idea that everyone in the game wants to raid.

But really, as has been pointed out, the main issue with Hunters have been covered many times over in this thread. I'm not sure your idea that, "Well I don't suck but other people do and so they should stop sucking," does little to forward any real dialog.

Oh really wouldn't that change essentially take the inefficiency out of the traditional BM stead/auto spam macro?

In the interest of turning this thread towards something that isn't a rehash of the Hunting Hunters thread that's kicking around, I wanted to respond to the pseudo-rant about developer vision for the hunter class. It seems to me that the vision which the devs had was basically squashed by the retardation that is the Hunter WoW general forums. Would it not be refreshing come Wrath of the Lich King to see 3 unique trees instead of 3 different ways of dpsing? It seems most classes that are not 'primary dps classes' can fufill at least two roles. Observe:

Mage/Warlock/Rogue - Primary DPS classes, Locks and Mages also function as CC, but generally speaking that's spec independant.

Priest: DPS(Shadow) Healing(Holy/Disc)
Shaman: DPS(Ele/Enh) Healing(Resto)
Druid: DPS(Feral/Balance) Tank(Feral) Healing(Resto)
Warrior: DPS(Arms/Fury) Tank(Prot)
Paladin: Tank(Prot) Healing(Holy) DPS(Ret, for the sake of arguement anyway)

Then you've got hunters. We're allegedly not supposed to be one of the big badass primary dpsers, which leaves us with very little in the way of options since all 3 of our trees are directed, in one form or another at increasing our dps.

How many people reading this would be unhappy at the following methodology change? Ignoring current mechanics entirely, operating under the assumption that abilities would be buffed/nerfed/removed/added etc for the expansion:

Beastmastery: Offtank spec. Focused on massive increases to Pet threat and survivability. Increased Hunter abilities to sustain pet (New abilities in addition to buffed mend pet). Basically remove the flurry and the haste and everything else in favor of being able to actually tank things. Possibly a pet health multiplier, a real taunt etc. Tradeoff for this is zero increase in offensive ability for the hunter.

Marksmanship: Ranged damage spec. Focused on enhancing bow/gun/xbow fire abilities. Lots of direct damage and utility ranged debuffs. Not entirely unlike a combination of marks and survival today. Your basic 'Raid dps' tree, possibly to include minor dps buffs for pets as well, rather than 'tanking' style buffs from beastmastery.

Survival: Melee viability tree. Not the laughable 20% crit to raptor s trike buff we have now, a real melee viability tree, designed for pvp, something to balance out the drastic drop in dps and survivability we have in melee range. Examples of things in this tree would be some of the existing survival talents like survivalist, clever traps, deterrence, survival instict etc. Full service pvp tree.

Take this with a grain of salt or what have you, but this is how I envision the original hunter methodology to be. It was simply too rushed in practice (Lacerate) at release time, and the class has evolved to the point where it's at today because of the inability to return to this methodology. It's a shame really, as I think it'd be great if we could return to something a little more unique and multi-hued than we are right now, which sadly as stated is a just a dps class with overly complex mechanics.

Kyt, your ideas are indeed interesting and harken back to I think the way that the game was originally envisioned. However that ship has long since sailed. The best parallel would be the Warlock class going from a debuff class to a DPS class. The other two obvious parallels would be the Shaman and Paladin classes. Shaman no longer have any claim to tanking and Paladins no longer (er...) have any claim to DPS. (Please take that last sentence for what I'm trying to do here and not rake me over the coals about it.)

To try and stratify the Hunter class at this point I think would be counterproductive to where they have moved to now. All specs being viable DPS but in different ways. It's hard enough at this point to move so many of the old school Hunters past the MM is the only DPS spec eva! mentality that to make such a drastic change again to the Hunter dynamic would lead to more confusion than it would be worth.