Zurai

Make use of our pets. For example: adds that don't pulverize people, but have a spammable knockback that clears aggro. Pets are immune to knockback, so they could tank the adds as long as they got heals, whereas if they're let loose on the raid no one's going to get anything done because everyone's going to be flying all over the room.

 

Pontiac

Wow, and here's me thinking I'm the ONLY raiding hunter in the world who wants blizzard to give us more use for our pets. Reading forums sort of creates the impression that we'd all trade our pets out for some extra RAP in a heartbeat.

But yes, I agree with this completely. Any hunter-specific roles that blizzard wants to put in new encounters should ideally revolve around the pet, since that's really the class feature that distinguishes hunters the most in my opinion.

 

Lumi

Ouro highlighted the strengths of hunters all in one boss. A highly mobile, low aggro, long range, moderate dps class that has a high survivability (hp/armor/access to resists). Unfortuantely that niche is so narrow that you'd need to almost design the boss fight around it.

Another fight that was pro-hunter (on our first kill anyway) was Twin Emperors. They could essentially move very little and still dps consistantly on the Twin Emps.

Unfortunately as our strats/execution got more refined and our rogues got much better gear, hunters lost whatever glory they had on those fights.

 

Qrt

As we have yet to reach Gluth with my guild I only have experiences from BWL/AQ40. We generally see most misses on Huhuran (probably because of the general gimping of +hit due to NR gear) and Chromaggus (don't really know why - he's a lvl 63 just like the others).

But on the Flamegor encounter it is very noticable how far away the hunters stand from the drake. As a consequence we move all our hunters in to stand on the edge of the dead zone to minimise 'air time' of the tranq shot. And so we almost never get a tick of the fire AoE.

Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Igor, help me with the bags.
Igor: Soitenly. You take the blonde, I'll take the one in the turban.
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: I was talking about the luggage.

 

Branar

Broodlord was another kill that, when it was introduced, was very hunter friendly without being gimmicky, kite-oriented, or even pet-oriented. Feign Death and agro reduction were king. Of course, raiding agro has changed a lot since then with shield slam being improved and gear changing, so now it's probably not something you can consider a "hunter" fight anymore.

Really though, I think hunters will just have to wait and see what's in store for them in terms of talents and skills in the expansion. It's obvious the developers are seriously rethinking some aspects (no pun intended LOL omg) of the class, and hopefully changes will give hunters a more clearly defined niche.

 

Nasq

Pet tanking: "Rawr, you're not a pet! I'm looking for a pet!" ;)

 

osirisunnefer

What rotation system do you guys use when you don't have enough hunters for 2 per shot?
1) Rotation of 2 or 3 people (depending on boss) with someone stepping in on misses/failures.
2) Rotation of all hunters with the next person moving forward on a miss/failure.

Im predominantly using 1 but 2 may be simpler to keep track of. Oh, and we had 2 failures (not misses) on huhu last night. Before then I'd only seen a failure once and that was a few months ago on Chrom.

 

Glaurong

If you have to use 2 hunters per shot, you need to get your hunters more +hit gear.

Since I've got 9% hit a good long while ago I've never missed a tranq. I've also never seen a failed tranq but I've heard its linked to two hunters getting off a tranq nearly at the same time. First one takes effect, second ones fails. I would guess if you see misses on specific mobs after getting to 9%, that particular mob has its defense score artificially boosted. Might wanna keep a dire maul +hit ring bagged (if you have at least 1 crit ring) for these situations.

As far as getting tranq shots off timely, as people have said, your hunters need to stand as close as they can while avoiding effects. The travel time makes a big difference. I also suggest Natur Enemy Cast Bars, it has a suprisingly accurate frenzy timer for encounters where its needed. Keep an eye on that bar, don't start an aimed shot that will not allow you to take your shot and spam your tranq button as it nears the end.

Log Parser for BM Hunters (Right click, save as) - Updated 10/11/2007

 

Largo

Huhu, I downgrade my NR until I have enough +Hit. Even then, I stand around 200+ Buffed as a primary soak. The more you do resistance fights, the less resistance you need, IMO, with more efficient (experience wise, not necessarily gear) healing/dps. Typically, we have 3 Hunters. The extra either spams after our Channel Message, so the most we would wait is 1-2 seconds, or when we scream maniacally on vent for him. The only fight I haven't done is Gluth so I can't comment there.

Flamegor, we've had the #3 Tranq misses, so you have to wait a splitsecond for a cooldown maybe and then the Tranq order just has to re-adjust itself.
Chromag, we always have a spare tranq if there's a prolonged stun or mispositioned timelapse.
Huhu, #3 always does a backup tranq after each msg.

Flamegor is one of the better fights to tell if a hunter isn't tranqing quickly based on the novas, then I just tell them to spam and it doesn't happen again.

 

Zurai

No. I've had my tranq fail using STranq 2 and I was the only one with tranq cooling down.


BTW for the person saying STranq needed to be synced, that's just bizarre crazytalk. STranq 1 was completely unautomated and STranq2 has always used a hidden channel to communicate. You don't need to be near other hunters to get the info. You don't even have to be in the same zone.

 

dojke

It was never a hunter fight. When broodlord first came out, aggro ceilings were not understood very well, so it was assumed that "slow dps = win". As soon as dps ceilings were understood fully, then people realized that if you could just nuke the shit out of it as long as it died in sub-5mins.

So the only reason hunters did well at the start was becuase we didn't fully understand the aggro mechanics. It's not becuase of new superior aggro due to shield slam or whatever.

I can think of exactly 1 mob that hunters have this perceived aggro advantage on, and that's gluth before the first decimate. The breakthroughs we made in understanding aggro mechanics is what phased out the "aggro-free dps" advantage we supposedly had, it had nothing to do with shieldslam or thunderfury or whatever.

 

Pontiac

A more subtle way to do it would be to give the boss abilities that don't affect pets. More specifically, abilities that don't affect Beasts, but are destructive to humanoids. Chain-knockbacks, disarms, there's a lot of options here, many of which would also make fights more friendly for druid tanking.

 

Steelfleece

Patchwerk's Hateful Strike will not hit a pet, even if it is the only target in melee range. So it is theoretically possible for a pet to tank a mob like Patchwerk while the raid burns it down with ranged DPS. Obviously, if that were the only way to beat Patchwerk it wouldn't be a well-designed encounter, it's just something to think about.

affect –verb (used with object) 1. to act on; produce an effect or change in
effect –noun 1. something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence
Know the difference.

 

LadyVex

Are you kidding?

Original Broodlord resisted 9/10 FD's and had a 100% aggro wipe; as a hunter you were doing like 20 dps because you couldn't ditch aggro and everyone near him was constantly losing it.

I always thought hunters had a good idea of the aggro ceiling on that fight since it was so aggro touchy, and just about all of our wipes were mage/warlock caused.

As far as hunters not understanding the aggro ceiling I don't agree with that at all.

 

Zurai

Heh. Yeah, if pets had twice their current hitpoints and armor. Good point, though.

There's all kinds of things they can do to give pets, and thus hunters (and possibly feral tanks depending on what they do), more of a role in raids.

The problem I have with Tranq Shot is that it is forced raid utility. Compare that to fights like Nefarion and Fankriss, where Mages and Warlocks have raid utility through powerful AOE abilities, or fights like Sartura and C'Thun where Rogues and Paladins have raid utility through stuns. One (tranq) is an absolute, artificial requirement that forces you to bring X number of Y class to the raid or you fail. The other (aoe, stun, etc) is an implied utility role that makes the fight easier, but doesn't prevent you from winning if you don't have the required-by-design number of a certain class.

That's why I want to see things where Hunters make a fight noticeably easier, but lack of Hunters doesn't make it impossible. Even in my knockback-spam example, it'd be possible for warriors/feral druids to Spider Boss the adds if there weren't too many of them. Hunter pets would be the ideal solution, but not the only solution.

 

dojke

Ok maybe my wording was wrong. I didn't mean "the week bwl was totally fucked up", but when you could kill him by something other than kiting him to vael's room.

When people were first doing bwl, the prevailng strategy for broodlord was to do slow dps. Fights would take 8-14 minutes, and casters (and even healers) would be overaggoring somewhere around the 7 minute mark. Becuase we did not understand the aggro ceiling, we thought there was an aggro problem and slowed dps on the casters. Hunters shined clearly there, beause they didn't have to slow dps for this strat, becuase of fd. In summary, if you kill broodlord in 11 minutes, your dmgmeters will look something where hunters did twice as much dmg as anyone else.

Now that we understand how broodlord aggro works, we simply burn the shit out of it, and it dies in 3mins 45seconds. This is not because of shield slam, or any other aggro mechanic change. It's because a mage can do 75k dmg in 4mins without overaggoring since we changed the tankstrat (the ceiling is directly affected by number of tanks you have tanking), whereas before you couldn't do 75k in 11mins.

Nothing mechanically changed, nothing was 'taken' from hunters, which was a previous posters contention. It's just simply as we (i mean the community, not hunters in particular) started to better understand how bwl fights work, and that in fact none of them were shaky-aggro mobs that we all initially thought they were. (Excepting the bugged conflag, when you could one-tank razor).

I'm not saying the hunters did or didn't understand the aggro ceiling in particular, I'm saying that no one at all understood it.

 

Uthalin

For tranqing on Huhu you can wear your normal gear with +9% hit for the first 60% then switch to your NR gear via FD. Just need to time it so you have at least two shots at FDing in case you resist one.

 

Steelfleece

*facepalm*

Broodlord did not and does not resist feign death more than any other level 63 mob. That's just something you were imagining. Please don't say things like that. No boss mob resists feign death more than another boss mob, though fights with adds are harder to feign in(read: Gluth) because you have to make a resist check against all the nearby adds.

As for the other posts on Broodlord, while that may be true for an Alliance guild, for the Horde with no BoS or Tranquil Air, it was not possible for mages and warlocks to go all out on Broodlord at any point or they WOULD pull aggro. The aggro ceiling was an issue, but DPS had to be relatively slow still because there was so little -threat for us at the time. Keep in mind we are talking about Broodlord when his knock-away was a 100% deaggro, not today's Broodlord which merely has a 50% deaggro Knock Away. Hunters shined because they could drop all aggro in the blink of an eye--I remember our first Broodlord kill had something like 7/8 hunters(or was it 9? it was silly). After a couple of feigns, hunters could go all out and top DPS charts easily while a mage doing more than half the damage of the hunter would pull aggro three minutes into the fight. It wasn't exactly a fun mechanic, though it WAS beatable with a balanced group(we downed him with a fairly balanced group the next week, still full-aggro wipe knockback).

affect –verb (used with object) 1. to act on; produce an effect or change in
effect –noun 1. something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence
Know the difference.

 

Lumi

Mages also had no real -aggro talents bar arcane missles.

 

christide

'Bloodlord' resists feign 9/10 if you stand in front of the gate leading to the rest of the zone. :)

 

Steelfleece

I wouldn't know, we always tanked broodlord up by the gate and had the rest of the raid in the corner "safe" spot. Still, I was under the assumption that they fixed the feign resist checking against mobs not in combat with you some time ago.

affect –verb (used with object) 1. to act on; produce an effect or change in
effect –noun 1. something that is produced by an agency or cause; result; consequence
Know the difference.

 

• Arawethion

This true? Have to tinker with my boss mods.

Also, is it definitely 10s on Gluth? I stole my numbers from LV, which used 9.

Answers to Moonkin questions (pre-3.3):
0) Read the TTT/use the spreadsheet: http://elitistjerks.com/f47/t66856-moonkin_pve_dps/
1) Maintain high DoT uptime. Use WiseEclipse.
2) Nothing beats 2T8.
3) Yes, sometimes you cast many Wraths and no Eclipse procs. Deal with it.

 

◊ selece

Tranq can most definately be resisted. It's happened a fair amount on Gluth now, results in the happy "==TRANQ SHOT FAILED ON GLUTH ==" message being spammed. It's supposed to be a fairly small chance but maybe I just have terrible luck. It has nothing to do with multiple tranqs hitting at once though as far as I can tell.

 

Gonkish

This is accurate except for a token rant from yours truly about how it is an awful gimmick pity-skill left over from the days prior to 1.7 where we were utterly fucking awful in raids and no one would ever want to bring us along. (Which is fortunately before my time.)

Tranq fights, at least for us, go as follows:
1.) Establish tranq rotation order.
2.) When it is your turn, mash the tranq shot button (tranq works like dispel/purge and will not go off unless frenzy is up) until it fires.
3.) Hit macro (or otherwise alert the next person in line).
4.) Go back to whatever it was you were doing, until you get whispered that it's your turn.

Repeat until boss dead.

The ONLY deviation from this is a tranq failure. If anyone is even half awake they should get the point across decently quickly and recover without much trouble. If ANY of your hunters are below 9% hit on a tranq fight, they are either stupid and you should tell them so, or a dwarf/troll with a gun/bow (respectively).

A successful tranq fight is completely transparent to every other class in the game, and should roughly be a reflex for your hunters. It takes absolutely no skill, is no more than an annoyance, is not fun, and should never, ever be the major reason why you wipe on anything. Ever.

Why Hunters suffer...
Benefactor's Bar learns you some goodness quicklike...

 

Hypothraxer

That's the case for all mobs that can frenzy - it's not exclusive to Gluth. Try Flamegor with two hunters and you will see the exact same thing.

I was always under the impression that pets are getting hit harder by raid mobs/raid bosses - I haven't tested it though so I can't really say if it's true. But if that "pet-penalty" is true then it would've to be lifted in order that pets can actually tank - just increasing the health/armor won't do.