Originally Posted by Kaber

After finding a decent priest to finally do a bunch of 2v2 today, as well as spending a lot of late-night time in Arathi Basin, I am starting to doubt my stance on the current changes. I went from dismissing them as useless bandaids, to supporting them fully, and now I am leaning towards liking the changes, but not believing they are what we really need to fix the class. MS and Dispell add more options for teams, and I think there needs to be more of each to allow for greater variation. The problem I keep coming back to is the lack of an ability to keep people at range.


1. Warriors and Rogues in general rape Hunters. Should we take a spec to deal specifically with escaping them (Beast Mastery) we lose a lot of our strength in dealing with healers/casters, and since mana burning just about the only viable strategy for a Hunter, this is devastating. I believe a little more depth into the melee vs. hunter situation will illustrate what I believe to be the Hunter's biggest weakness at this time.

Now once upon a time, Hunters could hold their own with melee's. And to be honest, in a 1v1 a Marksman or Survival Hunter still has a very good shot at kiting if they maintain a perfect distance to keep the warrior from Intercepting/Charging or by using cool-downs flawlessly against rogues. Now the problem with this is that the Hunter has to play flawlessly to win, where the warrior and rogue really do not need to. Scatter Shot and Traps are on 30 second timers, while Intercept is on a 15-20 second timer, Wing Clip is about equal to Hamstring for effectiveness, and less effective than Crippling Poison. So you end up with a warrior who can charge in and keep you from moving out of melee range every 15 seconds, while you only have the timers to deal with it every 30, you can pop deterrence once every 5 minutes, or you can keep yourself snare free with BM spec for 18 seconds every 2 minutes. No matter which skill set you take, the warrior will always have some means of getting to you unless you execute perfectly and kill him before it becomes a Timer war (which he will win). For rogues, between sprints, CloS, vanish, stuns, blind, and so forth, he is basically in the same boat with warriors where a good one will rip through a Hunter, unless the hunter can make the kill before the Timer war becomes an issue.

2. Freezing Traps only last for 10 seconds, take 2 seconds to arm, are visible (and one can often tell where it was dropped even if the hunter masks it by moving around), and require someone to physically walk over them. Compare this to all other CC: the few with comparable timers are AE (priest/war fear), and do not have anywhere near the same requirements. Add to this that all other single target CC is essentially spammable so that if someone trinkets out, they can be CC'ed again immediately, and it can be done from 35+ yards away. If someone trinkets or breaks a Frost Trap, the hunter is out of luck until his 30 second timer comes back up. This leaves the Hunter's only truly viable CC option in many cases to be the Frost Trap for its AE snaring effect, which is easily countered and avoidable by most classes (warriors can intercept their way out, casters don't need to worry about it, leaving rogues as the only class really screwed by it). Unfortunately, the snare is not nearly as effective as Hamstring or Crippling poison, so it is easily negated by both rogues and warriors if the hunter attempts to kite them through it.

3. Hunter melee is pathetic. The dead zone change is nice, but people will still be able to charge a hunter, snare him, and leave him without a very good chance to fight back. Partially this deals with poor defense (hunters are at the top of the "most easily killed" list along with Shadow Priests, Fire mages, and Affliction locks), as well as a complete lack of substantial damage dealt at close range. If the dichotomy is supposed to give us weaker melee for greater ranged prowess, then we are fairly broken since our ranged damage is so easily negated (and really not very impressive to begin with). Deterrence is certainly a nice ability to aid with our trouble in dealing with warriors and rogues, but with a 5 minute cooldown, it is hardly anything more than an occasional gimmick. This leads right back into our complete inability to keep enemy players at range given the extensive duration of any timers we may have to keep them there.


Hunters already have a lot of the abilities that we need to deal with what most classes can cripple us with (this is not a war/rogue rant, they just serve as the best example - mages, shaman, and others can do the exact same things to Hunters). What is absolutely destroying our viability is that all of our timers are needlessly long. That certainly is not the only problem, but it is one that really needs to be addressed. I fail to see why traps cannot be moved to 20-25 second cooldowns (and I have no issue with the duration of frost and explosive traps being reduced to 20 seconds as well). I do not understand why Deterrence has a 5 minute cooldown. Beast Within is an excellent talent for getting out of snares and keeping people at range; however, the 2 minute cooldown coupled with the requried utility that a Hunter gives up to gain it is not worth the cost. Viper sting having a 15 second cooldown when the ability itself only takes 8 seconds is also very strange. Scatter shot is the MM Hunter's only answer to most roots/snares, but is on a much longer cooldown than abilities other classes can use to get into melee range. Almost every cooldown a hunter has on his utility spells is far too long to actually be useful. To compound this, our timered abilities do not help a great deal against multiple players (the way Blink or AE fear do), leaving us very weak against a focus fire that most other classes have a means to escape.

Rather than having new abilities added, I would prefer to see blizzard work with what we already have. Surefooted, deterrence, bestial wrath, scatter shot, and traps could all be tinkered with (and even changed entirely in function) to help Hunters where we need it most. I look forward to having added synergy with groups because of an offensive dispell and Mortal strike, but people will still rip us apart unless we get some help with our survivability. The dead zone being gone is the biggest step in the right direction blizzard has taken, but unless they give hunters something more substantial to keep people from charging us and staying in melee range to avoid the majority of our damage/abilities, I don't think much is going to change for us.