Been a longtime reader here but this is my first post. My question is this, with hunters in an arena 2v2 - 5v5 what stats should you be stacking? Of course there are dps stats but I find myself the first target 90% of the time. In dps gear I can maybe get one of the oponnents down intime.. but usually by the end I die depending on how much focus fire there is. Obviously the solution is to get more stam. My question is at what point do you stop goign for stam and begin going for dps, or visa versa.

Currently Untalented I can get my HP upto 9.6k 15% would put me somewhere around 11k, but thats besides the point. I know it will at the end boil down to personal prefference aswell as playstyle but i am interested to see what other hunters are doing.
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Sympa of Skywall

As i've said in all of these threads. What you're playing with and your spec matters.

A quick rule of thumb is you should be at around 9,000-10,000 health and around 175-200 resilience, if you're always being focused then you should try to get around to 9,500-10,500 and 225-275 resilience.

Just remember that in the end you need resilience too, 12,000 health wont do anything for you if you only have 50 resilience.

thats prettymuch where im at now 11k, 50 res

http://www.geekboys.org/arena/index/5/ is quite helpful for seeing what other people are doing.

Try picking up 2 pieces of the blue PvP armor(shoulders and gloves would be my recommendation), the PvP belt, bracers, and boots. and band of the exorcist. Not sure what your Arena rating is, but grinding honor is a good way to pick up solid PvP items without having to wait a few weeks. My HP has stayed about the same over the last month or so, but after picking up some of these items and a few pieces of gladiator armor I noticed a huge difference in my survivability.

High resilience and hp is very important in 2v2's imo, since you'll fight a lot of gimmicky teams with high dps potential. HP alone won't save you from direct damage classes, and resilience won't do hardly anything against dot classes, so it's good to get a mix of both(which is done easily just by picking up PvP pieces).

I'm probably not qualified to talk too much about 5v5's, since I don't do them, but I imagine you'd want survivability over dps here too, since you're probably not going to be bursting anyone down. Because of this, resilience lets you prolong fights to your advantage(less healing required).

So theoretically speaking....

If I completed my T5 set, for arena I'd want to replace those DPS items with the blue PVP set with +stam +res while arena'ing every week for my gladiator gear?

I do think the gear is an amazing part to survivability as a hunter but from where you are coming form I think hunter mechanics alone can help you survive better. From a 5v5 point of view I noticed some groups will try to focus fire the hunter, or myself in that situation. This is where communication comes in handy but you should also be firing off your control to get rid of the fire on you. IE: FD clearing you as a target is extremely helpful along with frost traps.

I've noticed that if you are in a 5v5 as a hunter, and you charge alone or are typically out in frontal view of the other team you will get focused first. The best approach I take is to hang back when starting the arena, especially if you don't have the SM NE ability. My hunter is BM speced with entrapment and imp conc shot so those are also some viable options to keep people off you given they proc. Also having TBW is a great start to not being CC'd and being able to run all over your enemies to escape the focus.

For you to have over 10khp helps a lot I think and resilience is always a huge factor but I'd suggest looking back at why you are getting focused and how they choose you out. Naturally I know a lot of groups choose to focus the hunter because hunters dps is shocking at times if done right, but if that happens to me I let my group know I'm taking the dmg. I usually end up on the high end meter with dmg at the end of the arena by a significant amount so it is paramount that your group keeps you alive. Figure out how to stop it from happening as well as improving health and resilience.

In most cases, an opposing group will focus on you, especially in 3v3. It all depends on your team make-up of course, but by attacking you they neutralize a lot of your threat. After all, as long as they stay in your deadzone, you can't hurt them.

I tend to focus on survivability and utility most of all, rather than pure dps, because, as a class, we just lack the burst dps and sustained dps to take down high-resilience targets fast enough. In most of my fights we win by outlasting the other team.

Generally I go with both, and after looking over the top Hunters in the Geekboys link it is a completely mixed bag. They go with a mix, leaning towards DPS in most cases.

Depending on your setup go for 350 or 400 resilience with 11500-12000hp unbuffed.

If you know that you will get focused more in one of your arena brackets just build up a heavy resilience set as it does help a lot.

Using my own 3v3 as example here. I almost never get focused in 3v3 because we run with a priest so I can use the 'pvp dps' set which is roughly 350 resilience, 11900hp, 2k ap and 28.5% crit. It stil looks like I'm wearing full pvp set so no one will try to hit me like smart teams would if I used the shoulders from Shade of Akama. :p

Osse what spec do you use when doing arenas? Could you post a link to a talent calculator?
Thanks in advance.

So going along with the general sentiment of this thread, tonight I am going to pick up the Merciless leggings (as I am a relatively undergeared BM still using a lvl 66 blue leggings):

(Costs aside)
[Nethercleft Leg Armor] > [Nethercobra Leg Armor]??

I think you will want to check Cheeky's spreadsheet for the answer to that one.

I don't think I need a spreadsheet to tell me that NetherCobra is much better dps than Nethercleft. But looking at the geekboys site, its about a ratio of 2:1 of people getting the DPS leg enchant. (With Demon Stalker, the clear favorite is DPS, but with Merciless its more evenly mixed)

I'd get nethercleft myself, I can always put on my pve pants if I want to boost my dps a little, and they already have the nethercobra. My main incentive to wear the arena gear is survivability, and survivability only.

For some reason I didn't realize the first one was Nethercleft and thought it was 40 AP/12 Agi. That'll teach me to post at 4am.

Thanks, seeing how I'm only at 9k HP, stam it is.

Im going full out dps with gems and enchants on my new gear just because i almost never get targeted first, and as BM i can get away so easily they usually give up on focusing me until im the last dps left. Now, i dont have that uber much experience in arena since I havent managed to get many games going with work and studies but thats just my hunch. Btw, always use TBW defensively as the last resort, its imho meant for helping bursting down your primary target. Just my 2 cents.

This works when the opposing team isn't top-notch geared, but in my BG, even at low ratings the dps put out by teams means you really need a certain level of hp to survive, or be unhealable. That said, after getting all my non-set epics + merciless gear I gemmed purely for dps because I just couldn't do enough damage.

Not really, the main reason for me speccing dps instead of stam/resilience is mainly i dont get targeted first 90% of the time, and being able to fully use TBW and dps cycles uninterrupted instead of just using it as a gtfo tool usually means i come out as nr1 dmg about twice the dmg done over second. no matter if we loose or win. And those time I DO get targeted i ususally keep dpsing until the last 4-5 seconds of TBW then FD and run away and most of the times i get healed up to full again. Now it might be just my BG but i do find it a bit odd that me and those hunters i talked to so seldom get targeted early. Personally i make sure the opposite hunter in other teams get taken down first which is easier than most other classes (unless they use TBW and fag around pillars, but on the other hand they dont do any dmg then either) and we do least dmg when focused of pretty much all classes.

Your team composition matters a lot more for getting targeted. One of my guildies is in a 5v5 with both a priest and enhance shaman, both of which get targeted first over him 99.9% of the time. I, on the other hand, was in a 5v5 with a mage, warlock, warrior, and paladin with my hunter where I was focus fired first 75% of the time at minimum. This is part of the reason the backbone needed for a hunter is priest/war/paladin - the priest is usually targeted before the hunter and he has access to Blessing of Freedom for when he actually does get targeted first. The only setups that work for hunters are the ones that allow the hunter to sit back and DPS. He isn't like a warlock that can DoT and kite doing most of their damage on the fly. Moving means a hunters DPS is cut by over 90%, and I won't even touch the dead zone debate.

If you're the main form of slows and allowing your other teammates to fight in the trap then stack Stamina as a priority. You want to be alive to provide said crowd controls and viper stings. Personally, my team will jump on the Hunter if he gets too close to a fight to put down a frost trap, and more often than not he is geared for damage dealing and the incoming burst throws off their healers for the game win.

But if you're on more of a cookie-cutter warrior/crowd controller/paladin/priest/insert class group then wear more damage-oriented gear. They will need your reliable output on top of your ability to crowd control. (as a sidenote, it's probably best to start off with stamina gear until you are comfortable enough to switch over to damage.)