That was a joke ^^

The point was that it will proc off any of our abilities.

WTF are you talking about? One tick of a single Warlock DoT does nowhere near the damage of a Steady/Arcane/Auto Shot. My terribly geared lvl 69 Hunter's auto shots hit for about the same as my fully PvP geared 70 Warlock's Corruption ticks (the hunter's hit harder a lot of the time depending on resil/armor, and the Warlock is specced for highest Corruption damage, the Hunter is specced BM) and way harder than Siphon Life, Immolate, or CoA tick for.
Here are the numbers, (from DrDamage) and keep in mind this is with almost the highest DoT damage spec possible, (sl/sl with 3/3 Emp Corr and 2/2 Imp Agony, 1/5 SM, the only way it could be higher is 2/5 SM) these are also before resil:
Corruption is 428
Immolate is 286
Curse of Agony is 268 (average, it starts lower and ends higher)
Siphon Life is 191

Now I'll logon my Hunter and Steady/Auto a mob:
Auto 458
Steady 471
Auto crit 1011
Steady 427
Auto 474

Keep in mind my Hunter is lvl 69 wearing mostly greens with a few blues, no epics and specced BM... I could maybe believe that a Corruption tick will do a little bit more on plate targets but the other dots still won't. And on Cloth or leather or mail you'll do way more...

Riiight... I need some sleep, I'm being too serious...

Anyway, as you said, it will proc off any of our abilities, which is what makes it a bit unreliable. Thus, It can quite easily proc off the Aimed shot I just fired, or off the wing clip I threw in to get into range, and it's certainly not going to be of use for another Aimed shot, which is exactly what where we needed it most.

Truth be told, haste is otherwise pretty much wasted in arenas, as resilience and stamina help survivability, while AP and armor penetration probably bring more as offensive stats.

The problem here is that aimed shot has no anti-pushback like frost bolt. I can be shooting at a mage and for all intents and purposes his frost bolt can go off without interuption. A rooted rogue or warrior can simply use their throwing weapons on us and ensure the shot never goes off.

Also, they increased Aimed shot from 3.0 to 3.5 with TBC, and now they are returning us to the old cast time calling it a "buff." This is supposed to be our alpha strike ability but auto/steady will go off in less time, cost mess mana, and do equal or greater damage. I find the whole concept of Aimed shot in its current form laughable.

Frostbolt has no pushback protection. They can only get it with shields like ice barrier and power word shield, or while wearing two piece tier 4.

One of the problems of relying on haste to get Aimed Shot down to a reasonable cast time is that Aimed Shot resets your shot timer to your unhasted weapon speed. This is very noticable for me in pve since I run a haste-based BM hunter. The auto comes a full 3 seconds after Aimed rather than 2.2 or less (in practice I notice this because when misdirecting Aimed I can get two specials off before the auto without clipping whereas that's normally impossible).

So if you run on a team with a shaman, and for the sake of argument, run BM in arena, and you want to rely on Aimed to help you with bursting a target so you blow rapid fire, berserking, and bloodlust to get that Aimed off, you lose the benefit of those buffs as well as your quiver and serpent's swiftness for 3 seconds. No, that's not a huge dps loss, but it's a signficant one at a time when you'd like to be doing max DPS to burn down the guy you just MSed.

I'm skeptical that a Ranged-only team will be able to consistantly kill targets due to line of sight. Gotta have a melee in there to apply slows, stuns and best of all, consistant Healing reduction.

Might be able to destroy a few of those Warriors who have a habbit of charging into battle, thinking their healers will be able to keep them up.

The problem with haste is that Hunters move a lot...we're not always going to be able to shoot off autoshot every time the timer is up. It's not as significant a DPS boost as Berserker's Call or a Tsunami Talisman proc would be, and now that it has a hidden cooldown, it's even less worth it. Maybe I'm vastly underestimating the viability of aimed shot for Hunters in arena, but I just don't feel haste is ever going to be worth it for us.

Oh, and the problem with Aimed Shot in arenas is twofold. In 2v2/3v3 PvP, assuming I *am* able to get it off, LoS can be used quite easily to prevent a kill from an outlast team that's all ranged; and if there's a Rogue or a Warrior, their MS effect is far better than ours. In 5v5, running without a melee class again leaves you usually in an outlast situation as you're easily LoSable. Obviously having a ranged MS is a very useful tool for certain situations, but I don't see it as more than an extremely situational ability.

Hopefully they will change the PvP bonus to cast time pushback resistance? One can hope anyway.

Useless post but this is good stuff.

YouTube - 2.3 MS AIMED SHOT

Anti-pushback would go a long way.

You do know that the average "level 69 Greens" typically have more AP then the Merciless Gladiator Hunter set right?

Anyway, I found your post quite funny as you contradicted your argument in the first paragraph with the one in the second paragraph.
with

This is even without me going into how badly flawed and inaccurate your "test" is.

PS. my SL SL PvP lock corruption ticks for 534.
My Hunters Arcane shot hits for 490 in PvP gear (even with some BT gear)
My steady shot hits for much less (Armor ftl!)

Now you can dispel it, and you will both be on the same terms!

IF you dispel barrier in first place. AI, Dampen/Amplify, Armor, Fire/Frost ward... + other group buffs that should be plenty in 5v5.

And I present you the smartest Rat in Azeroth. If half the players would play like this vs Hunters.

YouTube - 2.3 MS AIMED SHOT

The reason you probably cant push back Frostbolts has more to do with the 2piece Tier 4 bonus that gives mages 100% pushback immunity on Frostbolts. While my mage is fairly new to pvp, I know im using it and the mage pvp thread seems to indicate most mages use it in 2 and 3man arena.

So yes, frostbolts can be pushed back IF the mage doesnt have tier 4 bonus and IF they dont have icebarrier up. Quite a bit different from steady and aimed shot, which get pushed back regardless of what the hunter does or how little damage hunters take.

Or the world's dumbest hunter. If half the hunters play like this, they don't deserve to be buffed

The point of the video besides its obvious humor is to show the Major lackings that even a faster Aimed Shot has. Hell, even mages can finish their cast times on Fireball if someone runs into melee on them.

I didn't claim I was wearing BT. I specifically said "PvP gear with even some BT gear.
Futhermore, to answer your question - Yes, a typical PvP hunter has around 1600 AP in MM spec, 1500 in BM spec. The World of Warcraft Armory

Can you stop speculating (wrongly may I add) about things you know very little of?
For one - BM spec is the most popular PvP spec. World of Warcraft Arena Ranking

Secondly, the difference in Arcane shot damage between MM and BM is less than 20 damage. (<5%)
You obviously don't know the hunter class as well as you think you do.

The World of Warcraft Armory

You said it yourself, your Corruption tick is 428 in PVP gear. I'm telling you (with a lot of data backing it) that thats usually the same or more than Hunter specials. Hence, I don't care about your Hunter in level 69 greens and how much he does. Its totally irrelevent when I have a Hunter with full PvP gear that I play on a daily basis.

Anyway, I don't really care what you believe. It was merely a humorous observation.

Note he's missing Hawk... But yeah I should have said 'some' before BT gear, my bad.

First, you're think none of those 41/20 specs are picking up players respeccing for PvE?
Second, the 0/4x/1x spec is much more popular, holding the #2, 3, and 4 spots for a combined 41%. All 3 of them are basically the same spec

Obviously I'm dumb. Hunters with Hawk and TSA and Might (I'm talking mostly 5v5, but even if you ignore Might) hit their arcane shots for less than 500. That's why this Hunter 5v5 video I'm watching has him hitting SL Warlocks for about 450-500 with Arcane Shot.


Yeah your Corruption doesn't tick for over 500 with that gear on without some special circumstances you aren't mentioning. Check it again...

What data? Yeah and you think you have no biases whatsoever when playing your Hunter?
Also it's sort of important to note that all DoTs are reduced by about 10% now in PvP, putting Corruption at ~385 per tick.

It's not even true

That's around 1600 with Viper up...so you're missing 170 from Hawk (including Master Marksman), which gives you closer to 1750-1800 AP unbuffed. I have nearly 2000 AP with just kings with my PVP/BT hybrid gear...so it seems your estimate is a little low.

Yeah... It pains me to see this kind of dishonesty. I recognize Hunters need some help but making stuff up only wastes peoples time...

Soeaking of dishonestly, there isn't a whole hell of a lot of difference between a DoT that ticks for 430 or whatever number you posted and an arcane shot going off for 470. The original point was that a Warlock DoT does similar damage to hunter auto-shots, and as far as I can tell from the numbers you posted they are pretty damn close. Not to mention you get 4-5 of them that you can load onto a person. You are not going to get any sympathy from hunters around here when you are disingenuous about the issues we face and attempt to derail the discussion.

I have no BT gear and have 1922 AP in FULL pvp gear (this is with careful aim). My gems aren't even AP focused for the most part. It's mostly crit/agi/stam. My only AP gem is the 20AP pvp gem.

But you're arguing over semantics. You both agree that dots do alot more damage than hunter abilities per GCD. If a corruption ticks for 300-400, and it's gonna tick 6 times, that's a hell of alot more than a hunter will get for a GCD unless he is using rank6 multishot and it crits.

Warlocks are absolutely improved versions of hunters in 2v2 and 3v3. It's not even close. I'll get to 5v5 later but for now let's focus on the smaller arenas. Behold how almost every benefit hunters have, has a better version in the warlock arsenal.

1) Hunter CC is crap. Lock is CC is possibly the best.
2) Hunter mana drain is decent. However it requires the use of a specific pet (scorpid) and the pet can only reduce the chance for viper sting being dispelled by 50%. In order to get better "coverage" a hunter needs to use a 30 second c/d (snake trap), and lose his CC abilities (freeze/frost traps). Locks on the other hand, can cover their own mana drain with their own spells, they can cover it much better than a scorpid can, and they have no cooldown on those "cover" abilities. Heck, they even do high damage with those abilities. In fact, just by using drain mana, they immediately stack another debuff on their target (Shadow Embrace).
3) LoS kills hunters. LoS is a lock's best friend.
4) Hunter pets are fragile and easily killed. Warlock pets are much more durable (felhunter has tainted blood, which someone calculated is equivalent to about 200 resilience against melee, and has resistances which help against casters. Voidwalker has high damage mitigation and high hp).
5) Hunter pets give no utility, they are limited to a single pet for the entire fight. It's also hard for them to rez their pet. Locks on the other hand have 2 amazing pets with great benefits - felhunter for offensive dispels and silence abilities, or voidwalker simply to keep an enemy healer in combat. They can instantly (and cheaply) ressurect to a pet of their choice to suit the combo they are facing.
6) Hunters are getting new abilities, all of which locks already have! offensive dispel, locks have it. MS effect, locks have a pseudo MS effect (Curse of Tongues) which is significantly easier to use. No deadzone, locks never had this issue and can use all their abilities even in melee range.
7) Mana issues. Hunters are the only class who's entire game revolves around physical dps and has a mana bar (enhancement shamans ofcourse have the same issue, but atleast they have other possible specs to choose from, we don't). Locks on the other hand, have life tap. As long they have a healer, locks have infinite mana. This is a HUGE issue.
8) Damage mitigation - Hunters have about 40% physical damage mitigation. Warlocks have close to that versus melee (assuming an SL/SL spec), and they have 20% mitigation versus casters, something which no class in the game has.
9) Survivability - Hunters' only mean of further mitigation beyond armor is their dodge and parry chances. These are worthless when stunned. Locks on the other hand have self healing capabilities, healthstones, and a 26% bonus to heals from all sources buff. Their survivability is nothing short of unbelievable.
10) Almost our entire damage output is mitigated by armor. Lock's damage is not mitigated by anything you'll see in arenas (except for priest buff and resistances found on other locks, ironically). Yes, some people use exploits which enable them to use SR gear versus locks, but since it's an exploit, it should be fixed and shouldn't be factored into this balancing list. Even despite this unfair exploit against locks, they are still topping the charts by a large margin (see the link I posted above).
11) Three classes can dispel hunter poisons. Two classes can dispel lock magic.


The list goes on and on. The only advantages hunters have over locks are better snares (wingclip, frost trap, concussive shot) and better burst damage. But in 2v2 and 3v3 locks are almost always able to force the fight to be an outlast fight, because they are extremely hard to kill.

Ofcourse, hunters can FD and drink, but locks don't even need to drink due to life tap. This gives them the ability to dps and CC none stop and buy time for their healer to drink. This is an extremely crucial factor as to why locks are so overpowered in small scale arenas.

The more I think about it, the more I see how an SL/SL lock is a truly 100% better class than a hunter for smaller scale arena.

Now, to address 5v5. It is true that things are a bit more equal here, but there is no doubt that locks are still much more successful than hunters. The reason things are closer is that both of the benefits hunters have over locks (as listed above, frost trap and better burst) have a much higher value in a 5v5 matchup. In 2v2 you're not going to burst anyone down as a hunter, and your frost trap will not hit more than 1 target usually. In 5v5 you CAN burst people down with an assist train, and your frost trap will be much more effective, snaring multiple opponents and pets, and allowing whoever is being focused in your team a very powerful kite path once he gains BoF. Another reason why things are closer here is that locks can't control the fight like they can in 2v2 or 3v3, nor can they singlehandedly force the game into an outlast fight where they have the clear advantage.

So those are the reasons why it's closer. For the reasons why locks are still better in 5v5, read above