I love the people bitching about Viper Sting. Viper Sting is one of the best abilities in arenas right now, it doesn't need a buff

-Warrior Intercepts, 3 second stun (intercept has 12 seconds left on cooldown), Hamstrings you.
-You Wing Clip, 1.5 second global cooldown (intercept has 10.5 seconds left on cooldown), you move away and gain ~2 yards.
-You continue moving away for .5 more seconds (intercept has 10 seconds left on cooldown, Wing Clip lasts for 8 more seconds, Hamstring lasts for 10 more seconds) and are 3 yards away.
-You Scattershot, 1.5 second global cooldown (intercept has 8.5 seconds left on cooldown, Wing Clip lasts for 6.5 more seconds, Hamstring lasts for 8.5 more seconds, Scattershot has 28.5 seconds left on cooldown), you move away and gain ~2 yards. Scattershot lasts for 2.5 more seconds.
-You are now 5 yards away from your target and can no longer Wing Clip him. If he didn't Hamstring you again while you were running away, Hamstring lasts 8.5 more seconds, Wing Clip lasts 6.5, and 8.5 seconds to next Intercept.
-Continue running away for 2.5 more seconds. On Live, you cannot shoot during this time. Lets say you gain 4 yards. You are now 9 yards away from the Warrior, Intercept has 5 seconds left on cooldown, Wing Clip lasts 4 more seconds, Hamstring lasts 6 or more seconds, Scattershot has 26 seconds left on cooldown)
-Attack Warrior for 4 seconds and lay trap, Wing Clip fades, Warrior catches up to you (because Hamstring lasts longer) and hits trap. Trinkets, continues to beat on you, has Intercept up once Scattershot comes back, your trap still has long cooldown, what do you do?

The number of times I hear palaidns bitching about cleanse resists trying to get rid of it has to be seen to be believed.

Judging the quality of a team based on the video you see is hard. You miss out on the games where they did focus the hunter and it just didn't work. Hunters are different to the other 2 mana draining classes because they can drain fully even under focus fire. All they need is their target in los and a free GCD and they can potentially drain 1778 mana even under focus. If you focus the hunter and you don't do enough damage the teams priest is free to mana burna and their warlock is free to fear/mana burn neither of which is fun.

Attacking warriros with 3 dps teams is a perfectly valid tactic as long as it is done at the right time. It's especially good for getting them to panic switching to defensive stance and lose MS on their target. In the rag dolled video after rag dolled mixed it up and killed CPC's paladin they started going for CPC's priest only to have their warrior focused and come within 800 health of dying. Not killing scorpids though is just stupid.

Actually in order to mana drain someone we need our scorpid stacking poison on him as well, so if whoever we are trying to drain runs into our dead zone or out of LoS we have to wait for our pet to go get at least 1-2 poisons up before trying to drain a new person. Mana burn is far better than Viper sting, and the warlock version that follows people out of LoS is as well. Big deal, the paladin gets resisted 30% of the time. Focus fire the Hunter and he never has to worry about it. You should see how often Hunters scream over having their Viper sting cleansed first despite a 5 stack of poison and the talent that makes it tougher to remove. The pendulum swings both ways, and given how low 30% is in the grand scheme of things it favors the classes that can cleanse because it is easier to remove than it is to apply and keep it there. As a druid I get to fire and forget a poison cleanse that removes viper sting along with the entire scorpid poison stack in one cast. Whenever I see a Hunter on the other team, my immediate response is "easy points." Don't try and tell me you think any differently as a warlock.

If viper sting was the best mana drain, as you seem to be suggesting, then Hunters would certainly would not be in last place for every single bracket. I find it interesting that it is mostly warlocks telling Hunters that we are fine.

For the same reason that dots are useful, (even w/o UA) stuff doesn't always get dispelled instantly or sometimes not at all. Healers only have so much time/GCDs, not to mention the (semi)protection that scorpid poison gives it. It's such a powerful drain, 1 GCD per 15 seconds for over 100 mana per second drained (ALL THE TIME!) The drain really puts huge stress on classes like ele shamans or mages. It helps a huge amount in any game where the game goes on for a significant amount of time. Hunters counter mages pretty well, with how fast they can kill WE's, the damage pressure they can put on a mage, and viper sting.

It's amazing in 2s and 3s where many teams run with Priests and can't cure it at all. It's pretty overpowered in those situations.

Can people stop talking about scorpid poison like its the fix-all for stopping viper from being dispeled? Do you know how easy it is to stop a scorpid from poisoning you?

Viper is bloody good, but against a GOOD shaman/druid/pally, it won't have a longer uptime than 1-2 ticks. Which is enough sometimes.

?? I specifically said 'the (semi)protection scorpid poison gives it'.

It is remarkably hard to cleanse a hunter's viper sting poison as a Ret paladin since most of my global cooldowns are spent actually trying to DPS if they have a scorpid. I also have a limited mana pool. I usually have to resort to LoSing and killing the pet, but usually I'm down to 50% by that point.

The two combined are a bloody powerful ability.

They dont. I played good opponents (2.3k or higher ratings). If the quality of warriors you face on a daily basis is better than this, well kudos to them. I'm not gonna bullshit you by stating things that work only versus nubs. This stuff works. It's how I do it. Fact is most hunters just don't know how to beat warriors. They lack the timing with their cooldowns and understanding of how to strafe kite properly. Piercing howl isn't gonna matter if you have hamstring on you already, and once you are moving away from him, you are faster no matter what debuff you have on you, because wingclip > any snares warriors have. Next season when hamstring is 10 seconds, it will be so much easier to handle them than it is now.

The problem is how people are focusing on one thing at a time. I never said i'll escape them with improved wingclips "only". People on forums quite often focus on ONE thing without realizing it's the bigger picture that counts. It's not just wingclips. It's scatters. It's traps. It's wingclips. It's wingclip procs. It's concussive shots. It's concussive procs. You have a ton of abilities to make warriors miserable and it all adds up to something that can be very hard to counter. But you need to execute it well (this brings up the issue of skill required for the hunter class vs skill required by others, and having played all classes except rogues in pvp, I agree that hunters require more skill than the average class to execute well - but it doesn't mean we don't have the counters, and this is why Blizzard will never buff us to be more than a semi average class).

Which leads me to this point: we need to seperate two issues here. The first issue is the fact that hunters require more skill to execute well, and has more glaring weaknesses than other classes in arena. This is something I am not arguing with. The second issue is what do we do about it? Thinking of abilities is nice and all, but there is just no chance in hell Blizzard will make a deterrence with snare removal + immunity + speed bonus with a 30 second cooldown. Forget it. Therefore we can do 2 things:

1) Think of other more rational ideas (like slight alterations to cooldowns)
2) Talk of ways to counter our issues with the current system

I am mostly focusing on the latter. Warriors seem to be a big issue for hunters. Therefore it would be pretty good if we discussed ways to counter them. Obviously I can't describe the warrior matchup to the very last detail by writing it on a forum. All I know is that it's not as hard as people make it sound. Warriors can't keep us from running like rogues can. If you can't dispel rogue poisons in arena, I agree, you're doomed to stay in melee if the rogue is focusing you. If your healer can cure poisons (or just BoF you), there is still hope. But with warriors it's easier because wingclip > hamstring and they can't see traps like rogues do.

People here seem to say that warriors see their traps the majority of times. My experience has been exactly the opposite. I actually remember telling myself a few weeks ago that I think warriors can't see traps for some reason, because they seem to ALWAYS fall into my traps.

Since my experience is different than yours, we're doing something different. I believe there's 2 reasons for this:

1) Preemptive trapping - your target will not see the trap if you put it from far enough (and "mask" it by moving).
2) If you're putting the trap while your target is in your melee, he WILL see it. But if he already has a snare on him (wingclip), it will be very hard for him to move in time. By the time he sees it some of the 2 second arming time would have passed. Add to that human reaction time (0.5-0.8 secs or so), and there is very little chance he'll move fast enough with a wingclip on him, the trap trigger area is bigger than the trap itself, so even if they start moving away, it's very likely to be triggered anyway.

I logged a hunter and a warrior simultaneously just to confirm these issues now. They will not see the trap if you put it from far enough. This is what I usually do when a warrior is about to intercept. If the warrior is already in my melee, I always wingclip first, then trap or scatter (or if improved wingclip procced, I just start kiting).

Also, if they move towards the trap, they will not see it before they trigger it, no chance. Unless they use the "walk" option or move very slowly towards the trap, they will trigger it without even seeing it.

Another thing I confirmed is that scatter and traps do not share a DR (someone earlier said they did).

I'm a bit confused here. Are you speaking of 1v1 or 2v2 with druid+warrior? As those are the only places where freezing trap is usable.

In 1v1 situation the result will depend on whether you have more than 20 seconds left on cd to next trap when warrior steps to your first trap, all I have to say.

I use freezing traps on healers in 3's and 5's but thats VERY, VERY rarely. It requires so much pressure put on enemy healers and viper sting up on one of them + scatter, silencing shot used on them to make it work. It does work, but rarely.

Generally freezing trap cooldown should be lower for what it is. 30 second cooldown on use effect with 2 second arming time thats affected by dimishing returns? -.-

How so?


IMO, hunters are fairly balanced against a good chunk of caster group, and i think this arcane shot change will further enforce that is the ability to remove a shield to actually finish someone off who is LoSing us will help immensely.


I think our strongest opponents, are rogue and warrior teams, and because warrior teams are a bit more common, i chose them to be the subject. It could be a rogue as well, and the same thing still happens, both melee classes have gotten many changes to improve their ability to close range/stay range and while this may have been balanced when facing other classes, hunters were clearly forgotten. Hell, our escape methods were even nerfed ( entrapment on DR.. which i agree was needed, but something else should have been given to compensate seeing as hunters defenitely need any help they can get and are in no position to be nerfed. The other change being the increase to trap cooldowns, plus arming times)



Also, picking out a single thing of a persons argument that is questionable, and then using that to discount the rest of their entire post is kind of stupid.