This thread is all about Hunter PvP- so any hunter questions, tips and such are welcome imo

No Clever Traps
Trap1 20s (10)
Trap2 10s (10)
Trap3 5s (5)
Trap4 2s (2)

With 2/2.
Trap1 26s (10)
Trap2 13s (10)
Trap3 7s (7)
Trap4 3s (3)

(number) is true in arena. I'm just not sure how it's rounded up or down(used down). Due 30sec CD, dispels and trinket I doubt you will ever chain trap someone for 3rd time. So Clever Traps don't really do much for Freezing Trap.

BTW:
Disc priest/MM-SV Hunter
vs
1. Frost Mage/Rogue
2. Druid/Warior-Rogue

How to?

So every week I spec for pvp for 3 days, then back to raiding for 4 days, and I want to use the same spec for my 2v2 and 5v5 teams. In my 2v2 team I am paired with a resto druid, and in 5v5 am trying to get a drain team going with a felguard warlock, resto druid, holy paladin, and disc priest. Both are extremely defensive, outlast teams so rarely is someone ever getting bursted down.

So even though I see most pvp hunters speccing mortal shots, wouldn't ranged weapon spec be better? With the specs I am debating, I have 6 points to spend and will probably put 5 points in RWS, and 1 point in mortal shots, but just was interested in other opinions.

Also in 2v2 it seems imp wing clip might be best, but in 5v5 entrapment is optimal, so I think that I will put 2 points in each instead of 3 in 1 talent, and 1 point in the other. This is the final spec I have in mind: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

There is something that can extend traps over 10 seconds. I was boggled the other day when I got frozen, saw 12 seconds on the debuff duration, and watched it tick all the way down to 0. I don't know if Clever Traps has that effect or not. Maybe it's some combination of Clever Traps + a lower rank freezing trap.

This is my first season taking arena seriously (and I'm only a few weeks in), but here are some initial impressions:

Clever Traps is nice, more for the increased snakes on Snake Traps and the increased duration on Frost Traps. It may be my imagination, but it seems that my snakes are more likely to go after multiple targets in a larger area with Clever Traps.

Regardless of whether Viper is getting cleansed or not, at least in 3v3 if the healer is cleansing anything they're not healing, which provides precious GCDs to burn down an opponent.

I just finished training a scorpid and I'll be giving him his first run this week, specced avoidance 2, cobra reflexes, 120 resist in frost and shadow, and the rest in stam and armor. The diminishing returns from all higher ranks of trainable pet talents cause me to feel like I'm always getting more overall bang for my buck when I go a little way into several.

First you'll want a macro that is simply /focus to quickly set who you want to be the focus.

Then for say silencing shot it's a simple macro like

#showtooltip Silencing Shot
/cast [target=focus,exists] Silencing Shot;

Then whenever you need to silence your focus target just hit this macro. As long as the target is in the front 180 degrees of you and in los/range they will get hit.

IMHO, unless you get a mod that counts the number of times your pet resisted fears, nova or roots you cannot rely on your intuition. In the heat of battle, you are alot more likely to take note of the times when fear (etc) wasn't resisted than the times when it was resisted.

I am also using a similar spec for 3v3 (11/42/8 - didn't feel I needed a 3rd point in Hawk Eye). I find it alot better for 3v3 and 2v2 than the usual 0/42/19.

The greatest power of druid/hunter is that they can effectively reset the fight and drink as many times as they wish. If you oom the opposing healer and you are oom as well, reset the fight, drink and then resume dps. You need to play very aggressively and for that you need mana. The best way to play druid/hunter imho is to play very aggressively, reset, play aggressively, reset, etc, gaining an increasing edge with each reset. You can totally abuse your opponent's psyche by trapping their warrior and FD drinking right in his face, only to land an entangling roots on him 1 second before trap fades.

Lock/Druid also has this advantage, they also can CC the entire team and "reset" the fight. Also their lock never needs to drink. The only downside to locks is that they cannot fear warriors and are very vulnerable to rogues. You can trap warriors very easily and your ability to kite rogues is very high as well now that the deadzone has been removed.

Against healer+lock just kill the pet, this should be doable with your CC's, then you can reset the fight by cyclone+trap.
If it's a lock/druid, you'll fight an uphill battle but it's still doable. You need to be very aggressive though. You will not outlast that combo for several reasons: 1) their pet is more durable (voidy) 2) their healing is just as good as yours 3) their sustained dps is better (especially with all the LoS in arena) 4) They can remove your mana drain, you can't remove theirs. In addition, their mana drain is more effective anyway.

All these reasons mean that beating a lock/druid in an outlast battle is very very difficult and most likely impossible given equally skilled/geared players. The one thing you have that SL/SL locks don't have is burst, and therefore I believe your best course of action would be to play very aggressively. Kill their pet aggressively while CCing them, then move to their druid and make sure he never drinks, silence/scatter the lock on drains/fear and hope for the best.

As far as I know that poison has a 10 second cooldown and I am 100% certain scorpid is the better option to use.
I rarely found snares on pet preventing me from keeping the enemy healer from drinking or from draining him. It makes it a bit harder yes, but generally it's no big deal. The biggest problem I found with snares is that if a warrior hamstrings your pet, he can dps it freely and KILL it. It's not the fact that the pet is slowed that bothers me, it's the fact that it will die. That's the beauty of bestial swiftness, a hamstrung pet with bestial swiftness will move at 65% speed, while a wingclipped warrior will move at 40% speed (or 43.2% with boots enchant/meta gem). Try it and you'll absolutely love it, the pet just outruns warriors now, all you need to do is wingclip.

Ofcourse there's ways to counter it, the healer can run to the warrior, but then the healer can't LoS abuse you. If the healer is a pally, he can JoJ the pet. If they have a druid, he can root the pet to buy the warrior time. And then there's improved hamstring. But generally speaking, bestial swiftness is king at keeping pet alive as long as you snare the warrior.

Bestial swiftness is a great counter to hamstring, but with rogues the picture also looks somewhat better. A bestial swiftness pet with crippling poison will run at 39% speed, while a wingclipped rogue will run at 40% speed. With some latency the rogue might not be able to hit the pet as effectively as he would normally. This is a long shot though, and this talent is alot better against hamstring than against rogues. Generally rogues in 3v3 don't go for the pet though, from my experience.

It is also an excellent talent regardless of snares. 30% extra speed means your pet will reach your target sooner (23% sooner to be exact) after it has been CC'ed, or avoided via bridge jumping in blade's edge.

Yes it does. Since the cap on CC's (pre talents) is 10 seconds, your freezing trap will last 13 seconds if you have 2/2 in clever traps. I tested this when patch 2.3 came out and heard of no changes since, so I assume it's the same.

Also, since the base duration is capped at 10 seconds, you can use rank1 freezing trap in PvP and save yourself some mana (same with scare beast, rank1 is all you need).

Sapa's reply seems to suggest that clever traps doesn't improve the duration of your first trap. I believe this is wrong but i'll have to test it again to be 100% sure. I'll test it tomorrow and let you know. There is no reason why it shouldn't affect freezing trap though. After all, that is what the talent does and there is no reason to nerf it (especially with how weak hunters are relatively).

Druid/Warrior = trap warrior, keep pet alive, fear druid in human form for some mana burns+viper pwnage. Your priest must drink as much as possible. Mark the druid to stack 440AP in the long run, this is very important. As a side bonus it will prevent a nelf druid from drinking in shadowmeld, but the 440AP bonus is absolutely huge.

Spec 11/42/8. 11 for bestial swiftness (warrior can't dps your pet even with hamstring as long as he is wingclipped) and 8 for improved wingclip (imba versus melee).

One more thing - while stacking poisons with a scorpid is nice indeed, a smart druid can use this against you, by running to your trap intentionally (and it will break due to the poison dot). In this case you can disable the poison autocast 10 seconds before your trap c/d is ready to avoid the possibility of this happening. If he runs to your trap, you can punish him for it by viper stinging him inside the trap (it doesn't break the trap immediately now, it only has a chance to break it like mana drain + fear).

Druid/Rogue = The strat is pretty similar, except now you can fear the rogue as well. You can pretty much CC the rogue for 70% of the fight if you wish. As far as hunter's mark goes, it depends who you plan to kill first. If the druid is your kill target I would keep mark on him and just keep the rogue in combat through the CC's with rank1 distracting shot and rank1 serpent sting. If the rogue is your kill target you can just mark him and that will prevent him from restealthing anyway.

Frost mage/rogue - you need to survive their burst. Be ready to trinket out of stun and silence the mage if he tries to sheep your priest. If you outlast their burst and drain the mage you can win. Also you can trap/fear the rogue, so when he trinkets out of one, use the other. If he is undead it will be harder ofcourse.

Use HoTs/shields preemptively against this setup, even at full hp.

Go to curse gaming, download a focus frame (I use default UI and thus I use FocusFrame, but each unit frame has it's own focus frame as well that is compatible with it).

To make a target your focus target, click it and type /focus. Some arena mods like Proximo allow you to make a target your focus by right clicking (or anything you choose) it's tab on the Proximo window.

With the focus frame, you're able to see your focus target's hp, mana, buffs, debuffs, target and cast bar.

Some macros you can use:

/cast [target=focus] Silencing Shot
/cast [target=focus] Viper Sting(Rank 4)
/cast [target=focus] Scatter Shot

This is the basic structure of the macros I use. I didn't really dive deep into the whole macro business so there may be better versions to use, but these work fine for me. You can also make macros for other spells and other ranks of viper sting. If your spell has different ranks, make sure to type it like I did above, and not "Viper Sting (Rank4)" for example.

How to use them in arena? for example if you're against Priest/Mage/Rogue, and they're focusing you, your goal should be to kite the rogue while draining and silencing the mage as much as possible. So you make the mage your "focus target" and then target the rogue. By using the macros above, you can silence/viper the mage whenever you want without changing the target you currently have (thus allowing you to wingclip/scatter/concussive/dps the rogue more effectively).

Well the issue of Mortal Shots is a bit of a complicated one with Resilience. Generally Hunters have somewhere between 25 and 30% crit in their PvP gear. I'll just take an average and say 27.5% is standard. Geared players generally have 350-497 resilience. I'll take 10.5% reduction to crits, and 21% reduction in crit damage as averages. That brings you down to 17% crit. Mortal Shots brings your Crit damage up to 130%, then apply the reduction from resilience and you get 102.7% bonus damage on crits. This is a total boost in damage on crits of 23.7%, and since you crit 17% of the time the bonus 4.1%. That is .82% damage per point in Mortal Shots. This means that 1 point in Humanoid slaying is better than 1 point in Ranged Weapon Specialization which is better than 1 point in Mortal Shots. I have also seen discussion on whether Combat experience is worth taking, but I don't recall the verdict. According to Cheekie's spread sheet RWS is better than CE, so I just assumed it to be true. I believe Careful Aim came in above RWS as well, but someone might want to double check that.

Mortal shots is a must due to it's "burstly" nature. You calculated that the bonus on crits is 23.7% then multiplied it by the crit rating (0.17) and thus reached the 4.1% per 5 talent points result. While it is true that this is the bonus Mortal Shots will give in terms of sustained DPS, in arena burst can be very crucial. I never saw a hunter without Mortal Shots tbh.

When you DO crit, you'll get that 23.7% bonus all at once rather than stack small 5% bonuses every shot with 5/5 RWS. Sustained dps is alot easier to heal through (especially for hot classes) than burst damage.

I'm not convinced Beastial Swiftness is worth taking over Deterrence. Deterrence has saved me countless times from Rogues and Warriors, and Beastial Swiftness I can't see making up for that. Although I'm currently 0/43/18, I've been having issues with pet survivability in 2v2, and was considering This Spec, possibly switching two of the points in entrapment over to Thick Hide.

Thoughts?

Edit: I should mention my 2v2 consists of Hunter/Resto Shaman, and we're having issues with pet survivability against competent Druid/Warrior teams.

Does anyone have any links to pure PvP Hunter specs?

My build is a BM Raid Build, but as I can't play enough to raid anymore and my WoW is limited to the oldd PvP game i was thinking as i read this thread i could benefit from respeccing to MM...