Take your pet off, feign, drink, put pet back on. Even if you only get a few ticks of water in, you can do it every 30 seconds, even out in the open.

I can't see any competent team being able to leave a Priest and a Warlock alone to mana burn them, since you'll be mana burning them whether they focus you or not. If it's a 4 DPS team they may be a little more likely to focus you since they can control your DPS, but it really depends then on how many 4 DPS teams you're facing. The battlemaster trinket is a nice trinket to have anyways, so you might as well get it just in case.

Myself, I took the AP one, and I'd love to throw tons of math at you to show why I did it, but I just liked it more.

I debated the same for a while...

I think for a PVE situation the AP trinket hands down, but for PVE I took the crit trinket. Most in times you will either be:

1) Mana Draining healer + applying some dps but only with the goal to drain mana and not to kill target
2) After healer is dry, attempting to burst down target
3) Attempting to burst down target quickly at the beginning

#2 or #3 - this is where I feel the crit trinket is more valuable than the AP one... and in situation #1, the goal is mana drain, not killing the target.

Does anyone else use the Mark of Conquest? I know I'm missing the small heal and a bit of the AP, but I like getting mana back. In a raid environment its equal to 35 MP5, I'm guessing in a PvP environment it's probably closer to 20-25 since you generally fire off fewer shots in a set amount of time. But still, over the course of a long game it can really add up. I was also considering the Heroic trinket from Slave Pens (or Underbog?) with resilience and mana returned everytime you get hit. Does anyone have an opinion on those trinkets?

Yeh I use MoC trinket + 2min. pvp trinket and love the combo. For wing clip kiting wars it's nice to get the occassional small hp return, and for long endurance games the mana return is nice. I mainly 2v2 with a disc priest so endurance is what we look for (that and the healer/dps combo)... and mana return is the name of the game in endurance matches (outside of actually being able to survive). Nothing sucks more than to have a healer next to nothing health and be out of mana. I'm sure we all have learned that the hard way.

And I totally spaced it on the heroic trinket you mention. That would be nice to get and try out.

I definitely use Mark of Conquest in a raiding environment and did consider it for PVP but ultimately went with the battlemaster because:

- it's relatively easy to FD drink in arena, simply pull pet off, FD, drink, put pet back on target
- Trinket's mana return is considerable smaller inside the arena than in a raiding environment
- Battlemaster has won us some games an extra 2k life to survive the initial burst from double dps teams is really nice, and one memorable fight it saved us from a shadow priest / rogue combo that killed my priest, i was able to finish off both the rogue and the shadow priest popping battlemaster to barely finish off the priest.

The one from slave pens is interesting but that's for healers IMO, the whole idea of hunters is Not to be getting hit that much by kiting them through traps.

I would recommend buying the battlemaster with badges rather than honor, if your guild runs kara/ZA and you do the occasional heroic, you will get the 75 badges in no time.

I also use Mark of Conquest in most of my 3v3 matches. We run Hunter/Hunter/Druid and it's much harder to generate a kill when you're struggling with mana. The Mark gives me a few more shots before I go OOM, and when I'm at low mana and it "procs" it effectively ups my burst DPS. I appreciate that about it much more than I appreciate from an "mp5" perspective.

Hmmm been reading a couple of posts in this thread.

As for the original questions, I think those have been answered. A lot of hunters use scorpids and how to spec them has been covered. I, however, do not.

Basically, I use the same pet and talent build for both PVE and PVP. Strictly my spec is kinda PVP, with Imp Monkey and Spirit Bond, but the little bit more haste I can get for PVE from Imp Hawk is kinda useless, and annoying, and I saw no real DPS change having it or not because I regularly go below 1.5 speed with it. My PVE DPS is great with this spec, and my PVP performance is good too. I am considering taking 1 more point from Frenzy and putting it into Bestial Swiftness, as that is a negligible DPS loss for my pet. Hmmm that's sounding good.

So I keep the same spec, keep the same pet (my trusty Wind Serpent) and I also don't do what most other arena hunters do. I see a lot of hunters saying basically you 'will' be draining, etc etc. That's just never worked out for me. I've always been in nuke teams, or I have lately anyway.

I first did 2v2 with a Resto Shaman and sure, I drained there and used a Scorpid. Lately I do 2v2 with an Enhancement Shaman, and I joined that because I basically had no-one else to play with and my 3v3 was looking a bit ropey. We managed to get 1850 with a lot of effort and it felt great for something we did to get points one week.

Not long after we did that, my 3v3 fell apart and me and the Enhancement Shaman made a new one, with a Disc Priest. In about 2 or 3 hours arena time we got to 2036. Made our efforts in 2v2 look weak, but oh well.

As you can imagine, trying to drain in a 2v2 with no healer would be a waste of time, so I basically just nuke the hell out of things, which is why I use my Wind Serpent.

As for using a Crit Trinket or an AP Trinket, I'd go for AP every time. I've gone for AP gems instead of Agi gems in my pvp kit (and in fact I have mostly, and will be from now on, used dps gems), mainly because I don't want to rely on crit, especially since its rate is reduced and its damage is reduced considerably.

Yes you can make a macro that does that. I have Kill Command on most of my regular skills to squeeze out extra pet DPS. A Mongoose Bite/Kill Command macro would be:

/cast Mongoose Bite
/cast Kill Command

As for adding Counterattack, I'm not sure whether just adding /cast Counterattack will work, but this will work as long as you spam it:

/castrandom Mongoose Bite, Counterattack
/cast Kill Command

I think o.O

As for which of the enchants to go for where, just write down a comparison and look at it like that. Personally I've gone for 12 Agi 3% Crit Damage in my Meta and 6 Agi Minor Run Speed on my boots. I'd say if you want survivability, definately go for stam and stun resist in helm and stamina run speed in boots.

Getting away from Rogues and Warriors is pretty difficult. In my case I can bestial wrath and run around dpsing, but when that runs out they can just sprint or intercept back to me, hamstring or crippling and I can't get away. I could trinket, and from time to time that lets me get distance again, but that would only work until intercept was back up (unless you just go completely out of range), and you have to hope they don't reapply cripple or hamstring before you go out of range. That's why I practice melee, because being able to do decent melee dps has won me matches.

Using line of sight to your own advantage can be very powerful against warriors. Not so much rogues, because they can sprint. But with warriors, you can stay at the opposite side of a pillar, placing a Snake or Frost trap depending on your preference and let your pet dps. If the warrior switches to your pet, call it back to you. People do it to us, if it serves your best interest do it back to them!

I was in a 2v2 game a while ago now where my team mate had died, I finished off the first of the opposite team, then did a bunch of damage to the remaining player (a priest, disc I think). I was getting seriously low on health from dots (I ended up on about 56 HP) so I ran behind a pillar and left my pet on the priest. Basically for the next 5 or 10 minutes I was constantly running around this pillar while my pet killed the priest, at one point I even laid a slowing trap and used that and intimidate to run to another pillar. My pet got a few lucky crits just before the priest regenerated enough mana to heal and that was game won. Probably one of the best feelings in arena I've had lol.

Whew wall of text.

No, you cannot make a macro to do all of those things without it getting stuck randomly. It will try to cast one or the other every time you hit the macro, thus you can end up with 5 key presses in a row all failing when you get a parry and want to cast Counterattack (because it is attempting to cast Mongoose bite), or Vice Versa when you attempt a Mongoose bite and the macro keeps going for Counterattack. What you can do is /castrandom each individually and macro up an ability with a cooldown first so that the macro moves past that line when you are unable to use it (otherwise your macro sticks to the first line and never does anything else). It also will not show whichever one is ready. You can try cast sequence macros, but those are clunky for reactive melee abilities.

This is what I do to get around that:

/castrandom Raptor Strike
/castrandom Mongoose Bite
/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

If you have counterattack and wish to use that instead of mongoose, simply change that one line:

/castrandom Raptor Strike
/castrandom Counterattack
/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Now if you try to use both Mongoose bite and Counterattack in that macro, for some reason it breaks and will not cast the 3rd one down. I think it gets stuck on the second line because the ability is neither available nor on cooldown. So something like this has never worked for me, but feel free to try it and find out for yourself:

/castrandom Raptor Strike
/castrandom Mongoose Bite
/castrandom Counterattack
/castrandom [target=pettarget, exists] Kill Command
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()


Unfortunately you cannot add Wing Clip into those macros either or they break, as Wing Clip will always be up. Blizzard did something sort of funky with the way macros work so that we cannot just make 1 button for all of our melee abilities like we did in the past.

Well you can, mine doesn't get stuck on my warrior because I spam it. Never tried something like what you propose though.

Easiest way is just having them separate with key bindings next to each other.

All my melee skills are on F keys above my normal attacks. Nice and easy to reach.

Your method looks interesting. I don't really understand how having castrandoms for one skill works better. I'd ask for a quick explanation, but then it would be the macro thread :P