| abstract
| - The role and viability of the hunter class in arenas is often contested amongst the class community, as between Beast Mastery, Marksmanship, and Survival hunters, there is a very large difference in play style. As a Beast Mastery hunter, your role will be to put out as much damage as possible paying heed to little else, as a Beast Mastery hunter requires less support from teammates. Your pet will be a source of damage with this spec and a very underestimated one. This style is generally preferred on teams without a healer, or 'gib' or 'rush down' teams. Beastmastery is also a part of a beastcleave team usually made up of a BM hunter, an Enhancement shaman, and a third pet bearing class (Unholy DK, warlock, boomkin, Frost mage). The Marksman's role is one of utility and damage output. As a Marksman, you will be expected to keep melee damage classes off your healer or more fragile team members with Scattershot, Freezing Arrow, Frost Trap, Concussive Shot, Silencing Shot, your pet’s web or pin abilty (you do have a spider or crab, right?), drain the enemy healer's mana with Viper Sting and keep one of the enemy players controlled with Freezing Trap. In many cases, all of these things are expected of you at once. Survival adds the utility of Wyvern Sting and extra survival cushion in the form of extra stamina while maintaining near the burst output of a Marks hunter. These styles have met with differing levels of success, but Marksmanship hunters are generally more successful in higher level brackets while Beast Mastery hunters and Survival hunters are better against more unorthodox teams usually encountered in lower level brackets. This is however a generalization and there are exceptions to both. Historically if you were a Marksmanship hunter, many of your fights would be long, since your most popular team setups would be drain teams (often with a disc priest and/or a warlock. In this scenario it was necessary to be patient, and not try to rush the game or rush the burst. A typical drain team game can take anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes. However, in current t10/s8 gear, Marks has pulled ahead of both Survival and BeastMastery as a high burst class while retaining all of its utility. Survival hunters are perfect for countering warriors, rogues, enhancement shamans or other hunters. With a diverse arsenal to immobilize (Counterattack,Entrapment for example), high avoidance (Deterrence, Deflection, and for maximum effect, go for the Beast Mastery talent Improved Aspect of the Monkey!) and 20% extra crit on Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite, it's possible to surprise your melee opponents with a barrage of alternating melee crits and short range shots while they are immobilized. Wyvern Sting and Scattershot are excellent arena weapons and give the hunter that much more CC. The downside to a survival build is the decreased ranged damage output and the loss of MM’s silencing shot and because of that, less viability versus casters. Survival should be combined with additional marksmanship talents and Improved Aspect for the Monkey to retain its diversity. Work on synergy with your team, and practice good decision making on utilizing your skills. How you play against one team composition may be completely different to how you play against another. Discussing strategy on taking down specific team comps or particularly annoying classes (cough, frost mage, cough), is the key to getting beyond a 1000 rating. Getting off your autoshots while kiting is often very important, if you can spare the room while kiting. Often referred to as stutter-stepping, it involves a brief pause while running/strafing away. The cast time for auto shot is 0.5 seconds, so as long as you stop moving 0.5 sec before your next shot, it will go off on time. Using a swing/cast timer like Quartz is extremely useful for getting the timing right, though eventually after practicing with the swing timer you should no longer need it. A slower weapon allows more movement. As you are a ranged class, melee combat should always be your last resort. Melee is an entirely impractical style of fighting for hunters. Only four abilities besides Wing Clip are available to the class: Scattershot (early Survival, often in MM Arena builds), Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, and Counterattack (Only available with deep Survival). It is not recommended to use anything but Wing Clip when engaged in melee, since Raptor Strike is based on next attack swing, Mongoose Bite is situational and Wing Clip is spammable. But your priority is to get out of melee range as fast as possible, using scattershot, Wingclip, Explosive Trap (if spec’d into Entrapment), Snake Trap, Disengage, Deterrence, or Master’s Call. Pillars work both ways. Try to stay near them and duck out whenever ranged target you, or when melee turn their focus to, pillars can help to avoid Shadowstep and Intercept. Being comfortable working around pillars is crucial for survival as a hunter in any bracket or level of play. Also using strategies to get a pillar-humper away from his pillar or lock him in place long enough to get some shots off is key. Often you can use the same strategies that you used to get melee off of you, to root a priest, mage or tree that won’t leave that pillar. Also if they are a healer, try to drag their teammates out of range, while staying in range of the healer. That way they will have to come out from behind that pillar or watch their tunnel-visioning dps teammates die. A quick switch back to the unprotected healer often results in a timely kill. Protect your Viper Sting. It is one of the hunter's most important tools in Arena. If you are draining a druid, following up a Viper Sting immediately with aSilencing Shot if you are a Marksman or Intimidation if you are a Beast Master, so the first few ticks are guaranteed protection from Abolish Poison. Conversely if your intended drain is something else like a mage, be sure to immediately silence or stun anyone on the mage's team who can dispel the sting. Be sure to work with any other crowd controllers on your team to chain CC effects to keep the sting up as long as possible. Use high points such as hills or buildings as firing locations. Any place that is hard to reach is perfect. High slopes in Alterac Valley and cliffs in Nagrand for instance. Also use bushes and trees as cover, making you harder to pin point. There are areas where you can shoot through the terrain, such as a hill. Paladins, rogues, and others who aren't ranged and can't charge/intercept you have little to counter this with, since they can't hit a button to find you. You can lay traps during combat. The best use of this is to drop a freezing trap, then run through it. Your opponent will likely follow. Once frozen (don't worry, your pet won't attack them), get as much distance as possible and load up an Aimed Shot/Arcane Shot combo. Use Concussive Shot to slow them if they are close then a Scatter Shot and repeat. It is important to note, freezing trap will break on most damage including dots, Serpent Sting and Piercing Shots (proc’d off chimera/aimed shot) will both break freezing trap. In arena, this means never try freezing arrow/trap on your focus target, save it for the healer/non-focus target. If you are trying to get a melee who is under the effect of dots off of you, Scattershot, Frost Trap, or Snake Trap are often more effective. The debuff’s associated with Viper Sting and Scorpid Sting do not break freezing trap’s effect. The most effective abilities in the battlegrounds are those that have little to no casting time. Chimera Shot, Explosive Shot, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, Kill Shot and Concussive Shot will be your best friends in the battlegrounds. Hunters are very powerful and versatile but require more than a button-mashing approach. Assessing the situation before you engage will always net better results for any class but no class benefits more from smart decisions than hunters. Steady Shot is a powerful PvE tool but its usefulness is limited in PvP. As Steady Shot has a 1.5 second casting time, it should only be used when you are not the target of any attackers. It is during this time that the hunter should take advantage of its mana efficient, yet surprisingly devastating damage output. For the Eye of the Storm battleground, Frost Trap is a must. On the tight passageways one well-placed frost trap can effectively cripple an enemy's advance. In addition, using Flare in tight passageways like the two eastern and western bridges as well as the Flag spot is great against rogues as well as stealthed Feral druids. Try to always keep your Insignia of the Alliance/Horde up as it will remove all crowd control effects from you when used. On an interface note, the debate of button pushing/mouse turning vs. clicking/keyboard turning rages on. After reading this article, you may come to the realization that the hunter has a huge array of spells and abilities that will be needed in arena. How could you possibly map keys to the 24 odd “main” abilities of a hunter. Well basically you could conceivably use the alt, shift, and ctrl modifiers to map 8 keys, however the chance of actually putting enough time in to master this configuration and always hit the right key combo at the right time would be immense. Also considering that strafing while kiting can often be far easier that jump shooting and allow more time to plan your next move, it works for many to map out some core abilities that are necessary when a melee manages to get in close enough that keyboard turning becomes a huge liability. It is important that you can switch from the usual wasd-qe movement to mousing on a dime (Especially useful for facing the right direction after a fear, in this case you might want to map your silencing shot, Chimera, big hitters to Alt-1234). Those core abilities are Scattershot, Wing Clip, Traps, Scorpid Sting (Chimera-disarm), Disengage, Deterrence, Master’s Call, Trinket. ZXC work well for Disengage, Deterrence, Trinket. R for freezing trap. 1234 for Scattershot, Wingclip, Frost Trap, and Snake Trap.
- Add the following skills:- Anti-air Shot- Arrow Rain- Rocket Launcher- Wolf RushWhen he is far away but in the screen, use Wolf Rush to knock it down.Use Arrow Rain while it is on the ground.Before he could start moving, use Rocket Launcher to send him up into the air.Spam Anti-air Shot.If your Rocket Launcher is level 2 or below,Use Arrow Rain,Use Rocket Launcher,Repeat.The best way is to Rocket Launcher it while you can, and spam Anti-air Shot.The rest of the skills are to assist in letting him fall to the ground, so he/she will be vulnerable to Rocket Launcher.
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