So. PvP. Discuss.

[Bairde]

Today I thought I would try my hand in a little bit of PvP, in the form of BG's. A guildie made me some starting PvP blues for my hunter (since I havn't even done any dungeons on him yet) and off I went. Let me tell you, the first one...it didn't go so well. I died a lot, got 3 killing blows, and 10 HK's. Something like that. I remember at one point that I hadn't tied down my action bar and when I clicked on an ability it come up and when i tried to click on another it got replaced...to be frank, it was a mess. The next time I went in, I was a bit more prepared. Pincer, my spirit beast crab, and I did rather well the second time through (with my action bars LOCKED). Got 18 killing blows, 1 death, and 45 HK's. After that I did TB but got DC'ed in the middle of it cause the realm died and I decided that was my cue to stop for the night and feed the family (They are eating now, I'm not a terrible person, I promise! XD). Anyway, I wanted to get everyone take on PvP'ing as a hunter, what your strategies are, what pets you use, your spec and why you use it, what talents you find most useful, glyph choices, your rotation, so on and so forth. I play PvP in BM and do everything is in MM (now that I have my terrorpene [or unless i'm just kinda playing around]), but I would like to hear what everyone else has to say on the subject!

[Saturo]

If you use keybinds you won't run into problems with messing up your actionbars. Just saying. :D

[Bairde]

I'm stuck in my ways lol. Many people have tried to get me to switch, but i'm on a laptop and have a crappy mouse, so I stick to what seems natural to me. /shrug

[Saturo]

If you have a bad mouse that's even more reason to switch.

Using keybinds typically improves your DPS, survivability, and maneuverability, as you can use the mouse to turn quickly rather than A and D. Still, if you prefer clicking I won't stop you. :D

[Moore]

I'm a BM hunter, I run a 2 BM hunter arena team we just hit 1600 the other day. My spec has a lot to do with my strategy my char is Minjoul on Venture Co if you feel like looking him up :p. I speccd into entanglement and such so that I can string along my opponent for as long as possible while my pet wails on them.


Dunno, what specific questions do you have?

[Phyress]

I play MM in pvp. It feels more natural to play in a pvp setting than BM or Survival does. I personally hate Survival for pve and pvp. BM I've played for years now in both pve and pvp, so i was rather shocked when I found myself preferring MM pvp.

Here's my spec and glyphs.

I use three pets: a spider, a bird of prey, and a nether ray. The spider is the pet I use the majority of the time. The nether ray is only used against casters/healers and the bird of prey I use mostly on other hunters.

I don't do arenas unless someone asks me to help them get weekly points - I just don't enjoy it. BGs I haven't done in awhile, since I don't need any honor currently, but I do find them fun occasionally. I mostly duel people.

My strategy changes depending on the class I'm fighting. The basic strategy, though, is to stay at range to shoot, use chimera shot whenever its off CD, use my defensive skills wisely (ie: don't disengage when fighting a DK until they death grip, don't freezing trap someone with a dot unless I feel very nervous, stuff like that), and make sure I keep enough focus to tranq shot off any hots, bubbles, etc.

My eyes are also constantly moving. I try the best I can to be aware of everything: my target's location and buffs/debuffs, other targets, my focus (if I have one), my surroundings, and my allies.

I don't claim to be a pvp expert, though. That's just how I play.

[Moore]

Also, scatter shot and then freezing them in a trap is a great way to stop a healer for a few seconds, makes a big difference interrupting a heal on the enemy flag carrier/partner in arena.

[Bairde]

I didn't really have any specific questions, just wanted to see what other people were doing and get some pointers. I havn't been able to find many good hunter resources on the internet as far as PvP goes, so I was sure that I could find some here with as many experienced hunters we have

[Foru21dr]

Also, scatter shot and then freezing them in a trap is a great way to stop a healer for a few seconds, makes a big difference interrupting a heal on the enemy flag carrier/partner in arena.

do you have an actual macro for this, or do you have the combo key bound? Have wanted to do this, but can't get the launcher to respond fast enough to drop the trap.

[Foru21dr]

My take on BG play.

I play the bg's as a BM hunter, and based on the game is what pet I use.

I have 1 pet for slow/trap, 1 pet for heal, 1 pet for damage, and 1 pet for annoyance, and last one is who-ever I feel like playing with.

I select the pet I play with based on what game I'm in. Mostly will bring out the slow pet for flag carrier games. The others I start out with either a spirit beast or devilsaur, and then swap on who I would like to play with based on how the game is going.

For slow/trap, I use either my sithlid, or my chimeara. I prefer the chimeara as the trap feature of my sithlid has a 40 second CD and so he only gets one grab before the carrier gets away. My chimeara as a 10 sec CD so his slow is up quite often. I also just got a croc as his slow CD is even shorter, but his disadvantage is his speed to catch up to a running carrier, in close quarters though, he would keep him even slower for me to get conclusive shot on.

For the other games I play with my other pets. For tower/flag base protection where I know that it will be close quarter fighting, I usually start with my spirit beast for heals (have macroed the heal to me so that I'm not dependant on Auto Cast), or my devilsaur for damage (love to hear the stomp and see the crits on the enemy done by him). Based on how the game is going, (mostly if it is in our favor) I may swap out to a different pet for the annoyance to the enemy, or because I just feel like playing with something different. I do tend to like the pets that have the shorter CD than the ones with longer. Carrion birds, cats, raptors.. etc. Good thing about the bg's is you can swap as you go.

[Moore]

Also, scatter shot and then freezing them in a trap is a great way to stop a healer for a few seconds, makes a big difference interrupting a heal on the enemy flag carrier/partner in arena.

do you have an actual macro for this, or do you have the combo key bound? Have wanted to do this, but can't get the launcher to respond fast enough to drop the trap.

I run up near them scatter shot, wait for about .5 seconds of them wandering around (sometimes people make the mistake of trinketing scatter shot and try to get a heal off) so i wait the half a second just in case i do before I drop the trap. I don't use a macro for it just scatter shot hit ice trap and that gets it done.

Me and my friend chain trap people ridiculously well.

For instance in the Lordaeron arena, if the other team is heals and a dps like it normally is we wait down in our starting area normally a warrior or dk get zealous and charge right down there. Well when they are down there and their heals are up top they are out of LoS. So what I do is when the warrior enters the door i shoot a trap behind him and my friend does the same as well. We then wail on the warrior while when his healer does finally get there he's trapped, trinkets, and trapped again.

[Acherontia]

I strongly suggest checking out this thread on the same topic, which has a lot of neat Hunter PvP advice.

I suggest watching PvP movies. You can learn a lot from them! Imo, macros (usually with modifiers depending on whether you want to use abilities on yourself or your focus) are a must for good reaction times. It helps a lot to know about the abilities of other classes, their strategies & cooldowns, so you can force their hands & work around their style. I think hunter is one of the hardest classes to play right in PvP, and depends a lot on your skill, reaction time and intelligent use of cooldowns & abilities around your opponents' strategies.

I play BM, and I find it very nice for solo--very survivable, with lots of low-cd defensive abilities. I think it's all about putting out enough control to stop your opponents from damaging you, and tucking in enough defensive cooldowns to support that. With BM burst you can easily put most classes right on the defensive. I use a Cunning pet when I want RoS and to be extra survivable--often while flag-carrying--and a Spirit Beast for the extra damage now that I have enough resilience to survive a few hits, when solo. (Damage through Culling the Herd, Rabid, Call of the Wild + the Agi/Str buff, and the heal is a very nice help in PvP). You can swap pets on the fly, so having an anti-caster pet, a root pet, a stun pet or a disarm pet, etc along with you is quite nice for those times when you find yourself up against one pesky opponent repeatedly.

MM has higher damage, double silencing shot (and everything else) etc, and the majority of serious arena players at high rating seem to use it, but I like the BM synergy with the pet, so I haven't played it (and thus can't really comment further ).

If you do choose to go BM PvP, feel free to armory me if you want to see my spec/glyph choices--there's a few floater points that can be placed wherever you like, but the basic skeleton of my 2nd spec is pretty much the one most players seem to use, I think. Since you asked about our spec/glyph choices, I mean

[Bairde]

I've gotten several pieces of my honor gear now (yay!) and from what i've found through my own experimentation is that bm is really nice. I feel like its got a much more "on the move" feel to it, if that makes any sense, and it just feels more natural /shrug. The main problem i'm having now is that, for the most part, alliance sucks in bg's lol. Even though i have about zero experience with bg's and crap gear, I still manage to be in the top 3 every single match. And most of them we lose. Except for TB, we seem to get that one a lot for some reason.