Seeing we have a thread for shammies and pallys up already I thought I might start a new one for hunters. I have been playing around with hunters a bit on MOP and since Mosg2 put the mozz on hunters in the ret thread, thought it might be a good time to start a thread collecting information for a 4 hunter group in MOP.
Primarily what I'll be looking at with a hunter group is 4 hunters and a healer ideally druid at this stage primarily for the stealth.
Improvements in this comp:
1. Camo now = stealth.
This will be awesome if it makes it through beta. The only weakness here is you have to be renew stealth every minute as camo expires, but the way it works at the moment, if you select camo about 1 sec before it expires, you will get a seamless changeover. Usr this in conjunction with one of the lvl 90 talents for an extremely hard hitting opener from stealth.
2. No minimum range
Hunters have always been strong against other ranged dps but this makes it easier to beat on melee that are all up in our grill. The only issue here is that IWT does not allow for close range dps spam the same way it does with melee IWT. Basically we are similar to all other casters in regard to range with the one benefit that we have autoattack occurring and a good range of instants to use for burst.
3. Pets
I don't have any addons for MoP obviously, but pets (in BM spec at least) are pretty powerful. My cat has 11.5k AP and normal hits are 5.5k, 11k crits then special attacks on top of that. There is a 1.4min cooldown increasing AP by 50% and this combined with BW results in pets getting close to 10k dps. Sending these onto a healer or CC target for interrupts via intimidation would be my initial tactic here.
For PvE, Tank spec pets have the increased armour and stam, decreased crit as well as last stand and now are unkillable whilst under the effects of BW given a glyph. Take 4 of these babies, add a specialised healer and we have the makings of a decent dungeon group. Only issue is queuing for randoms without a tank/healer :/
4. Crowd Control
The reason I have been playing with BM mainly is that they get an extra CC in the form of intimidation. All specs still have scatter for interrupting. All specs can pick up wyvern sting, silencing shot or the new binding shot. Traps are as good as ever, although admittedly harder to use as cc for boxers. The one new thing is a glyph to explosive trap which gives it a knockback effect. RR 4 of these at your feet with an ice trap and melee are going to have a tough time staying on you even if you are stationary. Alternatively, if you choose panda as a race you have an incapacitate to use for anyone in melee range. So al in all, 5 options for either stunning/sleeping/trapping or incapacitating opponents.
5. Survivability
It seems most classes are getting buffs in survivability and so have hunters. I suspect that hunters will still feel a bit squichy at times and the survivability is not as passive as it is with other classes that we traditionally box, but we have some extra tools to play with. Deterrence can be buffed to a 2 min CD immunity with 50% damage reduction via glyphs and talents. Disengage can give a 15% heal or snare every 25 sec and new spirit bond gives 1.5% heal every second. Alternatively we can get a passive 15% dmg reduction through Aot Iron Hawk now. Whilst not quite up there with DR of shadowform or moonkin, it is an improvement.
I think the nicest thing about this combo is the range of CCs as well as the ability to initiate combat through camo. The difficulties are going to be maximising our survivability and working out a way to face targets for IWT to work for easier automatic dpsing.
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