Everything I hear makes me more excited about my hunter alt team

[Kyudo]

http://www.bigredkitty.net/

Have a listen to his 1st podcast.

My 4xhunter, 1xpriest team could actually potentially be more viable than the shammy pally combo from what I'm hearing.

Improved healing, decent tanking, real variety between the trees... I'm more excited about hunters than shammies in beta as things stand.

[moji]

Core Hounds?

W


T


F


They better make everything else just as good, because frankly the stuff they're adding to hunters is making it way too much fun.

[Naysayer]

Looks like they suck.

Rhino's look OP though.

[mmcookies]

bunnies!!!

i



want



freakin'



critters



as



hunter



pets

[Jaese]

bunnies!!!

i



want



freakin'



critters



as



hunter



pets

Cooking has a recipe that lets you control critters.

[mmcookies]

yah, but i don't think you can kill people with them :(

[Kyudo]

Yes, well, as nice as raging bunniez a la Monty Python would be great:

http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/9296/dangerbunnyhf7.jpg ('http://imageshack.us')

However, I was attempting to promote some real discussion about viability of this team setup in WOTLK....

I'm not in beta, so this is all theorycrafting, but here are my thoughts.

Potential Buffs/Utility:

Improved Hunters Mark
Trueshot Aura
Ferocious Inspiration
Expose Weakness (although currently for the survival hunter only)
Hunting Party
Useful traps on Surv hunter
Power Word:Fortitude
Divine Spirit

Potential Debuffs:

Major Armour Debuff - Acid Spit (worm pets)
Aimed Shot - Reduced healing
Scorpid Sting - Reduced chance to hit
Serpent Sting - Nature dmg
Viper Sting - Mana drain
Wyvern Sting - mini CC
Silencing Shot
Explosive shot AoE

Add an elemental shaman (taking away one BM hunter) and you'd also get:

Strength of Earth (Grace of Air and Str of earth merged, so this will be +agil and +str)
Heroism
Self - Res
Healing or Mana Stream
Elementals
etc. etc.



A team with 4 hunters and a priest could be configured to give the following with the right mix of specs and pets:

Specs are approximate, but you get the idea:

BM Hunter1 (tank hunter): 55/1/15
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunter=052032005252122501305310515300002500000000 000000000000001000000000000000000000000
Maximising pet tanking abilities, focus regen, healing taken etc, hunter will be fairly low DPS, but pet should be able to tank most things.

Pet spec:
Tenacity Pet options include:
Bear: Swipes 3 nearby enemies, decent for small to medium groups, good HP and armor. 25 Focus, instant.
Gorilla: Thunderstomp is great for large groups, but cooldown is 1 min, too long for instance pulls imo.
Turtle: Shield Shell is like a mini shieldwall, great for single target tanking. 3 min cooldown, instant cast.
Worm: Acid Spit, same effect as a sunder armour, should be good for retaining aggro on single targets.



BM Hunter2 (dps): 52/19/0
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunter=522010015150121531005213510000000000000000 000000000000005305200004000000000000000
Maximising pet DPS abilities, crit hit, focus regen, abilities cooldowns etc, decent hunter ranged DPS abilities and attack power bonuses. Also picks up Ferocious Inspiration which no longer stacks, so he's the only one that has it.

Pet probably best as a ferocity (with a tenacity in the bank for offtanking when one BM isnt enough). Any of the ferocity pets would be workable I guess, although I like effects that impact the whole party or debuff more than one enemy, so I'd probably go with Wolf for furious howl (improved range now), or carrion bird for Demoralizing Screech, hmm these are both non exotic actually so could gain a point back at the end of the BM tree too....

MM Hunter: 5/59/7
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunter=500000000000000000000000005000002000000000 000000000000005335001005113253135031351
Done no research on this really, but basically big crit, high attack power build, pet would be minimal dps. Also picks up improved hunters mark 5/5 and TS Aura to benefit the other hunters, and picks up silencing shot, although this might be hard to time but it's only 1 point.

I like the sound of a spore bat for this guy, as he does an AOE attack that reduces armour, might cause him to get aggro sometimes, but as I say, I like AoE buffs/debuffs.


Survival Hunter:2/14/55
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?hunter=522010015150121531005213510000000000000000 000000000000005305200004000000000000000
Heavy Survival build, gives Wyvern sting and explosive shot. Hunting party and Expose Weakness (if it gets un-nerfed) benefit the rest of the party too. Will be the heavy agility build as in TBC, DPS should be pretty good, but not as good as the MM hunter.

Pet wise, whatever, this post is too long already :D

Priest:20/51/0
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?priest=053230003040000000000000000023503103230205 033005101351000000000000000000000000000
Really like the sound of the 51 holy talent Guardian Spirit, which sounds pretty good for helping out a slightly weaker than dedicated tank. Unfortunately, no divine spirit with this build, but do hunters benefit from it that much?

Your thoughts?

[Kyudo]

Forgot the pet specs:

BM1- Bear: http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?petcalc=0szG0rG0dk ('http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?petcalc=0RzG0rM0dz')
BM2 - Wolf: http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?petcalc=0cdz0fczzhko ('http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?petcalc=0MdM0f0zzh0o')
Marks - Spore bat: http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?petcalc=codz0bh0Mrz
Surv - Tallstrider: http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?petcalc=zmdM0f0zzh0o

[Kyudo]

No comments? :S

[brontes]

I ran three hunters to 60 as my first "RAF" test group while I got the hang of things. Their gear at 60 was avg ilvl~20 and they plowed through everything at a ridiculous pace. I can't imagine the dps with ss/aotv and gear that isn't forty+ levels behind.

(First characters on the server, no gold to twink, DEd/sold all BOEs I got, didn't run instances.)

On the down side, now that I'm playing my "main" hunter a bit solo in outlands (I'm RAFing to get a bunch of 60s on a single account and letting the other accounts expire,) the dps is so abysmal its depressing. Every fight is a marathon fight where I plink at a single mob for 30-40 seconds. LOL? :(

[Jaws5]

I have run 4 and 5 hunters

4 hunters and 1 priest is nice setup
4 hunters and 1 shaman nice also
4 hunters and 1 pal also good

4 hunters are 67 and now parked until I get this RAF out of my system (real bad case on many severs)

I did all BM and selected different pets based on pvp or pve.

with healing they kill very well in av

:)

[accretion]

I think your theorycrafting is pretty reasonable, but I'm probably going to wait until patch 3.0 is release to evaluate specs. I tried to mix MM, BM and Surv on my group a couple months back and frankly, my overall group DPS suffered a lot, so I went back to 48/13/0 on all of my hunters and have no regrets.

The real experimentation will involve pet spec, IMO, since I don't think we have any beta testers reporting on multiple hunter pets yet.

The good news is that I think a hunter/priest group should be a lot more viable than it is now, due to pet changes, but I'm still unsure just how well it could handle heroic-level content.

[Kyudo]

I think your theorycrafting is pretty reasonable, but I'm probably going to wait until patch 3.0 is release to evaluate specs. I tried to mix MM, BM and Surv on my group a couple months back and frankly, my overall group DPS suffered a lot, so I went back to 48/13/0 on all of my hunters and have no regrets. Yes, it is definately all theorycrafting, to get the most out of so many mixed specs, the cast sequences and setups will need to be refined a lot. However, dont you believe that part of the reason that the BM build is so much better at the moment is because ferocious inspiration stacks?

[Jaws5]

The whole reason I went BM on all 5 hunters was because of FI stacked 5 times.

it procs a lot and 5 pets and 5 hunters with it is really OPed at this time.

pets scale to hunters gear, even with s1 and s2 BM hunters can take down s3/s4 grps during that 18 sec window with focus fire 5 pets on a healer is a good time