4xHunters and 4xShaman - PvP Comparisons (BG only for now)

[shaeman]

When I first pvp'ed on my hunter I read some stuff and tried the most mana efficient route on my hunter (solo).

This ended with me being dead more often than not. I realised I really need to be doing everything I can to keep the enemy off me, so worry less about mana and up my dps.

I also found that hunter melee can do a decent chunk of damage too.

I used a macro something like (working from memory).

/cast kill command

/cast wing clip

/cast raptor strike

/cast mongoose bite

If something is in my melee range then I spam that button, with a bit of gear you see some nice big chunks of damage coming up as a result.

It also allows you to get on your toes if need be after wing clip is applied.

[daviddoran]

So, I take it that the ultimate group would be to 8 box, and do 4 hunters and 4 shammies?

[Boylston]

So, I take it that the ultimate group would be to 8 box, and do 4 hunters and 4 shammies?

Only for AV maybe. The problem with adding more people (even going from 4 to 5, in my opinion) is that you end up being a larger percentage of the battleground. I really prefer both 4xShamans and 4xHunters in EotS, AB, WSG. 4 characters is usually enough to secure a moderately defended node, and it's a good number to have defending a node.

[Jaws5]

the main advantages for the hunters is mana management. I run 4 and 5 man teams of hunters

They can own any grp up to 10 in av. for tower off, 5 pets kill a lone defender easy.

I only play one lvl 70 shammy rest if grp is parked at 60(RAF)

but I love palying hunters

[Boylston]

I thought I'd update this thread a bit with some observations that are either new, or confirmed after having some time to play with the team. I may merge some of this back into the main post over time. Here goes:

UPDATE: 10/08/2008 (BGs only, still)

The team has a couple of key upgrades, but they are still very much undergeared relative to shamans. However, since my first post, I have a bunch more playtime with them and can confidently say a number of things:

Being feared is not as big of a concern as I thought it would be-- the classes that can fear are generally cloth wearers (priests/warlocks) that can be killed very fast or warriors, which must get into trap range in order to do their thing. Warriors are by far the more deadly. Death coil or a singly fear on your main can be a little problematic, although less so since Steady Shot breaks follow-- a side benefit of this breakage is that your alts often don't follow around your feared main and can continue to kill their target. Fear is absolutely a concern, but I have learned to prioritize fearing classes and take them out first. The number of times that I find my team running around feared is relatively small, now that I'm used to the team.

However, Bestial Wrath is not as useful as I thought it might be. I do use it when I'm expecting a big zerg, or if I see a warrior that can fear-bomb me, but I still feel like there's a disconnect between it's theorycrafted uberness and my actual results. I do think that WotLK talents that will make it available almost continuously will be a big help. Part of my problem may be that I'm trying to "save it" for when I really, really need it.

A mage can be brutal. Unlike shamans, I can't do full DPS to a mage that bounces around inside the dead zone and I can't chain heal my way through it. Frost nova + Arcane Explosion is pretty dominating. Granted, putting pets on the target and using stuns is helpful, but the time between an intimidation button press and the actual stun is not immediate. Most solo mages can't actually kill my team, but they can certainly take everyone down to 20-50% health without much difficulty at all.

Auto-shot is nice and was not something I thought I'd consider an advantage. However, if your target is in range and in the 180 arc, your guys are always throwing some DPS at it if they can. The auto-turn of steady shot helps out some too.

I miss shields. Warriors and Ret Pallies hurt, even with mail.

Pets are great DPS, especially BM spec. It is also fantastic to be able to swarm a person with 4 pets and either tie them up or DPS them down. I have killed many opponents on tower defense that I was able to tab-target, sick pets on, spam a couple intimidates, and just watch them die. Even if I never actually saw the player. On the other hand, pets having such decent DPS means that I don't do quite as much damage with ranged attacks. A lot of people die by ranged attacks before the pet can even close with them.

The no or low cast-time abilities with fast travel times are great:
Multi-shot is awesome. I wish its timer was as short as Chain Lightning, but it is very effective.
Arcane shot is awesome. It's a Shock type instant with a 41-yd range that is very helpful against almost any class. I'm sad their taking its dispell ability away, but it's still great.
The new Aimed Shot that is Instant cast will also be awesome. It will allow a very quick and potent Aimed+Arcane+Multi combo in ~3 seconds. That's a lot of burst at long range.

Not having to worry about a grounding totem eating a ton of your DPS is fantastic, as is having a huge advantage against clothies with low armor.

Hunters are even more suited for big BGs (like AV) than shamans. They really shine when you can be slightly off the front lines and use your long range to decimate the other team. They have no where near the survivability once swarmed that shamans do. There's a way to deal with fear, there's tricks to deal with mages/rogues/warriors, but you can't do all those tricks at once. Hunters must be played more conservatively in order to do well in BGs, since a single "suprise" event can be troublesome.

If hunters lack the survivability of shamans, they gain some of the amazing territory control advantages. I have pulled off some amazing AV defenses by stringing frost traps together along a choke point and having all the time in the world to blow people off (having an army of tower archers backing you up also helps). Myself, a druid healer, and a mage (6 people total) killed a total of 31 people in AV in 2minutes in two closely-spaced waves. Frost traps are some of the best CC for a ranged DPS team... period. They can't be trinketed out of well, they have an intense slow and large area, and they persist for a nice long time. It will be nice if the ranged frost trap shot makes it completely into live.

Anyhow, in short, the Hunters are still very fun. I don't regret leveling them at all. I do wish that I had a S3/4 geared set to play with to compare them identically to the shaman, however.


In arenas, I still think they have potential, but I am not foolish enough to think that they could be as competitive as shaman. I have yet to win an arena game with them, although I've really only played 3v3 (by myself) and 5v5 (by myself with a holy priest in even worse gear) matches to date. My guys are definitely in the lose 10 and get points mode for the foreseeable future.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

The new Aimed Shot that is Instant cast will also be awesome. It will allow a very quick and potent Aimed+Arcane+Multi combo in ~3 seconds. That's a lot of burst at long range.

Aimed and Arcane are supposed to be on the same cooldown in LK, according to a Blizzard poster. They want you to pick one or the other.

[Boylston]

The new Aimed Shot that is Instant cast will also be awesome. It will allow a very quick and potent Aimed+Arcane+Multi combo in ~3 seconds. That's a lot of burst at long range.

Aimed and Arcane are supposed to be on the same cooldown in LK, according to a Blizzard poster. They want you to pick one or the other.

Well, poo!

[Kaynin]

Wait wait...

Did you try 2x hunter 2x shaman?

Think about it.

2x tremor at 2 sec interval, 2x pets which can annoy the healers during a focus, traps to snare melee, not as much insta nuke as 4x shaman, but with the added cc you can provide on healers, it might be able to work in arena!

4x shamans work because you can tunnelview and burn through any healers without having to bother with the healers, but 2x bm hunter and 2x elemental shaman do have that little extra something that can more easily interrupt a healer, or annoy a healer. Which might mitigate the lack of dps, 2x tremor should be just about enough.

I'm not saying it's a 2k+ set up, but I do think it has some potential, and quite possible, a lot of fun. ^^

[FtGeno]

I believe it's supposed to be the new aimed shot and multishot that share the same cd (correct me if I am wrong), and as a MM Hunter I don't particularly care for it as multi is a prime source of our dps. As it stands with the way aimed has been reworked the only point of using it will be for the healing debuff and though they say its dps now is comparable to multi, my own tests put it more in line with arcane shot. Looking at it from the devs point of view the new aimed was meant for those pillar humping healers who like to try and los us in arenas and it should help a lot but I wouldn't put it into my dps rotation just yet.

Very nice write up btw, interesting reading. I agree with you 100% regarding choke point defense, I can't think of a single class I'd rather have than a hunter defending a choke point. I'm sure it felt wonderful standing atop those towers while alliance basically just fed themselves to you. :love:

[Boylston]

I thought I'd update the folks following this thread on my experiences with the 4xhunters in patch 3.0.2.

Spec:

I dropped Beastmaster spec in order to pick up Explosive Shot with a 0/10/51 Survival build.



Gear:

2 piece Merciless, the blue PvP stuff, arena hands. Merc weapon. About 9k HP, 150 resilience, 1650 AP. Nothing special, clearly not S4 geared... Main has some purple PvE gear from Kara/ZA in spots.



Results:

Explosive shot is very nice. It's AoE range is very, very small, unfortunately, but its real advantage is that it has a very high crit rate and it deals FIRE damage, which is useful against all mail+plate wearers. When Lock-and-Load goes off, the ability to quickly spam 12 arcane shots (4x3) or 12 exploding shots into a target is huge fun. This setup continues to play a lot like a regular solo hunter-- you stay at max range and plink away at people. Multi-shot plus Explosive Shot offers a lot of AoE capability in larger battlegrounds.

I picked up spiders for their 20yd, 4 sec Web (root) spell. It's very handy and it's instant-cast, unlike intimidation. It's on round robin and is super duper handy. In larger fights, my pets stay largely out of the fray... I use them only when they're not going to get ret-pally or bladestorm dominated.

Provided you can avoid being swarmed by more than one person, this team is a lot of fun. There is no good way to deal with more than one person who decides to infiltrate your team and AoE attack you. Even with a healer buddy, if there's more than one person who closes the gap and begins to AoE, it's very bad news. I have a whole-team disengage that is fun to use, but it's only really useful against 1 person. (2 if you have a healer) So many classes have strong AoE now in 3.0.2 that it has been somewhat frustrating to play this team.

I can absolutely tear people apart at range, wield extensive ranged DPS (and a lot of it instant-cast), have a good handle on where people are at (due to track humanoid and flare), but can easily go down if I get swarmed. Aspect of the Viper is a god-send for long engagements-- throw it on and multi/explosive shot a couple of times and I have 100% mana in a matter of seconds. The ability to do a lot of damage via instants is nice, and I don't miss my shaman wind-ups when I play the hunters.

Summary:

Pre-3.0.2, I had to worry about being feared as a top concern. Post-3.0.2, the new top concern are those classes with strong AoE. The team is still fun, but it didn't get the PBAoE counter that shamans did in the form of Thunderstorm.



I will probably check out a 51-pt BM build next week with some devilsaurs.