(WoW) Lost Art of Being a Hunter

[The SkaerKrow]

Inspired by another WoW Thread, in which we see again that Hunters are largely considered to be tools who can't group because melee lust and an inability to trap = fail, I'm putting out a request for videos that show Hunters successfully doing such things as....

Dual Trapping!
Kiting!
Aggro Manipulating!
Off-Tanking!
Not Charging Into Melee!
Helicopter Pilot!

Because the next PUG that we Hunters ruin may be your own!!! :D

[Seroster]

Dual Trapping is (in my opinion) overrated. It's only going to work for the duration of a trap and then things are kind of screwed. Chain trapping is another thing. It's not that hard. You put a trap down ahead of the pull, shoot distracting/arcane shot to get aggro on the mob, lure it to your trap. As soon as your trap cooldown is available, drop a new trap some distance from the old one. When the trap cooldown ends, the mob should run to your new trap, hit it, refrozen.

Kiting? Here's a video of someone kiting the 3rd demon in the old hunter epic quest chain. Don't know how much you'll learn from it. If the demon reached within 30 yards of you, it would put a debuff on you which would do huge amounts of shadow damage until you died. So the rule was STAY FAR AWAY.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N3BlF-x-to

Look to Part 2 as well for the boss that required melee while it was weakened (so it only did 1 point of damage) and then kiting out into range when the debuff was wearin off.

Off-tanking? Turn growl on for your pet, have it attack that target, Intimidate if you've got it, throw up Mend Pet every time it expires.

[Seroster]

Ok, a bit more information:

Dual Trapping: place one trap before the pull. Wait for the cooldown to finish. Have the tank start the pull. Pull your mob to your trap.

Now place a second trap a little distance away, immediately. Target your second trap target, get aggro on it, pull to your second trap.


Kiting: if the mob is in melee with you, wingclip it. Get out of range by strafing to the left or right. Backing up is too slow, and running directly away will get you dazed.

At range, you can use concussive shot (and aspect of the cheetah if you aren't taking damage) to slow it down. Use arcane shot and serpent sting to do instant damage. You want to be able to fire these shots on the run, if possible. There are two techniques for this:

1) Jump shot. You don't move in a different direction if you start jumping and then turn in the middle of the jump. So you can run away from the monster, jump, and then either spin 360 degrees or 90 degrees, and then 90 degrees back. In either case, once you are partly turned, you can fire an instant shot at the monster before you finish your jump. You may need to up your mouse sensitivity for this.

2) Strafing. As you run away, turn 90 degrees and use strafing to continue to run away from the monster. Fire an arcane or serpent sting.

Keep running! :)

[brooksd01]

Chain trapping is another thing. It's not that hard. You put a trap down ahead of the pull, shoot distracting/arcane shot to get aggro on the mob, lure it to your trap. As soon as your trap cooldown is available, drop a new trap some distance from the old one. When the trap cooldown ends, the mob should run to your new trap, hit it, refrozen.

To expand a little on Seroster's excellent advice. If you keep the distances as long as possible between the two traps and use concussive to slow travel time you can chain almost indefinitely.

This is highly dependent of the room you have to work with. In something like the Moroes fight in Karazahn a good hunter can keep an add locked up for a very long time as you have a huge room to play with. In places like the tight hallways of Shattered Halls it's more challenging, but still doable if played right.

One thing to keep in mind as the chain extends is that you'll have less and less threat relative to the healer since they're constantly building and you just have your initial shots, so you will have to hammer the mob as soon as the trap breaks to keep it moving towards you. One trick can be to break your own trap with a Aimed / Concussive / Arcane burst just as it was timing out anyway to maximize your threat build between traps. The concussive also gives you that much more travel time between traps to help eat up the CD time on the next trap.

[slim_pick3ns]

Distracting Shot doesn't break traps, so the enterprising hunter can construct a focus macro to hit their trap target with Distracting Shot every cooldown while still maintaining most of their rotation on whatever's marked for death.

[davidb]

Playing a hunter is easy. Playing a hunter well is VERY hard. Kiting requires a great degree of 360 awareness, careful timining, and planning your moves 3 actins ahead.

The hunter quest is perhaps the HARDEST solo quest in the game; I can't think of anything that comes close. I'm a bit saddened there's not more quests like that to be honest...teaches people how to play their class.

Recently dusted off my hunter Mimer, and getting slowly back into the swing of things. Still mucking things up, but i'm slowly remembering the harder stuff. I don't think I'll ever master the Jump/180spin/shoot/180spinback/run combo.

I did get a kick out of a Gruul run though, where I asked Aylfric if he wanted to do scorpid sting or should I...I detected a tear in his eye as he said "No one has ever asked me that before!!!" :D

[Qetu]

Distracting Shot doesn't break traps, so the enterprising hunter can construct a focus macro to hit their trap target with Distracting Shot every cooldown while still maintaining most of their rotation on whatever's marked for death.

Now that is interesting.

[davidb]

Distracting Shot doesn't break traps, so the enterprising hunter can construct a focus macro to hit their trap target with Distracting Shot every cooldown while still maintaining most of their rotation on whatever's marked for death.

I never knew that. Thanks for the tip!

too bad multishot continues to break it though. :(

[Benny the Gnome Bard]

Playing a hunter is easy. Playing a hunter well is VERY hard. Kiting requires a great degree of 360 awareness, careful timining, and planning your moves 3 actins ahead.

The hunter quest is perhaps the HARDEST solo quest in the game; I can't think of anything that comes close. I'm a bit saddened there's not more quests like that to be honest...teaches people how to play their class.

Recently dusted off my hunter Mimer, and getting slowly back into the swing of things. Still mucking things up, but i'm slowly remembering the harder stuff. I don't think I'll ever master the Jump/180spin/shoot/180spinback/run combo.

I did get a kick out of a Gruul run though, where I asked Aylfric if he wanted to do scorpid sting or should I...I detected a tear in his eye as he said "No one has ever asked me that before!!!" :D

I think my raid leader wanted to hug me the first time he heard me ask "what sting would you like?" Apparantly all the other hunters in our raid alliance just threw up serpent and left it at that.

[Seroster]

I did get a kick out of a Gruul run though, where I asked Aylfric if he wanted to do scorpid sting or should I...I detected a tear in his eye as he said "No one has ever asked me that before!!!" :D


Well.... yeah. :)

Sometimes in the past I have felt like "If I don't fire scorpid sting every 20 seconds, it won't be up. And if I don't refresh hunter's mark, no one will." And "Aaaaaugh I'm out of mana again!" :D There are some others who are good at keeping scorpid sting up now, though.

5% less damage from the boss, and four hundred and forty attack power for the hunters in the raid is really good.

I shed a tiny tear inside if hunter's mark disappears in mid-fight. ;)

[davidb]

I think my raid leader wanted to hug me the first time he heard me ask "what sting would you like?" Apparantly all the other hunters in our raid alliance just threw up serpent and left it at that.

Aside from dotting up a rogue in pvp to prevent them from stealthing, I can't think of much use for SS. Maybe if you know you're going to die, one last final shot?

I've considered dot-tabbing and laying out SS as a warlock does DOTs, but the damage scales horribly and you're better off maintaing a auto/sureshot rotation under pretty much any circumstance.

[davidb]

Well.... yeah. :)

Sometimes in the past I have felt like "If I don't fire scorpid sting every 20 seconds, it won't be up. And if I don't refresh hunter's mark, no one will." And "Aaaaaugh I'm out of mana again!" :D There are some others who are good at keeping scorpid sting up now, though.

5% less damage from the boss, and four hundred and forty attack power for the hunters in the raid is really good.

I shed a tiny tear inside if hunter's mark disappears in mid-fight. ;)

In my mind, the lowest DPS hunter should always be responsible for scorpid as its a waste of damage if you have other hunters doing it. And same goes for hunters mark -- assuming its improved HM.

One thing I've been doing lately is throwing down a flame trap to dot up the mob and do fire damage to the boss over time. The DPS lost probably isn't worth losing a shot rotation cycle over, but if its something like gruul where i run past the boss to get to a better position, its just a little extra damage.

[James Ojaste]

In my mind, the lowest DPS hunter should always be responsible for scorpid as its a waste of damage if you have other hunters doing it. And same goes for hunters mark -- assuming its improved HM.Yeah, and likewise for every other class out there. There's no point in having a super-geared warlock drop Curse of Recklessness on a mob when that fresh 70's CoR is just as good.

The exception, of course, is when the person "responsible" isn't exactly responsible. If a debuff has to stay up, give the assignment to somebody who'll make sure it stays up. ;)

[hkgirl91]

In my mind, the lowest DPS hunter should always be responsible for scorpid as its a waste of damage if you have other hunters doing it. And same goes for hunters mark -- assuming its improved HM.

We really need to be better about that Horde-side. We never really assign either HM or scorpid to anyone.

[davidb]

We really need to be better about that Horde-side. We never really assign either HM or scorpid to anyone.

Trying to find a polite way to say this...um...most of the hunters in the extended alliance aren't as...um...diligent as they could be. To Mr Ojaste's point, you assign those roles to people you know who will do them.

Actually I've found warlocks to be particularly slack too. Seems there's a few like Azix and Phy and Wormbait and Selenee who know their class and what they're supposed to do, and then there's the rest.

[brooksd01]

Trying to find a polite way to say this...um...most of the hunters in the extended alliance aren't as...um...diligent as they could be. To Mr Ojaste's point, you assign those roles to people you know who will do them.

Actually I've found warlocks to be particularly slack too. Seems there's a few like Azix and Phy and Wormbait and Selenee who know their class and what they're supposed to do, and then there's the rest.

Yeah, I try to make it sound like it's random when I'm selecting hunters to do the MD work or warlocks to CC in Tempest Keep- but it's a "random" selection of the ones that I know are good at it.

On the choice thing though: sometimes you want to pick the better geared ones on non-hunter roles due to threat limits and what not. If it's VR and the good 'locks are going to be standing around a bit at the end due to threat, give CoR to them so the others can do more damage.

[hkgirl91]

Trying to find a polite way to say this...um...most of the hunters in the extended alliance aren't as...um...diligent as they could be. To Mr Ojaste's point, you assign those roles to people you know who will do them.

When I'm on Zula, I just assume I'm on scorpid. And a lot of hunters seem to take the mana talent instead of imp mark for that tier of MM, so I usually mark, too.

[WalkingTarget]

When I'm on Zula, I just assume I'm on scorpid. And a lot of hunters seem to take the mana talent instead of imp mark for that tier of MM, so I usually mark, too.

Ditto with Vaargul, unless somebody beats me to it. Even then, I've seen people get lax and let Scorpid run out so I'll start it up again.

[hkgirl91]

Speaking of Vaargul....I sent him an in-game mail last night, regarding this:

Zula's 12 badges away from that shiny badge crossbow.

Halaeya has done some frenzied mining and I believe I'm only one star of elune short of mats for a new Stabilized Eternium Scope.

I may not be on much tonight, but when would be a good time to catch Vaar to get the shiny crafted?

[Kurotowa]

Actually I've found warlocks to be particularly slack too. Seems there's a few like Azix and Phy and Wormbait and Selenee who know their class and what they're supposed to do, and then there's the rest.

Well, there's slack, and then there's untrained and unskilled. As a young 70 Warlock I try to pick up as much as I can. But a lot of the tricks and tactics are oral traditions, passed on from one generation to the next instead of codified in an easy to find place. And often their reliability can be suspect or subject to personal bias. Then there's player capacity; I know I'm not good at handling multiple information streams at once, so I don't even try the crazy things like Fear/CoR juggling two mobs at once while nuking a third.

It never hurts for the older hands to give us kids feedback. What we did that was good, what we did that wasn't so good, and what we could have done that would have helped. Otherwise it's all guesswork and trial & error.

[brooksd01]

Well, there's slack, and then there's untrained and unskilled. As a young 70 Warlock I try to pick up as much as I can. But a lot of the tricks and tactics are oral traditions, passed on from one generation to the next instead of codified in an easy to find place. And often their reliability can be suspect or subject to personal bias. Then there's player capacity; I know I'm not good at handling multiple information streams at once, so I don't even try the crazy things like Fear/CoR juggling two mobs at once while nuking a third.

It never hurts for the older hands to give us kids feedback. What we did that was good, what we did that wasn't so good, and what we could have done that would have helped. Otherwise it's all guesswork and trial & error.

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t17008-warlock_pve_raiding_compendium/

[The SkaerKrow]

Sometimes in the past I have felt like "If I don't fire scorpid sting every 20 seconds, it won't be up. And if I don't refresh hunter's mark, no one will." And "Aaaaaugh I'm out of mana again!" :D There are some others who are good at keeping scorpid sting up now, though. This must be a symptom of me never having been in a Raid, because Scorpid Sting has never been mentioned (let alone requested or alluded to as being desirable) in any five-man group that I've ever been in. Viper Sting gets more play than Scorpid Sting, from what I've seen.

I don't think that non-Hunters realize how many seemingly esoteric Skills that a Hunter has access to, that they will never fully learn to use during solo play. And by the time you really start hitting challenging five mans (or Raids), you can't very well start throwing out random abilities because you just want to see how they work. If the Group or Raid Leader wants something hit with a specific shot or sting, all they really have to do is ask. I've never met a worthwhile Hunter that couldn't/wouldn't keep up with a (de)buff is asked.

[davidb]

This must be a symptom of me never having been in a Raid, because Scorpid Sting has never been mentioned (let alone requested or alluded to as being desirable) in any five-man group that I've ever been in. Viper Sting gets more play than Scorpid Sting, from what I've seen.

I don't think that non-Hunters realize how many seemingly esoteric Skills that a Hunter has access to, that they will never fully learn to use during solo play. And by the time you really start hitting challenging five mans (or Raids), you can't very well start throwing out random abilities because you just want to see how they work. If the Group or Raid Leader wants something hit with a specific shot or sting, all they really have to do is ask. I've never met a worthwhile Hunter that couldn't/wouldn't keep up with a (de)buff is asked.

In raiding settings, small percentages (like 3% extra crit, or 5% mitigated incoming damage, etc) play huge dividends, as the effects are multiplied by 25 people.

In terms of regular grouping, you'd probably never easily see the impact of a scorpid sting in PvE content or normal dungeons. In heroic dungeons, probably would be benifical on some bosses.

To equate to console gaming....raiding is the unlock secret level of WoW, where all the bosses are ultra-hard and you have to play perfectly. ;)