f13.net

How well do you do against hunters in pvp?  I'm admittedly only 24, so don't have some of the nicer talent bonuses, and only the first 3 pets... but while it's not a terribly unbalanced fight, I've found I tend to lose to them, even if a few levels lower than me. (I probably just suck)

Alkiera

Summon succubus, Seduce Hunter, fear pet, get into Hunter's melee and startup with the dots, then fear kite.  If they've got a BW pet I dunno what to tell you, but it eats Marks/ Survivial hunters for lunch which folks seems to be switching over to.*  I don't think BW is a dispellable buff, so you couldn't have your felhunter eat it.  I suppose at that point it's use your pet for a HP bar if you've got the talents, and hope your Dots kill the hunter before the hunter's pet kills you.  (Again, get in close to the hunter. The pet may be doing 50% of the hunter's damage but a lot panic when they can't use thier bows.. thus the constant whines that "OMG growl should work in PvP!)

* The 'common' perception on hunter boards right now is that 'OMG BM sux!!1! onle nubs spec bw' simply because pets don't scale with gear.   Well, that's true and all but yor BW pet still eats clothies alive in PvP, dumbasses.

Here's one of the better approaches that good warlocks have used against my hunter:

Sac void, fel dom, summon succy, charm hunter, fear pet, soul link, move to deadzone, nuke.

Hunters are not the easiest class to PvP with (but one the most fun) so you'll only need to do this on one hunter in a thousand. Just fear their pet, move to their deadzone and drop a DoT on them, and most will be too flustered to react properly.

Beastial wrath hunters use fast attacking (therfore low damage per hit) pets, drop curse of weakness on the pet and its pathetic. BW hunters should be the last thing warlocks worry about, although they bitch about them all the time. Priests are the ones taht need to worry about BW. BW is the priest killer spec. Survival hunters are the most dangerous, particularly if they have epic gear.

Using a succy against a hunter is a good tactic but risky. If the hunter sees you first generally they will open with a multishot which has the potential to just about one shot kill your succy. I have accidentally ganked succubus that were invis before with multishot.

Also generally if a warlock is up and I can actually see the succy the boar charges the ass slapper and she dies almost instantly and then boar goes on the warlock.

Hunters bane is rogues and warriors. Warlocks are actually very nasty for warriors you may not survive the fight but chances are the warrior won't either.

Kaid

That's why you start with VW out. With fel dom you can get the succy out in the multishot cooldown.

I see rogues bitching about hunters all the time, which I don't understand because they eat me up.  If I get the drop on them, sure, I've got a shot.  But most often I'm occupied with another target and they come up, cheapshot, then cut me to ribbons.  I suppose the ones bitching are expecting some sort of toe-to-toe melee fight. You know, the ones who bitch when warriors get off a 2500+ mortal strike on them after being charged because they weren't sneaking.

Didn't know that about BW hunters, Righ.  I've never played with one myself (always been marks) so I didn't think about it.  Makes a lot of sense, though.   I also didn't realize Succys were so frail.  I'll have to start taking them out when I see them. ( I usually ignore all pets and just go straight for the player.)

Succies and imps are paper thin.  You can take them out in 2-3 shots normally even without crits.

On hunter specs:

As far as I'm concerned, beastmaster is still better for solo play, and best for levelling up. For most hunters, marksmanship is what to focus on, until the point where you get to near 400 agility. At that point survival with lightning reflexes will make the ranged damage on par with marksman, and passing up the huge melee benefits of the survival tree isn't something you want to do. Survival hunter is funny as hell to play in PvP, especially when you've got a big two-hander, as nobody expects your melee critical strikes to be so frequent (> 50%) or extreme. BW is a one-trick show, and slowly (they aint bright) people are catching on about how to deal with it.

If you do go beastmaster, take the road less travelled - go for as slow a cat as you can find - Jaguero Stalker is ideal at 2.0s. Not only are slow attacks bigger hits (which helps against armored opponents and attack debuffs) but the cat stealth attack (prowl) is a single hit multiplier, so you get the best bonus. Coupled with the beast trinket from the level 50 quest (certain crit = x 2), unleashed fury (x 1.2), orc racial (x 1.05), and BW (x 1.5), the cat pounce (x 1.5) can do a huge damage opener (5.67 x base attack), and from the certain frenzy off the crit follow up with hideous subsequent damage. More burst damage than survival or marksman hunter can do (since the beastmaster is also shooting too) even with whatever pets they bring, but as I said, relies a little too heavily one one trick for most PvP.

I am a rogue and I despise hunters. I hate them with such a passion. Let me explain.

In order to have about a 50-50 chance vs a hunter, a rogue must get the drop on one. And like I said even then its VERY iffy that the rogue can win. A good hunter will scatter shot, move out to range, feign death and drop a freezing trap, then concussion shot, then aim shot. By this time the rogue has around half life, is slowed, and the hunter is standing on a trap. By the time the rogue reaches the hunter, his scatter shot should be almost up, so even if the rogue avoides the trap, the hunter can scatter him again soon, and probably make him wander in to the trap, if he does, its gg.

Now if a hunter gets the jump on a rogue, the rogue has about a 5-10% chance of winning.

I think the majority is the hate come from the fact that it is so frustrating to be kited by a good hunter. A rogue can burn every cooldown, and use every trick, and its still a very one sided battle. I consider myself a very competent PVPer. I have a lot of experiance playing my rogue in pvp, and a well played hunter just has to many counters for rogues.

See, that's kind of the point in being a rogue, you're supposed to be picking your fights. If you burn moves with longer cooldowns, you should have much more than a 50% chance of winning against a similarly skilled hunter. And hunters are in fact supposed to be the foil for rogues.

Saying "if the hunter gets the jump on you" is kind of like a hunter whining about impotence in melee. Use stealth more, IMO. :P

Yeah, the rogues who tear me up do the following:

Wait until I'm engaged in wtfpwning a clothie.  If I'm on defense, my trap is at the flag, not at my feet, use detect traps to make sure. My detect-stealth is only about 3-4m AND only works in about a 180 arc, so if you come up from behind I'm focusing on the cloth I'm hosed.

  If you're cautious wait until I move, the cloth inevitably will charge me if they're competent, so I'll move eventually.  When I do, it's cheapshot (2pts) with crippling poision (ain't running from that) and do the goddamned run-through circle-strafe dance if you don't get the kidney shot off when I blow my trinket.  Your damage is from the SSs you're pouring on to get more points, not the auto attack so get as big a weapon as you can. If you don't pop kidney, then get out of my LOS and I can't scatter you, plus I'm too damn slow to turn fast with the crippling on me.  

If it's two rogues working in tandem, I'm usually dead before I can even swing around to TRY and scatter shot one.

Trust me, I know HOW to take out hunters. But what I showing is that the majority of battles with hunters, the fight is defenetly in their favor. I didnt even mention flare, and hunters marks. Also, the majority of your examples are a rogue winning in 2v1. That shows the imbalance. Basically If I play my character at 100% effectivness and a hunter plays his at 100% effectivness, hunter wins. Thats what im showing. Its a good thing for me there are a lot of people who cant play at 100% at all times.

Hunters are supposed to be the foil for rogues, especially ones that are hanging around unstealthed at distance. Did you think there was supposed to be a class that could kill everything else with impunity? Like Blizzard say every other day - it isn't imbalanced, because the game is not balanced for each class to have equal opportunity against every other class in one on one combat.

And hunters are the counter to about 75% of the classes. They are overpowered however you want to spin it.

Okay. Poor rogues, its such a tough class.

Alternately you can check out the boar. The new boar charge ability has a huge atk bonus on first hit and a stun as well. Boars have much higher AC than cats too so can take a lot more of a beating. My boar currently has 6400 armor, more than some warriors in our BWL capable guild. That's with natural armor 10 though but still a lot more than a cat is going to have.

The only problem with boars is there's a huge level gap where you can't find any. There's tons down below L30 but none until 48-50 and none after that. The only high level boars are the gold ones in Blasted Lands and one rare as hell 50 that spawns there as well.

As you might imagine, I disagree.  Our Burst damage is mitigated by armor and avoidance, both of which are problems for us.  In that sense, casters are better than us.

Our stealth... Well, it doesn't work.  It really, really doesn't.  Hunters Mark is awful against us, unless you're constantly popping the Resto potions.  Hunters pets, through a bizarre selection of bugs, can see us no bother.  Vanish is just ASS.  Seriously, it doesn't get rid of the mark and it doesn't actually work half the time.  The fact that AoE pops us right out of it makes it fairly useless all around.  When they say 'Improved Version of Stealth' in the ToolTip, what they actually mean is 'Squeal Piggy, Right In Your GloryHole'.  It's no bloody good.

Our low armor values mean that we cannot stand up to a straight fight, but our bugged and useless skills mean we cannot get out of said fight quick enough.  Further, you simply don't ever ever ever ever ever want to try dogding an MS specced warrior.  He will cut your fucking head off.

With the improvements to Warlocks (where the hell did that new confusing blast thingy come from ???) we're now fairly low on the rankings.  I am FULLY AWARE that this is because we were the most balanced and 'complete' class out of the box.  I Know.  I agree that we were.  The trouble is that the more you lot have improved the less complete we've looked.

I can't address your experiences.  I really can't.  But I am tempted to think that it's probably more at 60 that I'm getting humped.

Sap is still fucking great though.

/sap
Followed by
/dance

= :heart:

That's not nearly as good as my old favorite:

/sap
Followed by
/dance

Followed by

/seduced

Followed by
/sbolt

Followed by DoTs

Followed by death..

Warlock FTW..

(yes, I actually had a rogue sap in and try to cap the flag I was guarding last night)..

Did I missread that, or can you controll your pets while sapped ?

Never noticed that.

(chopped mid sentence for effect)

Rogue stealth works wonderfully against everybody but a hunter. That's not really broken with the exception of the pet. The pet bug is fucking horrible and needs to be fixed badly, and yes, I'm fed up with it on my rogue too. It's actually a good deal worse than you imply - the pet on aggressive will attack you from 30 yards out, and the hunter can actually assist the pet too.

The AoE vs. stealth is a poor argument. If you're a rogue sneaking into a mass conflagration where AoEs are regularly going off its going to bite you hard, but that shouldn't be your battle anyhow. Rogues aren't a jack of all trades class for the front lines, never were. So sorry you're playing them that way. May I suggest a Shaman if you want to be able to adapt to every situation near equally well - that's the real "well rounded" class. If you're sneaking up on mages and warlocks who aren't engaged already and they get you with AoE they either have immaculate luck, or you're being a dumbass. If they're chaining AoEs to detect rogues, wait. They'll sit to drink shortly. Strike.

Yes, Hunters can too. We just can't use our own activated abilities like BW.  The pet's stuff like Claw, Bite, Prowl, Charge? All available.  Pets are all treated as a separate mob in regards to their AI, not an extension of the player character like they were in EQ.

Shaman... ><

Fucking Shaman.

I believe Hunter's Mark was also "nerfed" several patches ago.  It doesn't go away, but only the hunter who dropped it on you can see it if you've vanished.  Hunters are VERY anti-stealth and I won't say they aren't.  I just know that rogues are very capable of taking-down the hunter once they get into melee range. Yes, even solo.

Fuck Off.

That's not what I wrote at all.  I was talking about Vanish.

Oh, and if the 'effect' you were going for is 'I am a Dick and Do Not Wish To Discuss This'  Bravo.

Not fucking likely, you screaming arse bandit.

My mistake on the vanish, mea culpa, ad nauseum. So what you're saying is that stealth is broken because you can't escape from a situation where you've bitten off more than you can chew? Lets face it, you can kill almost any clothie solo without giving them much of a chance to fight back. You'd only need vanish if there's more than one, then it's not really a case of underpowered, is it?

The anger is thick on Friday.  Thick I say.

I love the internet.  It's like the dysfunctional family I never had.

What the fuck is the point of talking to you if you're gonna ride off on your horse with 'what I meant to say' every time ?

That's the second reply that's been 'fuk u lern2play nub.'

And you decry this turning into the WoW boards ?  You ?!

I refer the right honorable gentleman to the reply I gave some moments ago.

The Scots are fighting.  What a surprise.

I didn't even say that, I said I was wrong in mireading your post, then gave another reply. Mea culpa means, my fault. Dear Lord, how fucking stupid are you?

Are you guys seriously fighting about rogues? Jesus.

I thought they were fighting about hunters! 

I find your avatar very disturbing, Calantus.  It makes me nervous.

You're thinking warriors. I eat pretty much everything but mages and other better equipped warriors alive in PVP. And that's suited up in middling quality blues.

(http://www.discovervancouver.com/chris/blog/Groundskeeper_Willy.jpg)

YOU JUST MADE AN ENEMY FOR LIFE!

I think I know what you are saying, but only because you can't see what the hunter is seeing. I am not 100% certain, but I am betting on an addon in conjunction with a bug. If my pet is attacking a rogue and I get a Hunter's Mark on him and he vanishes, my pet has always been fooled by it. All the way from release to the latest patch. But, if I can see you still because of the mark, I can tell my pet to attack you, and even though you are stealthed, my pet will attack you. In other words, if I can see you, then my pet can be told to attack you and will do so. That is the part that may be bugged. If my pet can't see you, he shouldn't be able to attack you, regardless if I can see you or not.

I am guessing there is an addon out there somewhere that makes it so that when pet loses target due to vanish, but hunter still has target, pet is given an order to continue attacking that target automatically. It is probably similar to those addons that reacquire targets when you are feared. I don't use those because I (my personal opinion, nothing more) think it is a form of cheating. I also have never gotten past rank 3 in pvp, since I don't really like pvp in WoW, so take that opinion with a grain of salt.

No, there's a horrible bug out there. Put your pet on aggressive and go stand on a flag in the AB battleground. As a rogue approaches, the pet will attack the rogue, irrespective of addons or you having sight of the rogue - its a bug in the aggressive behaviour of pets. Needless to say, you should warn a hunter that has a pet on aggressive (irrespective of whether they appear to be using it to detect rogues/druids) in PvP to desist, and if they don't, report them. Might not stop the player or get them in trouble, but Blizzard are more likely to fix something if they have realm GMs reporting many such complaints.

That is a bug I was not aware of. My pet is nearly always on Passive unless I am out farming and then only on Defensive. I don't think I have ever used Aggressive except maybe once to see what it did. In AV, the only BG I ever really spent any time in, my pet was pretty worthless as he would run off after whomever I sent him after and, before I could tell him to come back, would end up stunned and destroyed. So, I usually didn't bother seeing what my pet was doing in BG's.

Wow, they haven't fixed that aggressive pet bug yet?  It's been around since beta.

Rogues are an awsome class. I love my class, and I would never play any other as my main. But Im not complaining about Hunters soly as a rogue. Hunters are overpowered in general, hunters are the new easy mode. It just the Rogue vs Hunter matchup is even more one sided. Some thing else I forgot to bring up in the other post, was that the rogues main for of out of stealth defence is dodge. Well guess what, ranged attacks cant be dodged. Blah.

Also, to Ironwood. Thats a myth about not wanting to dodge vs a MS warrior. You ARE going to dodge him quite a bit, so his overpower will be triggered. Its better to use evasion and hopefully dodge the hamstring/rend. Anyway, if you know how to beat a warrior, he should hardly hit you. Rupture kiting works like a charm on warriors.

(http://www.brokenhorde.net/upload/3574crit.jpg)

This is from a WSG.  Guy had at least 4 other 3k+ crits in that game.

No, I know.  I comfort myself with the fact when Sulfurons Hammer comes crashing down on my napper.

Okay, I'll take the bait. That's the BWL crossbow, and the guy is a 0/21/30 spec hunter with a mix of T2 and T1 epic armor. You do realise that both warlocks and warriors can outdamage that without any BWL gear, right?

Yep, you're spot on with his gears/spec.  One of the most common things heard on vent is "Goddamnit, Burke", since he tends to pull aggro with just autoshot even if he's cycling FD.

Really, there are a lot classes that just get disgusting with BWL gear. We have a DPS warrior that does insane damage and he'll get even worse when he blows his load on Ashkandi (if it ever drops for us, this guild has terrible luck with drops), and yes, a lot of his gear is non-BWL (a lot of Hakkar shit, though).  All DPS classes are tending to get quite disgusting while hybrids (druids, shaman) lag somewhat behind in the "gear == uber killing machine" equation although I can probably now outheal any pre-MC priest.

Edit:  misread, thought he was trying to pull with autoshoot.

The chasm between a well-equipped non-raid character and somebody deep into the raiding end-game has become so extreme in WoW that any level 60 battlegrounds other than Alterac Valley (where there's enough folks to random sides up some) are usually one-sided affairs. I remember when on Earthen Ring the Alliance won almost everything largely because they had about a dozen established raid guilds and the horde had one (and their members didn't PvP). Now both sides field pre-made teams packed to the gunwales with epic gear grinding out honor, and the level 60 pickup game is pretty futile. The most favored PvP instances have become the level 40-50 range twinked alts (because they can have mounts but not raid gear).

Blizzard once had an idea of making every class roughly able to do similar DPS such that there would be no DPS class at all, which seemed pretty sensible. Of course it was the hunters, mages and rogues that whined and said they had "nothing to offer groups except DPS" and that that would be unfair. I think the current thinking in Blizzard is to buff mages in the near future to make them the DPS kings again, heh, so we'll see how that little venture pans out in the next patch or three.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. My warrior equipped with DM/UBRS blues, stronghold gauntlets/lionheart helm went up against a random hordie wielding a Rag hammer and decked out in full BWL gear... I barely lasted 5-6 hits while not being able to put up a dent in him at all, and that was WITH a druid throwing me a heal or two.

I believe there's a certain stage in uber gear [mostly BWL and Rag stuff] where they make a character play completely differently. The crossbow enabling 4k aimed shot is a good example, but so is the TOEP/ZHC/AP frostbolt spam for 3k+ a hit, the 5/8 felheart demonology bonus that makes a soul link warlock pretty much unkillable, Askhandi [duh], that dagger from BWL that can do 3k ambushes with the proper gear, etc.

High-end BGs are starting to become organized honor farms, too. It's kinda sad when the ONLY people queuing on the other side are 3 uberguilds with their pre-made teams, on voice comms. Good luck trying to do anything against them solo or in a pug other than being a speed bump... :p


-- Z.

Is anyone really surprised by this?   

I am, but I'm stupid and easily tricked.

What's really messed up for hunters is that other than that bwl crossbow, the next closest high damage weapons for these kind of aimed shot numbers are from Strath and Scholo. Another manifestation of that stupid atk power/speed of game design that made for crazy ms/rogue ambush numbers before it was normalized.

Even hunters are calling for it to be normalized on their weapons, dispite aimed shot and multi not being instant shots.

Next highest is the blue crossbow from the AV battleground reward, then the Strath one, followed by the epic hunter quest bow. The hunter quest bow will outperform the two blue crossbows, but its more marginal than it should be when its possible to spam aimed+multi such as in most raid situations. There's then a couple of recent epic crossbows that are just an edge too fast and come from the world dragons. Again, they're still better except for raid hunters spamming aimed+multi. The rest of the purple bows and guns including all the MC stuff are easily beaten by the two blue crossbows to the point where you'd only use the purple stuff in situations where you can't break crowd control. It all comes down to the fact that (as you say) ranged attack power is related to speed and that no fiddle factor has been put in for 'instants' unlike for melee attacks. And it is kind of unfortunate that hunters have to wait until the second last boss in BWL to get a weapon upgrade, but then with Lightning Reflexes, they get a better upgrade just from the agility they can get off tier 1 armor anyhow (so quit yer bitchin raid hunters).

Its a bummer that one of the main damage dealing abilities of the rogue, eviserate, gets no better no matter what gear they use. Rogues are one of the classes that see the least improvment from high end gear. Dagger rogues can see a bit of a damage boost on ambush and backstab, but nothing like a warrior in full BWL gear.

pew pew (http://www.yourfilelink.com/get.php?fid=14426)

:p


-- Z.
</troll>

You do realize that Warlocks were nerfed last patch, and even epic geared with the two trinks can no longer do this kind of crit damage, right?

EDIT:  You also realize that Warlocks can't wear mail armor, and can't do that kind of damage from a range further than any other class can hit in the game.. in addition, warlocks have one snare, and it's crappy (90% of your run speed FTW!) and it takes talents to unlock it.  Hunters have two great snares, the longest range in the game, mail armor, and crits that are twice as big as the best (once a month, with epic trinkets and the perfect build, on a 4 second cast time spell (with talents, 6 seconds without), with +500 damage gear) warlock crits.

I just hit 60 on my hunter (31/20/0).  I get excited when I get a crit for 1850.  (No, I haven't pvped much at all.)

What a difference equipment and spec make, eh?

And we're off again.

Now you're starting to talk about the range that epic geared warlocks with ToEP and ZHC can crit at since last patch.  And they can't do it from 41 yards away, while wearing mail armor.

That's because it's fucking swings and roundabouts. If warlocks were shite nobody would play them. I've beaten almost every class with almost every other class in a fair fight (and been beaten in turn). The balance isn't as bad as the nerf herders like to make out. Warlocks have no dead zone, their spells are unimpeded by the wonderful mail armor of a hunter, and they have 38 billion hit points. Etc, etc.

So lets get this straight, we've established that rogues are hard done by in WoW, warlocks are hard done by in WoW, and we're moving on. Who's next on the fucking cry me a river boat?

1850 is higher than I've ever hit on my shaman with any one attack. :) Although I suppose a frost shock/windfury hit/ns-chain lightning might do that much in a span of a second.  Fear the crazy mana-tide shaman DPS that relies on pure luck. 

Kinda psyched to get my hunter up.  I've always wanted a long range bomber.  Hard to level fast though with raid commitments.

Ah okay. Shaman are hard done by. This gets more surreal by the minute.

Can I cry now that my raid specced shaman has bad DPS? May I?  (I'm interested in how they twink our specs in 1.11, mana-tide is of questionable use.)

Heh, all whining and crying aside... any epic geared class is a beast in battlegrounds and can royally fuck you up if you're not on your toes, especially if they've taken their raid gear and gone pvp spec. Hunters just scare me a little more than the rest.  Mages and warlocks sure put the fear into me too, though.  I'm less concerned about melee, since I can effectively keep them at range if I need to.

You're a bit slow on the uptake today, aren't ya?  I was being facetious.

Edit: Shaman's aren't "hard done by" in any sense.  We could use some talent tweaks to make our resto tree blow less ass, but elemental and enhance are fine for what they attempt to accomplish.  I just like to make fun of my DPS whenever available.

Shaman does have mediocre DPS, especially if you have to go heavy in restoration. However, healing is one of the killer abilities, along with range and stealth. There's also a fair few other benefits to being a shaman too. There's so many little tricks available from all the totem fun that you learn new stuff for longer than when playing other classes. I think its about the most fun class to play in WoW.

One of the biggest problems with hunters in raid gear is that they are ALL PvP spec. Really a hunter brings very little to a raid other than ranged DPS, and their forte in PvP happens to be ranged DPS, since they can't stealth, heal, AoE, CC, or much anything else worth shit. Most other classes are compromised in PvP to some degree in order to best suit raiding. Almost every other tool in their arsenal is about snaring somebody long enough to get back out of their confounded deadspot and into range to do more DPS. When you understand how single minded a hunter fighting you has to be, they're uncommonly easy to force into mistakes. The biggest problem since 1.7 has been that hunters with 5/8 or more tier 1 armor can realistically go survival with next to no ranged damage reduction, which gives them not only more tools to snare, but arguably one of the most overpowered melee attackss in the game, simply because its on somebody that shouldn't have any melee advantages. It also probably wasn't reasonable to lower the hawk eye talent, allowing it to be used by non-marksman specs, since that's the one talent basically every hunter needs for raiding.

What would solve 90% or more of the valid concerns with hunters in PvP would be to tone down their armor benefits. Same is true of warriors. I still contend that neither class is especially overpowered. They become more overpowered than some classes in the late game because they are so gear centric. It's no accident that a million farmers chose rogues (fastest to level, most powerful without gear) until Blizzard failed to remove farming accounts, at which point they felt it was safe to invest time in gearing up hunters to farm with. Not only do geared hunters match rogues for DPS pretty well, but they have tools like feign death and a pet that are positively nirvana for farmers.

No, I think all of those classes are pretty balanced.  I was pointing out that the Warlock has some drawbacks to their "massive" critting ability that can't even crit as massively as a hunter.  Someone said "hunters can crit big" you responded "so can warlocks, so nyah" and I said "yeah, but hunters crit big and don't have to suffer from the glass cannon syndrome."  Your next response was basically "Warlocks can take Soul Link and have massive hitpoints, so it doesn't matter that hunters can wear mail armor", which btw, unless you know something I don't know, they can't have both Soul Link AND Ruin, so they choose either huge crits or survivability.. hunters have both.

But in all honesty, my main complaint about hunters is that they can keep you at range with their uber ranged snares (one of the best snares in the game, instant cast, ranged) and they can hit you FROM FUTHER THAN ANY OTHER CLASS IN THE GAME.  In other words, they can keep you at 41 yards and pummel you and you can't do anything in return.  You can't cast, not even your instant casts, you can't close in because they have you snared, you can do nothing.  It's silly to give one class longer range than any other class.

Changed ranged to 30 yards, just like spells, and make hawkeye take it to 36 yards, just like every spell caster.  Just like that, hunters are balanced.  Conversly, you could make all distance spells have a 35 yard range, and have all the "ranged" talents on casters bump up to 41 yards.  As it stands, allowing one class the ability to hold you at range and beat on you at a longer range than any other class in the game is just stupid and obviously unbalacing.. 

One class eh? See flame throwing (mage) which extends their range to 41 yards as well. How does a hunter snare you perpetually from 41 yards, out of interest?

Oops you are right, I missed mages having a 41 yard range.  Probably because mages can't snare me at that range, thus every other class just runs forward 5 yards until they get into range.  Plus it only works on fire spells (unlike a hunter where every single one of their abilities is increased in range).


4 second instant cast 41 yard snare + 3 second cast 41 yard major nuke + instant cast 41 yard major aoe dd nuke and/or instant cast 41 yard single target nuke == 4.5 secs till death.  Though you are right, I do have a good .5 seconds to get close enough to cast one of my instant casts on them..

Hell, the crit above would one shot my priest, he wouldn't even have to burn his second shot on me.. AND he has autoshoot at that range, so while he's waiting on cooldowns he's still doing damage, unlike any other caster class, who do not have damage abilities between spells..

Either hunters need a nerf, or the other classes need a bit of a buff to catch up.  But as it stands, hunters are not in line with the abilities of the other classes..

EDIT:  I think the real problem is itemization.  I said this last night in /guild.  Basically the game was balanced for the items in the game at the time of release.  Slowly they are forced to put bigger and bigger items in the game, to keep the epeen's growing in size.  As they do this, the classes become more and more out of balance, a slight different before becomes a huge difference now.  Then they start the "revamping" of the classes.. they revamp the classes more along the lines of what the current items can do.  The classes that are "revamped" end up fucking uber because they are balanced to today's game.  The classes that are not revamped suck, because they are balanced to the previous game.  Since this is a cycle that repeats, there will always be a set of classes that are ahead of the curve (hunters) and a set of classes that are behind the curve (priests).  Once each group gets it's most recent revamp, that group will be more powerful than the rest.  Mudflation at it's finest.

You're over-reaching here. The snare is a 50% movement speed debuff rather than a root, so you shouln't be dicking around at 41 yards all day. If you can't close to nuking range in the time it takes to cast aimed shot, you're probably watching TV or something else that's largely not the hunter's doing. Multi is neither a true instant cast nor a true area of effect. It's a shot that requires the hunter not be moving, unlike a true instant cast spell, and it affects up to three targets in close proximity in a given direction. The only instant that a hunter has is arcane shot, which is feeble, the only AoE is volley, which is equally feeble.

However, you're correct in that if a hunter attacks a clothie at range and gets the first shot in, the prognosis is generally not good for the clothie if they can't quaff a potion, heal or whatnot to buy enough survival time to close range. This is however, not the hunter's strength, but their only viable tactic. Exploit it.


This is what I've been arguing for what seems like months now.

Yeah, I came back to add another edit that said "I realize you are all going to say 'no shit, retard'", but you beat me to the punch! :)

That was really my point right at the start about Rogues.  We were balanced and had great talents and abilites, but because of that we were left alone for all these patches and, as a result, we're now not so happy.

And why the fuck do all our abilities miss or get parried ?  Seriously ?

How do you parry blind.

CRY.

Same way you dodge and parry bullets.

No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does NOT MAKE SENSE! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.

I suspect in the same way you can be invisible while standing right in front of me with no cover for yards in every direction. ;)

IIRC, people were complaining earlier that you CAN'T dodge bullets/arrows, as one of the complaints against hunters.  I dunno.  It's certainly possible to miss...

Alkiera

heh.  I am One with the night.

Again, Heh.

I'm fine with dodging bullets.

Parrying them is probably a mistake you only make once...

"Bullet Tooth Tony: Boris the Blade? As in Boris the Bullet-Dodger?
Cousin Avi: Why do they call him the Bullet-Dodger?
Bullet Tooth Tony: 'Cause he dodges bullets, Avi."

ahem.

Rogues have the advantage in world pvp -- you don't see them coming, and most people aren't paranoid enough to grind with ice traps behind their feet and constant flares. In battlegrounds however, stealthing can be Hard. Still, a group of 2-3 rogues and 1-2 druids is a pretty formidable strike force, especially if coordinating via voice comms.


-- Z.

Watching hunters and warlocks argue about who is more underpowered is like watching Bill Gates and Ross Perot argue that the other guy's caviar (in a gold tin) is inferior  :roll:

Warlocks are by no means underpowered but warlocks in pvp are a bit frustrating to play. Nearly all your powers are 2 or 3 second casts which is a lifetime in pvp. They now have lifecoil which was a long needed instant cast escape ability. Prior to that it was very very easy to mow them down because if they were under heavy attack they would never get their fears off.

Warlocks that I have seen can be good in pvp but they take a lot more effort and planning to get an effiicent pvp build going. Also they tend to wind up killing a lot of people AFTER they themselves die due to their reliance on dots.

kaid

So.. lets get a list of the overpowered classes in WoW:

Warlocks (omg nerf fear)
Hunters (omg multi shot)
Shaman (omg frost shock!)
Warriors (omg 2 shot)
Rogues (omg stunlock)
Druids (omg Moonkin)
Mages (omg 1 shot)
Priests (omg melts faces)
Paladin (omg bubble)

There, did we leave any out?

Wait, that's all of them?  Interesting..

My friends biggest cry about nerfing warlocks is that DoTs are "way overpowered."  I asked him wtf he's talking about, he said "well I can kill any warlock, but I always end up dying a few seconds later, that's totally unfair."

I said I'd gladly trade all my DoTs for insta cast nukes that do the same damage, then he would be dead before he could kill me, rather than after I died.  He no longer wanted to discuss the subject (though, he still says DoTs are overpowered).

Moonfire! Moonfire! Moonfire! Flip, flip, flip, Natures Swiftness, Healing Touch. Moonfire!

The only downside is how tediously slow druids are to level up. That and the whole elf or cow thing.

Mages are way, way underpowered.  At best, they are at the end of the patch buff list and at worst they aren't even getting their own patch (some dev supposedly said this).

Hunters and warlocks are the two god classes right now.  Shamans, druids and rogues are all competitive.  Mages, priests, paladins and warriors are at the short end of the stick.

Did you forget the green text somewhere? 

A warrior has never killed a mage that wasn't already dying or didn't have his head up his ass. End of story.

Mages are not underpowered.

I think Triforcer lives in some strange parallel WoW universe.

If someone asked me "I want to play a powerful class, which one should I roll", I'd say:

- Warrior
- Warlock
- Hunter

These are the 3 strongest IMO, but there are no gimp classes, and there's not even room to argue certain classes are gimp (unless you're playing a paladin as something other than support, I'm not quite sure how well that works out these days).


EDIT: Warrior->Charge->Hamstring, Mage->Nova, Warrior->Trinket, Mage->Blink, Warrior->Intercept... dead mage.

Actually a mage can live through it if they trinket out of the stun and PoM->Polymorph the warrior, or if they have iceblock. But the above sequence generally works. The mage wins if the warrior can't break the nova though of course.

You sound like a guy who has seen omgwtfbbq screenshots of 1 of the 3 mages with AP, ToEP, and the other +dmg trinket critting a frostbolt for 4k.  99% of mages can't do that and die to Charge/Blink/Intercept/Unstoppable Force ftw.

Mages rock.  Period.  I am on a team of 4 mages, a lock, 2 warriors, a priest and a hunter and the mages fucking own EVERYONE.  They make it through every pvp without a death and with millions of kbs.  I can keep up with them on my lock, but I can kill 2, sometimes 3 (rather inexperienced) people at a time (fear, seduce, HoT), I never ever ever see them fighting less than 4.  Mages rock.

Everyone pvper I've seen that is "the best" has been a mage.  Mages simply rock.  Granted they are probably not EASY, but neither are locks (or hunters according to Righ) and they are still "overpowered".  Every single class comes along and claims to be "underpowered" and that's exactly my point, no one really is.

Once again it's a question of Itemization. Warriors are Uber if they have the right gear.  However, 80% of the warriors you see are going after Valor and Dal'Rends swords or Arcanite Reaper.  In the case of that 80% I'd have to agree that they're a little underpowered, and then qualify it with, "they're also under equipped."

I'd also say they were ill-equipped. Only the shoulders and chest from valor are the top blues for the slot. A warrior in top blue armor and an arc reaper can hold their own very well against other top-blue classes. Also, if your server has AVs up often there is no excuse not to have a TuF and don julios, it's only marginally harder to farm than a reaper.

I think a lot of people run around with sub-par blues getting owned by epicced players and just assume their class is crap or something.

Been playing AB quite abit with my warlock (SM/DS)recently so here's some observations....

Warriors are at the top of the food chain with mages as the only counter... if they have good gear. Been fighting warriors with Untamed blades and they are seriously very scary - anything in melee range dies in seconds.

Don't find hunters that scary actually. The aimed shots and multishots do hurt, but much of the hunter's range dps requires him to stand still.... and 1-2 melees on a hunter ties him up effectively. For me, if my death coil is up I usually win with a insta curse, insta dot, insta dot, insta weakness on pet while charging towards him, then a death coil and drain life waiting for nightfall to proc. Maybe there aren't enough epic hunters on Blackrock *shrug*.

Epic rogues are freaking scary. The epic geared rogues kills me so fast that i am dead before a single cheapshot-kidney shot combo is over. Blue rogues are generally no sweat if death coil is up.

And mages with epic gear are very very far from gimp - and the frost mages are also quite tough with ice barrier, ice block and cold snap. Vs node zergs 2-3 good mages timing their IAE and blast waves = the win.

Druids and warriors are a very solid combo in AB. The druids can stay alive while healing, and cannot be polyed, and the warrior's intimidation shout is great for scattering,  the perma snare with hamstring means most classes simply cannot get away once charged/intercepted, and the mana-less high dps of the warrior makes him a deadly killing machine if there is healing support.

As a warrior in middling quality gear I found myself not having a hard time with anything outside of mages and better equipped warriors...in an environment where neither of us are getting much/any support from our teammates outside of them keeping the other team busy.

Epic'd warriors, shit, let's be honest, warriors with JUST a better weapon than mine beat me if they know how to play their class. Mages eat me alive if I can't break their nova via trinket/luck/dispell/potion, because even hamstrung a decent mage can kite you enough to kill you before you get them to that magic 20% health number (which for cloth wearers means 0% when facing down a warrior with a decent blue+ two-hander). I can kill a mage dead right quick if they're stupid or the gods smile on me, but the odds just aren't in my favor.

I'm not exactly sure why, but I simply eat druids and shaman alive. I do the traditional "hi 2 u" warrior introduction of a charge or intercept into a hamstring and after that their HP simply decreases much faster than mine does.

Rogues tend to clonk me and skedaddle off to softer targets, and if they stay to fight, they usually can't outlast me unless they have much better daggers or swords.

Hunters I hardly ever have a problem with. Pretend the pet doesn't exist, and if you have Intimidating Shout queued up it may as well not exist...and that leaves you against what is basically a shitty warrior. A lot of hunters freak (or at least that's what it looks like to me) when they can't get out of melee range with you.

Priests pretty much die in direct combat unless they fear you and their buddies notice you're beating up their healer. If the enemy team has their head and ass wired together hitting the priest gets you more attention than you'd probably care for.

As for pallies, I don't know, I haven't PVPed at high levels on a horde character. Assuming the sort-of one-on-one battles that go on a lot in PUG PVP can have my experience dueling applied to them, pallies take a LOT of killing. a LOT. Their damage output is glacial compared to yours, but decently equipped and specced they're extremely hard to outlast.

The only hunters that can reasonably survive long enough toe-to-toe with a warrior to regain range and control of the fight is a survival-oriented hunter. It's not an easy task and relies rather a lot on several lucky 'rolls'. Druids and shamans should be causing you more trouble than they are, and neither should be a certain win in every case. Shapeshifting gets rid of the hamstring, root forces you to burn your trinket, bear form lets druids go toe to toe for an extended period, natures swiftness lets then flash off an instant heal for 80% of their health, root, mana dump via spamfire, back to bear to finish. Shamans should be thowing out purge early, spewing totems (grounding, earthbind, searing) and forcing you to dump your rage into sweeping strikes, to keep you from MSing them and reducing their heal effectiveness. If you ignore the totems, they should allow them to kite you long enough to cause some serious trouble with shocks. They'll have a trinket too, plus their shocks can snare you as effectively as you can snare them, and much more frequently than you can reciprocate.

But yeah, warriors are a tough act for anybody in PvP, including mages to a degree, because one fuckup or resist, and they're at the graveyard.

kek @ mages being underpowered.

Mages are fine. They have the only reliable CC in the game that can be made insta-cast, they have the best AOE and insane burst damage capability. They're also one of the most valuable classes in battlegrounds due to AOE power.

Anyway, my (blue geared, SM/DS -- it's a horrible pvp spec, imo) warlock's experience with other classes:
- other warlocks: If they have 5/8 felheart, I lose, otherwise it's about spec (SL beats affliction beats SM/ruin beats SL) and who banishes / deathcoils first.
- hunters: Blue hunters are easy, dot 'em up, get in the deadzone and draintank. Epic hunters can 3-shot me.
- shaman: Stupid shaman (the sort that use an arcanite reaper, wear omg crit gear and the only spell they use is frost shock) are fodder, but smart shaman (1h/shield abusing tremor / grounding) last long enough to get 7-8 shocks in, and then I die.
- warriors: Anything up to TuF / blue pvp gear I can draintank. Warriors with epix not so much, they tend to 2.5-shot me (the .5 is execute). I've fought someone wielding an Askhandi and I died before charge stun was over. Granted, the assist train was focusing on me, but the warrior hit me for 30% of my hp right away.
- rogues: Yeah, like Register said, blue rogues are easy, even if they get the jump, deathcoil gives me all the time/space needed for my dots to kill them. Epic geared rogues kill me before cheapshot/kidneyshot are over (check the e-peen video posted earlier in this thread).
- druids: Eh... they can't really KILL me, but I usually can't kill them before they get away either.
- mages: Warlocks are the anti-mage.. even without a pet I can mess them up bad. Unless it's an ice spec mage with insane spellpower and the two trinkets, 'cos that means a 2-shot. And no Triforcer, that's NOT rare. Every 2nd mage I see in battlegrounds has at least the hakkar trinket.
- priests: Shadow priests >>> warlocks. Undead shadow priests especially.. they can fear me, I can't fear them, and by the time fear is over, I'm down to 30%. The only spec that can reliably kill priests (even holy/disc) dies to hunters, smart rogues and shaman. Any other spec will simply run oom.
- paladins: They're weaksauce, even tier 2s. If they have decursive, just spam level 1 dots on them; otherwise fear+drain mana.

Gee, I'm starting to see a pattern about what makes a character from any class being easy / impossible to kill... heh heh.


-- Z.

Mmages, in my opinion, are broken.  And yes, I play a partially BWL equipped mage, and am lookin to get decked out in full Netherwind, with maybe some of the nifty +damage gear from there for giggles.

Why are mages broken?  Because to be even remotely effective in any form of PVP, 31 points in arcane talents, 2 crazy trinkets, and a lot of plus damage is pretty much mandatory.

The fire and Ice magic trees are pretty much worthless past 20 points.  Deep Ice builds are pretty much exclusively PvE, and Deep  Fire is almost completely useless in its endtree stuff, when compared to Arcane.

Sure, we are 3 minute GODS when we have those talents/trinkets/+damage, but any other spec in PvP is pretty much garbage (I know, since I have, as an experiment, never respecced from 11 Arcane / 40 Fire).  We are one trick cookie cutter ponies.

Oh, and for your big numbers, the +damage, +crit whore fire mage of DOOM in my guild recently recorded his latest highest number: approximately 6100 damage (before igninte) off of a fullbore trinket/talent Pyroblast.

I will see if i can find a Screenshot.

To be fair, the same thing could be said of warriors not speccing for MS / wearing tanking gear...
... or combat-specced rogues using balanced gear instead of pure agi/AP...
... or holy priests. :P
For some classes, you need to spec a certain way to be viable in pvp at all.


-- Z.

I'm starting to notice this on my mage. I got him to 60 just earlier in the week, and have been getting my feet wet in AB and WSG. And I noticed that I cannot kill for shit with my 18Arc/33Frost build. Instead of waiting forever to gear up with +dmg stuff, I'm tempted to go deep arcane to help out the burst damage problem I have. It's a gray area because I'm still learning the mage's endgame playstyle/niche...

It seems like ALL classes (not just some of them) hit the same wall at 60. You have to respec to a very narrow set of options and learn a new playstyle to fight effectively compared to how you played pre-60. But I guess that's kind of the beauty of the talent system.

Exactly.  Also pvp builds and pve builds are very different.

Earlier when I said I got excited after critting an aimed shot for 1850 (once) - my typical autoshot damage is in the 150-180ish range.  My typical aimed shot is in the 500-600 range.  This is a 31/20/0 spec (beastmaster, marksmanship, survival).  Worked well for soloing up, but not so great for end game instances.  Seems to stink for pvp (although I haven't done much of it - maybe it's just that I stink in pvp).

I've been a marks hunter and remained a marks hunter my entire career.  I used to have a 5/31/15 build but, personally, I think Survival is Ass.  The "tricks" don't help enough vs the gimpy ranged damage. (You need something like 450+ BASE (pre talent) Agi to make-up for Trueshot/ Multishot)

I switched to a 14/31/6 build and I'm doing fine in PvP and PvE both.

This thread makes me fucking giggle under my breath every time I check on it.  Seriously have any of you people ever played the other "pvp" MMO's if you have THEN SHUT THE FUCK UP.  Seriously WoW's balance issues are nothing compared to every other game with PvP I've ever touched (which is all of them except AC1, god I wish I had played AC1).

WoW has a few minor balance problems that would cease to exist if a few obvious bugs were removed.  Hunters spent the first 5-8 months from launch with most of their abilities only half working.  Don't get on their asses now because they have the most fun, Hunters have always had the most fun in group vrs group I could have told you that (in fact I bet I did post it) a few months from launch.  They have range, durability and some nifty tricks.  They are a fun class, they DO NOT break the game.  Fucking anyone with top gear can break the game.

Stop blaming the classes and start blaming the tards at Blizz who are making the new fucking weapons.  The new armor doesn't scale with this shit at all.  At the rate they are going by the time Burning Crusade comes out whoever hits the other person first will win, because everything will be a 1-shot kill.

Rogues are underpowered, lolz, I'm sorry that all the pvp has moved to lame ass instances I dont like it either but that hardly makes a stealther gimped...  l2p jesus fucking christ.

This seems a strange assesment to me - being a clothie, the sort of shammies that "use an arcanite reaper" should be wrecking your day with hard hits and lucky devastating Windfury procs - a shield is doing a shammie no good at all against your spells, so that wouldn't make him last any longer - and of course tremor, grounding, and proper use of shocks are just as easy to do whether you're using a 2hander or 1h/shield. Using a 2 hander is hardly any indication of a "stupid" shaman - especially since many "smart" shaman carry both setups and will quickly and quite reasonably switch to their 2hander when going against a cloth wearing class.

You need a touch over 420 to compensate for the loss of Trueshot Aura (100 RAP), Ranged Weapon Specialisation (5%) and Barrage (5% on Multishot). You're trading off for Lightning Reflexes (+15% agility : 1 agility = 2 RAP and 1/52% crit), Surefooted (+3% to hit), Killer Instinct (+3% crit). In PvP the increased agility helping dodge and parry, the extra 10% health, counterattack, etc makes even the unbuffed solo reduction worthwhile. Buffed, the break even point drops significantly. In raids, having a less epic equipped marksman hunter provide you with TSA, a shaman with air, mongoose potion and winter squid makes it highly valuable to put even hunters with more than around 380 unbuffed agility into survival spec.

Having got used to a raptor strike with a 50% chance of a crit, I'd be hard pressed to go 14/31/6, though thick hide (>6200 armor wolf) and a quick rez (handy in non battlegrounds PvP) are good things. If I hadn't got to the point where I could get over 630 agility buffed, I might consider a 10/31/10 solo build.

Not really... a shaman with an AR is typically in hunter gear (all AGI, maybe STR, +crit, etc) and has little mana. I have enough HP to withstand even the nastiest windfury combo, and then he has no answer to deathcoil. These shaman typically spam earthbind and frost shock as an attempt to keep their prey slowed... my felhunter can dispel both, so yeah. Earthbind means no tremor, which means all I need is a fear (easy since they can't earthshock after they frostshock), and they're going down. They typically don't have the mana pool to outlast my dots via heals, either.

Just my experience... a 21/7/22 (or similar) build focusing on shocks (double damage crits) and uninterruptible heals is a LOT more scary than a stormstrike  or enhancement/NS build. 21/7/22 can't use 2h axes or maces, so they stick to 1h/shield. It doesn't help much against a caster type (aside from the extra stats and maybe the felhunter melee.. hah), but in group pvp, it makes them a warrior-level target instead of a rogue/hunter-level squishy. Big difference.


-- Z.

Thanks for clarifying your point, though I do think you're making an awful lot of assumptions about a Shaman's spec, gear, and playstyle just based on what type of weapon they've currently got equipped. Though I'm a 0/30/21 build and am often swinging my 2 hander in PvP (No AR here, just a humble yet servicable Twig of the World Tree), my gear still focuses mainly on stamina and intellect. And frankly any Shaman that is dropping Earthbind instead of Tremor when fighting a warlock deserves to lose.

Thanks for clarifying, Righ. Now i've got a different question along the same vein, what's your HP/ Stam at with your Agi that high?  I imagine you're all in purples as well, yes?  I can see the advantage to switching, but the majority of hunters are NOT there.

  I outdamge better-equipped (though not so well-equipped as yourself) hunters in my crappy blue set, which always gives me a giggle.  When I ask about spec, they've been doing the survival thing becuase they read it Roxorz, but didn't read the info on what you need to MAKE it roxorz.

Right - survival only rocks once you have the gear for it. It's not entirely wrong to use it for a character that spends their time doing a lot of world PvP, though you're still better off having friends than trying to be capable of taking care of yourself when forced into melee. Hunters are about ranged damage, so play to their strengths.

Can't recall my health offhand, but over 5000 buffed. The epic sets are decent for that too, though that's incidental - I'd pick agility over a mix of agility and stamina in every case. Not a glass cannon, but definately not planning to tank stuff. We may have mail armor, but we have no shield.

The same can be said for warriors, if you are truly l33t and have the best of the best with honors in terms of gear.  Then Frenzy actually trumps MS in terms of damage.  Coupled with the fact 31fury/20arms > 31arms/20fury this means that people who actually pay attention to the metagame and are fully geared out warriors really have no excuse to not go Fury.

But in order to have the #'s work out you need to have crazy fucking high atk power, I forget what the magic number is.

MS debuff.

It's the most significant PVP ability in the game, and why the arms tree is better than the fury tree regardless of gear.