Beastmastery PvP Guide Edition 1

Hello folks! Today I’d like to talk about PvP as a Beast Mastery hunter and, more specifically, getting prepared for battlegrounds in order to gear up.

So your alt has just dinged level 90, or perhaps you’re thinking about getting into PvP on your PvE geared hunter. Where do you begin? Gear provides a significant advantage, so if you’re the latter, you’re already ahead. Rest assured though, gearing is relatively fast and easy once you know the right way of going about it. If you’d like to purchase the crafted PvP set remember that this will be quickly replaced by the honor set. Let’s go over some basic setup.

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Hunter Comp Wins Blizzcon Arena Tournament

The big news of the 2011 Global Battle.net Invitational is that a team with a hunter on it managed to come out on top.  And it is news because, well, nobody expected any team with a hunter to do this well.

The winning team was OMG, a PHDK comp of a holy paladin, a marksman hunter, and an unholy death knight.  In the final they went up against Skill Capped, a team of a holy paladin, a frost mage and an affliction warlock.  The matches are fun to watch and pretty tense at times.  You can find the videos here.  You can watch them without a virtual ticket.

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Why is Focus Allegedly Too Weak in PVP?

To the PVE hunter, Focus can seem perfectly fine.  It satisfies the costs of a rotation.  It requires enough management to be interesting but not enough to be distracting.  It can largely be considered a successful class change on Blizzard’s part.  But many PVP hunters think otherwise.  The official forums are riddled with threads about issues related to hunter PVP and almost ubiquitous among them is the complaint that Focus is fundamentally flawed in PVP.  Why is this argued?

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Comparing the Hunter Talent Trees for PVP

This post goes over the relative pros and cons of the different hunter talent trees for PVP.  It leaves aside the strengths and weaknesses that hunters have in general, focusing instead on how the specs compare to each other.

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The Only Way to Get an ilvl 378 Gun

Blizzard has left us with few options for a PvE gun this tier.  It gave us a crafted gun at ilvl 365, but at raid-quality item levels it ultimately decided that the Firelands needed a second crossbow more than a single gun.  This leaves us with one ilvl 378 gun in the game, the resilience-clad Ruthless Gladiator’s Rifle (there’s also an ilvl 391 version available to skilled pvpers).  Dwarves (whose gun racial outweighs the stat loss to resilience) and those who just prefer the aesthetics of a gun have reason to be interested in this PvP weapon.  How might a hunter go about getting it?

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Moving Into Hunter Arena PvP!

A lot of hunters are starting to get into PvP, if only to fill in some gaps in their raiding gear. A lot of hunters don’t have access to epic PvE head and shoulders, and using Vicious Gladiator pieces in those slots can be a DPS increase, especially when you consider the 70 agility from the two piece bonus. Also, the PvP ranged weapons have the same ranged DPS as their PvE counterparts, and as we all know, especially for marksmanship hunters, weapon DPS has far more of an impact on your DPS than even agility, let alone the secondary stats like crit and mastery. The PvP weapons have the same agility and weapon DPS, and generally trade one of the secondary stats for resilience.

The 359 PvP weapon is purchasable for 3400 Conquest points, and is probably a significant upgrade over any blue, and possibly even over the new ZA 353 PvE weapons. As always, femaledwarf.com should be used to ensure that this is the case.

The next step of PvP weapon is the 372 Vicious Gladiator, and this is more DPS than anything in the game short of a heroic raiding weapon. It’s not the easiest weapon to obtain, though, since you need to have a 2200 rating in 3v3 or 5v5. 2v2 doesn’t count because Blizzard doesn’t balance around duels or 2v2, instead focusing on groups of 3 or 5.

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How to Fight a Hunter in PvP

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time on PvP lately, and while I’m far from an expert, I’ve logged a lot of battleground time, a little arena time, and have picked up a bunch of habits that I plan on writing about. As I’m fairly certain that I’m the worst PvP hunter on the planet, I’m expecting you, loyal reader, to correct me in the comments and make me better!

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The Right Stuff (Arena Edition)

Hey all. Today I want to talk about an issue that is about as near to my heart as anything related to arenas can be. Most people take a lot of time to figure out their gear and spec before stepping into arenas: they look for good teammates of the right classes, and they try to research strats, macros, mods, and anything else they can think of that might contribute to a win in arena. The number one most neglected issue is probably the most important: your mindset. When you go into an arena, you want to leave all considerations about what others will think of you if you lose, or how lame the other team’s comp is, and just focus on focusing.

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How to Position in Arenas

Positioning is a big deal for anyone in arenas, but for hunters it is a particular problem. Today I’ll present all the information I can in a concise way on the topic of arena positioning. At the end, I will address all the hunter-specific considerations associated with the same.

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List of Arena Advice for the Ages

Hey guys, I’m gonna throw up a list of great tips that anyone can use in arenas to increase their rating, even experienced players. I’ve been doing arenas actively since s1 and I still screw these up, so don’t feel bad if you don’t do these!

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Marks, DKs, Spell Cleave, and Comps in Season 7

So I got a new weapon recently, and I’m sure by now most of you have managed to pick up something from ToC that’s giving you good mileage, which means it’s time to look at marksmanship! Of course, a lot of you PvE as marks. MM is by far the most fun spec to play in PvP, but until you have a good weapon (ilvl 232 or better) it can be hard to unlock it’s true potential.

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How to Enchant for PvP!

Hey everyone, today I’m going to write a short post about enchanting your gear for PvP. It’s not as straightforward as you might think. What enchants you use obviously depend on your professions, to some extent, but hunters actually have a lot of flexibility and it’s important to know what you’re doing.

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Hunter PvP 101!

Hey everyone. Today we’ll talk about what it is the beginning pvper needs to know as far as gearing and setting up for pvp. I’ll try to cover the most basic things that everyone should know without favoring one type of PvP over another.

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S7 3v3 Comps

Hey everyone! I’ve been experimenting a lot this last week with different comps and have a lot of tips and ideas. Today I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned :).

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MLG Tournament Coverage!

So, for anyone who didn’t check MMO champion this weekend, there was another MLG tournament (3v3 arena). eMg won, running alternately BM hunter/Enh shm/Disc Priest and BM hunter/Enh Shm/Holy Pld. Grats to them on a job well done, but I have to say the stars really aligned for them. Only 1 RMP made it to the final round of the tournament, and they were eliminated almost instantly. Why that happened and what coL (team complexity) could have done about it is fodder for another post. There were several world-class RMPs at the tournament, however, and more of them didn’t advance mostly because the RMPs were feeding on each other while the cleaves fed on them.

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A Hunter’s Guide to 5v5 Arena

5v5 has always been the hunter’s strongest bracket. We’ve never had enough support abilities to really shine in 3v3, and always lacked the burst to dominate 2v2, but in 5v5 playing a hunter feels just right. I really live for the moments when my 5v5 gets to queue. If you are lucky enough to find 4 (or 5, or 6, or 7, because people tend to quit before a season ends…) dedicated people to play 5s with, I guarantee it will be the most fun you ever have. How do you do your job, though? After some preliminaries, that will be the question I address today.

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Why stamina-stacking doesn’t work in Arenas

Sometime early in s6, hunters looked at the talent hunter vs. wild and thought to themselves, what if I gemmed and enchanted completely for stamina? The desire to make a gimmicky kind of build work is understandable given how successful, in WOTLK alone, stuff like shadowfrost DKs (a phenomenon that appears to be making a comeback in the aptly named sfrost 2.0 spec), fan of knives rogues, and other specs were. These builds revolve around pressing 1 or 2 buttons and completely overwhelming the opponents with damage. Unfortunately for hunters, if there is a truly effective, gimmicky build out there, it has yet to be discovered. Today I will explain why stam-stacking isn’t worth it. The proof, I hope, is in the pudding. But first an explanation:

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