Uses for the New Deterrence in PVE

In 4.3.2 Deterrence will gain a 30% damage reduction over the course of its duration in addition to its current effects.  This post discusses how to take advantage of Deterrence and its new buff.

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No more deterrence while carrying a flag

While it’s nice to be able to deterrence if disarmed, there was an undocumented change that slipped through with 4.1: we can no longer use deterrence while we hold the flag in a battleground. This is probably because a double deterrence combined with a double disengage (and the nice little 40% speed boost that comes with it) would prevent anyone from stopping a hunter from getting across the field, but it certainly makes us less attractive as flag carriers.

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Ability Spotlight: Deterrence

This round of Ability Spotlight focuses on Deterrence.  As usual, we’ll be looking at pve applications here, leaving pvp applications for other writers.

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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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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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Tricks of the Hunter Trade!

This post will feature useful tips for hunters versus each class. The tips are meant to be general, and you should look for ways to apply them in any setting you can. Playing your class to its fullest is one of the few remaining ways to enjoy WoW, since the advent of the Death Knight ;)

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S7 and You (Yeah, I Did Just Look That Gift Horse In The Mouth)

If you spend a lot of time on the popular forums, like the class specific ones at the Blizzard site or the class specific ones on arenajunkies.com, you will notice a lot of doom ‘n’ gloom posts about 3.2 not being too great for hunters, despite many people’s opinion, including Ghostcrawler’s, that season 6 was not good for hunters at all. Well, they’re partly right and partly wrong about 3.2. Most of the time, the patch notes reflect changes that can be construed in one of two ways: “Oh, sweet buff,” or “Shit, why are they nerfing that.”

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