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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New PvP articles in the works!

Hi folks, OutDPS has a new PvP writer. Please extend a warm welcome for Andrew! If you have any questions for him, please feel free to email him at newcastleandrewc at hotmail dot com.

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Hunting Party Podcast 143- And not a single duck was given that day

This week, Darkbrew, Frostheim, and Euripides discuss patch 5.0.4 hunter bugs and impressions, as well as answer a bunch of live chat questions about the patch.

We’ve started uploading our videos on our youtube channel. Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com. Also, we love iTunes reviews. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

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Hunting Party Podcast 136- Back in My Day

We’ve started uploading our videos on our youtube channel. Here’s the site where we host our shows live. The hunter album is well on its way, the hunter-only raiding is progressing, and there were interesting blue posts about Dire Beast, Thrill of the Hunt, and Stampede on the beta forums. Then Frostheim started telling us about what it was like in Vanilla.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com. Also, we love iTunes reviews. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

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Episode 105!

This week, we’re joined by Zeherah, creator of femaledwarf.com, and the most recent of three dwarven hunters to receive an in-game item named after her! We talk about OMG’s triumphant display of hunter PvP, and how it doesn’t mean we aren’t due for some buffs, as well as the buffs to BM DPS.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

You can now stream our show onto any mobile device through Stitcher.com, for those of us who prefer something like Android to the iPhone. As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com. Also, we love iTunes reviews. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

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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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Episode 95!

This episode, we discuss transmogrification of guns, tank threat, and (surprisingly), pvp.

Here’s the site where we host our shows live.

As always, here is the iTunes store link, the Hunting Party Podcast feed, and the direct XML feed. If you email us comments or questions, we’ll read them on the next show. Send an email to huntingpartypodcast@gmail.com. Also, we love iTunes reviews. So please drop by iTunes and mention what you thought of the show.

If you don’t do syndicated podcasts, and just want to download this week’s MP3 and play it on your player of choice, click here.

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Encouraging Blue Post on Hunter PVP

Zarhym sat down down in the forums tonight and talked pvp with folks.  Out of that discussion we got this somewhat encouraging post about hunter pvp:

I need to talk to the devs about the balance feedback I’m seeing echoed in here. That still doesn’t guarantee I’ll get right back to you tomorrow on this stuff, but it’s on my radar. I’m sure it’s on there’s too, as they regularly read our forums and AJ. I just need to discuss it with them.

To my knowledge it is the first thing we’ve heard in a very long time about hunter pvp, and so even the affirmation that they are at least listening is quite welcome.

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Transmogrification!

First thing I’m going to do with this is transmogrify all my PvP gear to look really dumb. Trying to decide whether I should go for BC-leveling-greens-clown-suit, or classic old season gear. Maybe I’ll use a stealth pet and wear shammie mail! Should make basing a kill priority decision much harder :)

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Finally, a Gun

I got my gun tonight.  After weeks of grinding CP I’m finally again able to make use of my dwarven racial bonus.

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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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Assorted Advice and Commentary for 4.2

I kept starting and stopping a variety of posts because I’d find something to write about but it wouldn’t be enough for a full post.  So, today, a stew of all those ingredients.

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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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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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Vicious PVP Gear in PVE

Many classses were using pvp at the start of the expansion to obtain gear that was superior in pve to anything that dropped in heroic 5mans.  Blizzard responded to that drift toward pvp gear by nerfing 4-piece pvp set bonuses across the board.  Yet, this did not bring an end to the well-reasoned use of pvp gear in pve settings by hunters.  Even now sets of Vicious gear outperform heroic dungeon gear and pvp weapons similarly come out ahead of ilvl 346 pve weapons.  So, how do you know if pvp gear is good for you?  How do you get it?

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