Game-Changing New Powers

[Kevin]

Just wanted to add that your cooldown begins resetting when you place the trap, not when it goes off. So when you know what you will be trapping before the pull, if you can set your trap down 10 seconds before you need it, you can get a second trap on w/o worrying about the 30s cooldown.

In 5 mans, in the rare event you really do need that third trap, your pet might be available to offtank the mob for the necessary seconds for the cooldown to reset. It may not.

Hunter trapping is certainly a skill that takes practice. Catch a resist, or have someone break it, and you're in a world of hurt, it isn't like a sheep or a shackle where you can just recast. Of course, it works on a lot of mobs that you can't sheep or shackle too.

Yep, early placement helps a lot. It's why I pretty much always put a trap down regardless of if I'm going to trap or not. If I am trapping I have the cooldown advantage. If not the healer has a place to run to drop a mob (the trap generally goes where I figure the healer will be if I don't expect to be trapping a mob) Place it before you drink or while others are drinking. It will be out of cooldown when the pull happens then and you can put the 2nd trap down immediately after the mob traps. That means the cooldown is now 20s in when the first breaks. And the 3rd trap can be put down and the CD is 10 seconds in when that one breaks, etc. Using a little extra distance (fire an arcane on the FF mob while moving to keep the DPS happening and if you move right you don't even lose auto-shot time) just cuts the time the trap is cooldown even more.

It's not a prefect science by any means but now that it doesn't rely on FD it's even simpler to do (you don't have to reaggro the mob you want to trap every time, you don't have to worry about FD resist). I have a tendency to pull the trap mob with an aimed shot + arcane + distracting + steady (don't usually have distance for more) to put aggro on it and get some damage on it to make it go down faster later. Of course to use aimed I need to know better when the tank is pulling so that I can get the mob trapped faster so I don't always get to, but more damage and aggro on the trap helps. Most warriors/druids are going to break it with a taunt anyway. Besides I can disengage the trapped mob without breaking the trap so if I need to drop some of that aggro and don't want to FD I can.

It's not precise, but I have a lot of practice since I've been multi trapping in instances since I got FD at L30. I've also done it as a survival spec, a beast spec, and a marks spec. Survival has it easiest by far. You have traps that last longer, can remove the resist chance and cut the cooldown. Not to mention you can deterrence tank if you need to (pretty much just as good as evasion tanking) and will likely be able to counterattack and get space as well. Marks have it a bit easier with scatter shot to buy extra time. Beast is actually the trickiest I feel because while the pet is a great offtank the pet may be actively involved in tanking, have warp or dash or charge on cooldown or what not (so you can't get it there quickly) and you cut out even more DPS the longer the pet is not fighting than the other specs do, in addition to the DPS you lose just from maintaining a trap. So you have less escape skills if there is a resist or a sheep wanders into the 2nd trap or an immune mob hits the trap first and makes it go away or whatever.

I also have the advantage of playing with people that are used to traps around me. Since I've been trapping stuff for a long time and played my hunter with many of the same people for a long time they are used to some of the positioning it takes or even just a random trapped mob when I'm doing the pull. That helps. It's like people that are used to playing with mages sheeping a lot. Charge and thunderclap pulls still work just fine because the mages and the warriors know how to time things and how to move stuff to keep the sheep safe in the middle of the chaos.

It's why I'm undecided on if cyclone behavior is intended or not. Hunter traps have drawbacks but with a good group do mean you can keep something in a trap pretty much forever if you like. Don't know if Blizzard is balancing around the best skilled or the average skilled. Of course even with diminishing returns you just work that into your kill order.