Patch 2.1.2 preliminary notes

[Kevin]

Yay, nerf those pesky hunters right out of the other two Arena pvp games!

(No, I don't pvp, yes, this is tounge in cheek)

Yeah arenas are not friendly to hunters. We still do very well in battlegrounds, but we have issues in the arenas and it will either take a redesign of the arenas or the class. The size of the arenas and the ease of causing LoS issues or deadzone issues make it tough on hunters to do any kind of damage. All hunter specs are pretty limited on CC options. Oh and for those that don't get it. If someone jumps out of LoS of a mage, the mage just has to get LoS back and can then use the full arsenal. If someone gets out of LoS of the hunter they not only need to get LoS back but then need to make sure they aren't too close. I end up doing more melee than I would like and I've already switched, in most cases from trying to use the mostly useless freezing trap (since it can be dispelled by priests and paladins already so if there is one around that cooldown buys you all of about 2 seconds of CC on someone) to, believe it or not, the snake trap. Since snakes can now entrap and the snakes like to put up crippling as well they are generally the best way for me to get distance again in an arena. But it often means that even when I do damage I'm not doing nearly close to my effective damage.

I do play arenas, once a week on a 3v3 team that we all know isn't a good composition class wise and we aren't PvP players either and are all PvE specs we don't expect to ever really do anything other than hover around 1500 rating, which is alright with us. But even at those levels vs some pretty poor PvP players frustrating the hunter isn't that hard to do. One of the best things that can happen to us is to get the newest arena layout because it's so much harder for folks to play LoS and deadzone games with me. In situations like that I can really do some damage. But any good team when they see the make up of our team is generally best served by killing me off then getting the other folks.

Battlegrounds though are different critters, it's much easier to get and keep range and do some serious damage or interrupt the other side via various traps and distractions for the pet. Hunters are decent flag carriers in Eye of the Storm as well because of how control of the map tends to end up, aspect of the daze can actually be used, this is much harder to pull of in WSG but hunters still have value for that there.


So I know you were tongue in cheek but I wouldn't be surprised to see the hunter ratios go down even more with this change in arenas. If there was no priest or paladin on the team the freezing trap was good CC and did give the hunter team help. Now it just means that even on those teams you end up using snakes or frost to just try and get the slowing or entrapment triggers but that also means you might lose more to them since you can't take some of that DPS you are facing out of the fight (if the team has a druid healer you generally just killed them first because druid healers are the easiest healers to kill by far in arenas at least at the lower skill levels since they have long heals or purgable heals or can't heal at all if they change forms). It does help hunters a bit since we can get out of sheeps now but I still think it hurts us because the few times when we were better to bring than another class in the first place, times when you need CC and everyone could trinket out of sheep, are now gone and the mage is going to be better than the hunter with the blinks, novas, sheeps same or better DPS from range, better burst DPS via trinkets, counterspell on a caster is as good or better than a pet that is there to just stutter casts, etc. Sure a hunter can get out of more annoying situations now because they can actually break sheep and fear now but it just means the mages repeatable CC and the warlocks repeatable CC got more valuable compared to the now breakable hard to repeat hunter CC and the hunter didn't have much in the way of advantages.

But I was already under the impression that hunters were only on top teams anyway because that is what they played and their friends kept them around on the team because a well played hunter can at least break even and bring a few tricks to a team with good focus fire (well timed stun from a beast master scatter shots and silencing shots from marks, but marks bring better tricks to the table than beast for arenas anyway) so that they aren't a total liability in the arena. So their friends let them still play the hunter. I've never figured a hunter was on an arena team because the team thought a hunter was a better choice than another class, only because there wasn't another choice.