Druid PvP Strats and Gear

[Kevin]

The only class I can think of that a Mage actually wants to stay close to is a Hunter.

-Bolty

And even then they need to be careful. I've melee'd down a few mages, with beastial wrath up and my trinkets popped I can crit right around 2000 damage with my sonic spear and that isn't that great a melee damage weapon. If there is anyone else helping me attack the mage I still hurt up close. Plus you'll hit the mage with wing clip and so many mages seem to blink instinctively if they get slowed. If a mage can root me (trinket and beastial wrath in cooldown) and sit in my deadzone they destroy me, but a lot of them end up too close or too far away. What mages do that really hurts me is get in the 20 yard range where most of the instants can hit me and play LoS games, and there are plenty you can play in the arenas, after smacking me with something. Or they will take a ranged hit to hit me with a big spell. The chill effects help them a lot with this since they can move faster than me.

Of course a lot of hunters forget they can do decent melee damage and even with attacks auto swapping from ranged shots to melee swings won't hit a raptor strike or wing clip, or won't decide to just stay there and melee and take the damage. Of course I have deterrance as well so that I can jump up to about 80% avoidance for 10 seconds so I'm a bit more used to not always trying to get range, especially if I'm out of tricks right then (trap, trinket, beastial wrath(scatter when I'm marks spec) all cooling down) and/or my healer isn't in danger. Sometimes I fight back sometimes I pop it just to be able to cut my damage while I'm trying to ranged DPS someone else down. But I've killed warriors, rogues, shaman, mages, and other hunters in melee. In arenas I won't bother with it on priests, pallies, and warlocks since they have no way to snare me so I can get range again with just wing clip, though in battle grounds there are times I'll melee them to death because I'm staying out of LoS of their friends. Wing clip spam is also a pretty good way to proc kill command for a little more damage. But if they have you snared and you keep them snared you can't get range on them until you can remove the snare. So your options are try to get range on them anyway doing very little damage or just melee back until you can get free and do some damage to them in the process. With monkey up most hunters should have right around 25% dodge + parry and 5 to 6K armor. That is decent melee avoidance and mitigation. If they bother to keep their melee skills current they can still do OK damage in melee (not ranged DPS levels but OK and if you can get a windfury totem wing clip spam can make it good melee damage). PvP is the only place where I'm alright with the gear being itemized as +AP and not +RAP. For PvE I want all the gear to be +RAP so that I can have more of it since it is cheaper item budget and since I will never need to melee in PvE unless I'm being silly.

And I'm not saying it's a good idea for hunters to melee a lot (except against other hunters who don't expect it and who just try to get range and don't hurt you bacK) but that in a full health 1v1 fight I can actually melee many classes to death, just not nearly as fast as I can shoot them to death and mages are the easiest of all the classes (next to bad hunters) that I'll bother with to melee to death. If I were marks and had silencing shot I might want to get back to range faster on mages, but I'm not right now so if they want to play in melee range I'll happily kill them before they can kill me (gear depending I'm decently geared on my hunter if the mage clearly outgears me they'll kill me however they want to kill me)