WoW newbie looking for advice

[Lissa]

I think you nailed it. I've had it and I've not had it on various builds. As Mirajj said, you miss it most after you've had it for a long time but you adjust and the deadzone changes really make it less valuable in many situations, the deadzone change was a massive playstyle change for hunters in many ways. But when I don't have it, I miss it the most in PvP and Raiding and the least in soloing. In 5 mans I do miss it but there are a lot of times in 5 mans where you simply can't get at max range anyway, but there is still stuff in raids that 41 yards lets you avoid but 35 doesn't. And there are times I miss it soloing but that is mostly when I'm competing for spawns while farming something and the extra range helps me get tags faster, there are other times, as mentioned, it helps with kiting but you can easily be happy without it.

I can't imagine doing serious PvP without it (casual PvP sure, but it's a big deal when you are really playing to win all the time). But I can see doing serious PvE without it (and have as the top DPS hunter spec is beast and doesn't use the extra range).

And I also miss not having the range talents way more on a mage, lock, and caster shaman than I ever did on my hunter and I missed it a lot on my hunter at times. I adore the S3 healing shaman gloves for that extra 5 yards on shocks I know.

There's only a couple raid/5 man fights I can think of where the additional 6 yards really helps. For me, the additional 6 yards really helps with kiting mobs (I'm a big fan of kiting things all over to kill them, it's how I soloed Banthar, Bachlor, the forge camps in Nagrand, and a few other fights). That additional 6 yards can really help, especially if the mob has a 30 yard power (I'm very, very tempted one of these times to try kiting Azuregos, Krator, and a couple other elites/world bosses just to see if I can do it).

So in my thought of order would be that Hawkeye really helps with BG PvP, Kiting, Arena PvP, Raiding/5 Mans.