Hunter = Ultimate Puller?

[KiloVictor]

How many of you even played a warrior to be a tank in an instance? I see quite a bit of lack of knowledge from some people. How many people here have been a tank in high-end instance? I am talking BRD, BRS, Scholomance, Stratholme. Regular pulls there consist of 4-5 elite mobs, or often they are a mix of 6-10 elites and non-elites. Theorycraft is nice, but it often just doesn't work. Now lets consider a simple scenario:

Disclaimer: Not trying to be argumentative here, but I think there are some valid points to be made for hunter pulling, and I've seen a lot of people (especially on the WoW forums) dismiss it out of hand. I think it merits some investigation & experimentation.

I won't profess to know squat about warriors, I haven't played one yet. But I'd suggest you keep an open mind about this tactic; a group I play with more and more often has just sort of evolved to tactics like this, and now that somebody's written it up, I think we'll go see if we can improve on it. Find a good hunter, brief the group on the plan, and go try it. You might be pleasantly surprised.

I don't know what talents they are using, but I know that the hunter/warrior pair that I've played with most often have developed a regular habit where the hunter pulls and the warrior intercepts the incoming mob, pulling aggro from the hunter. So it can be a regular part of group play.

The hunter has to pull 5 mobs. He pulls 5, then he has aggro on all 5. Even if he disengages, they will still stay on him, because no matter how little aggro he has, the warrior has none. So, how does a warrior get them off hunter? He can get the main target off with a simple taunt/smack. No big deal. But what about the other 4?? You could polymorph one, mez one, but you still need to get the other two off him. Simplest way is to use demoralizing shout or piercing howl, which requires rage, which warrior doesn't have. Yes, bloodrage is nice, but an earlier heal leaves less time to grab sufficient aggro on the surrounding mobs (And if you think a warrior is not doing good enough job tanking, perhaps you should try and keep the main target on yourself with several dps classes are beating on it AND keep  the 3-4 other elite from running after priest. Spamming taunt no longer works, and every little bit helps.)

I think people really don't understand how effective Feign Death is. I really only understood it after seeing it in a pick-up group in Maraudon this weekend. There were two examples that blew me away:

1) I was later than I would have liked getting a heal to the hunter, so I had to resort to PW:S first, then heal. As the shield came up, he went down, dead. I was already in mid-heal, but the spell completed (leaving me puzzled, I expected the "target is dead" error) and the hunter miraculously arose from the dead to rejoin the fight. Took me a minute to figure out that he'd feigned death, but the mobs never did - they dropped all aggro against him instantly, and when he rejoined the fight, he could uncork all his biggest shots without picking up aggro.

2) Slightly later that evening, we had a horrible pull of the gas-cloud slimes that wiped us out. The hunter was the last to go down, and just before he actually died, he again feigned death. I had a soulstone on, so I was watching the whole thing unfold, hoping that I'd died far enough back to res in safely. And when the hunter Feigned, the mobs all went happily back to their home spots. As far as they could see, they'd wiped the party, job done, time to go home. So not only could I res in the clear, I had a hunter and freshly-revived pet to cover me while I went to res the party. Very cool!

Point of all this? Feign Death seems to drop *all* mob aggro against the hunter, if it's not resisted. (My hunter buddy took the beating of his life in the early 30s, when he tried it on a group that were +4 levels above him, all he got to see was the little "resist" animation and a buch of Dwarven hammers... but that's another story :) ). So if you want to transfer aggro from the hunter to the warrior, have the warrior stand between the hunter and the mob, have the hunter pull and use FD, and the mob *should* simply lose all aggro on the hunter and then give proximity aggro to the warrior. We'll test it tonight, but the warrior shouldn't even have to do *anything* to get the aggro from the hunter, FD is so effective.

Now you can say, what about charging into mobs after hunter pulls them? Not only this adds an extra complexity (which we know can cause mistakes), but it's not even that reliable. Often the mobs will be strung out, so you might not get all of them within demo shout/howl radius, but if the mobs resist they will not switch target to you either, even if the hunter uses disengage. Yes, he could use feint death, but then he is taken out of the fight for a short period of time, since the hunter has to "unfeint", then get certain distance away before he can use ranged attacks again. In short, you are adding layers and layers of complexity while the warrior could simply pull and have all the initial aggro on him.

Again, I'd suggest you try it -- the complexity needn't be that much. The hunter gets up instantly from FD (I believe it's a channelling ability), only needs 8 or ten yards to use his ranged attacks, and can also throw his pet in to soak up anything that the warrior can't grab immediately. AFAIK, he can also direct his pet while feigning death, but I don't know that for a fact.

And this whole " absolute safety zone" idea. There are three problems with this.
- One is as simple as the fact that often there aren't any "absolute safety zones to fallback on. Patrols/area design/respawns make it hard.

The area you cleared two minutes ago is arguably the safest place in the instance. :) No, nothing is absolute, but I think standing a goodly distance back and watching for adds from behind is safer than everybody crowding into the doorway to see the next room. I've had way too many accidental aggros from that, I think it's a greater risk than a patrol or respawn.

- Second (and biggest probably) issue is caster/ranged mobs. The hunter cannot reliably pull caster/ranged mobs, which are the more difficult pulls. Just how much more difficult would the above scenario be if it had 2-3 casters? Hunter has no way to bring them closer besides running back to the group. By then he has melee mobs on him and casters shooting him, and the warrior can gain aggro on one or the other, but would have really hard time getting aggro on both due to the two groups being certain distance away from each other. Compare it to a warrior pulling, where he will have the aggro right away.

I think this is actually the biggest argument for hunter pulling. Given the huge range of hunter attacks, they're the only class (possibly excepting mages) that can stand at the absolute fringe of a ranged mob's attack radius and still hit the mob. That means they can hightail it out of range faster than anybody else (neglecting Aspect of the Cheetah, which further enchances that), and therefore *force* the ranged attackers to come to the party. In theory, he can do that without even getting hit, saving priest mana and healing aggro over a warrior who takes a few arrows in the back as he retreats. But yes, that's only theory -- again, it needs to be tested.

The other consideration is a wipe. If the group wipes back in an area that's already been cleared, rezzing & reloading is pretty straightforward. If the warrior (or heaven forbid, a rogue) charges into the mobs while pulling and dies at their feet, we're probably done for the night.

- Third issue is that ranged pulls are often not needed, or even would be detrimental to killing speed/safety. A typical 4 nonelite/2 elite pull in BRD would be preferably charged by the warrior, so that he can gain and maintain aggro on the two elites while mage/warlocks kills off the nonelites. Is it faster to charge in? Yes. Is it less safe? No, not really, because the mob spawns are far apart and involve casters. Charging the group allows you to stack both melee and casters for AOE attacks, while with a bow pull you would have to deal with casters hanging back, having to fight melee first while someone else brings the casters closer, all the while prolonging the fight. Also, if we are talking about the BRD - the places that most groups wipe in aren't regular pulls, but specific areas such as Lyceum or the 7 dwarves bosses.

I don't know about BRD, haven't been there yet. I do know that greater focus of firepower makes the mobs go down faster, and here's the biggest plus in having hunters pull: class specialization. Bear with me, this might be a longish explanation.

One of the problems that I've seen in groups is that to effectively kill mobs, you need to be directing maximum group firepower onto a single target at a time -- the "defeat in detail" tactic. So what we've always tried to do is follow the lead of the warrior, but quite often that breaks down once the warrior has to start switching targets and running around to soak up aggro. Once fire discipline is lost, you lose the edge over the mobs, and pretty quickly all hell breaks loose. Warriors are designed to soak up and hold aggro, and have great tools to do so, but the chaotic nature of that task means that they can't effectively direct the group's firepower.

Now, enter the hunter. Useless at less than 8-10 yards, but capable of devastating ranged offense -- I'm playing with a level 44 who crits above 800 with aimed shot. Maybe the best way to use a hunter once melee starts is as a fire director - calling the targets in order of attack. Using the f-keys and the /assist function, the group can follow the hunter's targeting and make short work of the mob currently in the crosshairs. Plus the hunter has an aura (Trueshot, which I think is available after level 40) that boosts the ranged attack power of the entire group, including my wand-equipped priest.

Maybe I've only just discovered that which has long been known to all around me, but this feels "right" to me -- like it's the way the class was designed. So tonight our group's going to go test this out. I think our basic strategy will be something like this:

1) hunter scouts (using tracking, calling for warlock/priest or other scouting as required)
2) hunter calls for crowd control (i.e. there will be one shackle + one poly on this pull), so the CC classes know what to expect,
3) hunter pulls, and then simultaneously
4) i) warrior goes in to grab and lock down aggro, and
4) ii) CC classes kick in the CC, followed by
5) Combat! Warrior manages aggro, hunter calls targets from range, and fun-filled chaos ensues. :D

The one problem that I can forsee is that if the hunter is going all-out on one target, he might peel that target off the warrior. But he's got a pet to assist, and the rest of us to snare the mob on the way in, so hopefully we can manage that.

Maybe our group is just late figuring it all out, and everybody else has been doing this for ages, but I think using our hunter this way should greatly increase the effectiveness of our little group.

I will give you this - it IS safer to pull with a hunter to prevent the group wipe. But so it is with a rogue (vanish is nice, and dps is better), or any class, as long as they are far enough from the group. If they do die, well, it's just one death. I stand by my point - until hunters get some special pulling ability that other classes do not have, they will have difficulties finding a spot in a high-end group. Heck, if a Hunter had some special truly distinguishing pulling abilities, I would probably see him as one of the top choices for a group. As it stands now, there really is no need for a role of a "puller", until the hunter gets some special pulling abilities that will make pulling with him easier, as opposed to warrior pulling.
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OK, if I was going to take a strongly argumentative position, this would be the point. :)

Maybe I haven't had the chance to play with a good rogue, but the rogues I have played with seem to thing that "pulling" == "ambushing and kicking the snot out of". Maybe if they were smart enough to go in and Sap one target then run back to the group, it'd be different. But rogues always seem to force the melee to be up where the mobs are, greatly increasing the odds of adds and patrols -- not to mention that they tend to die in places that make for hard resurrection. Rogues in my instance groups make me shudder, but that's a different topic -- I'm sure there's a set of team tactics out there that will take full advantage of the rogue's abilities, but I haven't yet played with one that has demonstrated them to me.

Anyhow, the main point is that I think there's a role for hunters in scouting, pulling, and (arguably most importantly) directing group firepower during melee. I think it bears invesitgating, rather than dismissing it out of hand. I've heard a lot of warrior types on the WoW boards stating that this is categorically false, and I think that's because 1) they see pulling as some sort of glory role that should be fulfilled by warriors, and 2) they're not capable of adapting tactics to make use of the assets in the group. They seem to want one consistent, repetitive way to play, which is based around the warrior being the one true puller. Yes, warrior pulling is easier for the warrior, but this might be better for the group overall.

Maybe there's another way, and maybe this is the crowd that should be figuring that out. :)

Kv