by Brian Wood
Hunters have a lot of stats to juggle — more than most classes. On any given piece of gear our DPS could be affected by attack power, agility, intellect, hit rating, haste rating, armor penetration rating, crit rating, ranged weapon DPS, and even stamina. Not only does each stat affect our DPS differently, but many of our stats have some kind of cap after which they become much less useful — or no longer useful at all.
Today we’re going to head back to hunter school and take a look at the hunter stats that have caps: hit rating, crit rating, haste rating and armor penetration rating. We’ll look at the hard caps and soft caps and how these stats change as our gear improves.
Hard Cap vs. Soft Cap
When we talk about stats that have caps, we often hear the terms “hard cap” and “soft cap.”
A stat is considered at its hard cap when it ceases to help us at all. Any more of the stat does nothing at all for our DPS. You’re filling a glass with water, and the top of the glass is the hard cap. You can keep pouring water in it, but it won’t help anymore. The glass is full, it can’t get fuller.
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by Brian Wood
today we’re going to run down the advantages of the tier 9 and tier 10 hunter set bonuses for each of the three hunter specs, and suggest which way you should gear your hunter.
Older Sets
We’re only interested in the tier 9 and tier 10 sets. Anything older isn’t worthwhile for hunters. We don’t even care about the tier 9 4-piece bonus (not even if you’re BM). The only other older set that we’d ever want to hang onto is the tier 5 2-piece (from BC raids) for extreme soloing situations (it lets us automatically heal our pets for 15% of the damage we do).
Before we get into the spec by spec details, lets hit a quick review of our tier 9 and 10 sets.
Tier 9: Windrunner
There are three versions of the hunter tier 9 set:
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by Brian Wood
Trinkets fill a very special slot in our gear selection. Rather than just a collection of stats, trinkets are the one gear slot we can pretty much count on doing something special, be it crazy procs or on-use abilities. Of course because they aren’t just piles of stats, trying to compare one trinket to another can sometimes be difficult. Worse yet, they are some of the most difficult slots to fill, and we don’t want to waste our time (or DKP) with a subpar trinket.
Today we’re going to look beyond just ICC and examine all of the top hunter trinket choices, from Greatness to Deathbringer’s WIll. Furthermore, I’m going to go out on a limb and rank all the trinkets from best to worst for each hunter spec. So join me after the cut to see if that limb can hold up against some solid dwarven weight.
Evaluating Trinkets
Before we get into the trinket list, it’s worth taking a moment to explain exactly how we evaluate trinkets. For most gear we use spreadsheets to determine the comparative benefit of each stat. So perhaps we find out that 1 agility is equal to 2.4 attack power. We then add up the total value of all of the stats to get a number that we can compare to the total value of all the stats on a different piece of gear.
The problem with trinkets is they almost always have abilities, either procs or on-use, that are not always active. So what we do here is average the proc portion of the trinket. The key here is to find out what the typical uptime of a special ability is — and generally this is done by spending a crazy amount of time testing it on a target dummy — usually over a couple thousand shots.
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by Brian Wood
The Crimson Halls of Icecrown Citadel contains the kind of horrors that the Plagueworks could only hint at. The Crimson Halls is where all the emo vampire RPing blood elves went to die… and then came back!
True story, and a complete tangent: a friend of mine, in her 30s, mother of two, recently admitted to me that her shameful, guilty pleasure is reading the Twilight books (which, I gather, are like Anne Rice 90210 for teenagers). She says the books are awful and everything you’d fear, but she can’t stop reading them. Then she saw a Twilight movie was horrified to see — to really see with her own eyes — that these hunky guys of literary lust were like 17 years old. Sure, they were in the books too, but apparently when reading she had unconsciously changed them to a more age-appropriate hunky mental image and suddenly felt very creepy seeing these kids on the screen. It’s one vast landscape of pain, being old.
Do as Your RL Says
As always in these hunter guides, we’re going to assume that you’re familiar with the basic strat and abilities of the encounter. We are focusing on the hunter role, not teaching you the fight from scratch. And of course if your raid leader’s strategy involves anything different than what I’m saying here, always do what your raid leader says. Even if he’s wrong.
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by Brian Wood
We hunters are basically an entire party unto ourselves. Our pet is the tank, we’re the DPS, and we can split the healing duties between hunter and pet. By focusing on the right talents and gear and glyphs, hunters and pets can be a formidable soloing team, taking on content that was never meant to be done alone. We can solo our way from Molten Core straight through to even Lich King 5-mans.
Soloing content meant for groups or raids comes from the same impulse behind climbing a mountain: we do it because it’s there. We do it for the challenge, the excitement, for the glory for the hunter class. And if that isn’t enough for you, there’s also the allure of legendary items like Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, or rare mount drops like the Swift Zulian Tiger, Midnight, and the Swift White Hawkstrider.
Join me after the cut as we take a look at exactly how you can topple Molen Core to Violet Hold on your own, how you can heal your pet for thousands of heals per second, and become the envy of your guild mates. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as polishing off Ragnaros and hearing your friends bemoan how horribly broken you are.
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by caleb @ Ensidia
When people whisper me in-game and I don’t answer there is usually a good reason for it. Please take no offense if it happens to you. I’m probably afk, or just busy with something else. I’ll try to answer questions on the forums (at least the ones that haven’t been answered already).
Some parts of this guide are taken from the previous guides, obviously the ones that apply for marksman as well in Icecrown Citadel. These are in italic, so you can just skip over it if you read the previous guide and got a general understanding of the appropriate section. This should make it easier if you are only interested in marksman specific information for the Icecrown Citadel dungeon. .
Hunter Guide for Icecrown Citadel
Introduction:
Welcome to the Hunter guide of Icecrown Citadel’s pre heroic mode stage. The guide will only cover raiding related concepts, such as:
-{ I } stats
-{ II } gems, enchants
-{ III } talents, glyphs
-{ IV } shot rotations
• { IV/1 } Kill Shot
• { IV/2 } Serpent Sting
• { IV/3 } Chimera Shot
• { IV/4 } Aimed Shot
• { IV/5 } Silencing Shot
• { IV/6 } Steady Shot
-{ V } a bit of gear selection
-{ VI } buffs, debuffs, consumables
-{ VII } macros
-{ VII } addon recommendation
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by Zach Yonzon
1A hunter’s basic repertoire of attacks consists of shots and stings, the former doing a variety of damaging effects and the latter applying a debuff. Although you only have to worry about one kind of sting being applied to you at any time, hunters have a sting for every kind of opponent. Serpent Sting is the most common, damaging sting, although they can also opt to use Viper Sting on mana-users or even Scorpid Sting against melee classes or other hunters. Stings are nature-based poison debuffs that can be removed by spells such as Cleansing Totems, Cleanse, and Cure Poison.
Most good hunters will try to keep a sting applied on a target, as it can confer benefits to the hunter beyond the basic debuff. Even with abilities to remove the debuff, stings can be reapplied almost immediately, so it can sometimes be a mana-intensive effort for both parties. Out of all the stings, hunters will protect and re-apply Viper Sting the most. On top of their sting, hunters also have a wide selection of ranged attacks. You can expect to be the target of their version of Mortal Strike, the marksmanship talent, Aimed Shot, or the Execute-like ability, Kill Shot, so always watch your health.
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by Brian Wood
When you’re looking at stepping into the hunter class for the first time there are three key concepts to keep in mind: guns are finely crafted machines of death while bows are primitive contraptions better suited to butterfly-humpin’ hippies; dwarves are solidly-built, better looking, and better able to handle the sweet nectar of life (alcohol) than other races; and finally beast mastery is the ideal entry point into the hunter class.
No spec is as widely useful and easy to learn and master as BM. Today we’re going to walk step-by-step through everything you need to know to get started on your BM hunter. Don’t worry, they’re baby steps. Even the aforementioned butterfly-humpin’ night elves will be able to understand.
What is Beast Mastery?
In many ways BM exemplifies what it means to be a hunter. BM are all about their pets, be it increasing pet damage, pet survivability, and selection of possible pets. A BM hunter’s pet makes up nearly half of his damage output, and a BM hunter without his pet is like a draenei without his spaceship… a sad, sad thing indeed my friends.
Beast Mastery Benefits
- Easy to play.
- Forgiving of errors.
- Larger selection of pets and better ability to bond with your pet. Unlike other specs, your pet is absolutely vital.
- Phenomenal for leveling.
- Can tank instances.
- Can solo lower level instances, including raid instances.
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by Zach Yonzon
Hunters have long been a force to reckon with in the Battlegrounds, an environment where they thrive. Also, as strong as they were back in vanilla WoW, they’re even more powerful in Wrath of the Lich King, gaining new tricks, losing old limitations (e.g., traps can be deployed in combat), and having access to diversity of pets that make PvP encounters more interesting than ever.
Hunters are the game’s premier pet class. More than even warlocks, hunters rely on their pet to accomplish their goals, with the best hunters mastering the art of micromanaging their pets and its varied abilities. Recognizing a hunter’s spec is only aspect of identifying a hunter’s strength and weaknesses. Part of learning how to deal with hunters involves recognizing a hunter’s pet type who now even have their own talent trees. Let’s take a closer look at this master of beasts after the jump.
Long range combat
Hunters are the masters of long range combat, dealing most of their damage from far away. It used to be that hunters had a monumental Achilles’ heel, a range between 5 to 8 yards where hunters could do almost nothing because their melee strikes couldn’t go beyond 5 yards and most of their shots couldn’t be fired under 8 yards. This was called the ‘dead zone’. Effectively removed in Patch 2.3 where the minimum range for their shots was brought down to five, the change broke one of the oldest and most reliable strategies to use against a hunter.
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by Brian Wood
It is well known that hideous undead monstrosities concocted by the deranged minions of the Lich King make for excellent target practice. Having rained death throughout the ICC Lower Spire and gathered up all of our rightful hunter loot, our next stop on the way to the Lich King is the Plagueworks. We are given more trash to shower us with Ashen Verdict rep, including the much sought-after Precious’s Ribbon (clearly hunter loot) before stepping into the chamber of the grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous undead of yore.
Join me after the cut as we take a look at the hunter tips for defeating the bosses of the Plagueworks. As always, we’re going to assume that you’re familiar with the boss strategies and will be looking at hunter-specific tips.
Trash Tip
We normally don’t talk about trash at all. We don’t optimize for trash and we don’t strategize for trash. We know that the trash is going to go down no matter what and if your raid is really having problems with trash, then you probably shouldn’t be doing that content.
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