Friday, July 04, 2008

Hunter Battleground build 0.1

I've leveled my hunter almost completely in the cookie-cutter Beast Master build 41/20/0. I've had great success with it but it was time to try something different. With my focus on PVP I wanted to give another more survival oriented build a spin. The result:

21/0/40

The goal of the build is to make it easier to survive battlegrounds and hence be more effective. It is NOT an arena build. It is not a raid build and probably not a farming build. When I enter battlegrounds - warriors & rogues are my biggest nemesis - or at least I get most hammered by them. A BM build is probably much stronger against casters (BW ftw)

So a few highlights from the "Battlegound Build" are:

Savage Strikes - Gives your raptor strike additional 20% to crit. When you get a rogue/hunter in melee it is going to hurt them.

Improved Wing Clip - 20% of imobilizing them. This is almost instant win when applied to an enemy melee. At least in theory ^^

Deterrence - Increases dodge AND parry with 25% for 10 seconds. It will allow you to charge into a warrior and avoid that hamstring and instead clip him... or survive that rogue's barrage of attacks.

Wyvern Sting - put an opponent to sleep for 12 sec... CC or why not just as a cast interrupt.

Intimidation - your trusty pet stun. I would rather have Scatter shot for this build but I've chosen the Pet route.

Improved Aspect of the Monkey - again 6% dodge against melee can be the deciding factor when trying to avoid their stuns/hamstrings.

I've just begun learning the build and it feels very different from a beast master. First you don't have to be afraid in melee - actually it is a good thing to go seeking melee at certain times with other hunters and even rogues (at least non-gladiator geared). I still need to change/add a few macros for all the new talents to make the build work correctly.

I took my pet to Skettis to try out its PVE use. While I could handle all encounters (thinking of the escort quests) I had less mana after a fight than I would as a beast master. BUT damn! It was much easier to handle multiple mobs. Wyvern sting and Entrapment are good PVE talents in the survival tree.

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