Lo-Quality WoW

Another quiet night on the WoW front. There was a brief Wintergrasp battle I was in but it was hardly worth mentioning. I still attempted to get into a Heroic Halls of Stone but had no luck. I did get invited to other instances, and you know things are slow if people are desperately trying to fill dps slots on runs. Did some wandering around Kalimdor, but I’m still having trouble finding quests I haven’t done. So with nothing else to talk about, let’s talk about how and why I’m a Survival Hunter.

Now the three trees of the Hunter are BeastMaster (BM), Marksman (MM) or Survival (SV). Well, what’s the difference? My opinion is that the difference mainly comes from what you focus on. The BM hunter is a dps class where he focus revolves around his pet. His pet does all the nifty tricks like holding aggro and a size-able portion of damage. The MM hunter is the dps class where the hunter himself is the focus. He’s the one causing the damage output. The SV is a utility dps class. You don’t do as much damage per se as the other two classes, but you make up for it with all these little tricks like traps or Hunting Party or the old Expose Weakness (where it affected the Raid but now it just affects you.)

But I thought the SV hunter was the “raid” hunter build. Not really. Yes, SV hunters had the Expose Weakness (EW) that people loved in a raid but it didn’t stack. So at most, you usually only needed one SV hunter for the EW proc. But even then, when you looked through some of the top raiding guilds, almost all their hunters were BM or MM. They did massive damage and damage was what they wanted out of them, not additional buffs or trap based crowd control.

And from what I saw, people just didn’t know how to play the SV build. EW is relatively simple. You have a chance on a critical hit to add 25% of your agility as AP to all physical damage attacks on that target. So what does that tell you? Agility is important. Critical rating is important. Yet I would see SV hunters with 500 agility and maybe 18% crit! That meant that you rarely saw the EW proc and when it didn’t it didn’t do much. But SV’s did more than just EW. You also had these neat little crowd control tricks, stuff that made your traps more effective or reduce the time till the next trap could be laid. But I would constantly see SV hunters use the wrong trap or position their trap in a place that made it harder for the tank or place a trap, then forget to put another one down and then get killed because the trapped mob broke out and slammed them.

Not that it much matters nowadays. You’re rarely ever called upon to do crowd control anymore and EW only affects you. Hunting Party, while nice, is like other replenishment talents and several people can do that now. So why do SV when BM and MM can out dps them? (Or used to before the 3.0.8 patch.)

Well, I started out as an MM. As I said before, my pet was nice but he wasn’t my focus. I still used him and I got really used to sending him in, him holding aggro long enough for me to get a couple of shots off, but then aggro would be pulled and I would get maybe another shot or two before I would raptor strike the mob dead. But that’s not how you play a hunter you say? No, that’s how I play a hunter. I never said I played it the right way.

So where did SV come into play? When we started doing instances in my guild. I was puttering around the builds when I started realizing the potential of the SV talents in instances. But even then, I was a MM/SV hybrid build for quite a long time. Then I started realizing what else all those neat little tricks and the boosts to my survivability gave me. I do a lot of soloing, so being able to survive hits better and being able to whip out some melee damage if necessary became very nice. I also did PVP in the form of battlegrounds and arena. Well, crowd control actions like freezing traps and wyvern stings were just awesome for that. And again, bonuses to my melee abilities helped. Few things gave me greater pleasure than a warrior or rogue closing in on me and taking them out with a couple of raptor strikes. While my damage potential went down, I didn’t shy away from melee combat, something I know surprised more than one opponent. And between high agility and stamina, well, I also wasn’t a push over and sometimes it would take a melee class quite a bit of time to finish me off while I still was whaling on them.

But why stay an SV when things changed with Wrath? After all, CC wasn’t as important and other dedicated melee classes got powerful enough to smash you when you tried those old tricks which just aren’t as effective anymore. Well, I stayed SV because it suited my style of play, which I think is actually more important. I don’t have a powerful need to be on the top of the damage charts. It actually bothers me when I am, because those “pure” dps builds should be out performing me and if they’re aren’t, that’s bad. I do a lot of soloing, which includes lower level instances, and having all that extra survivability via bonus stamina and high agility means I last longer even when things go to hell. I still use traps as part of my bag of tricks, whether it be a freezing trap, snake trap, or exploding trap. Even outside of PVP combat, I use scatter shot and wyvern sting frequently, whether to give me a few more seconds to setup something else or run away, or to keep a mob off the healer for a few extra seconds until the tank can go grab the mob’s attention back.

And that’s what it really comes down to. What build suits you and the way you play. With the recent nerf to BMs and the tweaks to SVs, quite a few people are switching. And I’m fine with that as long as people realize that it will require change on their part. You don’t play an SV like you do a BM or MM. And if that requires so much of a change in your play style that you either aren’t effective or having fun anymore, then switch back. Right now SV seems to have an advantage but I can guarantee that SVs are gonna get a whap with the nerf bat in one way or another. (Although I still think Blizzard secretly hates SV’s, but probably not for the reasons you think.)

I am getting annoyed by those complaining that they’re being “forced” to be an SV hunter now. You’re really not, I think Blizzard has done a good enough job that you don’t have to be a certain build to be effective. After all, even before the recent changes in 3.0.8., I could often beat or at least equal BMs or MMs in damage and dps. Given equal gear and la, that should never happen and I can’t always be running with poorly geared people. You may not do as much dps are you used to, but you are still beating out tanks and healers right? And if you’re not, either your tank and healers are amazingly overpowered or you need to start blaming something other than your build for poor dps output.