Post by blah17
I may be proven wrong with time but...
As more people gain resilience hunters will become less effective. The thing hunters excel at currently is bursting people down which is why you don't see a ton of drain teams, expecially in the 2v2 bracket. As the average resil level of the arena playing field increases hunters will be forced back on to drain teams to attain higher ratings. This will make hunters more complicated to play leaving many of the current hunters incapable of competing due to the complexity of the fights. More and more hunters will be pushed into the 1700 and below range and we will be at the bottom of the list again by no later than s6.
LoS in arenas kills all but the most skilled hunters more than any other class. The only saving grace I see for this is DKs and Death Grip/Chains of Ice. Too bad they will likely be playing with paladins and rogues over hunters...
On a positive note I believe MM hunters will continue to do well in 5v5s as the part CC/ part burst role they have played preWotLK.
Flame on?
Flame? nah, that's for differant Communities, not so much Wowhead.
As for what you said, it's a valid point, I have a counter-argument though. I believe hunter's will become
better as time goes on. There is the incoming nerf, but thats mostly on BM hunters and PvEers (Not that you never use steady shot in arena, but for our purposes we'll assume that impact will be insignificant, especialy in 2v2).
My reason for thinking hunters will do relatively better is the improvements to our Kiting abilities. Admittedly some classes have gotten better at closing the distance, but ide say on average a Hunter is more able to stay outside of Melee range than we we're in BC.
The new Disengage of course and also one of our new abilities, Master's Call, which is perfect for use on things like Hamstring or Crippling poison (Unfortunatly cant be used on stuns), it even provides 4 seconds of immunity from such effects, hopefuly granting time to make some distance (In theory they will be Wingclipped, Frost-trapped, Scatter-shotted or a combination of those).
Also having Detterance as a base ability is good for buying some time while our partner can hopefuly do something. And lastly, using Readiness if your specced for it will let you do any of these nice cooldown Kiting abilities twice, Imagine something like using Scatter shot on some melee class twice, disengage once and a freezing trap.
So what is our problem anyways? In my opinion our biggest problem is what you argued is our biggest strength, low Resiliance / Hp.
I havent done much Arena since WotlK, just 10 games, but most of our losses (All but 1 iirc) was me being killed too fast to even think about Kiting. My gear isnt bad (18k hp, almost 200 Resil), but it's not enough by a longshot to deal with a Rogue + Feral druid jumping me.
My Conclusion: If given the Oppertunity Hunter's excel in two very significant areas:
- Kiting (Allowing us to put strength #1 to good use)
In addition to those things we also have decent Crowd Control (Differant from Kiting in that it cannot be used in conjunction with Damage dealing), Even stronger Mana-Draining capability (With effective use of Chimera shot for MM, you can keep Viper sting on a target at all times if it's not dispelled). And also some nice Utility things, such as Flare, Master's call (Dont forget you can use this on your partner too) and Silencing shot.
If given the oppertunity to really use these things to their maximum potential (With higher Hp and Resil is my hope) I think Hunter's will be quite a bit stronger in PvP than people predict.
Sorry for the Wall of Text
