The 4.0.1 Inune hunter guide.

[Inune]

We've had a couple days to figure out all the hunter shenanigans in patch 4.0.1 and now it's about time to write it all out for the hunters in the guild who may not be doing their class research. I'm gonna go over the main points to adapting your hunter to 4.0.1 including spec choice, how to regem, what to reforge, what pets to get, etc.

With out any further ado, here is what you need to do to adapt your hunter for 4.0.1 (and potentially cataclysm):


What do I spec?
You spec BM for solo content and MM/Survival for raids. There is only one exception to this unless you really, really, really don't give a shit: providing buffs with exotic pets. From the best testing I've seen on the Hunter boards, BM is still behind MM and Surv, but the latter two are more balanced now. MM is still less frantic and focus-starved, though, so I would recommend it over Surv.

BM is still hands-down the best solo spec because it's still based mostly on pet strength and your pet matters so much more while solo. This is perhaps a good soloing build, it focuses on surviving and utility, not on long-term DPS. If, however, you are speccing BM in order to provide a pet buff to a raid, you're going to want to use something like this, which focuses more on the damaging talents.

As for MM, this is considered to be the cookie cutter spec at the moment. I will mention, though, that the Marked for Death talent is largely up for interpretation. You still need those two points in the MM tree to reach Chimera, but Marked for Death is presently about as lackluster as you can possibly get. Outside of add fights, you save yourself 1 gcd every 5 minutes for an effect that's overwritten if any other hunter throws up mark. I really don't think it'll matter if you elect to drop a point or two out of MfD to get, say, Silencing Shot.

Lastly, the prime glyphs for both specs are pretty much the same: Kill Shot, Steady Shot, and Arcane Shot. This will likely change in cataclysm, once BM and Survival get Cobra shot (meaning they'll drop the Steady glyph), but for the next two months, those glyphs are your bread and butter. In addition, BM has the notable Bestial Wrath glyph in the major area, but other than that all lower class glyphs largely have no impact on DPS. I'd recommend Disengage and Misdirection as majors.


What pets do I get?



That's not my own work, but it is a flowchart that every raiding hunter should have from now until the game dies or they change pet mechanics again. In order to be an effective raiding hunter, you must train the following pets:

-Corehound (E) [Blood lust]
-Silithid (E) [Fortitude]
-Raptor or Serpent [Sunder armor]
-Wolf [5% crit]
-Ravager [4% physical damage]
-Dragonhawk or Wind Serpent [8% spell damage]
-Cat [Str/Agi totem buff]
-Hyena [So Irenke doesn't bitch about a manglebot]

upon cataclysm's release, add in a Shale Spider for Blessing of Kings. Due to the wide variety of raid comps you can encounter, I highly suggest you keep that flowchart or something similar around so that you're bringing a useful pet and not overlapping buffs.

(I also highly recommend getting one of the Drakuru raptors in Zul'Drak. They have a cool deal where they swap between a couple color palettes randomly after you summon them.)


How do I regem and reforge?

Reforging is fairly straight forward for 80: take crit, make it mastery. Take more crit, make it more mastery. So long as you keep a fair amount of crit (it's possible to get a ton of mastery rating and still have 55% crit or better), reforge as much crit as you can into mastery (This will change in cataclysm, we can only abuse this for now because of how things like crit rating scale for a level 80 character).

Gemming is going to take a little bit more work. The nightmare tear that we used to love for our meta and one blue socket is no longer as useful to us as it once was. In addition, we lost that awesome crutch talent in tier 1 MM that gave us 3% hit for 3 talent points, so if, like most hunters, you had that talent, you're probably under hit cap.

The hit cap is still 8%, which now correlates to around 247 hit rating. To get this, gem either pure hit zircons or purple agi/hit dreadstones in blue sockets until you hit 8%, then back to stacking agility. If you use up all your blue sockets and haven't made it to the cap yet, consider Icewalker for your boots, or else throw an agi/hit gem into a red socket - it is worth it to gem hit in red sockets if that is what it takes to hit cap yourself, but it is never worth reforging to hit.

Also note, if you are engineering, normal enchants now stack on top of engineering tinkers. That means you can get both the agility enchant and the hyperspeed accelerators on your gloves, rocket boots and icewalker/assault on boots, agility and parachute on cloak, and lastly, if you feel so inclined, both the mind amplification device and your usual glyph of torment on your helm.


There's a boss in front of me, WAT DO?!
The MM rotation has changed significantly since before the patch, but the BM rotation (just to reiterate: you should really only be BM if you're solo'ing or bringing lust/fort) is really just a mutated clone of its former self. Cooldown usage is still much as it always has been: blow CDs off the start of the fight (covering yourself with MD) or coincident with Lust, if blowing them at the start of the fight would cause them to be on CD for the lust phase.

As BM what you're going to want to do is hit Kill Command and Focus Fire on CD and proc, respectively, and spam Arcane shot otherwise. Use Steady Shot to regen focus and ensure that you always have enough focus to hit Kill Command when it comes off CD, but use Arcane shot to focus dump so you don't cap yourself. Sub-20%, you're also going to be spamming double Kill Shots every 6 seconds due to the glorious glyph we got (note: to the best of my knowledge, Kill shot presently costs no focus, so it's not necessary to plan more intricately for focus use sub-20%).

MM is where shit hits the fan in a very big way. You want to start with Serpent Sting and Chimera shot as usual, and you want to hit Chimera on CD throughout the fight to maintain your sting. Beyond that, however, the MM rotation looks nothing like it used to. The new Improved Steady Shot is a potent buff and should be kept up as much as possible. Arcane Shot is what we use to bleed focus and prevent capping. Lastly, our formerly powerhouse Aimed Shot is now utterly gutted and pathetic, you only want to use it when you get a "FIRE!" proc and can fire it off free of focus cost and cast time.


So here's kind of what the MM rotation is going to be for you:
{stuff} - Steady shot x2 - {stuff} - Steady shot x2 - {stuff} - Steady shot x2.... etc.

{stuff} takes one of the following forms (ranked by priority):

{Chimera Shot, Kill Shot, Kill Shot}
{Kill Shot, Kill Shot}
{Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot}
{Chimera Shot, Arcane Shot}
{Aimed Shot, Arcane shot}
{Arcane Shot, Arcane shot}

You prioritize Chimera above all else and Kill above everything but Chimera. Aimed gets thrown in on proc, but not if you're sub-20% and you have Kill shot ready. Otherwise, spam arcane to bleed focus and prevent capping yourself. If done properly, you should always have enough focus for Chimera when its CD is up.




And that is about it. If you do all of these things to adapt to 4.0.1 you.... will still pathetically under-DPS every casting class in the game, but you will at least be doing it right. If you want more information, or perhaps some more in-dept analysis that I didn't touch, head to The WoW hunter forum or elitist jerks.






P.S. I didn't say anything about PvP because if you're reading this for information, you're a goddamn hunter. The almighty Blizzard has spoken and you don't get to PvP from now until level 83 unless you feel like being a free HK to every class that can minimum range you (that's every class but other hunters). Just don't do it. If you want to PvP, do it on an alt... maybe a mage, boomkin, warlock, or Spriest...

[Irenke]

Just a random question from someone who hasn't played a hunter since Black Temple. Bow speed was always a big thing for hunters in the past; pre-TBC we tried to find bows with the slowest speed so that we could get the biggest hits (particularly with Aimed Shot, as I recall) and in TBC we tried to get 2.8s bows as Beast Mastery hunters so that we could get the rotation perfect.

Is there any optimal speed for a hunter and his rotation or is that something that was phased out in Wrath? I ask mostly because I've been mulling over the idea of leveling my hunter to 80 and the changes made intrigue me.

[Inune]

Speed isn't so much the issue as is the top end of the damage range, which is still correlated in the manner you're talking about (slower = higher damage ranges, usually), but merits mentioning just so we're clear (there are situations where you'll find a faster weapon with higher damage, and in that case it's better than a slow weapon with lower damage).

As for how focused you are on top end weapon damage, it depends on spec. BM and SV care less since more of their damage comes from things not dependent on ranged weapon damage. Higher damage is still good, but much less so than with MM. MM cares the absolute most, because of how much of our damage is dependent on our weapon's damage range and it is always a DPS upgrade to use the higher-damage weapon.

You can see this very clearly in that Zod's, despite having no stats and a shitty proc, is actually better than the Njordnar Bow, and in the weird happenstance that the best pre-raid weapon is actually a tanking gun (Rowan's, because it has higher damage than the Felglacier Bolter).

Fortunately, the ranged weapon progression after hitting 80 in wrath is really straight forward:

1)whatever you can get your hands on
2)Felglacier Bolter (Heroic Pit)
3)Rowan's (if you have gold to burn)
4)Njordnar Bone Bow (DW 10) or Stakethrower (Queen 10)
5)Windrunner's Heartseeker (LK 10)
6)Zod's (DW 25)
7)Falinrush (LK 25)
8-11)The same list from Heroic mode ICC.