I Have a Dream: Hunter Tourney Edition.

I have a dream that some day soon we'll get to see an experienced capable MM or SV hunter compete in a major arena tournament. I have a dream that the BM tree will disappear from competitive play until it's revamped into something other than a cool down ram and pray spec.

3.3 is on the horizon and with that Blizzard has one of the last if not the last opportunity to get the hunter class set up to be competitive and viable to round out this expansion. So why exactly are non BM hunters having a hard time finding their way into the tournament scene? My personal opinion regarding that question has to do with the difficulties a hunter has vs players that play at the very peaks of coordination and strategy and the fact that tournaments are represented by a lot of rogue/caster/X variants as well as the variation between the MM and SV trees to where one of the trees is nearly required to beat some teams while at the same time puts you in a position to be countered by the next.

When you're faced with with the decision of joining the next arena queue the pops as either MM or SV there are a couple decisions that have to be made. Would I rather have a better chance of beating X,Y,and Z while potentially failing hard vs A,B,and C or should I queue up as SV and be in a more moderately successful position to where I'll be "okay" vs most but not really "great" vs any.

That discussion has been carried out in a thread on the AJ forums if any are interested in reading the opinions of a variety of junkie level hunters.

http://www.arenajunkies.com/showthread.php?t=129190

I don't think anyone knows exactly what should happen to the MM/SV tress but there are a few ideas that have been tossed around on ways to tune some abilities/talents to bring some more consistent results.

Scorpid Sting/Disarm:
This is an example of one of the most highly inefficient/broken ability synergies I have ever seen in this game. It requires 2 globals to initiate. Relies on poisons not being dispelled two fold (one of the initial scorpid application and secondly on the disarm effect itself) as well as relying the hunter to burn his highest damage shot(at a high manacost) on what usually isn't the focus target. Well Damn Levi that sounds horrible but there has to be a positive side to this ability? Umm, well there isn't. The only time I've even used it to any real effect is when we score a kill and turn the match into a 3v2 and I disarm the melee on the other team in an extra effort to help reduce the chance of a counter kill.

Scorpid Sting should be changed into a disarm at the baseline available to all 3 specs and not reliant on a secondary trigger to use the effect. The downside to the ability being made base and fire and forget would be that the disarm would remain a poison and thus still vulnerable to dispels which is a pretty fair trade off IMO.

Scorpid Sting
1 minute CD
Disarms the target for 10 seconds
Applies the poison scorpid sting effect which disarms the target for 10 seconds (5 counter talented)
With that said the IMP stings talent should have scorpid sting added to it giving the scorpid sting disarm portion 10/20/30% dispel protection.

MM and stings:
In previous blogs and on multiple occasions I've covered the problems with poison based afflictions and their indirect relationship with rogues and poison mitigation effects. You can read more about my writings on that relationship by following the link below.

http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Hunt-this/Poisons-Rogues-Hunters-A-recipe-for-balance-disaster

When you have an entire hunter tree that revolves around keeping up a largely unprotected poison DOT that takes a global to fire each time the effects on a team that have solid poison mitigation become evident. Rogues utilize poisons as well but they don't have to burn a global to apply them and the proc rate is so high that even against teams with extensive anti poison abilities they still are afforded an extremely high up time. Its almost impossible to trinket/disengage a stun w/o having a poison proc on you before you escape because of the rate for example.

There are 2 approaches which have been discussed and both paths would lead to an ultimately satisfactory goal.

One of the options is changing chimeras sting modifiers into modifiers that take effect based on the aspect the hunter is using. A hunter in dragonhawk would deal the damage of the current serpent sting/chimera combo and a hunter in viper would deal reduced damage but would get a sizable amount of mana back for that sacrifice. There wouldn't even need to be any real changes to the shot itself in that regards because aspect of the viper already has a damage penalty attached.

The other option is to steer away from stings and to make the MM tree based around bleeds. If strings were turned into bleeds via a deep MM talent the tree could function as is does now w/o being completely neutered by highly poison defensive teams. If the bleed feel you would obviously still need to reapply but it wouldn't be the current situations where you have to prep your chimera shots essentially every time vs a team with a defensive cleanse and it's not like the flame shock bonus situation here where we get a sweet benefit of a guaranteed crit we basically get screwed on any damage potential unless 1 serp is up and 2 we crit at least half of the shot. The viper sting nerfs early in this expansion already paved the way for this potential change because a viper sting ticked on a target now pales in comparison to it's former self. Viper sting now is more  a mana regen tool for the hunter rather than a mana drain effect vs the other team.

You could add the alternate effect to chimera shot itself.

You deal 125% weapon damage, refreshing the current Sting on your target transforming your stings into bleeds and triggering an effect:

Surviving as Survival:
One of the main things that even gives you any hint of a survival advantage as survival is the ability of the spec to deal a lot of its damage while maintaining high mobility. There are two areas of the tree that I think can be improved on to make the tree slightly more competitive and slightly more consistent w/o being too much.

Wyvern Sting: With the focus on making sure CC abilities share proper DRs I think it's time that wyvern stings dot effect be changed. Instead of the target being afflicted by a poison DOT they should be afflicted by a crippling poison level snare.

The other area that I think SV could have a niche role in is stun survival. This would require a little talent shuffling to accomplish but would still remain largely noninvasive. The disengage bonus could be dropped from survival tactics and added to survival instincts and survival tactics could be dropped down a couple tiers taking it out of range of chimera shot while having a damage reduction against stuns added. A 7/15 or 10/20% damage reduction via stunned added to that talent should be a nice addition to the tree and would help give the survival tree something to fall back on since it doesn't have the luxuries of readiness which allows double disengages/deterrences/master's calls as deemed necessary by the hunter.

I'm not going to include anything about BM in this blog (except the indirect change via the proposed scorpid shot change) because I feel like a tweek to an ability or two wouldn't even come close to scratching the surface of what that tree needs and I'm planning on writing an entry devoted entirely around some ideas of the tree most of which would be radical enough that they couldn't really be explored until cataclysm if blizzard bites on any of the ideas.