The Hunter Problem

 

So here we are at the end of S3. Things haven't changed much for hunters, there are still some breakout stars that see success, but most generally lag behind in competitive arenas and the TR.

Why is this? Power isn't a problem when talking about hunters, anybody can tell you that if you're standing within LoS of a hunter you will eat some massive damage. The problem with hunters lies in the mechanics. Hunters are like confused teenagers who don't know if they want to grow up being a boy or a girl. We are classified as a physical dps class, but with mana?

While we benefit very little from being a physical/caster hybrid we have somehow managed to grab onto the major weaknesses of both. Our DPS is dictated by our mana pool. Drain a hunter and he is reduced to viper and steady shots. Being a physical dps class we have very little mitigation when it comes to magic related damage.(This of course, does not apply to rogues.) With our little to none built in escape mechanics we are very easily locked down. Some may argue frosttrapsdeterrencepillarslolnoob, but really; deterrence is on a 5 minute cooldown, pillars work both ways, and frost traps while being effective most of the time are rendered obsolete if the pursuer has BoF, ShS, or if the hunter is rooted or slowed.

But all of this has been discussed to death with much flaming and nerdraging. Let us move onto possible fixes and solutions shall we?

Solutions

These are some ideas I'm hoping to see in WotLK

Smart Trap: Mark an enemy which causes the trap to only activate when the marked target triggers it. Possibly 1 minute cooldown?

Smart Trap solves many problems hunters have with trapping in both PvE and PvP encounters. We could also add in some negating spell resistance bit to help counter the whole spell-hit thing. Traps are our main source of CC and are on a 30 second cooldown. I think being able to land one every minute or so is fair enough.

More Aspects: I feel like I'm being bludgeoned into using Hawk and Viper. Monkey is nice but punishable by warriors. Both cheetah and pack require some ridiculous amounts of timing to pull off, and with the gcd on them its really unreasonable to try. I'm not even going into Beast and Wild. Aspects that have more utility to certain situations would make switching worth something and would add more buttons to click. Obviously a plus.

Smarter Traps: Snake trap. Explosive trap. Immolation trap. While Snake Trap's viability can be argued the fire traps serve nothing but some miniscule aoe damage and a weak dot on a 30 second cd. What I'm hoping for in WotLK are for traps that make the hunter have to choose between in certain situations. A good one imo would be the Stasis Trap. It's got it's roots in WC3 and an AOE stun for like 6 seconds wouldn't be bad when you need to go for a kill.

Trainable Skills: Seriously. Either make Scatter Shot, Deterrence or Aimed shot trainable. It's getting ridiculous when you give rogues clos(yes it was a ****ty 41 talent) and mages ice block(yes they needed the survivability) but you won't even give the only class with a CC on a 30s cd a scatter shot. Or maybe increase a hunters survivability with deterrence?

That's all I really have to say now. Sorry the post was a bit long