Back to BM

Even though I’d just plunked 45G down for a Glyph of Explosive Shot the day before, I respecced back to BM as quick as you please.

My experience in week one of arena taught me that if our Ret Paladin/Hunter combo is to work, I’m gonna have to return to my beloved tree.

Initially, I was going to try a “Top Secret” BM spec like this one. I figured this may work, because opponents wouldn’t see any BM buffs on me, therefore thinking I’m SV. My rationale was that it would help keep them from focus-firing my pet right away. The build would also give me Readiness, which would be a nice asset for double traps and Intimidation. I thought Improved Hunter’s Mark, along with the Glyph of Improved Hunter’s Mark would help compensate for some of my lost burst, but then…

I thought, “F**k it”… they can just try and kill me before I kill them. I’m going to step into arena as a BM Hunter, and that’s just how it is. No sense in pussy-footing around that fact.

My current spec looks like this.

I may play with it some more, but for now it’s working pretty well. If I do mix things up, it will be to pick up Cobra Strikes. I’m considering pulling 2 points from Spirit Bond and 1 from Frenzy and going 3/3 Cobra Strikes. Problem is, I absolutely love Spirit Bond as BM. I may be one of the only BM Hunters that swears by it, but it has not only saved my ass on more than a few occasions, it’s also so convenient for BGs by eliminating downtime.

Once I get really settled with a spec, I’ll detail it out a bit more. I don’t want to create a lengthy post outlining my spec, only to have it change the following week. Wait a minute, that’s what I usually do… why change now? Honestly, I think I’ll wait until I get my PvP pet leveled up, and see how week 3 goes before I go in-depth with my BM PvP spec recommendation. Until then, you can armory me and see what I’m doing in the meantime.

For my glyphs I went with Bestial Wrath (of course), Aimed Shot (needs to be in one of every PvP Hunter’s glyph slots) and Glyph of Mending. I had a tough time with my choice for the 3rd glyph, but I went with Mending for the added pet uptime insurance.

The pet I used was my wolf. While not the best pet for arena, he came through in a pinch for lack of a better solution. I had tried my crab out in BGs after speccing BM and he didn’t bring the necessary muscle to finish opponents off quickly enough. I started the night with my wolf to see how it went, and never looked back. However, I do have a familiar face in my stable, or faces rather, waiting to make the trip from level 77 to 80 so we can unleash hell.

After I specced BM, there was a noticeable change in our level of ownership. In fact, I got to plant my flag several times on some deserving opponents, which is always fun.

We reached a rating of 1697, with 38 wins and 19 losses and a 66% win percentage. Unfortunately, we sat there for about another 2 hours, finishing the night at 1686. I attribute some of that to: Blizzard’s tendency to throw 1950-2K teams at you when you’re about to break a new rating, fatigue and copius amounts of Corona.

Alright, so 1686 isn’t really anything to brag about at this point, but my point is there was a noticeable improvement in our level of competitiveness over week one. We achieved a much higher rating, with a larger win percentage, and vs teams with higher hidden ratings.

In a nutshell, I find BM to be an advantage for this combo because it is a better answer for melee classes, especially Warriors and Rogues. Being immune to stuns and snares for 18 seconds is incredibly useful for our double-dps team. Last week, good Rogue/Mage teams were eating us alive. Due to well timed CC and insane burst. This week, not a problem.

So far it seems as if we have a sporting chance vs all combos. The two teams we seemed to have had the most difficulty with were well-played Resto Druid/Warrior and Ret/(insert random class name here). This will change once we both get a little more geared, especially my partner. Once he’s geared enough to out-burst me, we should be on our way to 2K I would imagine. We shall see.

Tagged as: 2v2, arena, beast mastery, ret paladin