The Week in Review: Another Trip to the Hunter Trainer

Alright… so those of you who’ve been following this blog know that I’ve been bouncing around the various specs the past couple of weeks trying to find dual spec harmony. Marksman was my eventual choice for raiding and Survival was the path I chose for PvP. These choices shocked some of my site visitors, and even me, because I have always been a BM Hunter since day one.

Marksman has been a really great spec for raiding. My DPS has gone up considerably since I chose to roll as MM for dungeons as opposed to BM. I feel like I’m also bringing more DPS to the raids overall with my Trueshot Aura. Of course, that’s when I have it activated /facepalm. Even though I have Power Auras configured to alert me after a res that my TSA is off, I still forget sometimes. It wasn’t until our third attempt on KT in Naxx last night, after having back-to-back 2% wipes, that I realized my TSA had not been on. >.< Oh well, I’ve been a PvP machine for the past 2 weeks, so my raiding game was a tad rusty.

I landed on Survival for PvP, and had been quite happy with it. Survival has great armor-mitigating burst and lots of tricks to lock opponents down, and to escape from melee. I was doing nice damage as SV, and found the spec to be pretty dominant for BGs.

Being grouped with a Ret pally for 2v2 Arena, I was pretty optimistic about our chances with this double dps combo. I figured us to be nuking people into oblivion.

Once arena season began, I only had 2 non-exotic pets to choose from – a wolf and a gorilla. I chose to begin arena with my gorilla until I could get my crab leveled to 80. Tenacity pets are good for SV Hunters in arena for their utility, hardiness, and for their Roar of Sacrifice.

Long story short, the first week of arena went fair with me as SV. We queued 69 matches and reached a 1301 rating with 37 wins and 32 losses. Not too bad, but not great either.

So what happened..? I thought this combo was going to run things in arena.

For starters, SV/Ret can be a good double burst team when both players are well geared. It’s difficult for many comps to stave off that burst long enough to pull out a victory. The problem with us is, my gear’s decent but not great, and my partner’s is not so hot. He’s still rocking some blues, 2 pieces of mail armor and a green libram.

After this slightly disappointing first week, I did a little homework on Hunters and 2v2 Arena. First of all, out of the top 200 players in rated 2v2 arena, there is not one single Hunter. Sigh… That is just so wrong I cannot tell you. Aside from being broken in the crazily imbalanced Season 5, Hunters have always had a pretty poor representation in arena, but not one Hunter in the top 200 is absurd.

Unfortunately, I was busy leveling and stalking rare exotic pets when Hunters were dominating in arena. I never got to truly experience the joys of 50/21/0 BM with Readiness or the insanely OP Survival stun and burst.

At any rate, what I saw on ArenaJunkies was not surprising really. In fact, after queueing nearly 70 matches it made all the sense in the world to me.

Back to the Hunter trainer we go.

More on this coming shortly…

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