Hunter PVE

Vapo's Hunter Tips ver.1

First off I want to say that I do not believe one bit that I know all there is to know about hunters. What I have learned has been from experience and reading up on this class. I rolled this toon ages ago on Suramar with friends. I already had a 60 warrior and a 60 priest Horde side on Stormreaver. This guy was my fun toon. And that he is. I have a blast playing my hunter.

Anyways I wanted to write this up to share my tips and hopefully get other inputs from other hunters as well.

=UI=
I think a big part of playing a hunter well is having a good clean UI setup for yourself. Me, I am a minimalist and have the bare essentials shown. Only action buttons that are not keybound are shown. Make sure you have a way to see your target's target as well key people(ie. main assist, focus target if used).

=Mods=
I will list the key ones that have helped me.
Most of my mods are made using the Rock/Ace architecture. I keep most of these updated using WoWAceUpdater tool provided by www.wowace.com. A lot of these files can be downloaded at http://files.wowace.com -

oRA2 You remember CTRA? Yeah well it's old. Upgrade yourself to oRA2. -

Omen2 Threat. Keep it updated. You also need the Threat 2.0 library for this mod as well. -

BigWigs Boss Mod. A must. I like it better than DBM because it's not as bloated as DBM. No pvp timers and what not. A boss mod should just have boss timers imo. -

oUF Unit frames. I used to use Pitbull forever till I heard about this one. Very nice setup. I use the Kosken layout if anyone is wondering. -

ElkBuffBars A very clean buff replacement mod. -

Chatter Chat mod. Long time user of Prat and I changed over to this. Loving it ever since. -Chinchilla Minimap mod. Lets you move it anywhere you want and change it's shape. Lots of things can be done with it. -Bartender4 Action bar replacement. Allows you to hide bars, move bars anywhere and do just about anything you can think of. -

OneBag Bag replacement. I just hit B and one bag comes up with all my gear and ammo in one location. Very minimal and very easy to use. -Parrot Scrolling combat text. -Hourglass Cooldown monitor using bars. -

Chronometer Dot timer. -HunterAEP Agility Equivalence Points mod. Gives me a nice round number that I can use to gage if something is an upgrade or not. Applies itself to the tooltip. Works for gems and chants as well. -

RatingBuster Gives you a quick breakdown of what up/down grades you will get from a particular item. -

AtlasLoot Shows you what loot comes from where. No need to find out what loot Prince drops when you can just look it up yourself. -

Fence I hate having to look through the AH and figure out in my head real fast what the price is on items per when someone puts a stack of something up. Makes it very easy for me at a glance to find out who has the best price per unit on mana pots. -

MrPlow Organizes the gear and items in my bags and my bank. I’m lazy I can say it. -

Wardrobe2 Outfit organizer. Change between my PvE and PvP outfits with just a few clicks. -Quartz The best castbar. Period.

=Group Makeup=
Give us a shammy and a feral druid and we are happy. Put a rogue and a fury tank in our group and they will be happy with our BM proc. An ideal setup would be a BM hunter, MM hunter for TrueShot Aura, feral druid for 5% crit, shaman that actually drops GOA totem <3 and if at all possible a spriest for mana regen. Spriests are usually snagged up by the healing groups and I don't blame them. But if we were ever to have a mass influx of raiding spriests, don't forget the hunters

=Gems=
Big thing with a lot of hunters is they want to stack AP everywhere so they can flex their AP. What a lot don't know is Agi scales higher with Kings then AP. So gemming Agi is actually the way to go. There is nothing wrong with using gems with AP that you got from quests(ie. 20 AP epic gem from Kaelthas) and the like just as long as you don't make a routine of it in all your gear. You really will hurt yourself. =Enchants= Again Agi is king here. You can put Savagery on your wep and still be fine. I actually think I might put Savagery on my S3 when I get it. Don't know yet. My ideal setup would be two of the daggers off Hex Lord with 20 agi on both.

=Hit=
If you are not hit capped you are not only hurting yourself but you are hurting your group. If you do not put points into Surefooted(BM hunters) then you must have 140 hit rating. That will put you at 9% hit rating. That would mean that theoretically you cannot miss on a 73 elite. If you do spec in to Surefooted I think the number you want is 90 hit rating. Having this hit rating should be simple if you are smart about it. If I put all my hit gear on I get up to like 260 hit rating. Does nothing for me being that high so I try to balance out gems and gear to get a good number. I beleive right now I am at 143 hit rating.

=Consumables=
I usually just run around with Blackflight arrows but if we are headed to a new boss fight I try to get the Kara revered arrows. Make sure you have on you plenty of mana pots. Hunters do not regen mana for shit. Get a good cycle going of popping pots. We are lucky to have a ret pally in raid with mana return. Be nice to have more spriests but even then I don't know if the hunter group will get one For flasking I would tell you to just use the relentless assault flask and be done with it, but there are numbers that show that the intellect elixir and major agi one are slightly better. Your call on that one really. Warp burgers are ideal for your food buff. Just go to Cosmowrench and farm the warp guys right outside there. Then just give the meat to your local butcher or cook it yourself. It is also not a bad idea to put some mana oil on your wep to give you more regen. Not expensive to buy or make at all. =Shot Rotation= Shot rotation has already been talked about in other threads here and they hit all the key points so I don't need to go in to that. One thing I would like to point out. If you are doing the 3:2 rotation correctly, your SS should be your number one damage shot for your overall damage. If you have further questions on this you can get with me in game, I have no problem helping out.

=Websites=
Here are a few links to pages that contain lots of important data.
Hunter Shot Rotation Illustrated http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t13107-hunter_shot_rotation_illustrated/
Hunter DPS Spreadsheet http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t9816-hunter_spreadsheets_--_development/
Hunter Beast Mastery Bible http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t11420-hunter_beast_mastery_bible/ Hunter Survival Raiding http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t12346-hunter_survival_raiding_2_1_a/ WoW Wiki - Guide to WoW http://www.wowwiki.com/Portal:Main
World of Raids - Up-to-date news on WoW http://www.worldofraids.com/
WoW Ace - Home of Ace Mods http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Main_Page
Online Character Auditor http://be.imba.hu/

Written by Vapo (Trollbane)