WotLK [Guide] Marksmanship PvP

[Multisnipe]

@Treba

True that you won't get off 100% of autos but wild quivers but you can still get off a majority of them. Quiver shots do nature damage which works well against high armor targets. I also find that I don't get the chance to use arcane shot off cooldown because I might be doing something else like marking/trapping/focus stinging etc. About a 1/8 chance to quiver proc which can sometimes do that extra bit of dmg for you to get ppl to kill shot range.

Up to you though but through a number of tests the 15% increase on arcane shot is about 300 crit difference on a target with 0 resilience. Let's be generous and say arcane did an extra 400 for every crit it did, and say it crit every time. Quiver does a decent amount somewhere between 3k-6k crits.

The cooldown of arcane shot is obviously 6 seconds. It would take you a good amount of shots to make up for 1 quiver proc. Let's be generous and say 5 (400x5=2000) arcane shots made up for the dmg of a quiver proc. That's 30 seconds. In this window I can guarantee you that quiver will have procced by then your quiver would easily have procced at least once. You also don't have a global cd for quiver procs and sometimes I have nothing left to get the target to 20% and then ironically quiver proc does it for me. Even though I don't rely that much on RNG it's pretty nice when RNG carries you that extra mile.

[Treba]

Thanks. Sounds like you've given this some thought. Do you know whether wild quivers randomly break ccs, like they did on retail for a long time? I remember several times on retail tranq shotting a target in a freezing trap (or scatter shot) and having a wild quiver fire off and break it. That memory is another reason I don't care for the talent. Does that happen here?

On another note, I've noticed you gem resilience on your pve gear. What's the rationale for that- wouldn't it be better to just mix in more pvp pieces if you want more resilience? Seems like the gemming approach just maxes ARP, which is kind of a meh stat for pvp.

Also, do the pve set bonuses work in pvp, both instanced and world pvp?

[Multisnipe]

Your auto shot cancels whenever you scatter/trap and your pet gets pulled back too. There are rare cases when you scatter and your auto hits the target but that shouldn't matter. I just use a mouseover/focus macro for scatter/silence so I don't. If you don't use a macro for scatter you can always just move and scatter since moving delays your autos.

As with gemming resilience, it gives you more stats overall if you gem resil in pve as compared to gemming agi in pvp gear. You always want every piece of gear to give you agility. This means pvp neck/cloak/ring/weapons are rather lacking in agil. I gem resilience in my pve to make up for the resilience loss. You lose a little bit of health but the offensive stat gains are huge. Hunters have crit modifiers which are probably the highest in this patch. I have a wrathful belt/wrist to swap to when I really need to go high resil; but they both give me agility hence why I can change them. I won't be losing as much damage because of this reason. You also want to always wear 284 ilevel gear for hunters which include the ring, boots, melee, ranged equipment slots. I have about 1300 resilience when I just swap belt and wrists and maintain most of my agility.

You gotta think about it in terms of budgeting. You need to calculate every item by giving it a score. You do this by looking at what it takes to gem. For example , 40 attack power would give the same score as 20 resilience because they are equivalent to 1 gem. However, you have agility modifiers as well so agility will always be better than attack power. Even without agility modifiers agility is still superior to attack power.

Theoretically crit would be better than Arp however ArP is not as bad as you think. Even though you don't gem it you can still get over 56% ArP whilst maintaining your resilience at 1100 resilience. With heroic gear available ArP gives you extra stopping power. Think of it like this. If you had Sharpened twilight heroic and with that you had 60% crit, or if you had Whispering fanged skull with 63.5% crit. With best in slot gear your Arp with STS is 56% whereas with WFS it drops by 13.15% which actually affects your auto shots quite a bit. ArP scaling is exponential; the more you have the better it is. The reasoning behind ArP here is because you already have a decent amount of attack power and crit and ArP just amplifies that even more.

Reason why I don't use ashen ring is because it procs out of sync with your trinket and only lasts 10 seconds. I prefer consistent damage and extra crit.
That being said, the time whispering fanged skull or death's verdict would be better than STS is when you're starting out and you have low attack power and crit chance. STS won't be of any use since you won't have the base stats to back it up with.

Another way to see it is from a Warrior/Rogue perspective. If you had 100% ArP as Warrior or Rogue unless you are full pve you would be sacrificing a large portion of your base damage because all you gemmed was armor pen, hence your damage would obviously be lower than if you had dropped a little bit of that ArP to get the base damage you need. This is why you gem agility instead of ArP because you want to balance out all your stats so that they compliment each other.

[Treba]

On dueling rets, I agree that mana is a big concern. That being the case, what do you think about speccing rapid recuperation instead of piercing shots for fighting them? 2 rapid fires would help a LOT with the mana situation, and it would also solve the problem that it's really hard, often impossible, to implement the scatter-trapping every 30 seconds strat with piercing shots proccing off of both chimera and aimed crits.

I realize that spec means less offensive pressure, but you don't have any pressure at all if you go oom. Thinking of making an offspec with rapid recup for this reason- there are a LOT of rets in wotlk pvp.

[Multisnipe]

I don't think rapid recuperation is necessary but it is still plausible. The thing about rets is that if you don't have enough PvE they will literally sit there and sustain themselves like a holy paladin and spam flash even if you have mind numbing and silencing shot.

Also, against a remotely competent ret who knows how to 1h/shield the duel area gives them a huge advantage as it is so small there making it impossible to kite the whole duel. Scatter trap is the safest way to deal with rets so I strongly recommend scatter trap. You will only win rets who stun wings 123 insta freedom 2hander 24/7. because you can nuke them down in readiness. I have extra gear sets gemmed with spell pen against the ones that actually use frost aura.

You can try to aspect of the cheetah but if he has exorcism proc or engineering hand rocket you might get dazed. Draenei is typically better for dueling rets because of the 1% hit and heals, as compared to Night elf shadowmeld which doesn't really do as much against rets.
Piercing shots isn't really a problem since all you need to do is hold off a little bit before you scatter trap again which you might not be used to.

[Treba]

I've gotten absolutely blown up in a stun by a pve-geared prot warrior. Your tips are kind of hard to implement against them, such as making sure your ravager stuns him from behind. How do I control the direction that my pet stuns him from? Also, silencing him before he fears after you trinket his first stun is hard to do since you'll likely be in melee range when that happens.

Should I keep my pet completely off him? I know the warrior revenge ability works off of dodges- does having your pet on him feed him dodges and thus free revenges?

[Multisnipe]

If you get one shot in one stun it might be a resilience/stamina problem.

revenge will proc off blocks as well so sending your pet on him (except to stun or pin) is usually going to backfire. I only send my pet on prot warriors when I need to stun/pin them or need that little bit of extra damage to finish them. Use petstay at the start of the duel and after ravage/pin and do not stack with your pet otherwise it'll be a double shockwave/fear/revenge. To make it easier, try to position your pet behind the warrior by kiting him in a way that he turns his back as he follows you. Get the hang of using petstay/petfollow/petattack against melees so you can better land those pins and ravages. Also keep in mind to be careful with snake trap as it might proc revenge if they block instantly. If using ravager, bullheaded is a must have since a full fear on pet is never good. Try to readiness burst outside shield wall (the good ones will try to save it just for this). Don't worry about disarming since they can still use all their abilities. Try using pre-deterrence to avoid stuns as prot warrs usually spam charge as you get away from them. If you can dodge this and land a root on him then you will force him to at least block or take a load of damage.Master's call the shield slam immediately as he most likely won't be in battle stance to hamstring you later or have piercing howl.

If playing with crab I like to open with intervene to get the first hit but as of now intervene is quite buggy and you'll get hit anyway so don't rely on this too much. It tends to work more if you /petattack after intervene.

If he pops recklessness shield block at the start your goal now is to just dodge as much damage as possible. Blow Roar of sacrifice, deterrence and snake/frost trap and do some damage of your own. He can't wall 12 seconds after recklessness.

You can also start the duel with a pre placed snake/frost trap and then feign death+scatter shot before first charge. If he doesn't trinket this then you will absolutely destroy him so expect he will do so. As you set this up, walk near your trap and start jumping away from him. He will charge and get instantly rooted. If you successfully outrange him here then his only option to catch you is to either 1) shockwave 2) intercept 3) fear. Trinket the shockwave. Use the roots to get as much distance as you can as well as unload big damage onto him. Just as the root ends he's going to be spamming intercept bind so I recommend using pre deterrence and your second root trap (Frost trap/snake trap; doesn't matter too much which one you use first, but i find that prot warriors tend to use block on snakes for some reason so full root with snakes forcing block can be a good thing). If he intercepts your deterrence it's already GG since he has no more charges and you still have readiness and disengage. Pre deters usually only work a few times until the warrior realises he has to hold onto his charges however it's still okay since you won't be take damage during the deter. Lay down traps during deter so you have more gcds to do other stuff. Concussive shot is decent against warriors if you have nothing else to slow them with.

Overall, the best advice i can give you is to mitigate as much damage during charges and stuns and you will end up kiting him. Prot warriors have no reliable slows so they will be walking at wheelchair speed while you continue to make more distance and continue to force more charges.

When playing prot warrior myself I find the most success when I land first charge+concussion blow and slam. If the hunter trinkets I will instantly try to shield bash to at least try to slow him and then wait a split second and see if I can shockwave him. If not I will wait until i can intercept disarm him and then pop enraged regeneration with last stand in hopes that he didn't aimed shot recently. Then I will wall the next chimera shot. I get rekt whenever the hunter pre deters charge or intercept and I get rooted and bursted, giving him much more space to decide what to do next.

Consider using double 1 handers in case you get disarmed and need to pre-deter

Never give back to prot warrior (obviously). I've dodged big damage simply because of dodge lol

I also have 2nd wrathful helmet with 15% stun reduction against rogues and prot warriors.

Use Roar of sacrifice early (the first moment you take damage is when he gets trinket procs = big damage)

Can also use disengage early to 100% bait an intercept

You might get unlucky a miss some shots because of their 4% avoidance to ranged talent. Hopefully it's not chimera shot or aimed shot lol.

[Pooppickle]

can you still get hunter's mark applied before aimed shot hits, or is the server just too laggy these days. Can't tell if it's my latency making it impossible or the server.

Also, what 1handers should i have in addition to oathbinder for when I want to dual wield vs spriests and the like? Scourgebourne and wrathful seem like the only reasonable options.

Also what exactly should I have spell pen on besides a pvp cloak ench swap from pve piece? Wrathful belt seems like the most obvious, 20 + 20 + 35 GG

Thanks for your time

[Multisnipe]

Server delay too high now to get mark as aimed lands, forgot to mention that for a while.

Scourgebane/Lungbreaker/Wrathful 1 handers are best. if you die too quickly then i'd recommend using wrathful because of the extra resil and stamina.

spen gems on hands and belt blue sockets will do

[Pooppickle]

Server delay too high now to get mark as aimed lands, forgot to mention that for a while.

Scourgebane/Lungbreaker/Wrathful 1 handers are best. if you die too quickly then i'd recommend using wrathful because of the extra resil and stamina.

spen gems on hands and belt blue sockets will do

So have a second pair of wf gloves with spen gem? And a wrathful belt as well to swap nerub'ar out with?

What about 1x 43 spen gem + 35 ench on vareesa's dexterity? That way I keep >50% arpen and don't lose any crit/ap from equipping wf belt which is a pretty crappy item. I can get enough spen this way but and am losing 34 resi and 22 agi. I should still have >1150 though. I'd honestly rather trade off 22 agi than an additional 34 resi by throwing another spen gem somewhere in the mix.

I understand this is some pretty small margin stuff either way, but min maxing is good. I'd like to have 75 spen and 50% arpen while making as few sacrifices as possible. Any ideas? I'm gonna go full WF 5/5 w/ crit/arpen pve offpieces

Or is it just not worth it to be spen capped vs mark by default? I haven't crunched the numbers to see how much damage is getting resisted vs the total im doing or anything. I just feel like it should be a larger % loss than -22 agi would be.

edit: i was thinking even of using +43 spen dragon's eye in wf pants just to get the meta gem active, in that case i am trading 10 stats + 14 resi (from having to use a 20resi gem somewhere else) instead of 34resi Do you think losing +10 all stats, 14 resi, and 22 agi is worth 78spen? Particularly for bgs/wpvp where I'd be encountering mark a lot.

[Multisnipe]

So have a second pair of wf gloves with spen gem? And a wrathful belt as well to swap nerub'ar out with?

What about 1x 43 spen gem + 35 ench on vareesa's dexterity? That way I keep >50% arpen and don't lose any crit/ap from equipping wf belt which is a pretty crappy item. I can get enough spen this way but and am losing 34 resi and 22 agi. I should still have >1150 though. I'd honestly rather trade off 22 agi than an additional 34 resi by throwing another spen gem somewhere in the mix.

I understand this is some pretty small margin stuff either way, but min maxing is good. I'd like to have 75 spen and 50% arpen while making as few sacrifices as possible. Any ideas? I'm gonna go full WF 5/5 w/ crit/arpen pve offpieces

Or is it just not worth it to be spen capped vs mark by default? I haven't crunched the numbers to see how much damage is getting resisted vs the total im doing or anything. I just feel like it should be a larger % loss than -22 agi would be.

edit: i was thinking even of using +43 spen dragon's eye in wf pants just to get the meta gem active, in that case i am trading 10 stats + 14 resi (from having to use a 20resi gem somewhere else) instead of 34resi Do you think losing +10 all stats, 14 resi, and 22 agi is worth 78spen? Particularly for bgs/wpvp where I'd be encountering mark a lot.

If you're looking to min/max stats then the cloak enchant for +35 spen is very good if you can afford the luxury of having multiple cloaks. When gemming and enchanting I always compare the gems. For example 20 agi = 20 resil = 25 spen. The best available cloak enchant is 22 agility (23 if engineering). We know that 20 agil = 25 spen. Therefore we can figure out that 35 spen claok enchant is equivalent to 28 agility; which mean the spell pen enchant is worth 6 more agility when compared. With that in mind I would have 10 all stats on legs/oathbinder and the 43 spell pen gem in either of them. Resistance numbers are about 15% against mark and mage armor. Not many hunters use aspect of the wild so you don't have to worry about that. Shoot down nature resist totem when possible and you should be ok.

For battlegrounds and class specific duels spell pen is worth it. If you're playing with a disc priest in arena who dispels mark then you can ignore it.

[Ryd3rs]

Many Keybinds and Macros _ ?? !?!?!!?

You find this dificult for a hunter ? oh comon get rzer naga man. lfe eez after that xD lol

[mazan10]

Great guide man. I have a question for you though, I've read multiple times how 3x spell penetration blues are good for PvP for burning through shields/resistances? What's your opinion on this, is it ever worth it to gem those?

nvm

[Multisnipe]

Spell pen is indeed worth it but its primarily used against Druids and Mages who use Mark of the WildMage armor. This will happen most of the time in battlegrounds so if you only have 1 set you should use 35 spell pen on cloak and 2 blue gems for spell pen. I have two sets of PvE gear and a duplicate cloak with 35 spell pen so that I have 85 spell penetration against druids/mages. I gem blues in PvE Bracer and Sanctified chest so I'm not losing that much agility. In battleground prep room I always check for druids. If there is no Druid then I will switch to my set with no spell penetration. This is really tryhard so you are safer just to get Spell penetration.

For arenas with Disc Priest against druids you don't need spell pen because the disc priest dispels the mark. Get duplicate Wrathful Legs and Hands to gem spen if you know you will be facing a mage who uses Mage armor. If you have a warlock who uses curse of elements you probably won't need Spell pen. Alternatively, Gem your Melee Weapon one with Resilience/Agi and the other one with spell pen so that you may swap weapons in between if you can't be bothered predicting who you will be against.

Against Nature Resist Totem you can easily use mouseover petattack or arcane shot it if it has stoneclaw.

[mazan10]

Spell pen is indeed worth it but only its primarily used against Druids and Mages who use Mage armor. This will happen most of the time in battlegrounds so if you only have 1 set you should use 35 spell pen on cloak and 2 blue gems for spell pen. I have two sets of PvE gear and a duplicate cloak with 35 spell pen so that I have 85 spell penetration against druids/mages. I gem blues in PvE Bracer and Sanctified chest so I'm not losing that much agility. In battleground prep room I always check for druids. If there is no Druid then I will switch to my set with no spell penetration. This is really tryhard so you are safer just to get Spell penetration.

For arenas with Disc Priest against druids you don't need spell pen because the disc priest dispels the mark. Get duplicate Wrathful Legs and Hands to gem spen if you know you will be facing a mage who uses Mage armor. If you have a warlock who uses curse of elements you probably won't need Spell pen. Alternatively, Gem your Melee Weapon one with Resilience/Agi and the other one with spell pen so that you may swap weapons in between if you can't be bothered predicting who you will be against.

Against Nature Resist Totem you can easily use mouseover petattack or arcane shot it if it has stoneclaw.

Thanks for the in-depth answer, this is exactly what I needed to know. Really appreciate it