World of Warcraft Arenas: Are Hunters the True Forsaken?

Okay hunters, you all knew something was wrong. Normally the darlings of the battlegrounds--the class with the highest kills--you wondered why the heck couldn't your arena team rise above 1700 or 1800 (at least, if you didn't have a druid). Where were all the 2000+ ranked hunters? Well, now you know you weren't imagining things. The numbers show they're simply not there.

Last week in the Warlock Discussion Forum in a thread called Lifetap change reverted (self-explanatory), Kalgan (Tom Chilton, the lead game designer's nom de message board) dropped The Drama Bomb and the forums erupted with hunters screaming. Especially since the Vengeful Gladiator's Waraxe is getting nerfed in 2.4.

43.0%...50.2%...43.0%. What's that all about?

The only information Kalgan provided about the chart was this,

...a value of 100% means the class is represented as we'd expect, a value over 100% means the class is represented that much more often than we'd expect, a value below 100% means they're represented less than we'd want...

...and, yeah, hunters were listed as having 43...well, I don't have to repeat it. The chart was for 2200+ ranked teams, though among the 1850+ teams (2v2, 3v3, & 5v5, respectively), hunters fared no better: 50.2%...50.2%...50.2%. Ouch.

Incidentally, don't go posting those numbers on the Warcraft forums repeatedly. Posters who did that last weekend were banned, and I wasn't around to see the carnage. I do know that Megatf, the only consistently 2200+ ranked hunter I know of, was permabanned from the forums and his sticky thread on how to pvp as a hunter was removed. Afaik, his character is active, but whether or not he'll compete in the arena tourney is anyone's guess.

Hunters are not a weak class. But in the fishbowl arena, the hunter can't always play as a ranged class. There's the biggest problem. And the fact that hunters don't have the melee to compete with a melee class of equal gear makes it very easy for them to get crowd controlled (CC'd) and beaten to death. They're also not a burst damage class. Hunter damage is meant to be meted out over time, using autoshot in between a special shot. Hunter CC is good in a 1v1 situation and grows poorer the more enemies there are (you won't ever see a hunter freezing 5 people in place like a mage). They're getting to be as complicated to play as warlocks used to be a couple of years ago. The more complicated a class, the less people will choose to play it. And the harder it will be for just anyone playing it to do well.

In the hunter forums it's generally assumed that if you're going to do well in arenas, you would choose MM (marksman). Recently, because I do 5's, I was thinking of trying out survival for better CC, but I could find no real evidence that it's a good way to go, for several reasons: 1.) People aren't flocking to do it, so the general consensus is it's not any improvement for pvp, 2.) I can't find any survival hunters in a high ranked team, 3.) looking at the tree, I see a 31 point dispellable CC (wyvern sting) and a 41 point talent (readiness) that seems more like a pve talent. In fact, 4.) I most often read survival discussed as a good pve tree, not a pvp one. Seeing as paladins, druids, and shaman can dispel wyvern sting, none of this seems like any big surprise. So I guess, for now, mana draining as MM will have to continue to be my purpose (like it is for just about every other hunter).

If anyone remembers how bad warlocks used to be, they'll also remember just how long it took Blizzard to improve them. Doubtful that any real changes will be made to "fix" hunters for season 4, but possibly by season 5 (provided that Blizzard wants to continue with the whole arena system). In that case, you're looking at six months to a year, so changes could be in conjunction with WotLK xpac.

So what will I be doing? Leveling my old druid and gearing up my even older priest. Still doing the weekly arenas on my hunter for the points, of course, and just keep on keepin' on. After all, what else is a "scrub blood elf hunter" supposed to do?

And now for something completely different.