Lich King Hunter Guide

[tomas]

Another expansion, another attempt by me to give advise to less informed Hunters.

What is a Hunter?

A hunter is a ranged physical damage dealer. This is different to a melee damage dealer due to hunters being able to avoid things like Whirlwind, or other melee unfriendly effects. We're also different to the likes of Mages and Warlocks due to not having to worry about resists, not being as squishy, and having an auto attack.
Also hunters are usually found with a Pet, an animal companion that does a fair amount of damage, can do things like Tank, or offers alot of other tricks.

Talent Trees

The three talent tress for a hunter are Beastmastery (BM), Marksmanship (MM), and Survival (SV), two of these speak for themselves, BM and MM do pretty much what they say, SV on the other hand is not a tree about "Surviving".

Beastmastery.
Most of the abilities in this tree focus on your pet, increasing your pets damage, armour health. Other talents increase the effectiviness of your Mend Pet, and general healing of your pet. One of the main talents in this tree is Serpents Swiftness, which increases your attack speed by 20%. In the past this was the main damage increasing talent in the tree. Now more of the focus is on your pet, and 20% increased attack speed not as good as it was. The important talent high end of this tree is The Beast Within, while allows you to pump out high damage for a limited time.

Marksmanship.
The tree is about increasing the power of your shots. Most builds will have at least 10 points in this tree, and many will have at least 12. The main ability to get at high end is Chimera Shot, which will be your main damage dealer most of the time. Several of the talents in this tree compliment many of your Shots, or all of them, and Shots will be your primary source of damage. This tree also offers a nice +10% Attack Power raid buff.

Survival.
Quite alot of the survival tree looks like a collection of talents that didn't really fit in the other two trees, so were put here. Quite a few of the abilities live up to Survival and are helpful to PVP. High end of this tree increase some of the best Mana regeneration talents for a hunter, and ends with Explosive Shot. Unfortunatly Explosive Shot is underpowered, and thus, the entire tree suffers by being underpowered. Explosive Shot is being buffed, but it's unsure if the buff will be enough to make Survival worth taking.

Doing Damage

Hunter damage comes from 3 area's,
1) Hunters Pet
2) Auto Attack
3) Special Attack

Auto attack now triggers automatically, as long as you're not moving. If your attack speed is 3.0, you can spend 2.9 seconds between shots moving, but more than that and your Auto Attack will freeze until you stop moving. Auto Attack is effected by Haste, but due to it making up less than half your Damage, it's not overly important. Auto Attack just happens, and you'll never focus on getting the most damage out of it.

Special Attacks are shots. Apart from 3/4 found in the talent trees, there are 4 main shots worth considering. Arcane Shot, does magic damage, and therefore ignores armour, this means it sometimes does more damage than Steady Shot, but costs more mana. When Steady Shots scaling is changed, Arcane Shot will probably always do more damage, so is worth a look.
Multi-Shot, fires at 3 targets close together, this means in alot of instances it's not worth using. Also due to the fact that it's damage isn't brilliant compared to its mana cost, you'll not be using this against single targets.
Serpent Sting is a DOT (damage over time) which scales with Attack Power, this means if you have a temporary AP buff, the dot will do higher damage until it expires. This is particularly helpful to Marksmanship hunters who make use of this fact while using Chimera Shot to make sure the DOT doesn't expire (effectivily keeping the higher AP on it).
Steady Shot. This has a 2 second casting time, and is the cheapest shot available (in the hunter change, Arcane is coming down to the same mana cost) and one of the most damaging (in the change, this will use 10% instead of 20% of your AP, meaning if your AP is 5000, this shot will do 500 damage less) Due to other shots being Instant, this is the only ability that is really effected by Haste. But once the cast time reaches 1.5 seconds, you can't get it any faster due to the Global Cooldown.

Pets
Pets can be divided into 3 catagories, Ferocity, Tenacity, and Cunning. Every beast you can tame falls into one of these catagories, and loosly speaking, they are DPS, Tanking, and PVP. These are Talent Trees your pet has, this means if you tame a Cat, it will have the Ferocity tree, but if you tame a Rhino, it will have the Tenacity tree.
Half of these talent trees give the same abilities, and the other half are particular to that tree.
Every pet family (Cats, Wolves, etc) also has their own unique ability. Wolves get Furious Howl for example, while Gorillas get Thunderstomp.
This means, when deciding which pet to use, you need to consider not only which tree you want the pet to have, but also which ability will be most useful.

Statistics

Hunters want:
Attack Power, Critical Rating, Intelligence, Haste, Armour Penetration, Mp5, Stamina.

You could also add Agility to the list, but Hunters want Agility for Attack Power and Critical Rating, not for anything else it offers (usually).
How badly you want each of these depends, but usually you'll stack the first 2, and consider the others later. Meaning you might take an item with 100 more AP, even if it has Strength that you don't want, but, the item would be much better if that Stength was Intelligence.

One thing to remember, 2 Attack Power is better than 1 Agility. It used to be the other way round, but due to needing more Agility to get a +1% Critical Chance, you're better off stacking Attack Power and Crit Rating seperatly, than stacking Agility. But, since Agility gives both, it is definatly the most important statistic, it can just be ignored for better stats.

Shot Rotation

The most important thing to consider as a hunter, is what order do you use your abilities. Due to Steady Shot having a short cast time, and most instant shots having a 6 or 10 second cooldown, you will have access to most of your abilities most of the time, meaning (like other classes) you need to know what order to use those abilities. Should you cast Arcane Shot or Aimed Shot first?
This evolves into being able to work out a shot order. My current Shot Rotation is:
Chimera Shot, 5x Steady Shot.
This will probably change when the Steady Shot changes are made to:
Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot, Arcane Shot, 3x Steady Shot.

Sometimes, the shot rotations arn't as static, and most involve using an ability whenever it is up. Most hunters with Chimera Shot will recast Serpent Sting "Whenever it's not on the target" and most hunters with Chimera Shot will recast it "Whenever it isn't on Cooldown"