The Enigma Order

Hmm so basically "kill command" doesnt screw with the timing of steady shot /auto shot weaving any more
and mend pet is instant so i dont stand there like a lemon for 15 seconds
and some semi-nerfing stuff / changes for talents i dont have

overall not big changes but sort of thumbs-up

Be interested to know how hunters mark improves with each hit...(numbers if anyone could find em would be nice)

Ok, as I mentioned a few times I can not open new topics on forum while at work (at least I strongly belive they're somehow deleted even if I see them posted for a while), this I'll use this here little thread to share a thing or 2.

Hunter crowd-control (this is not only aimed for the hunters to read, I may ever re-post this in Enigma forum when I?m able to start a new topic there)
Another words ? kiting + freezing trap. Let me recall Sweter?s words when he was sharing his thoughts on heroic mode in general ? ?I never new hunters where so good at crowd control?. Well, not totally true, but it is true that we are able to keep a single mob busy for a long time not taking dmg.
Few thing related to know, bit like the tanking thingie Warsaw linked.
- it?s easier for us deal with melee mobs then casters. It?s hard to trap a caster at the initial pull seeing that it may not run into the trap, but rather stay and cast some spell of his while some other mobs run into the trap.
- if you?re before some harder multi-mob (elites I guess, Karazhan for example) fight, do 2 things to make hunters job easier (ye, I can already imagine everyone doing exactly the opposite due to hunter-love:) . First ? after the hunter placed his trap wait with the pull for like 10 seconds. The trap?s cooldown is longer then its duration, so it is wise to give a hunter those few seconds he needs to be able to place a new trap before the initial one expires. Second ? do not clump up at hunter?s (meaning ? the trap?s) location. No matter if the tank or the hunter with misdirection is pulling. Let the mobs run to the tank (which they will do in both cases) and the hunter will grab his mob in a second.
- last but not least ? do not expect the mob the hunter is supposed to cc to be trapped at all time. As written above, cooldown is longer then duration (I?m not sure if conflagration affects traps in pve, I?d think it does, but my observations make me doubt they do), so the mob will need to be kited for a few seconds before he can get trapped again. Why is that important? Because it happens damn often that he gets dot?ed while on his way to the trap.
These are ofc details and obvious stuff for most of you, still it may help to have them written down ? we do happen to see some of the mistakes described above in Karazhan for example (mainly the dot thingie and tanks standing over the trap).

Leather.
Ye, I'm stating to think that it may very well be time to go back to the good old 'hunterloot', 'ninja hunter' and start getting some leather items. I haven't made a serious thottbot research on that one yet, but I believe there are some leather armor pieces with way better stats (better as in more dmg) then mail ones. And then, seeing that I'm totally into pve and hunters are (the way I see this) a class that's not supposed to take dmg (ye ye, sure, eg. tanking shaman is a different story, but it also needs totally different set of gear), being short on armor shouldn't be a biggie. Basically - no decrease in stamina (I don't see that leather armor has less sta at least, does it?), no diffrence in terms of taking magic dmg. Only a slightly more dmg taken if being meleed.
Thought about it? Any thoughts to share? I'm hoping I'll have a moment to look into this in details today.

Aggro.
In pre-TBC times I had no aggro problem. With a skilled (aka TEO) tank, I could pull with aimed shot and go full dmg at all time, being pretty certain I wont even need to feign death much. In TBC I got misdirection to give that initial aggro to the tank, so I thought - at first - 'hey, time to drop feign death off the bar'. And then what? Then it was pretty much like that. Up to some point, namely - up to level 70 when I got some gear. Some steady-dps gear I might add with rap around 2100 and crit below 20%. That?s where the problems started. Misdirection on tank, aimed shot, steady shot, arcane shot ? you?d think the tank has a fair agro now, huh? I would at least. Then I go with the easy autoshot-steady shot combo. No way on the earth for me to take aggro, right? Lies, I had the mob on my ass after like 20-30 seconds (mind that ktm pretty much doesn?t work for hunters due to the misdirection and pet dmg). ?But hey, you?re a hunter, where?s the problem, feign death noob!?. Yes, sure, true. Feign death, not resisted, aggro wiped, all cool, huh? To make the long story short ? not quite. I go with the autoshot-steady shot yet again. After feign death ktm works more or less fine, so I?m able to track where I am again. Pew pew pew and I?m again close to tank, though, I admit, if no crits happen, usually below him. And feign death is still on cd. I wont even mention what happens if I dare to use arcane\multi shots.
Right, nuf crying, where do I go writing this?
Basically ? am I the only one with that sort of problems? Do you guys feel a difference between pre-TBC and TBC times? Or maybe you just go easy and don?t use steady shot all that much?
I?d totally hate to do anything to decrease my dmg, but seeing that the above described situations lead to me taking a beating way to often (and generally bad stuff, we do want the warriors to take their beating, huh?), I was thinking what options I had. One of them would be reconfiguring the gems to get more mana regen instead of rap (I have a lot of rap in gems). More drastic one would be repsecing to go more into survival for the additional health. I?d hate to do any of these tbh, but then again being forced to just stand still in Gruul?s Lair not to take aggro (fd gets resisted all the time there) is a no-no too. Same as doing ?easy dmg? = autoshooting only (back to the old times where hunters could go afk on boss-fights:/)
Last of all, if any non-hunter dps read this far ? do you have anything wise to say on the aggro issue?

the aggro issue is quite annoying just to bring up the prince kill i was in i focused on my rotation and gaind aggro quite fast luckly the fd wasnt resisted that time.
Other times i just had to cool down using autoshot only cous of 3 fd resists in a row , so the steady shot is a high aggro gain ability that we need to be carefull using ,not to blow the aggro roof thus cooling the dps abit and that turns into even lower dps from what i think already low
Pre tbc i had no problem go all out if i remember correctly

If a warrior gets shielded, he wont generate any rage from hits that is absorbed.

my take on the aggro issue (experienced tanks please feel free to correct me) is..
at level 69 you had, for example 1500 AP and gained a certain amount of aggro per second, the tank out aggro-ed you with sunder armour, etc...
at level 70 ++Epix you have 2100 AP and gained alot more aggro per second, whereas the tank still uses the same sunder armour for aggro and their aggro generation ability simply does not scale in the same way as your DPS can.

Im not sure this is a TBC specific problem as in theory the same problem should have occured with the old level-60 cap.

Windir wrote:

to a certain degree you can say that the better gear a warrior gets, the less threat he can generate due to less ragegain.
When you get high parry and dodge rating and starts to fully avoid damage you simply gain no rage.

Indeed, but the part about us having no scaling threat abilies is somewhat false though, but you need to be at least 31 points into prot to get a good scaling threat ability, as heroic strike primarily scales with your weapon, while devastate, which you get at 41 points in prot, scales with both weapon, sunders on the mob, and the stats from your gear.

Lamme wrote:

- the additional ap does not display neither as my buff or mob's debuff, right? .

No it doesn't. Another cool adjustment which I noticed is that when you trap at target naturally the trap icon will display beneath the trapped target's hp/mana bar. But know the icon kinda gets darker the longer the target has been trapped, like a timer. and when the icon is totally darkned the trap effect ends.. And I'm really pleased that blizzard has worked on the pets too, for example they dissapear when you mount etc..

been looking on forums a bit, but didn't find what I think (or I did but I donno how to use it) - anyone could post a macro I could copy-paste to WoW that would always triger the...um, can't remember the name - pet special attack after my crit - ability when it's possible? (kill command or something)