Close your eyes for a moment, forget the world around you, forget your day job or your classes at school and feel that you are a hunter. What does that mean to you?
Does it mean you see you and your pet as being so much a part of each other that you draw energy from one another as you call on the aspects of the wild to give you speed and grace and a precise rhythm to your attacks?
Does it mean you see yourself as being the calculating sniper from afar, masterfully weaving your full pantheon of tricks and abilities into your weapon as only you can do?
Does it mean you see yourself as a wielder of defense and survival, knowledgable about the land and the terrain, impossible to kill, always ready when the enemy isn’t, and quick to use all your resources to your advantage?
Well?
That’s how you should spec.
I don’t tell people how to spec. If somebody is clearly unsure about what they are doing I will offer suggestions, just as I do if people ask for advice. I am also not afraid to come right out and say that in most cases it’s Beast Mastery topping the damage when it comes to our class.
But if you prefer to be a Marksman or a Survivalist I will not look down on you in the slightest and you will have earned a lot of respect from me for being a hunter. Pike does not discriminate against any well-thought-out spec.
You don’t choose the spec. The spec chooses you.
In other news, I have been slowly picking through my blogroll and rearranging it a little and moving inactive blogs to a separate section. If you happen to be the author of an inactive blog, I still love you, and will restore you to the “active blogs” list upon a new update.
And if you link to me and I haven’t noticed yet, feel free to poke me about it. I try to link to everyone who links to me back and who has some decent content. ^^ (Yes, this means my blogroll is huge. Wall of Text crits you for 47k. You die.)
Hmm that reminds me I need to do some updating on my blogroll too, I’m, sure I’ll get round to it sometime.
I can’t say I blame anyone for wanting to be a non survival spec, Beast mastery sounds great in theory, and apparently is so in practice, but its just not *me*
As for marksmanship, well I was close to choosing this over survival when I first started Lienna, however given whats happened to th blood elves recently it seems that only people with a strong survival instinct would be alive. That and its more of a pvp spec which isn’t my favorite time spent in game.
Lady, you just hit it on the nose: my hunter isn’t Beast Mastery spec because it was the one that does optimal damage for the gear that I currently have; Eszti is a Beast Master because that’s her personality. I blame it on the fact that I’m a roleplayer, but that’s how I chose her spec initially.
Esz is feral, refers to her friends and guildmates as her “pack”, and definitely considers herself the alpha female. She doesn’t walk through town; she moves with a loping gait. She’s almost always aware of her surroundings (I’m a tracking fiend) and moves with the sleek but powerful grace of prowling animal.
Thanks for the insight, miss Pike! I hadn’t really sat down before to consider why I made Eszti a Beast Mastery hunter all those years ago.
Ere is a BM hunter because not being such would be awfully mean to Luca and Whitestar, and he doesn’t want them to be sad 😛
Thanks, Pike. I suppose I’ll say that my angst is generally directed at those people who are too stubborn to understand the intricacies of our class. It’s just frustrating for me to have someone be critical of the way I’ve been playing when I practically had to learn about the class almost entirely myself and finding out the nuts and bolts on my own.
My post may have sounded like I was despising BM hunters, but I really do respect you guys also. I wish I could’ve been there pre-BC to see how much our two specs have changed to get a more whole perspective.
This is *exactly* how I and several other posters on the WoW official paladin forums used to advise players on how to spec, with a twist. We used to tell fledgling Paladins to un-spec and run around 0/0/0. If they tended toward putting on a shield and trying to wear down each enemy they came to, go go prot! If they kept trying to heal themselves, healadin it is! If they whipped out a two-hander and tried to smash the opponent before they got smashed themselves, time for some retribution! Gotta go with the flow, ya know?
On that note, I wonder if I should spec my hunter alt (level 16-ish) to Marksmanship. He’s currently working up the Beast Mastery tree for ease of leveling, but the ranger I played in Guild Wars was Expertise/Marksman, which is closer to Marks & Survival than it is to BM. I ignored my ranger’s BM tree…
*poke, poke*
Been a reader for a while, and love your thoughts on hunters. I am actually speccing my brand new hunter as survival
Well said Pike!
My hunters… “plural”, are all beastmaster spec. And they all have a boar either as their active pet, or in the stables.
I do not chose the boar for any real reason other than I love him 🙂 I have toyed with a gorilla, but playing with my BM hunter just feels so relaxing with my boar charging into everything…
A Bm hunters pet is there Muscle, there powerhouse of a partner. The truck that drives the adventure machine.
A survival Hunters pet is his hidden finesse. MY prowler who is cunning and quiet. Fast to the point of being ignored. She is my soul and tends to lean on cunning and clever antics to adventure safely.
Unfortunately the game is not so benevolent to spec variety like that. That is the core reason why I have quit.
I would take it just a bit further in that I believe that the spec chooses the character! I love being a BM Hunter and had played several when I ended up creating a character to specifically play with someone. It was not a decision, but this character was different from the beginning… I ended up playing with a pet I have never used before and a spec that just seemed to fit.