My 1 Priest 4 Hunters

[Lprkorngod]

Hey guys,

played WoW a few years back and never really got into the game, however watching some of your adventures on justin.tv and the lack of having to rely on others for quests I gave pwnboxer a go and its been awesome so far.

I have done it with 1 DE priest and 4 DE hunters and am currently lv 57ish, however my question is in relation to talent tree's. I have currently just been putting talent points into the Holy tree on my priest and the marksman on my hunters without much thought , however im getting to the stage where the instances are getting pretty tough and i need some advice on whats the best talents to maximize my group using the bears as tanks.

any advice would be awesome.

Cheers guys

[Ualaa]

For the hunters, I would go with one as Beast Mastery and use that pet as the tank. I believe a Gorilla is the best "tanking" pet, mainly because of its AoE stomp/threat move.

You might want one to go Marksman for the True Shot Aura. Not sure on this.

The other two (or three, if you didn't go MM on one) will want to go Survival. Until you reach 4,000 unbuffed ranged attack power + 30% critical hit + 350 armor penetration, you'll have more DPS as survival. Once you reach or exceed this gear, Marksman begins to pull ahead.

I would spec the priest discipline. You have similar power keeping a single target up, and 2 of the 3 AoE healing spells, which is more then enough for a group too. You lose some of the raw healing power, but gain the equivalent amount as damage reduction. Given a pets relative health and survival, reduction is probably a much better option to have.

You probably won't clear any heroics, with a tanking toon. But just about every normal instance should be doable.

[Lyrix]

Originally Posted by Ualaa

You probably won't clear any heroics, with a tanking toon. But just about every normal instance should be doable.

You probs mean "Without a tanking toon"

Anyway, i do have a 1 priest 4 hunters team. And i'm doing fine in normals.
I do believe with this new patch 4 hunters (Beast Master) with a Bear tank should be able to do atleast some Heroics.
Since Cower has been changed into awesome shieldwall on a 45sec cd...
40% less dmg for 6sec aint bad
Prob less cooldown with a beastmaster.

[lofblad]

If you want an AoE tank, go with a bear. They have swipe as well as thunderstomp (which all tank pets have nowadays, not just gorillas).

[Iru]

Originally Posted by Ualaa

For the hunters, I would go with one as Beast Mastery and use that pet as the tank. I believe a Gorilla is the best "tanking" pet, mainly because of its AoE stomp/threat move.

You might want one to go Marksman for the True Shot Aura. Not sure on this.

The other two (or three, if you didn't go MM on one) will want to go Survival. Until you reach 4,000 unbuffed ranged attack power + 30% critical hit + 350 armor penetration, you'll have more DPS as survival. Once you reach or exceed this gear, Marksman begins to pull ahead.

As someone else pointed out, a Bear is a more preferable choice. Swipe + Thunderstop = AOE pet tank win.

More importantly, you will probably NOT want to spec the rest of the hunters anything other than BM either - except the one tagged with being the TSA/IHM drone that specs MM - as your bear is likely to have threat issues otherwise. For BM, the hunter/pet damage ration is about 60/40 and any threat issues are easily compensated for by a survivability-based BM spec and high-threat pet spec. For both SV & MM, the hunter/pet damage ratio is more like 85/15, meaning it will be very easy for the other hunters to simply overpower the pet tank.

[Ualaa]

If you have to change to a lower damage/slower kill spec, because of threat... I'd seriously consider getting a real tanking toon on your team, assuming you wish to do instances. This will also open up heroics for your team, which gets you gear 25x better then in normals.

I would assume, one hunter would need to go BM, for the pet to have the mitigation/threat to act as a tank. If the other hunters have to go BM too, to reduce their damage output.... well you can go 4x BM, if you really want to run as your current character set, but either changing to BG's for leveling or altering the team seems to make much more sense.

[Lyrix]

Originally Posted by Ualaa

If you have to change to a lower damage/slower kill spec, because of threat... I'd seriously consider getting a real tanking toon on your team, assuming you wish to do instances. This will also open up heroics for your team, which gets you gear 25x better then in normals.

I would assume, one hunter would need to go BM, for the pet to have the mitigation/threat to act as a tank. If the other hunters have to go BM too, to reduce their damage output.... well you can go 4x BM, if you really want to run as your current character set, but either changing to BG's for leveling or altering the team seems to make much more sense.

I'm sorry but gotta ask this.. Did you ever played a hunter?
Did you ever played a 4 hunters 1 priest team atleast around level 75?
Doubt it. Will give you a hint : Feign Death + Misdirect.
Not everyone likes to go easymode paladin + shamans ;-)
Also playing 4 hunters + 1 priest is alot of fun.
That's prob cause my main is a hunter for about 5 years now i guess :-)

[Ualaa]

Well, Iru seems to imply, unless you spec for lower self damage, your pet has no chance in hell of holding threat. If pets are that limited, then you can make the hunter team work, but you won't be doing anything quickly, and heroics are probably out of the question entirely.

If misdirection and feign death work that well, then you'll be better off specing for damage, then for lower threat builds across the board. I'm not sold on the pet being able to survive against a heroic boss, but trash will be ok, as long as threat stays on the pets.

Prior to the resilience change, heroics were never an option for this composition. Even with the resilience change, I doubt you'll do well with a pet as your tank vs any heroic boss. Maybe, if you severely outgear the instance, but that's the same thing as going 5x Shaman, without a tank or healer - not practical, until there's nothing for you there.

I do have an 80 hunter, but I don't have a hunter team in the mid 70's. My hunter team is mid 60's and on the back burner behind other teams.

A hunter team will do normals fine, battlegrounds, and world quests.

[EaTCarbS]

IMO hunter pets don't have the Stam/Mitigation to tank heroics at the level a dedicated tank can.

[vlad]

I am running 4x BM Hunters (3 Tenacity and 1 Cunning (for web)) + 1 holy priest. I am tearing apart heroics without a problem. Since this game have evovled into a joke (clowncirkus of easyness) and all bosses are tauntable its VERY easy to keep the pets up. I loose more pets to thrash but that gotta more to do with my priest going shadow when im bored then the thrash actually being hard.

I have tried a lot of different approaches with adding survival and MM hunters for buffs and replinshment. It have all been bad. 4x BM Red pets is ze shizzle (and faceroll easy)
I can say that this grp is so absurdly easy to play its almost making me laugh. Almost.
4x Hunters go NO downtime, no risk of wiping unless u are retarded (like me).
You got an infinite number tanks to throw @ a boss.

For your threat issues, MD is your friend. The new 3.3 MD is making an already easy task stupidly easy.

As far as surviability goes, the only thing that have been a problem so far has been that RoS copy boss in the new HC due to server lag. Now in 3.3 when you can care even less about AE then before (PoM spam ftw) its .. seriously a joke.

You have one HUGE drawback tho. You cant use the dungeon tool. And that is freakin annoying so I end up playing my other setup (mage/lock/pally/shaman/shaman) more then this, just because of the time you save with the dungeon tool. Normally I just run thru the 3 new instances with my Hunters, hope for a Hilt or 2 .. then I realize I have to fly around to farm more and just log the other team.

Note:
I have tanked the trash in ICC10 with my pets as well when we went farming for Ashen Verdict rings.