Hunting down flag carriers!

I’ve been grinding a fair bit of MM PvP since 4.0.6. I’m not so good at arenas, but I’m fairly decent in BGs. One of the most important factors in BG success with a hunter is your ability to play the map, and utilize the advantages of your superior class to the best effect possible. The skill I’m going to talk about today is hunting down those miserable flag carriers.

First thing to note is that there are some universal truths about opposing flag carriers you wish were true about your team’s:

• They have protection. Not blindly pew-pewing people busy stunlocking their precious flag carrier, but actively slowing, kiting, and CCing them. Also healing and purging the flag carrier.
• They are often classes that can move faster than their pursuers (nasty feral druids, shaman in wolf form, sprinting rogues, what have you).
• If not, they’re classes with nasty CC abilities and the ability to power through just about any group of players not unlike a linebacker sacking someone in an NFL game.

Luckily, hunters have an arsenal of tools at our disposal that allow us to single-mindedly hunt down and destroy flag carriers. Or at least make their route back to their base a lot longer.

• Concussive shot is your friend- it takes no focus, can be reapplied often, and allows you to close in without having to use any neat tricks.
• Assuming you know where the flag carrier will be going (almost always the same path for the flag maps), you can hunker down in camo while waiting for them to pass you. As Eidotrope mentioned in the last post, you can start casting aimed shot before it will take you out of camo. Also, while you’re not moving in camo, any traps you throw will not be visible in any way to opponents. If you’re moving, however, they will see where your arrow lands. Snake and ice traps are your friend, however a well placed freezing trap will often force the flagger to waste their trinket.
• Aimed shot crits 80% of the time at my levels of crit on targets above 80% health. Be the first person to open on the flagger. I’ve gotten some pretty sweet crits on characters with low resilience when I have my trinket popped.
• Aimed shot fires much faster when you use rapid fire, and assuming you’re specced properly, hitting rapid fire also grants you 25 instant focus.
• While your first aimed shot will go off because they either don’t know you’re waiting for them or because they can’t target you to prevent it, your second one might be able to go off if you use web from a spider. Pet abilities, like the spider’s root, can be cast while you’re in the middle of your aimed shot. Assuming the flagger tries to get into your minimum range for their interrupt, this might well land you a second aimed shot.
• Once the buffs, heals, and cooldowns start being applied to your mark, tranq shot is often worth more damage than the focus would have done in some other form of attack. Especially if you have someone trying to prevent you from getting another aimed shot off. Tranq will remove one magic effect and and enrage. I haven’t been able to find a good list of abilities that count as enrages, but since it’s short and filled with some pretty important cooldowns, it’s nice that your dispell doesn’t have to try to find it in the middle of a sea of buffs. Warriors and bear druids in particular are good targets for this.
• When the defenders start trying to lock you down, you can jump/turn/disengage to get ahead of them. If you hit master’s call in the air, you’ll land unable to be slowed, and assuming you have post-haste on the second to last tier of the marks tree, you’ll also have a 30% speed boost. While you’re ahead of everyone, jump and drop an ice trap and a snake trap. They both cause a 4 second root, and make it even more annoying for people to catch up to you.
• Remember when you see polymorph or hex being cast on you that feigning death will interrupt the spell.
• Remember that you can deterrence out of a lot of damage now, so if you’re being focused, consider hitting that before you try to disengage out of harm’s way.
• If you can get ahead of the pack with a flag carrier who is faster than their healers, so long as you can keep up, you can keep firing steady shots with aspect of the fox to unload some pretty unfair feeling amounts of damage. Especially since your chimera shot should be dazing your target.
• Lastly, and I think this is my favorite part of this whole list, kill shot has a 5 yard additional range than your other shots. It’s particularly satisfying to see the flag carrier pop their sprint or whatever, think they’ve just made it out at 15% health, only to be hit with two kill shots after they’ve just made it out of range of their healers. Glyph of kill shot is always on my list for this reason.

The glyph of concussive shot will be a requirement eventually, however right now, testing on arena junkies has shown that it has no effect. Concussive shot with and without it is always slowing people the same amount.