Aspect Management and YOU!

'Sup,

Well, its been a wild week for me. My spring break started this week, and of course, all of my professors decided to punish us for it by piling on as many papers, midterms, and quizzes as possible. As I write this, I still have to take an online exam, create a 5 minute presentation on the subways of tokyo in japanese, and do about two hours worth of additional homework. I should probably study for an exam coming up in two weeks too, but screw it. Talking about Hunters is definitely more fun than that noise!

With the latest series of hotfixes, you may have noted something interesting. Namely, that Aspect of the Hawk now grants 2000 attack power base, making the talent "One With Nature" even more powerful than its ever been, with 3/3 granting an additional 600 attack power on AotH, which is almost as much as it granted pre-buff!

What does that mean for you? Well, it means that suddenly, Aspect of the Hawk is very attractive for use in the arena, especially for Marks Hunters. The much larger problem is that of Aspect twisting, which is something you'll probably have to get used to very quickly if you want maximize your effectiveness in the arena. Oh boy!



First, you may want to take a look at this spec.

If you feel like you can play with your traps getting resisted more frequently, you may want to give this spec a shot. You'll also have a longer CD on Disengage, which will hurt your mobility. However, some people really like this spec.

I personally use this spec.

Regardless of which spec you choose, the heart of the matter is that its time to get used to switching to Hawk all the time.There are a couple ways to go about this.

First, you could try sitting in Hawk and just never use Fox. This is good if you want to try to play in hawk only, but I think you're really hurting your focus regen if you don't use fox effectively.

The second thing you could try is making a macro that switches you to Fox every time you try to shoot a Steady/Cobra shot, and switches to Hawk when you try to shoot any other shots. There's some discussion about macros like that in this thread on Arena Junkies. One of the drawbacks of doing this is that you'll have massive sound spam from Hawk activating over and over again (its worse than you can imagine), and you'll also have to press every keybind twice. Once to activate the Aspect, and the second time to cast the move. I found that this added a ton of delay to all my actions, mostly from server lag.

My recommendation, however, is to use this macro:

Much Better.

Copy/paste version:
#showtooltip Aspect of the hawk
/castsequence Aspect of the hawk, Aspect of the Fox

This macro will allow you to press one button and instantly switch from Hawk to Fox, and back again. No matter which one you have up, it will automatically switch to the other. If you have any other Aspect up, it will switch to Hawk.

Take this into some BGs and practice switching back and forth between Hawk and Fox as needed. When you enter the Arena, you'll be ready to take advantage of the massive attack power now granted by Hawk, and begin pounding people with 32k Chim Shots (maybe).

Good luck out there!

 Stay tuned for the next installment of my highly anticipated "Hunters Tips and Tricks" series! Will I be talking about druids? You bet your ass! Look forward to it!

Oonoes