Hi all,
I just leveled a hunter to 80 and want to do some PvP. How is each spec functioning in PvP? Is one spec better than the other?
MM, well, you see the number of threads. Honestly I feel it’s a bit exaggerated but MM is great for BGs. Arenas, they struggle a bit under the larger amount of pressure.
BM I think is doing well all-round, due to it’s simplicity, pet utility and still solid damage. Also swarming enemies with huge pets infuriates others. Including me. 
Surv is the most difficult spec to use well, and is melee so epic BGs are an exercise in masochism, but a good Surv player is downright terrifying.
Really think it boils down to what you know how to play, and what you enjoy playing! Think any of them can do work.
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BM is the easiest and most well rounded option if this is your first season and you’re shooting for an elite set from blitz or shuffle. Marks is also still good after all of the nerfs, but it no longer crushes team fights with volley cleave and gets shut down much easier in rss or coordinated arenas. Survival is also just as good as marks and bm, but ironically (to its name) has a hard time staying alive and suffers pretty hard from the lack of a ranged interrupt. It’s harder than the others to play at a high level but still good. I recommend trying them all.
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I agree with all the above except with that Survival been bad at Epic bgs. If you play it well and are smart about your approach to combat, Survival is really good in epics.
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My main experience of PVP SV was in Legion and it was, I think, one of the few times I had fun trying melee pvp queues (really any pvp at all, it’s normally not my cup of tea), virtually spammable aoe and interrupts.
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Thank you all for your input, it is much appreciated. Sounds like I might be trying BM to start since I have not done any hunter PvP since Legion. Back then I was survival. Time to slap on some honor gear and start the grind 
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BM is the “safe” spec
MM is the “fun” spec
SV is the “odd” spec
Make your pick!
The big difference in gearing for PvP is gonna be how much haste vs mastery you want to use. Marks typically goes high mastery with less haste than bm. Bm typically goes very high haste with less mastery than marks. You’re really not going to lose out on much playing with extra haste as marks but bm won’t feel right without enough haste. Sv and bm are about the same except for obviously different weapons. Check murlok for how other hunters are gearing.
I am doing something experimental with my gear as marks so also don’t use my toon as a model. (Not that you would have in the first place but just in case)
If you’re going to be doing bgb, it’s also pretty important to learn your role as bm. You are going to be spinning/sitting nodes on those maps and chasing flag carriers on CTF maps. You may sometimes want to pull out pet in bgb as marks if there are no other good node sitting specs in your lobby but otherwise try to stay imp mark and team fight. Just try to communicate early on to see if you should use pet or not.
After conquest uncaps in a few weeks I’m getting a full crafted crit/mastery set (incl weapon) + crit/mastery gems + crit trinket way beyond stat DR points, with 0% haste 0% vers and will play black arrow spec for the true PVE experience in PVP.
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I will be at 42% base crit when I cap and get badge. I’m finding that non crits do not deviate nearly as much as I thought with low mastery. My top end crits are higher than they were with high mastery and low crit. Master marksman is a lot of damage when you crit half of the time.
I personally feel that crit became way better than mastery with 11.1, even with all of the nerfs to crit damage talents and crit effectiveness being base 50%. More variables get combined to calculate your damage via moving target, mark, bulletstorm, etc. where the base calculation of your spells used to be a much smaller number of things combined with your mastery. The base PvP mod of aimed shot being ~1.7 seems to make crit still scale at a 25:17 rate against mastery at 21000 crit rating in PvP (which i still won’t have with badge) which is pretty absurd. Ros, denounce, and curse hurt you a little more but not enough to make a difference against how much more damage you do the rest of the time, imo.
I have a lot more testing to do and evidence to provide before I’m confident enough to claim any of this as absolute truth, and I’m also a max ~2300 arena and 2398(rip) shuffle player. So take it for what it’s worth.
Aka op don’t take this as advice yet.
I played full crit to duelist in shuffle last season, but you need a vers set against locks and hunters.
Crit outscales all other stats in terms of damage for dark ranger, because crit damage is additive to the 150% and not nerfed in PVP, and black arrow has extra crit damage built in. If you have 50% crit chance, you get 20% extra crit damage baseline with the talent, 20% or was it 25 more from black arrow, 20% from stacking rapid fire, 10% from trueshot, and black arrows crit for far more than 200% in PVP with all this, and if you crit a deathblow black arrow you leave 2 huge bleeds - razor fragments and master marks, each for like 1-1.5 mln or more. Very fun spec but fragile with low vers so hopefully you position yourself well
That tracks. My rapid fire averages out to just under 100% crit damage. Aimed shot and black arrow are well over 100% across large data sets. 5.5-6m crits into plate with aimed shot is way more frequent. Black arrow outside of trueshot averages between 2.5 and 3.0 with crits and 4.5-5.5 in trueshot with crits.
Again when I compare my non crits in logs to people at the same item level using full mastery, it’s just not very significant at all. 2.0-2.5 non crit aimeds are approximately my cap without extra battleground mods. You might get one to 2.7 or maybe 3 with stars aligned using all mastery (non crit). I don’t think 3 but maybe.
I’m also still using 14% haste and will probably be at 11% when I am finished. My mastery is lower than my haste but I’m using the mastery weapon enchant. 3600 mastery when you’re already at high levels of crit is a much more noticeable weapon proc than agility since both stats scale better than agi at this setting and the mastery proc is way more stats than the agi proc. This only compounds when you add higher and higher PvP modifiers on base spells.
I could try that as well. I’m currently at exact mastery cap 21000 with the agi proc, but i could try the mastery proc and lower mastery instead.
I only play with the crit trinket, was the first conquest piece I bought.
I will say that I genuinely could not tell a difference and was kind of disappointed until I decided to double down and full send it. It didn’t feel better or worse until I got significantly over 30% and started using killer mark. I was cutting imp streamline before cleave nerf and now just not using volley.
For sure, yeah, 25-30% crit does almost zero difference.
42% is a good breakpoint, i played a bit with 42-44% crit with the green crafted gear at the start of the season (recrafted everything day one to keep sockets) but when i started getting upgrades, crit went down and I recrafted out of it completely. But in 4 weeks I’ll be back to full crit for the real MM experience, the way it’s designed by blizz for better or worse
“Since 2016”, because…
Though SV had the potential since 9.2 to be a major contender(it could have been somebody).
I thought DR needed some Haste though. Even so, just like our childhood hero Plissken had said, we’ve come full circle to ditching Versatility.
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Haste really only matters for marks in PvP insofar as you need it to accomplish things fast enough with your globals between casts. For example freezing trap has a velocity of 20 yards/sec, so at max range you cannot intimidation directly into freezing trap without some haste because you incur a global on intim and the trap takes longer than your remaining stun duration to get there. You’re otherwise bound by cooldowns/charges on abilities too much for running large amounts of it to matter. You’re not going to accomplish significantly more actions per minute. This is probably different in PvE where you have closer to full uptime and the number of procs you’re able to get maybe starts mattering more or something.
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Thanks for this info. On the back of my head, I always disregarded crit without thinking because its not as valuable in pvp as it is in pve; that is until I saw your post.
I couldnt copy this, but I tried to do this with jewelry only(I also have crit from set pieces) since most of the secondary stats come from jewelry anyways.
This is my talent build. I’m not sure about a couple things though: htt ps://imgur.com/a/dBRKH4n
These are my stats in pvp: htt ps://imgur.com/a/nL5nust
Now I dont know if it actually is better than the normal vers/mastery stat periority, but I can tell you that it is so much fun. I dont feel the effect of less versatality(more dmg taken).
Thanks!
If you’re going to run crit, drop volley and salvo, pick up incendiary ammunition and killer mark, also run unerring instead of double tap. In the rhythm is also pointless, I recommend swapping for QuickDraw. The explosive shot talent is also better if you’d prefer to play that with 4 set and run explosive shot. In the rhythm just doesn’t make a difference at all in PvP.
Also salvo volley can be viable, but I still would recommend that you use it with 4 set and the explosive shot talent instead of in the rhythm. The idea is that you save volley for when you have a lnl proc, precast explosive, volley, then use proc and blow them all up at the same time. But this is also kind of ignoring the reasons why you would use a crit build in the first place because you’re using explosive shot talents instead of crit damage talents so just be aware of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
Essentially what Tavington said (he beat me to it)
You can play the default build, yes, but the crit stat shines when you play the crit-talents build (as outlined by him)
It’s very fun indeed, 100% viable in high-level battlegrounds where you can stay behind and kill people without getting hit a lot, and you can make it work in arena with good positioning and smart play. It’s still best to play normal vers/mastery against other hunters, warlocks and against rogue/mage.