Melee hunterism: part 3. Speccing for glory!

When all is said and done the spec of your character is the single most customizable factor you have, well unless you include gear but that's not fully under your control like your spec is. A good spec won't make a bad player a good player, but a bad spec can make a good player a bad one! Its important to know what to take and what to avoid for your play style.

This is extra true for melee hunters, the hunter talent trees weren't designed for people to go and thwack things with an axe, each tree has been carefully planned to increase your ranged combat abilities with only occasional boosts to melee abilities thrown in to help for those times you get locked in combat. And where are these melee talents found, well in the survival tree of course, or at least mostly in the survival tree anyhow, lets have a glance over the 3 trees and what they provide:

Marksmanship:

There are some marksmanship talents that effect your melee capabilities, but they are few and far between, focused aim for example gives you +hit for both ranged and melee and might be worth dipping those 3 points into marksmanship, however the next good talent for melee is all the way down at trueshot aura (though you can make an argument for combat experience). Now trueshot auras nice, but your going to have to waste about 25 talent points to get to it, just let someone else get it and follow them around if you really must have the buff. Master marksman boosts +crit across the board, however after it there is absolutely nothing for the melee inclined hunter, and once again way too many filler talents to get to it.

Basically ignore the marksmanship tree unless you really want the +hit, but since 2 hand melee attacks and ranged attacks both have a 9% miss chance (on bosses) your not going to need an abnormal amount of +hit in your gear anyway.

Beast mastery:

Beast mastery has a few melee boosting talents right off the bat, endurance training and thick hide are both useful as being in melee is more dangerous than being at ranged and focused fire is a flat boost for you and your pet on all abilities, ranged or melee. aspect mastery however isn't a hugely useful talent for melee hunters, chances are you'll be in aspect of the beast most of the time, though it is only one talent point, I wouldn't exactly blame you for taking it.

Now most of the rest of the tree is pet boosts, and I would argue that your pet is part of your character and most definitely melee, but really that's cheating and would be arguing that all beast mastery hunters are melee hunters, and I think a certain dwarf would come after me if I said that...

However don't turn away from boosting your pet, the beast mastery talents might not be strictly melee, but a strong pet is still a good thing, and the image of someone fighting in combat next to their pet wolf is a nice one, at level 80 with a little creativity (and missing out on trap talents) its possible to get bestial wrath and ferocious inspiration with a melee build!

Survival:

Ah, here we go, the tree which really brings melee talents to light, just look at the first tier of the tree, 20% crit on your 2 core melee attacks for 2 talent points, that's heavenly, a 5% boost to all (non-dot) attacks against tracked targets, yet another sound melee talent. Survival instincts: less damage and a boost to arcane shot (which you will use a lot), wing clip and surefooted, sure both are designed for getting out of melee faster, but they work just as well at getting into it too and entrapment, a snare on your traps, letting you run rings around things foolish enough to step in them. This tree has some melee gold hidden in it!

Scatter shot: deals some damage, makes your enemy blunder around perfect for trapping, and its usable in melee range! Deflection and survivalist both give you more survivability, lock and load is pretty amazing for melee hunters too, you will be trapping (at least) every 30 seconds, and you have no real excuse not to have serpent sting up, you will get an absolute ton of free arcane shots from this! TnT a stun on your fire traps, so lets see a chance to immobilise and a chance to stun, that can build to some pretty nasty CC effects for a damaging trap! Oh and there's counterattack too, questionably useful but quite nice in pvp situations against other melee.

Hunter vs wild and killer instincts: they both boost melee and ranged abilities, resourcefulness a 60% reduction on abilities you'll be using constantly and a 20% reduction in trap cooldowns giving you even more dps and even more lock and load procs! Lightning reflexes gives more agility which is melee and ranged attack power (as well as crit chance for both). Now we reaching the end: wyvern sting, some CC and a nasty dot but more importantly it leads on to... Noxious stings a flat 3% boost to your damage (melee and ranged) so long as you keep serpent sting up, oh and of course trap mastery, 30% trap damage and remember your dropping them every 24 seconds by now!

Unfortunately the very end of the survival tree doesn't have much to offer which is why I mentioned looking into the early beast mastery tree.

Conclusion:

I would suggest this build for level 70 pve , moving on to level 80 I have 2 suggestions for pve builds, a beast within build which picks up ferocious inspiration and a trap mastery build, I wouldn't really like to say what a good pvp build would be for a melee hunter, its probably never going to be a competitive spec for pvp, but I think the talent choices are quite obvious, move to take as many CC options as possible and you might at least manage to really annoy the other melee!

Hopefully when blizzard updates the survival tree they will move trap mastery back up the tree so its easier to get at, they did say they aren't happy with it for a 41 point talent, and unless the new 41 point talent ends up being useful for melee hunters then that will ease up on the spec a little.

The melee hunter collection:
Part 1. The theory
Part 2. The power of paper
Part 3. Speccing for glory
Part 4. Fangs of the viper