Why We Don't Want BM Hunters in Our Raid

My GM is Frostheim, the main writer for Warcraft Hunter's Union and the Hunter columnist over at Wow.com. A couple weeks ago he wrote an article for wow.com where he talked about whether or not BM is a viable raid spec. Feel free to read it for yourself, but to summarize, he says that while a BM hunter is certainly capable of passing the DPS checks in ICC, that same player could be doing significantly more DPS (on the order of 20%) with a little practice as MM or SV, and that consequently he doesn't want BM hunters in his raid.

I am going to go ahead and just say right now that I agree with Frost (there's a reason I am in his guild), just to make sure there is no confusion about that. There were, unsurprisingly, a lot of people who disagreed very strongly with the article, to the point that some of them were actually seriously offended. I wanted to do my best to outline why I (and Frost, to the extent that I can speak for him) feel the way I do about a situation like BM hunters.

One thing that a lot of people brought up in the comments is that we should evaluate our raiders on a basis of more than just the dps they output. I fully agree with this, but to be blunt it doesn't really address the issue at all. It's not like switching to MM will suddenly change your personality, turning you into some kind of elitist asshole through the magical influence of picking the best spec. You can bring all of the same lovely personality that your guild loves while also doing a lot more dps.

The person who annoyed me by far the most out of any of the commenters was a guy who leads raids for his guild, and basically argued that because he maximizes his character in other ways (best gems, best enchants, etc.) he is still doing his best. I disagree, but what really got me was that he specifically said that no one with ANY ungemmed gear was allowed to come to his raids. I could have no gems in any of my gear, and my DPS still wouldn't go down by as much as his does because he chooses BM as his spec. That's like letting some guy on your basketball team who can't dribble while you reject the All-American because he's not very good at behind-the-back dunks.

This ties in to the example that seemed to be the most contentious one of all. Bob is a raider who refuses to flask, eat buff food, use anything better than green gems, or wear pants (for roleplay reasons, obviously), and as Frost pointed out, Bob is still hurting himself less than a hunter is by choosing BM. Some people were absolutely appalled at this example, but I didn't see any of them (and I read something like 10 pages of comments) that actually presented any factual rebuttal to this. If you want an example that's closer to home, a Ret could leave CS out of his spec and still lose less damage than a BM hunter, from what I have seen of my damage breakdowns.

My argument here is not that you CAN'T be BM. If you are by yourself or doing something easy (like heroics) than I really don't care at all. In the amount of gear we have these days, me and a tank do as much damage as the whole party did back when heroics were real content, so you could just sit there and /dance and we'd still get the place done. And if your guild is fine with you raiding as BM, then good for you and I wish you guys all the best luck. What I AM saying is that we don't play that way. All of us make the effort to maximize our dps when it comes to easy things like speccing well and eating/flasking. We are aware that we are not Ensidia, but we want to progress and that means doing everything we reasonably can to do so.

What brought this to the front of my mind was that our guild is experiencing a bit of a roadblock on Festergut, who is the simplest DPS check that ICC has. I had a paragraph or two written up about this already and everything, but two nights ago we got a better example. We were fighting Blood Princes (also progression) and things had really picked up from our first attempt of the night (which was my first attempt ever, but not the guild's). Our kill was on the 4th or 5th try and we were so close to wiping that most of us thought that we actually had wiped until we noticed that we had received Frost Emblems. That was easily the most razor-edged kill I have ever been a part of, and as Frost pointed out later in our forums, it's a great illustration of why we require flasking and eating (free) buff food. If any of our dps had not been fully buffed, it would almost certainly have been a wipe. This was that special case where that extra 260 AP really made a difference. If either of our two hunters had been BM, that kill would have been a wipe. Maybe we would have gotten it on the very next attempt, but maybe we would have gotten worse and had to save it for another night. Maximizing our performance is what got us that kill, and that is why we don't raid with BM hunters.

P.S. I would like to leave a quick shout out to Dreyja, who I had a small discussion with in the comments of the wow.com article. Going to try to leave a random reply or two to your comments and see if I can get you to visit here. If you have anything further to add, feel free to leave it in the comments, or talk to me if you want to do a full rebuttal-type post.