Emailed Questions!

Hooray! I love emailed questions, they make post topics so easy. So here are some questions I got recently, regarding having multiple hunters in a group:

What's the best way to handle the Hunter's Mark?  Mine will cancel theirs and vice versa. Does only the shooter get the benefit from the Mark or does any shot fired after the Mark is place benefit any shooter? If it's not a boss and there are multiple adds, is it appropriate to go ahead and select a secondary target and fire away? Or should I keep my dps on the tank's focus that has already been marked?

Luckily the first part of that is easy: both the standard hunter's mark and the mark from Marked For Death give their AP bonuses to all hunters attacking the marked target. So you don't have to worry about who's putting the debuff on the mobs.

As far as target switching, in general I just single-target one mob after another. Having all the DPS kill one trash mob is the fastest way to get it to stop hurting the tank, which can be a real issue with some high-damage mob packs. This was also more important before the threat change, when targeting a mob the tank didn't have targeted was likely to pull it off her, but that's way less likely at this point.

And here are a few more questions from the same email:

What about traps? If my Hunter friend places a Frost trap to slow down the mob, can I place an Explosive trap to help proc Lock and Load and Sic 'em? Will one trap negate the other? I know that some mobs are immune to fire damage, so I'm assuming that if that is the case, I won't get the proc on the talents. Is that correct?

Yep, different hunter traps can definitely all affect the same target (or targets) at the same time. Heck, you could drop your own frost, explosive, and snake traps on a group and they'd all do their respective things to the mobs.

Also, especially with regards to LnL procs, I should point out that explosive trap is the preferred use of your fire trap cooldown for Survival hunters right now, even on bosses. Black Arrow does more damage, it's true, but it costs over three times as much focus as a glyphed trap launcher and ticks only half as many times. So as long as you're engaging a boss that can be kept in the AoE of an explosive trap (and you're confident that the tank will in fact keep it there), you should definitely be using explosive trap to fish for LnL procs*.

Finally, you're correct that explosive trap ticks on a mob that's fire immune will not proc LnL for you. Luckily, there are very few elemental-immune mobs at this point in the game, as they've realized that problems like this aren't very fun to deal with.

Thanks so much for your email!

It also reminds me that I need to go back and update my gear guides and my survival guide for 4.3. At this point with the gear guide especially, I wish I'd held on to my original recommendations for Cataclysm release. That way I could have easily had several successive steps of gear so that new-85 hunters could easily bring their average item level up to the point where they can queue for the DS heroics, which would shortly get them into the LFR queue.

I think just a paragraph saying "take it if it has more agility than what you're wearing and use your JP to buy item level 378 stuff" should be just about as good, though.

*This is another one of those things that keeps happening that totally mystifies me. How do the very smart class design teams at Blizz not remember that this happened before (even before trap launcher!) and is going to happen again as long as BA is an inferior method to proc LnL?