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are lower levels of a spell more likely to be resisted?
no. that's why higher ranks of frost nova are a waste of money.
ah, thanks - I knew about frost nova, but was thinking of randomly spamming rank 1 arcane explosion as a method of rogue detection/deterrance, albeit a very visible one. At higher levels, I imagine the mana cost for this would be negligible.
For the rest ... hmm ... where should I start?
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scatter shot > mages. the "dead zone" is just the soft pillow hunters hump at night when the developers threaten to nerf their overpowered asses. a hunter who doesn't know what wing clip does isn't a dumb hunter at all, because that would be redundant. oh. and let's not forget traps.
The dead zone is very real, just mages aren't the best to exploit it. If a rogue or warrior gets in there and slows (hamstring/crippling poison > wing clip), the hunter with their relatively weak melee is pretty much screwed. Traps are the only attack in the game that you can manually dodge, and have a long enough cooldown not to be useful more than once in an engagement (unless you let the Hunter kite you or are relatively a lot weaker).
Wing Clip is a ***** for mages, but frostbolt is a ***** for hunters. Yes, wing clip is instant, but if you're skilled enough to stay out of their melee range, it's useless - and rank 1 frostbolt goes pretty fast. Again, on a skill level, it's much easier for the hunter to outrange/melee you than for you to stay in the dead zone, but you did say that there were no good hunters, right?
At least at 29 (and I admit it may change a lot later on), spamming my instant spells and moving unpredictably within their dead zone (freezing them as frost nova comes up) wins unless they have a bunch of +stam gear.
Again, scatter shot upsets all of this, and I humbly agree with you assessment there. You also have a point on the inability to slow hunter range pew-pewing. Caster wands really aren't comparable in damage. Anything outside of a non-cc'd hunter's deadzone 1v1 is going to be hurt. If it's any consolation, in team play, a hunter standing still to attack you is open bait for any class that can get inside its deadzone and cc/kill it.
off-topic aside:
Because I don't have any high-levels yet, I lurk on a bunch of the class forums, and one consistent pattern I've seen is complaints which group mutually exclusive skills. A mm hunter may 3-shot a glass cannon mage (or vice versa if they mage gets the jump), or a survival hunter may cc and melee kill you up close. Each spec has ups and downs, but nobody has them all - much like people who want all mages nerfed more because of the one time they got killed by a 3-minute instant pyroblast mage, and another time where a whole group got slowed to a crawl and damaged by aoe frost aggravation. Anecdotal evidence doesn't show the bigger picture. Knowing the skill trees/mutually exclusive abilities of the other classes can be very beneficial, especially if you're fighting a specific opponent more than once.