What’s holding you back? Hunter's and their Stances

So I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about the various hunter stances. There are a number of Hunter’s in Heren Lokion and we all seem to have a different approach. So I thought I’d share a few thoughts on my stance selection.

Stances are all about what is holding you back or limiting your DPS. So to answer what stance to choose I ask myself “What is limiting my DPS in this fight?”

Strength Stance: If there’s nothing holding you back, then let loose with everything you got. Strength stance is the best DPS especially if you get a few traits in the bow master line. But remember there are a lot of things that can hold you back. Threat and power are the obvious issues here with threat being the half ton gorilla. So the times to use strength stance are when you are soloing, or playing like you are soloing. What I mean by playing like you are soloing is when you are ina group fighting normal mobs of equal or lower level. Things that the party is just going to mow down. In this situation, might as well use Strength stance, the mob isn’t going to live long enough to get to you anyway.

Precision Stance: It’s a good middle of the road stance. It does not have the threat magnifier of strength stance but still offers some benefit in the form of reduced miss chance and increased crit chance on quick shot. This is the stance I’ll typically use against higher level mobs where misses are more common place.

Endurance Stance: This is the bread and butter stance for grouping vs bosses and many elite mobs. In longer fights the typical limiting factor is going to be threat. You can’t do more damage than the tank and dish out hate. Endurance gives you an extra 10% (20% traited) damage that you can do before the mob comes to eat you. It also has the added benefit of costing you less power, which gives you more staying power. It’s not as sexy as Strength or Precision stance, but over the long haul, assuming you are in a situation where your Tank is not doing THAT much more threat than you can dish out, it’s going to end up putting the most hurt on the mob.

So to sum up… in simplified terms…

Strength: Burst Damage
Precision: Middle of the Road
Endurance: Sustained Damage