Xavias

This issue has sprung about so many times, as I look around both in-game, on forums, and more recently - whilst trying to recruit.

Why do so many Hunter players simply not know how the class works?
No, i'm not talking about the guy who just rolled a hunter and is still learning how shot rotations work, I am talking about the people who have been playing the class since 2004, and are still clueless on how to DPS, still using serpent sting in raids, still using aimed shot in their shot rotations, blindly pressing their shots with no regard for their autoshot timers, falling below the main tank in Damage (you'd be surprised how common this is).

Why is it extremely rare to find a hunter who can justify taking up a raid slot?

I'm sure every class in the game has players who are just not that good, be it that they don't play often, or don't take it serious enough, but I have never seen anything on the scope of the hunter situation.

The Hunter class in itself, when played by a "skilled" player is up there with the top raid DPS classes. I'm sure many of you have witnessed that on your WWS or SWSTATS.

It has got me asking:
What is causing this? Are hunters too difficult to play? Are they too technical? Are there too many phantom mechanics? Do the abilities not make sense, or are unclear to their actual purpose?

First and foremost, the Hunter class is an extremely technical class to play. Hunter shot rotations are extremely unforgiving, and there are literally dozens of tiny mechanics that if you don't know about them, can severely gimp your damage output (silent 0.5sec autoshot cast). Shot rotations need to be perfectly timed, and gross misuse can lead to an actual loss of DPS in comparison to just afk-autoshotting.

The other main issue is that many of these mechanics are not at all explained or visualised on the WoW UI. For example, you would never really understand about the 0.5sec rule on autoshot without having a custom UI that shows you a cast bar for autoshot.

Rather, forums like these, are pretty much the only places one can learn about these mechanics that are so VITAL to the success of a hunter player.

If you were to ask 20 random level 70 raiding Hunters if kill command invokes the 0.5 sec autoshot rule, they would have no clue what you were talking about. Knowing a fact such as this would drastically improve your performance as a raiding hunter, yet, a tiny percentage of hunters know this.

More alarming is that most hunters I interview when trying to recruit, fail to answer questions as simple as "do haste effects/serpents swiftness influence steady shot?" or "why is it a bad idea to use serpent sting in a raid?" or "what is the max % hit chance you need for raid bosses?"

The next issue is judgement on itemisation.
This one really really upsets me: Hunter players making ridiculously bad item choices.
How many people here have seen Hunters using Maulgar's Warhelm over the quest reward in SMV? Pre-2.1 legacy over Blackened Spear? When will players realise that just because an item is mail and has attack power on it, doesn't make it an awesome Hunter item. Blizzard is mainly to blame on this one, the pre-SSC/TK hunter itemisation is horrendously bad. While the smarter hunters totally bypassed some of these items and went for the blue alternates, many fell through this itemisation hole on the basis that the item is purple, mail and has AP on it! (a lot of these were fixed in 2.1).

Talent specs:
This one is less of an issue as of late, as people have finally caught up on the fact that BM spec is the highest damage raid build. While most good Hunters knew this since 2.0, it is amazing to me how long it took some people (particular elite guilds) to actually figure this one out. Not so much of an issue now, but it just another example of unclear Hunter mechanics that many do not understand.

In closing, i'd like to ask the question: What on earth is going on with the Hunter class?

 

◊ Quigon

You're going to find that with most classes, the majority of players do not know what they're doing. Or at least, they do not theorycraft of play optimally.

You can download videos of tanks in top-end guilds using absolutely horrendous aggro and mitigation rotations, letting demo/tc drop, not sb'ing - missing rotations... some main tanks never hitting revenge once.

This goes for all classes - hunters just appear the most retarded because not understanding hunter mechanics shows up more dramatically in that class than perhaps any other (although warlock, and dps warrior is pretty close).

Also, hunters level quickly, and perhaps just attract dumb/lazy players. You definitely have particular personalities on each class. You're more likely to be a forum troll as a rogue I'd say, than a priest. I believe the class stereotypes have some reasonable foundation.

 

• constantius

It isn't any different now than it was pre-TBC, pre-Naxx, pre-anything.

We have intelligent hunters, who do the theorycrafting, push dps to the limits, and regularly break top-5 in a raid setting. They can do 1400-1600 dps on a static target, provided their pets can do dps (Morogrim, Lurker, etc).

And there are some stupid hunters, who barely break 500 dps, who just afk-auto-shot through the instance, never realizing that they can do more.

This has always been the case. It's no different now. So I guess my question is ...

... why are you surprised?

 

Dizglan

I'm in a rather casual guild and we did our first SSC raid yesterday, killing Lurker and Hydross. In the end, our hunters finished with dps' of 294, 303 and 672. Yeah, the first two used aimed shot and never once casted steady shot. :p

 

Camora

I agree with Quigon, every class has the people who absolutely have no idea what they are doing. Hell, I was talking to a mage the other day, I looked up his armory, and noticed that he had, of all things, improved blink AND wand spec. I asked him why in the world he would choose those talents, and he said "I blink alot in groups, and I always end up wanding when i run out of mana.".

I think you also hit the nail on the head with the autoshot rule. Things like that, that you would not know if your only source of information was in-game experience and the general forums, make a much bigger difference to a hunter than pretty much any other class, hence why we have so many "Huntards".

 

Revenj

hmm...
I've never played a Hunter. However as a raid leader who strives to understand the classes of his members; I have a suggestion for the OP. Why don't you make a list of "Hunter gotchas" that address those details that Hunter's arent usually aware of.

I have a couple of Hunters in the guild who are good and dedicated raiders but English is not their first language. As much as I'd love to point them to these forums, I am sure they would hardly understand anything. I've tried enumerating through previous Hunter threads, but I am quite lost. So a nice bulleted list of Hunter tips would help everyone.

Thanks.

 

Xavias

Thats definitely something that I would like to do. The main obstacle with doing that for a hunter is that words can't really describe/teach someone how to time shot rotations. Its something that every hunter needs to do for themselves, and it surprisingly takes a very large amount of practice to get it right.

In my personal situation, I only have 1 hunter under my "charge", and he's very good, and learns extremely quickly. However, i'm trying to recruit another Hunter, and this is where I am running into a lot of trouble =(

Brutal Gladiator

 

Camaris

The reason for this is... there is no indication that you are doing something wrong in the game, unless you use specialized UI addons. Many people play this game for fun, and are not interested or do not enjoy calculating optimal use of skills.

The main problem is perhaps that you have to actively search for this sort of information, and really put effort into understanding and using it, whereas most of the game just sort of explains itself. It is, perhaps, exactly what 'easy to learn, hard to master' means. Using only the default UI, there comes a point where it just looks like you're doing pretty well, and there's no obvious incentive to try harder.

Now.. this is basically true for casual play and 'low-level' raiding. At higher levels of raiding, the pressure to learn should come from damage meters, but mostly from peer pressure and good guidance. You just have to remember that for many people, theorycrafting does not come naturally, and is quickly perceived as 'too difficult'.

 

◊ songster

There are only two hunter gotchas.

1) You cannot autoshot while casting.
2) Autoshot itself has a "hidden" cast time of 0.5s

The second is an esoteric gotcha that only affects the top few percent of hunters - the ones that get past the first gotcha! And it's really only an extension of the first one: you have to leave 0.5s more leeway between shots than you would expect from just looking at your weapon speed.

The big one is the first gotcha, and in itself it makes hunters unlike all other DPS classes. No other class has to juggle their autoattacks and specials to anything like the same extent. Rogues and feral druids have nothing that clips their autoattacks. Shaman shocks and pally seals/judgements/consecrate/etc are all instant casts. True casters like priests/warlocks/mages/boomkins have no autoattacks in the first place. The only exception is Slam for DPS warriors.

This means that hunters are the only class where screwing up the timing of your specials can actually lower your white damage - and it can lower it all the way to zero. You don't need anything more than that to explain it.

 

Clandestine

I think he means in particular players in top-end guilds.

I'm a super insomniac and get pretty bored in the later hours of the night, and for fun I like to go to wowjutsu and look at Warlocks in iLLidan killing guilds and critique them. I'd say at least 40% of them are obviously clueless players who have zero understanding of the game's mechanics and absolutely idiotic gear / spec choices.

Like Quigon is saying, I think the same is true for basically every class, it's just for some it's rather more evident.

 

Avessa

I find it quite funny that you're talking about hunters being so technical when you probably sit there and spam a one-button macro for 5 hours while occasionally hitting TBW. I'm sure you could teach the clueless idiots how, though.

 

Targam

Many hunters do not even know that they need a macro (or an autoshot timer+good focus). that is the main problem clipping autoshots because they spam steady, using aimed because of pre TBC theorycrafting ad not knowing how to keep the pet alive (basically how to spec resistances on pets, binding keys to attack and follow and sometimes heal them).

Just use a castsequence macro to allow for better environment awareness and keep the pet alive and the dps goes skyrocket.

 

okla

Dpsing on a (TBC) hunter was one of the harder things i have learned in this entire game.
Macroing like you describe it here not included obviously, im talking about the MM rotation without a macro, while working on a new boss watching your agro (early on in the fight at least) and the pet.

So far its been more challenging then on any other dps class i have played, and i have played all of them, bar warlocks and healing hybrids.

 

Gonkish

Part of the reason for this specific problem, I'd gather, is that the basic shot mechanics operate on a completely different principle from any other class's combat mechanics.

There is no other class where you can completely screw yourself because you're just mashing buttons. Sure, mindlessly mashing shit left and right will make you look like a complete idiot when someone critiques your performance (and they'd be right) regardless of your class/spec, but with Hunters the problem is two fold:

1.) Auto-shot is everything. Interrupting your auto-attack is something that simply does not exist for any other class in the game.
2.) (OP noted this.) The mechanics are completely obfuscated within the game. There is NO explanation, NO UI implementation, and no real way beyond constantly perusing WoW-related forums to access any information relating to the BASIC FUNCTIONS OF THE CLASS.

Honestly, shot mechanics, in my opinion, are completely retarded at this point. Their initial reasoning behind Steady Shot was to negate the old-school "Slower == better" rule that made Ashjre'thul the single best Hunter weapon in the game until a much, much higher iLvl drop from a boss most people never even saw. The problem with Steady was, and is, that they screwed that up as well. Steady effectively sped up the rotations, and while that's fine, it also means you have less time to work in another shot after a Steady. That means doing your job is HARDER than it was back in the pre-2.0 days. That also means that 3.0-ish weapons are STILL the most common, which STILL isn't quite slow enough to comfortably fit in an Arcane/Multi after a Steady, and is TOO slow for BM to get their optimal rotations going. In short, their initial reasoning for Steady Shot's introduction has backfired, and resurrected the same exact problem as before, while creating another.

That also means that the difference between a theorycrafting Hunter, and some random guy who may have been a Hunter for longer than I have, but just doesn't understand/know/care about shot mechanics, is going to be absurdly massive. The shot mechanics, as they exist right now on the Live servers, are just endlessly punishing, as the OP noted.

You can take a player of any class, the best Rogue/Warrior/Shaman/Mage/Warlock/Priest/Druid/Paladin you can think of, and put them up against someone you just dropped into the class, and, while the latter SOB will get trounced, he SHOULD be at least capable enough to figure out how to mash buttons in some reasonably acceptable form, so that he's not getting demolished too badly. If you did that with a Hunter, the newbie will still get completely and utterly slaughtered, but, more than likely, he will have no clue why this is happening.

There's your "Huntard gap", as I like to call it. You've got the theorycrafting raiding Hunters, the more casual people that "get it" (and they probably understand what they do from skimming forum threads such as these), but aren't going to be able to spout off the optimal rotations/spec/gear for X, and your mouth-breathing masses that simply don't know what the hell, and, probably, don't care to. Our mouth-breathing friends probably don't understand why a Mage can DPS by mashing one button repeatedly (though not exceptionally, but you know where I'm going with this), but a Hunter can't. I'm almost certain that, when told how to play their class, or simply that "they suck", they either completely ignore this, get offended and leave, or simply just don't give a rat's ass.

Regardless of the reasons, it does nothing to help the image of the class, and it CERTAINLY doesn't help when attempting to recruit people, or explain the intricacies of the class to others. 90% of the people I talk to, even if they're experienced raiders, that don't play Hunters simply think that all we do all day is mash Steady Shot (a la our Mages) and "maybe Feign once in a while". Surely, Hunters cannot be THAT difficult to play, considering that they have "EZ Mode" with a full threat wipe every 30 seconds. I've been told, on multiple occasions, by varying and otherwise intelligent people, that they could "rape the DMs if [they] had access to Feign Death". That shows a clear misunderstanding of how we work, how Feign works, and, honestly, how little they really care about Hunters, our mechanics, or our "whiny bitching". In summary: "You get a complete threat wipe every 30 seconds. I am jealous. I want a complete threat wipe every 30 seconds. I will not get one. Thusly I will make random, overarching, baseless statements to prove my superiority over you, at least in my head, because I still beat you on DMs without that complete threat wipe every 30 seconds that I want. PS- **** Hunters."

Basically, Blizzard needs to either change the shot mechanics entirely to make them function/scale in a much more logical manner (i.e., making Haste effects not a complete pain in the ass to work with, etc.), or, at the very least, give the Huntard masses some sort of indicator inside the game that might cause what few neurons they possess to fire in such a sequence that they may, at the very least, have some sort of inkling as to why they can't even beat their tank on DMs. Until this happens, Huntards will be the most common thing in this game, unless you count naked dancing elven women.

The Hunter class is a mystery on the scale of Atlantis to most people, and all too frequently this includes those that also happen to play the class.

Why Hunters suffer...
Benefactor's Bar learns you some goodness quicklike...

 

• Chicken

I personally found the following thread extremely helpful when it came to getting a proper understanding of how the Hunter class's shot rotations work:

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t13107-h...n_illustrated/

While it's not really a bullet-pointed list, the images used are pretty helpful when it comes to getting a general idea of how things work.

 

Xavias

That macro you speak of results in massive loss on DPS for people with latency over 100. This is because we have to pre-empt our steady shot/arcane shots before the autoshot even goes off. This macro forces you to wait for the autoshot to go off, and as an Australian player, I have between 300-600 ping, this causes my steady shot to start casting during the middle of my auto shot and invokes a dps loss as the 0.5 sec rule screws me over.

Not to mention the fact that exclusive use of steady shot is a lower-dps rotation then incorporating arcane/multi into the mix.

PS. Gonk raises a very good point about the amount of skill and effort needed to just "get by" as a hunter. Whilst another class putting in similar efforts into their spells would be classified and rewarded as "extraordinary players", hunters would be just merely getting by and barely justifying their raid slot.

 

Gonkish

Ok so to drive the point home:

Look at the mechanics threads all over the place, even here on our forums.

There is no other class in this entire damned game that has to use some hellspawn of a chart such as these to try to get the most out of their class. Most other classes are concerned with the order they use their abilities, how to make the most out of them, etc. Hunters are largely concerned with how to not get screwed simply BECAUSE they are using their abilities. There's a subtle, but important difference between those.

I'm positive that every other class in the game undervalues the relatively large amount of attention attending to a shot rotation requires, and I'm positive this is reinforced by the large majority of Hunters that simply do not do so.

I would post /facepalm here but Kaubel would definitely banhammer me.

I mean really, who the hell wouldn't tell you to piss right off if they had to try and make some sense out of this, just in order to DO THEIR JOB in a raid?:



No one but a Hunter, that's who.

Why Hunters suffer...
Benefactor's Bar learns you some goodness quicklike...

 

Mokhtar

What is being said here is quite interesting, I wondered about that myself for a long time. Being a priest and never having played a hunter I wanted to try and understand why some of our hunters performed between 2 and 3 times better than others.
The thing is for most classes it is extremely easy to come up with real easy to apply groundrules (for shadowpriests it would be something like : always refresh DoTs, squeeze in as much MB/SW as mana/threat/health permits and fill in with MF), the 2 points stated are interesting from a theorycrafting standpoint because they are at the root of a lot of the underlying mechanics. But most people cannot be bothered with that, they want to play, if possible they want to make the best use of their class but they re not ready to twist their brains into a knot understanding the implications of "1) You cannot autoshot while casting" in terms of gameplay (in french we call that "masturbation intellectuelle", I'm sure you get the meaning...). So I guess the bulleted list should cover more the "how does that translates in terms of skill use ?" part.

 

Kazanir

The Professor Metroid has spoken -- let all hear his words, and partake of his wisdom!

More seriously, the more I read/learn about hunters the more I realize that I as a raid leader know little to nothing about them or how they are supposed to DPS, nor do I really know what I should be looking for. It's easy for me to understand the basics of mage/warlock/rogue/dpswarrior because they involve significantly more of the normal formula:

1) Get the right gear.
2) Enchant and gem it intelligently.
3) Bind keys to your good abilities.
4) Roll face against keyboard.

Hunters fall apart at step four, where, like Gonk pointed out, there is a LOT more leniency with other classes. Most of my work in improving raid members can be done in steps 1-3 for other DPS classes, but it seems to me like "play skill" (defined in terms of the finesse required in step 4) is the dominant element in (the lack of...) hunter DPS.

'War' is too small a word for what I'm fighting. Like a candle in front of the whole burning Sun. I told you. This is bigger than a war. Now, I am not going to die today. I have other projects, and other options.

You can come with me. I can protect you.

 

Mokhtar

nm double post

 

Gonkish

To be fair I tried that once and ended up killing the lot of us, and then Gurgthock yelled at me and called me a noob.

(PS - He calls me a noob regardless of what is going on because he is a big mean jerk.)

Anyway... thread commences.

Why Hunters suffer...
Benefactor's Bar learns you some goodness quicklike...

 

Zogeth

I agree with all thats been said here.

In a nutshell, for players here seeking to learn more about hunters and maybe why they are under performing:

1)Only class in the game that actually involves timing their damage. Next class i think think that may do this is shadowpriests, in timing mindflays and deciding whether it better to use something else or not.

2) Again, on the timing issue. I guess it would be fine if the timing were a bit more lenient, but we have to time things, quite often in miliseconds, and the margin for human error is absolutely HUGE, not to mention the margin of error that latency plays.

To illustrate this: Scenario= BM hunter with Sunfyr bow of the Phoenix.

2.1 cast time.
0.5 second hidden AS cast time = 1.6
1 second steady shot leaves you with a margin of error of 0.6 seconds. And this is why we macro our steadies with our autos.

(In the hidden 0.5 second cast time, if anything is initiated, the auto shot won't start casting until after that 0.5 seconds, so its not like 'an extra 0.5 seconds off the cast time', as i may have perceived)

I liked the familiar scenario somebody mentioned earlier: If you have ever played a warrior, and want to know what a hunter has to do, to to good DPS? Try fitting in a slam into a 2.1 weapon speed. (If slam is 1.5 seconds, which i think it is). Now try and do this 500 times in a row perfectly.

Auto shot is doing about 40% of our damage, interrupting this is the main loss of hunter DPS, and for the small percentage of hunters that theorycraft, it is quite often, out of out hands. (Due to latency or FPS issues) Yes, thats right. FPS issues too, drop below 15fps and i find it hard to do my job properly.

3) Too much to think about! I know alot of people say that hunters just mash mash mash their macro. In my experience, threat is my biggest worry, i can still creep up the meters if we are 50% into a fight and i have just feigned death. I have to keep an eye on my pets health, and if necessary, chose the right moment to weave 'mend pet' into my rotation so my auto shots don't screw up. Then do i macro Kill Command into my steady/auto macro? With bad latency or FPS, i don't...so that means finding a suitable place to insert that into roatation, but don't replace it with any specials! IF the tank has rotated the boss, i have to move to a different position, to move my pet to the back again, so my tank doesn't get mashed by parry streaks. Ok, I waffled there, but it isn't just plain sailing for us.

4)And i know somepeople say we have it easy: aggro dump every 30 seconds. What you maybe don;t realise is that a hunter has 0/zilch/nothing/kaputt aggro conservative talents. This makes us probably the worst class for fast aggro generation, which is why you may see hunters pull aggro early on in fights. Whats worse is that, if you don't use any threat meters, you can't see where you are!

And after all that, rogues still beat us

 

zork

Its so easy. Tell your hunters to get Errormonster (http://files.wowace.com/ErrorMonster...ter-r45523.zip)

Secondly tell them to use this macro:
Thats it.

As a BM Hunter get a scorpid from shadowmoon, have him learn poison rank 4.
For bosses manually activate poison _after_ you got the beast with + trinket buffs. You will get a big poison stack that refreshes himself everytime.

If you are lazy, just get a ravager, its awesome too and you don't need to handle the poison stacks. Plus the ravager does more dps on trash.

RothUI Download - Tank Guide - Avoidance Calc - Threat Calc - Rothar - darkmasters.de

 

Gonkish

Stop.

Look upwards and read.

Say that again.

Also, macros are only so good until the UI gets confused and it starts spamming you with "Another action is in progress". I have Arcane and Kill Command macro-ed together because this was happening constantly with a Steady/KC macro, thus preventing Steady from going off until my pet did a KC. Also, Scorpid Poison is RIDICULOUSLY GOOD, I'll admit, but I also can't see it lasting like this for much longer.

Saying anything "is so easy" is just falling into the overarching, baseless statements that I mentioned.

Why Hunters suffer...
Benefactor's Bar learns you some goodness quicklike...

 

zork

Gonk I tried alot with all this macro stuff and yes I sometimes get this "another action is in progress" stuff, but you would get it by activating the skill manually too.

Try to activate shield block, heroic strike and sunder armor all at the same time without /stopcasting ... that will not work (some for hunter abilities). Hope blizz gets rid of that with the /stopcasting change in 2.3.

Just try the macro, it works well. MM hunters should add a /castrandom Multi Shot line though.

RothUI Download - Tank Guide - Avoidance Calc - Threat Calc - Rothar - darkmasters.de