A VERY BRIEF ESSAY ON HUNTERS

Written on a rainy and boring day, 7th April 2006



I've been hunting for like 18 months or so (US beta, hell if i remember when it was) , and even if I still like my class and I dont plan to change it, I thought I would write some hopefully well thought considerations just after having quit (at least temporarily) this game.
Keep in mind that I won’t talk about itemization here, as it is mostly a common problem for every WoW player and not only the Hunter class.
First of all I'd like you all to read http://www.wow-europe.com/en/misc/wowinsid.../interview.html which I will eventually quote here and there.


Let me start by distinguishing at least 3 main hunting situations, which I will briefly analyse:
1) Leveling
2) PVP
3) End game PVE

LEVELING
Leveling with a hunter is actually quite fun, especially since you have a pretty wide range of options to choose among useful talents. Personally while levelling up I preferred to spend my talents in Marksmanship and in Survival, especially concentrating on the traps aspect, since I loved solo playing on my race to 60. However, those talents spent in traps could have possibly been spent in Beastmastery, especially up to level 55 or so. After that your pet simply can not handle it anymore.

PVP
Many claim hunters are imba in pvp, or just simply annoying. Well they are quite right I guess. However, when you reach level 60 some problems arise, especially if you want to play efficient end game PVE as well. I don’t like PVP that much, but I think that both a Survival or a Beastmastery build can be very good, depending on your playing style. However, if you do also end game PVE (meaning all the 20 and 40 man instances) , here comes the first, big hunter problem: PETS SCALING IS JUST PLAIN WRONG. A level 60 pet against a blue/green geared opponent is barely decent, while if you are facing an epic geared opponent it just becomes the equivalent of an itch on your pelvis. Annoying, but nothing that will kill you.

END GAME PVE
Be it a 20 or a 40 man raid, you know what to do even before you have started. Say a big farewell to Beastmastery spec, and dismiss your pet, because you know that it will only be a weight on your shoulders. Too often you can not even have it by your side cuddling upon you, because so often mobs or bosses have unavoidable damage that will inevitably kill him, resulting in your sadness and in a huge mana waste while ressing it. When it comes to endgame PVE, I tried basically ALL the more or less useful specs since May/June 2005 : full Marksmanship, full Survival, a whole load of hybrids between these two talent trees and the nice 5 Beastmastery – 40 Marksmanship – 6 Survival spec. Damagemeter, Recap Mod and whatever at hand, I can honestly say that the difference in damage done (of course without overaggroing!) is barely noticeable depending upon the encounter, making at least in my opinion such a wide range of choices to achieve the same result pretty useless, especially considering that at the end of the day we end up just clicking very few buttons, using our very few abilities.

To make it short, in the very vast majority of the encounters, a hunter’s job is to deal damage : this, considered the potentialities of the talents and the abilities of the class seen while levelling up and in PVP, is quite a shame.

ANALIZING THE DEV INTERVIEW

http://www.wow-europe.com/en/misc/wowinsid.../interview.html

Q: In World of Warcraft, the different play styles must create interesting design challenges for the available talents. How do you approach this fine line between keeping talents valid for PvP or PvE play styles across all the available classes?
A: Balancing talents for PvP and PvE is obviously an important consideration for us. One of our goals is to ensure that when we create new talents, we design them so they are useful in both PvP and PvE situations. Of course, sometimes we come up with a really cool idea for a talent, but discover on closer examination that it would in practice be more useful for one play style than the other. Thus, there are cases in which we feel we couldn't make a talent perfectly viable for both styles equally without changing the design in some drastic way. We try to minimize that, however, as a general rule. We set out to design a talent tree that would prevent players from becoming over-specialized, because being completely locked into one play style by your talents generally isn't much fun, especially when you're forced into specializing in those talents in order to be as specialized as other players of the same class.

Too bad. Whether we like it or not, one of our talent trees (Beastmastery) is totally cut out of the game when you start raiding. They do not want people to specialize, or lock into a play style. We might end up speculating upon the verbs “being forced to” and “specializing”, but at the end of the day the hunter knows one thing: if he wants to raid, he must say farewell to Beastmastery spec and his pet will be basically only useful to do some suicide pulls.

[…]if it's an active talent, we first want to determine the actual gameplay situation in which we think the ability will be useful. Once we have a good idea of when and how players will use the ability, we can balance the numbers to support the design. […]


I’ll try to be schematic here. Now you tell me the last time you used the following talents and abilities (in a proficient way) in a 20 and especially in a 40 man raid:

° The whole Beastmastery talent tree besides Improved Aspect of the Hawk
° Improved arcane shot
° Scorpid sting! And its laughable upgrades, Improved scorpid sting.
° Entrapment, Trap efficiency and Trap mastery (booo! Molten Core mobs are no more frostable
° Wyvern sting
° Serpent sting and Improved serpent sting could be quite nice if they did a little more damage, and if the debuff priority system on mobs was programmed better
° Scatter shot : I recall using this sometimes only and exclusively during the Razorgore encounter, and possibly on very very few trash mobs here and there if something has gone bad raid-wise.
° Freeze traps: mobs that are vulnerable to these traps are very few, and the use you make of this trap is even less, especially since both shamans and mages can do a better job than you at slowing down mobs
° Frost traps: last time I remember frosting a mob in a 40 man instance is in Molten Core, some patches ago.
° Immolation traps: well, in a world where almost every damn mob has a cleave or an aoe attack or whatever, even if you have sick skills at feigning death this debuff is pretty useless, considering the risks you have to undergo to apply it and the sucky priority debuff system on mobs.
° Explosive traps: only thing that comes to my mind is to use them in the Suppression Room before Broodlord Lashlayer. However I am amazed at how much aggro you can pull with these while doing , in fact, crappy damage.
° Wing clip: decent talent in a 20man instance, however if you end up using it that means that something went wrong raidwise. I don’t remember ever using it in a 40 man instance.
° Deterrence: same as Wing Clip, I guess.

Q:World of Warcraft is a game that is constantly evolving, with new content like high-end raid dungeons and equipment introduced to the game on a regular basis. Do you consider the talent review something that will ever be "done", or do you feel like the class talents should evolve the same way the game does?
A:I think it's a little of both. I feel like our talent trees are getting to the point of being very solid, but keep in mind that the level cap will be raised in The Burning Crusade, and we plan to extend the talent trees in the expansion. Consequently it is inevitable that on one level or another, we'll feel compelled to continue to tune the balance of the various talents from time to time in order to make sure that the balance "keeps up" with the evolution of the game in general.


Ok, the Beastmastery talent tree might be solid, but for WHAT???

THE UNSOLVED PROBLEM OF PETS
Every hunter while levelling up, especially the ones that started back in the days like me, always dreamed to see his cuddly pet fight fiercely by his side against the horrible monstrosities of Azeroth, aiding his fellow raiding companions to achieve victory against the infamous bosses in every possible dungeon. Too bad. Your pet level says “60” but in fact it is more like a level 55, even with its maxed out abilities and talents, be it improved stamina or XYZ resistance. Your pet will die. At level 60, with half Tier 1 and Half tier 2 set like me (hell, if you want make it even the 3 Tier1 bonus and the 5 Tier2 bonus, it won’t be much of a difference anyway) your pet will struggle against level 58+ mobs, depending on their abilities. I won’t even mention a pet in a 40 man raid, which is nothing more nothing less than a cooked steak in about 1-2 seconds after you send it in to attack.

Oh, and we want them biiiiiggggg! Come on, it sucks that once you tame a pet it becomes all little. Give us something like Misha!

CONCLUSIONS
I think that without even adding new talents or abilities the hunter class could be definitely improved a lot, especially by having a look (once again) at the Beastmastery talent tree and by FINALLY upgrading pets in a valuable way for raiding. Also it would be nice to be able to use all of our talents and abilities in the majority of the instances and raids, therefore not ending up only and exclusively doing damage (by pushing just a few buttons) but in doing some things that are possibly cooler or harder to execute: this clearly hints that a)some of our talents and abilities need to be more worthy of being in the game (not even being chosen in a spec, worthy of being in the game!) b)raid encounters could use more fantasy (and this one not just from a hunter perspective, but from a raider perspective) .

yes, hunters MUST be able to do more damage when sending their pets in to fight while hiding behind hills in alterac valley

Yes pets need to be overhauled.

No hunters as a class don't need an overhaul because there are talents that go unused.

Sounds like you haven't done AQ40 yet, am I right? On some fights (e.g., Broodlord) the job of a hunter is very monotonous. Auto, auto, aimed, multi, auto, etc., feign, repeat. But on the other hand, hunters have varied and interesting roles in trash and many boss fights. We use hunters to do almost all pulling, we use hunter kiting extensively where possible to simplify pulls, hunters use their pets on the fights where it is possible to do so; explosive trap, frost trap, scatter shot, and others, all have their time and place. In all honesty, I'd say being a mage is probably less interesting than being a hunter, again except for certain figths and certain roles.

And yeah, Beast spec isn't worthwhile on raids. But how many Subtlety rogues do you see on raids? Shadow priests? (Except for the token mage-priest some guilds have.) And so forth.

Unfortunately I did everything that you mentioned (www.ravenoushorde.com - Dunemaul EU , if you wish to pay us a visit) and I feel that I would love to do it more, but as I stated on my long post, 99.9% of the time we are stuck in the Auto, auto, aimed, multi, auto, etc., feign, repeat. routine.

While I am sorry that I do not really know so much about the other classes, this in fact proves my point when I criticize the interview made to the dev.


And Steelfleece I am not complaining about the fact that we suck, but about the fact that the "variety" that has been promised to us, that they have tried to give us, is in fact non existant.

Sometimes, I get to shadowbolt things before hiding in the corner with my imp out and praying I didn't just grab agro with the 3 bolts I did throw.

It's pretty sweet, really.

I played a mage once and threw frostbolts instead.

I tried a rogue, too, but I broke two of the three buttons he used and couldn't play him anymore without rebinding stuff or buying a new mouse.

Being a hunter sounds extremely dull. I'm glad I don't have one of those.

SS SS SS SnD SS SS SS SS SS SnD SS SS SS SS SS Rupture.

Repeat, adjusting cycle as necessary to account for ruthlessness/relentless procs. Vanish at appropriate time and you probably won't even need to feint.

Sunder Sunder Sunder Shield Block Revenge Sunder Sunder HS for rage dump Sunder repeat, etc. (haven't played a tank, assume the sequence looks something like that)

Most of the time, every class is stuck doing something fairly repetitive. Once in a while you get to change to doing something different (Vael, stun fights for rogues, kite fights, Buru's aggroless design, Razor phase 1 for pretty much everyone, etc.), but I don't think you can fairly say that hunters have been somehow singled out as particularly lacking in variety. Blame the genre, blame the encounter design, but they tend to affect all classes equally in terms of lack of variety; you aren't singled out, you're suffering from the larger flaw, that designing a good encounter is just plain hard, and sometimes Blizzard gets lazy and throws another tank'n'spank your way, albeit with a gimmick of some kind (back out for debuffs to reset! back out to bandage when you lose too much to the nova! taunt rotation off the cursed tank! etc.)

Be glad you're not a Chromaggus paladin, unless you really like standing in one very specific spot and decursing down your list every chance you get.

Yep. 85% of my casting in a raid is Shadow Bolt. The remaining 15% is Curse, Corruption, Siphon, Create Healthstone/Soulstone, and Ritual of Summoning. Quite a bit of monotony there, but at least I get the enjoyment of running into Broodlord's (or a thunderclapping anubisath's) AE range to plant an imp for the tank.

Aren't you a bit worried about that? The pet stats on that armor comes with the cost of having absolutely no crit or hit or anything else on the set. Frankly I'm surprised that pet stats are so high in the item budget, as 1 crit for a pet isn't anywhere near as valuable as 1 crit for the hunter. If the tier 3 set has even 1 piece with pet stats in place of what could have been hunter stats, won't you be pissed off?

/signed for real. The current 5 piece bonuses (while okay for PvP and some solo grinding) are somewhat irritating and the 3 piece bonus for GS is just absurd. 50% increased range on mend pet? Oh goody.

Tier3 better not even think about pets.

Also I vote being able to sac my pet for an increase in my DPS (5-15%? :D)

You do realize that the +feral AP stuff actually costs quite a bit and is basically a mirror of how much dps is on a weapon. The AP bonus is equivalent to however much the weapon's dps is above the base dps for an epic of that level. Since a druid can only utilize the dps or the AP at a time and are therefore interchangeable.

And yet another thread is now a druid thread.