Survivability is the big trade-off. 7,000+ health with 4,000+ armor is nothing to laugh at compared to other dps classes. When you look at fights like Faerlina, Sartura and Twin Emps, its much easier to stay mobile, survive the AoE's/other environmental damage and still maintain dps to a certain extent compared to other classes. Actually, I think good hunters should be considered more based on that fact. You "could" take an extra hunter for dps, instead of an extra healer. With more fights being timed and dependent on dps output (Patchwerk, Faerlina, etc.) that could make a significant difference.

tbh most mages worth their salt can DPS and decurse especially on Chromag and even in Noth if your curse cures are made in a good strat, hunters arent the only ones.

I'm sharing the same blues that you're sharing Avellyr. Showed up in Naxx, and ever since all the changes if I was the raid leader I'd feel inclined to replace a hunter at my first opportunity.

The post you had is basically the same conversation I've been having with our MT/OT/Officers lately. It just seems like we're an unimportant item. Even when it comes to tranq shot...they made it so it requires absolutely no skill at all. You just keep spamming your button until the mob enrages, and then he's tranqed right away. Flamegor? LAWL. He doesn't get 1 AoE off.

Anyway...my beef wasn't with our damage either as much as our utility. I'm 0/21/30 specced because of the fact that other classes can outdamage us, but I...I can offtank!

As silly as it seems I've actually been offtanking (briefly) some mobs that cleve a lot (I'm a Horde Hunter) such as the champions post emps clear. When they clear hate, fear, etc on the tank that's on them I'm the next on the hate list as opposed to a priest that's just begging for his sac kicked in.

Monkey tank until it's pulled off and deterrance in the oh shit moments, but it's fun, and actually works making it a smoother clear. (As an aside I use the eskhander's collar and AV trinket for my "tanking gear" :P).

My solution to this problem is more aspects, or modify our existing aspects. AotH should be a party buff. Why the fuck does each hunter need to have it on for the extra AP? Also the 3/8 DS should apply to this aura as well, so we can upgrade our shit.

Monkey is an aura buff too. 8% is high, but 5%? Seems nice. I've recently given our MT a hardon for the viability of dodge tanking. I understand the problems with this type of tanking myself, but even still...I can find some situations for the utility.

Aspect of the Beast? How about making it +100 DMG to beast mobs? Fuck I don't know but it seems like a better idea.

There are many other aspects I can think of, but without taking away from the Shamans too much this is where I think we should go.

Our pets are a loss...we just just deal with that. 5% pet damage seemed like a good idea at the time...fuck Blizzard.

Anyone can claim "uselessness" on raids. Druids are superior single target healers than Priests. Everyone is a superior single target healer compared to a Shaman.

Warlocks have it worse than anyone - you only need 2 - 3 max on a raid if you want to get wacky and use CoR. All the rest are just superfluous, and gimp your DPS.

Hunters are great, risk free DPS to bring to raids. Granted they don't keep up with Rog/War/Mages in the long run, but two of those three classes have a narrow role as one, Warriors being the only true hybrid in the game, get to enjoy two things without respec.

All other "utility" classes buff the people around them. As a hunter I think it's kind of funny that one of our goals is to stay under the radar from being picked off by the raid leader...

hunters are great, and there are no fights in the game where i feel useless, or even really a second-class raider. patchwerk is the closest, since it's a fight that's entirely dependant on your healing while you're learning it, and in which hardly any of a hunter's strengths come into play. does that mean a hunter isn't a valuable contributer to the raid? of course not. a hunter with trueshot aura and a wolf pet contributes far more than his own damage output, which can be substantial even if it's not among the top numbers - damage meters don't tell the whole story. hunters SHOULDN'T shine on patchwerk, or else there would never be a reason to take rogues on raids. rogues do one thing in raids, and that's hit a stationary target very very hard.

hunters offer largely risk-free, highly mobile damage. look at fights like grobbulus or ouro - i almost universally outdamage everyone on those fights, barring mages with crazy ignites on grob, and the whole while on ouro i'm giving my group (which is eating sand blasts) +60 nature resistance. on noth we can position ourselves to pull aggro every blink and feign, so the tank knows where to run to grab him. on faerlina our high HP is a great help to help survive the environmental damage. on maexxna the same is true, and our burst ranged damage is great for getting people off the wall.

would it be nice to have more to offer? sure. do we realistically have a narrower role than a rogue or mage? not really.

Aimed Shot/Multishot are "spells". They take away from our mana pool, and reset the timer on our spirit regen, however...

How often do you hear about hunters bitching about being silenced? Mages...you counterspell a hunter often when they've queued an aimed shot?

I am interested to know that, can you kick/earth shock/counterspell an Aimed Shot?

I would assume you could, but I am not sure.

The other classes you mention aren't "just" that though. I would argue rogues are in a pretty shitty situation as well.

The only thing I have noticed about being silenced was that I was unable to swap aspects. I could still use shots.

Afaik Consecrated Sharpening Stones also add to rap vs. undead, so it's pretty useful buff in most bossfights in naxx.

Otherwise I agree with most of it, but I can still do a lot of damage, and survive a lot more than other classes.

Oh, and just FYI you can't kick/counterspell/silence an Aimed Shot. The only thing those abilities effect for hunters are Revive and Mend Pet, in addition to switching aspects (you can't, while silenced).

that's not QUITE true. slow isn't always better. closer to 3.0 is always better. hunter damage output revolves primarily around one spell - aimed shot (which is coincidentally a talent - go figure). because aimed shot has a 3.0 cast and 6.0 cooldown, a weapon that is as close to 3.0 as possible will give you exactly two autoshots in between aimed shots, and since autoshot damage isn't normalized, you'll get the highest possible attack power contribution. with a slower weapon than 3.4, your attack speed gets hasted to OVER 3.0, which means you're losing part of an aimed shot cooldown every cycle.

the really scary thing is that as hunter gear gets better, it's more and more important to have the exactly correct speed on your weapon, because more and more of your damage comes from attack power and less and less from your actual weapon. nerubian slavemaker, even tho it's 3.2 speed, is an upgrade from ashjure'thul because the damage range difference is high enough and the speed difference low enough that the added base weapon damage to your multi/aimed shots can overcome the loss of AP contribution. at higher levels of attack power, though, the AP contribution will overcome the weapon damage difference and ashjre'thul will be the best weapon again. i'm not sure what those numbers are, though.

Doesn't this scream "fix me"?

Or would that be too much work/too much of an uproar in the community?

Maybe we have to wait until the expansion (along with Shaman) to fix itemization/classes.

it does, and i sent a huge breakdown of the problem (including a bunch of math from a post on here) along to people-who-know-people back when slavemaker was first datamined at 3.0, after which point it was changed to 3.4 on test, then back to 3.2. there's a lot of game mechanics that are clearly problematic nowadays, but realistically it's not possible to address most of them until the expansion. as long as there's real weapon upgrades from now until then, it's not a huge problem. fixing this particular issue would require a pretty huge overhaul of hunter mechanics, and i'd rather wait and see a real fix than a quick bandaid to make soulstring more attractive.

I would argue hunters and shamans need the most fixing of their basic class abilities. The pet who is supposed to have a strong link with their hunter has been reduced to a pulling tool who I dont even feed anymore. The entire BM tree is a waste save imp aoth. All pets have fairly useless abilities with the exception of dash and furious howl. They also only get one ability. Comparing this to the only other pet class, our pets are rediculously shallow.

Is the endgame content not raiding? I think a key focus of the class should be somehow intergrated into raiding don't you? I once again refrence back to the Warlocks Demonology tree and how viable it is for raiding and really makes your pet MEAN something rather than useless.

it is integrated. a full BM spec hunter has a better pet for raiding than a full MM spec hunter. because of the way gear scales with MM and not with BM, though, the full BM hunter just isn't as good - and that's fine. BM has it's strengths, and raiding just isn't one of them. pets aren't useless in raids by a long shot, either. do patchwerk one week with a wolf attacking and howling the whole time and the next week with no pet, and you'll see a huge difference in your damage output, not to mention the damage output of your party.

Thats basically the problem in a nutshell with hunter ranged weapons.

Because of this autoattacks could be sort of thought of like specials for other classes... yet the AP isn't normalized. You get the stupid "barman shanker" problems.

I personally hate how Scorpid Sting doesn't work on anything worth using it on. Even in ZG all the bosses are immune. I'd feel even more useful if I had to put Scorpid Sting up on bosses and such.

I feel hunters need more options for damage type shots. Shots that are shared cooldowns with Aimed Shot/Arcane Shot or Multi-Shot- shots that wouldn't necessarily raise our DPS unless we used them intelligently.

Right now we're pretty much just working off of the same two shots and the only decision we have to make is can I Multi-Shot w/o breaking some CC or pull aggro from the AE? Do I have time to get off an Aimed w/o interruption? It's pretty bland.

Does anyone else feel like Naxx is lacking in the creative design we found in BWL and AQ40, to make everyone more viable? I know as a warlock I can count a lot more reasons why I was desired in BWL. Hunters had the gimmicky-yet useful tranq shot, Nef calls were better to have 5 of each class for, rogues disarmed traps, hunters kited dragonkin ...

From what I've seen and heard about Naxx, it's a little boring almost.

The bosses are fun, but doesn't have any of the inbetween that BWL had (from what I've seen so far).