Infraction for Goreshot: Whining

◊ Praetorian · 08/15/07, 3:58 AM

Post: The Hunter Psyche - Why so many "Just don't get it"
User: Goreshot
Infraction: Whining
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Take a deep breath. This isn't your soapbox, and your valid points are lost amid the ranting.

Original Post:

Just to throw my two cents in:

1) Everything "wrong" with the hunter class stems from the fact that Blizzard had absolutely no idea what it wanted to do with hunters in the beginning, had no idea how to "fix" the class in the middle, and to this day has no concept/model to follow with which they can direct the class from a developmental standpoint. Only a few people seem to remember this fact, and most of those seem to skim over it. This is a big deal. A. Big. Deal. In the beginning hunters didn't even have mana. They had ENERGY. They were also supposed to be a pet-based class. Not a "how do I keep my pet alive to get that extra bit of DPS" class. A. Pet. Based. Class. This means that your choice of pet was supposed to be important - whatever pet you chose fundamentally altered how you played the class, or at the very least, the mindset of how you played the class. Anyone who has bothered to look at the Blizzard MPQ data can show you the last vestiges of this pet-based mentality. When Blizzard realized it couldn't balance "Energy hunters" and being "pet-based" meant that hunters were "too mindless" (not that it didn't stop them from making pre-TBC Paladins retard-central in terms of playstyle), at THE VERY LAST MINUTE they gave us mana, changed several shots, and basically told us to screw ourselves.

2) This lack of direction permeates the class to this day. As others have pointed out, when you level a hunter, you can play like an idiot and still win. Why? Because Blizzard doesn't know what the hell they want. From levels 1-10 YOU DO NOT HAVE A PET. So what do you do? YOU MELEE THE CRAP OUT OF EVERYTHING THAT MOVES. So armed with nothing better than freaking Raptor Strike you run around like a gimped warrior and smack stuff with your rusty freaking dagger hoping that the tetanus will set in long enough that whatever you're attacking will die. Then Blizzard tells you "OMG UR SUPPOSED TO HAVE A PET LAWL" and gives us the most convoluted class questline in history that really doesn't tell you anything about how the class IS SUPPOSED TO BE PLAYED beyond "Go tame something and feed it so it doesn't run away." Granted, this is important information, but is operationally void of information. What the hell does any new hunter do when he gets his freaking pet? He gets a pet, sends it in to attack, THEN RUNS UP NEXT TO THE FREAKING MOB AND ATTACKS IT WITH HIS RUSTY SWORD. Why? Because he has absolutely no incentive to do otherwise, and this is how the player has been trained for the first 10 levels of his existence. Ranged weapons are absolutely useless beyond the first attack because the mob runs into your minimum range and starts wailing on you - by that time you learn REAL QUICK that you better start putting high value in: 1) a good melee weapon, 2) good armor. By golly gee whiz, you're a freaking gimped warrior with a gimpy version of Heroic Strike. By the time your ranged attacks actually overcome your melee damage, it is too late. Conventional inductive wisdom has given you no reason to stop using melee attacks. "Tanking" as a concept is beyond you, and you only appreciate half of its value in your pet - the value of not taking damage yourself. The fact that your pet effectively tethers mobs to a single spot, allowing you to use your ranged attacks effectively, is left completely out of the picture, because your first experiences with ranged attacks left you getting the crap beat out of you by a mob while you swung your rusty dagger. One of your THREE viable shots, Multi-Shot, is dangerous to use in single PvE, and even more dangerous to use in instances. Aimed Shot "takes too long" and is only supposed to be used as an opener (a farce which became reality right before TBC hit). All you're left with is Arcane Shot and (lawl) Serpent Sting (which you get to trade for Viper Sting on caster mobs yay). Well that's really not all that much better than running up there and spamming Raptor Strike and maybe even Wing Clip, which is what you've been trained to do from the beginning anyway. This is WHY you see so many melee hunters. It's not their freaking fault. They haven't been given any in-game incentive to do otherwise until it's too late to change their behavior. The fact that hunters wear mail (which is extremely valuable in individual PvE) only reinforces this fact. Rogues wear leather and stand in melee, so hunters wear mail and stand in melee because they get a pet to help! It sound stupid to the people who "know better," but I'm not going to stand here and say that I would've known better had I not friends who were already raiders by the time I started the game to shepherd me along.

3) Hunter mechanics were broken FROM THE BEGINNING. Even something as simple as how we do damage was broken. Aimed Shot WAS NEVER INTENDED TO BE SPAMMED IN ROTATION. Multi-Shot WAS ONLY INTENDED FOR MULTIPLE TARGETS (hence the 10-second cooldown - long enough in single PvE to only be used once, yet dangerous enough that you only used it in specific circumstances). The only things we were "supposed" to be using were Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting. (As a side-note, you guys do realize that the only reason they linked Arcane and Aimed Shot was to prevent Aimed->Arcane->Multi chaining? Guess the whole fact that they were forcing us to CHOOSE between one and the other completely flew over their heads). Yet it turns out that the best damage rotation, by far, is spamming Aimed Shot and Multi Shot. Blizzard, realizing they didn't know what they were going to do before, and realizing that this fluke of broken mechanics actually compensates for their complete lack of development (and hence balancing) of the class, take an ad-hoc results-driven, money- and time-saving view instead. "Well, that's not what we intended. But we didn't really know what we intended anyway. And hey, hunters are doing comparable DPS to other ranged DPS classes! Let's let them keep this until we figure out what we want to do." Anyone who thinks that this isn't how things turned out is deluding themselves. This is exactly what happened, and this is exactly how Blizzard rationalized completely ignoring the hunter class until TBC.

4) So then TBC hits, and what do hunters get? Steady Shot. ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!?!? STEADY SHOT?!?!?! It belies the complete lack of time investment on Blizzard's part that their solution to the hunter problem was the inclusion of Steady Shot. You do realize that Steady Shot is just Aimed Shot lite? THEY GOT THEIR INSPIRATION FROM A COMPLETELY BROKEN, COMPLETELY UNINTENDED MECHANIC. Rather than allow us to keep using Aimed Shot, they basically removed it from our bars completely by forcing it to reset the Auto Shot timer, gave us Arcane Shot back as a throw-in, and dumped Steady Shots on our laps instead ("Hay guyz u have to WEAVE UR SHOTS insted of SPAM UR ROTATIN cuz U HAF 2 TINK WEN U PLAY LAWL" - real Blizzard quote, slightly modified for veracity). Yay, our pets got buffed. Yay, Arcane Shot does more damage (oh wait, that's too much damage, let's make it hugely mana-inefficient again). It was all a smokescreen. Nothing made that more clear than the change to Agility. Or the subsequent IMMEDIATE nerfs of Arcane Shot and Silencing Shot three weeks after TBC came out (AS IF YOU IDIOTS NEVER TESTED IT AT LEVEL 60 TO SEE IF ITS DAMAGE OUTPUT MIGHT BE MISLEADINGLY HIGH IN THE BEGINNING BUT WOULD LEVEL OFF ONCE EVERYONE HIT 70), and MONTHS before the vast majority of the playerbase reached level 70 and thus had any strong empirical testing of how balanced the classes were (anyone remember when the Warrior Class Forum got a post basically saying, "We are waiting for more data at level 70 before implementing nerfs/buffs" AT THE EXACT SAME TIME they nerfed the crap out of Hunters based purely on whining in the level 60 PvP bracket?). Don't get me started on how the TBC talents and talent trees have turned out. Or the changes to trap mechanics. Or the change to Feign Death. What about +spelldamage gear. Remember that? Come on, they still have those idiotic pants that add to pet stats rather than your own. Hell, if you're in the right progression range, you can ignore "hunter gear" altogether and just wear freaking LEATHER and you'd be just fine.

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Blizzard isn't going to change anything about the class anytime soon. The best idea - to make Auto Shot behave like Auto Attack - will pretty much never happen, because Blizzard si too married to half-baked ideas about "how the class should work" even though they really have no idea at all how they think the class should work. Changes to the timer? Don't hold your breath. Just accept it and either deal with it or move on. Steady Shot will remain the way it is, completely FUBARed and completely ruining the class's mainstream DPS viability along with its wholesale PvP viability (anyone who thinks hunters are even remotely as viable in an aggregate sense of both the population of players and the opportunity cost vs. other classes in Arenas is completely lying to him/herself).

I realize this sounds rather strongly pessimistic, perhaps even to the point of existential whining, but I just want to make it clear to the people who might be under some delusion that things are going to "get better." They aren't. What WILL happen is that, like Aimed Shot, like Feign Death->Freeze Trap, like BM+Steady Shot+2.0 Attack Speed or Survival+AGI Stacking, or even like stacking Scorpid Poison (an idea with which I'm vaguely familiar, har har), good players will find ways to get by, and perhaps even for a time do better than get by, at least for a little while. While the class as a whole, and the playerbase at large, suffers.

But hey, I haven't deleted my hunter, and I never thought of deleting him even though I no longer play the game on a regular basis. I don't have any alts above level 54 that I levelled on my own, mostly because I liked playing my guy just fine, as broken and ignored as he is by the developers of the game. I just don't live in magical fairyland where the elves and the gnomes live happily side-by-side, either.