Like many ive been playing classic lately, and i feel like a hunter again.
The ability to customize the build, having stings and traps back as baseline, so silly pvp only skills, kiting and such actually mattering?
I hope the devs are paying attention, reverse course on dumbing things down to try to fit on a tablet and give us back the complexity we all obviously want.
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Uh, what?
Firstly, traps are baseline on live. Furthermore they can actually be used in combat.
Kiting matters on live too.
As for stings: there’s an argument for Viper Sting to be brought back but honestly with the current implementation of the stings (which is BETTER than Vanilla non-scaling nonsense) they are fine as PvP-exclusive skills. You didn’t use stings in PvE in Vanilla most of the time either.
Complexity? I mean, you had a lot of abilities but most of them were situational or reduntant. The core gameplay was definitely much simpler since it was just weaving Aimed Shot, Multi-Shot, and Auto Shot. I guess you can argue that there are more things to keep track of with immobility, ammo, pet food etc (all bad things for the class by the way) but I don’t see that as any sort of meaningful “complexity”. I would also argue that mana is less complex (also less enjoyable) than focus.
Don’t forget that modern Hunters have many things classic Hunters didn’t have like Disengage (the real version) and Camoflauge.
Literally the only things worth taking from classic Hunter are Eyes of the Beast, Distracting Shot, and Viper Sting. Maybe a few things Everything else? Meh. Look to MoP for guidance on what to do with Hunters in the future, not classic.
I just saw a thread yesterday on MMO-champion that said Hunter population is proportionally much lower in Classic and then it was 15 pages of people listing everything they didn’t like about Hunters and why they avoided the class.
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Im guessing that poll was taken by a lot of hunters that became hunters after the BC era, aside from that we can agree to disagree.
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I think I see where you are coming from, but hunters DID hit there stride in BC. Being a hunter in classic, while fun, was not ideal.
-Just wait till you are pretty much forced to give up your favorite pet in favor of better “raid” pets, because you have next to 0 stable slots…
….You must be Beast Mastery, the initial roll-out of focus was AWEFULL for everyone else in PVP.
The open skill point system was FAR more interesting than the current template system.
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Im only comparing classic, to now.
Yes many improvements were made in BC and even beyond, but the complexity for me is much more engaging in classic than current retail, and i’m not even max level as yet.
Current Hunter bores me i’m sorry to say. We’ve lost so much to the prune wagon or in the name of “unique specs”, when the ability to customize how we wanted it was really all the unique most of us wanted.
It wasn’t ideal, i’m not suggesting it was only that, in my view, its more interesting, than current retail.
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Again, I get what you are trying to say, but that game vitality that you are feeling has more to do with the whole experience. (Classic adds an entire essential role to the game that hasn’t existed since the end of Lich King…CC)
Bepples flew off the the handle because a LOT of your skills are currently broken, or underoptimized for use, in addition to a HOST of other problems that you have yet to discover…or be annoyed by. (like the much reviled deadzone)
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It wasn’t a poll, it was just a thread with people expressing their sentiments alongside a census website that showed class populations.
The Hunter class has generally always been popular but the degree of popularity went up a lot in later expansions. WoD was probably the peak and by then all the “classic elements” (i.e. token RPG grind timewasters) like ammo, pet feeding, and melee were well and truly gone.
And no, I don’t settle for “agree to disagree” because I am right and you are wrong.
I played MM and Survival in Cata. I don’t really care about the PvP situation back then because I’m a PvE player and focus was fun enough. Sucks that they didn’t get it right immediately upon release but it’s still a better system for the class.
“Interesting” is the positive equivalent of “clunky” i.e. a canned buzzword that doesn’t mean much. Both approaches have their merits. The talent trees provided a reward for every level, and the opportunity for niche builds, but at the same time the playstyle variance was pretty minimal, they weren’t designed to be changed often, and ultimately devolved into cookie-cutter builds for every spec. The talent tiers are more infrequent but they have legitimately varied playstyle choices. Of course, the current state of BM’s talents is very cookie-cutter indeed but that’s mostly a tuning oversight. In past iterations you would change specs often and it was a system built to handle that well.
Ultimately I think the benefits of talent tiers are more tangible and important. They do need to find a way to make levels more rewarding (maybe some mixture of both systems) but the talent tiers were a positive addition.
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Considering the entire post was about opinion, and not how many people played the class, fine, you want to be an tard thats up to you but in no universe do you get to tell me my opinion is wrong.
I dont give a rats how many people played it what you think of it to be frank and since you wont let it go with me trying to be respectful i ll leave it at that.
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im ok with this tbh.
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Actually, I can. Watch me do it again:
Your opinion is wrong
What happened to Survival taught me to never have any respect for bad suggestions to the class. I used to ignore them and let them be but now it’s clear Blizzard might actually listen to them and it can drastically affect my own enjoyment so I know to actively rebuff them whenever I can.
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No it doesn’t, you literally can’t kite more than half the melee in the game, they have permanent uptime (demon hunter, ww monk, feral druids, etc)
pretty much only rets can be kited but it doesn’t matter because half their damage is ranged anyway
hunters need more kiting tools back. a LOT more. we’re supposed to be the anti melee cleave class, but that sure ain’t the case anymore
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We still have most of the kiting tools we used to. The problem is so many melee have gained so many anti-kiting tools.
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OK… allow me to rephrase… you can, but it has no merit.
Your view ha no more import than my own to anyone but us.
You can bold it, italicize it, have a priest bless it, it changes nothing.
I stand by my views, have a peachy.
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In Classic, I don’t have any redundant abilities. Situational on the other hand I agree with. That is the best part about the game. That is an essential part of what helps create the huge skill gaps. You have to learn when to best use your situational abilities.
As for complexity, the Hunter class in Classic is 10 times more complex than BfA. Even the rotation takes a whole lot more thought and mindfulness. Kiting requires thought and timing and stance switching and pet management and choice.
OMG choices all over the place. This is where the “complexity” really shows itself. I had forgotten what choice was in this game. Now I remember. I am never playing BfA again. I am never playing Retail again unless they give real choices in gameplay back to the classes. You have to have pitfalls, you have to be able to make mistakes that cost more than a couple DPS for successes to be meaningful.
You say this, but please at least acknowledge that this is purely a matter of preference, i.e. this is your opinion, and it is not one that is universal. It’s likely not even one that is in the majority. There is no way to know what the majority opinion is on that, but I will say this: I’m fairly certain that atm, there are more people playing the version Hunter with all of those things, than the version without.
Wrt to ammo and pet food, I agree that doesn’t add to PvP or combat PvE complexity. That is not why those two things add to the game (for many (most?) people). Those add to the game by making it feel like a real game. They add immersion. Immersion is something BfA is almost completely bereft of in gameplay (i.e. outside of the story itself).
As for “immobility” I am assuming you mean modes of travel. To that I say, the world is a much larger place. You make decisions on what you are going to do based on the size of the world and the time it takes to travel. The lack of travel options makes the world meaningful. It adds to the immersion, as well as a feeling of grandeur and exploration. I mean, I’ve been all those places a thousand times, but when you have to walk through them, you notice the flowers, and may even stop to pick them (yes, I’m an herbalist).
Yes, these are sorely missed. Though playing a Night Elf with a Cat, I almost have Camo, at least there is dynamic and interesting gameplay choices to be made there. And Wing Clip really helps with getting out of melee, so it’s not powerless against melee. Quite to the contrary actually.
However, it’s not the things we don’t have that make the game, and the Hunter class specifically great, its the things we do have that the current game doesn’t. Classic is far from the best version of Hunter ever, but don’t downplay what there is that makes it engaging and more complicated just because its not “the best”.
You will get no argument from me there.
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I will stop playing hunter if it goes back to anything like what it was during classic. This is a terrible idea.
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You used stings all the time in PvE, how are you leveling without using stings? I don’t play retail, haven’t since cata so I can’t say much about the rotations currently. You did over simplify the rotations in classic though. Good hunters mastered stutter stepping in order to weve melee in rotations.
As for pet food etc (all bad things by the way) that’s your opinion. A lot of Hunters enjoy that aspect. Learning pet abilities and hunting rare spawns to give you an edge was great. I’m a bit sad we’re at 1.12 for pet attacks, i was really looking forward to getting lupos for shadow damage against warriors.
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You stand by your views because you are stubborn and in denial. Stop trying to force cancerous mechanics on the class, please. That steps way out of bounds of just an innocent little personal opinion. You want to control other people’s gameplay and that’s disgraceful. Speaking of disgraceful, in comes the biggest disappointment of the Hunter forums:
Right off the top of my head: Immolation Trap and Explosive Trap. There is frankly little reason for either of them to exist and even less reason for both of them to simultaneously exist. Like half our god-damned toolkit they don’t scale with the core stats our class is meant to use so while it feels nice to have an initial damage boost at the start of the fight they are ultimately barely worth the mana cost if at all (which is just as much an indictment of mana as a resource for Hunters as it is on the lousy traps themselves). They also share a CD with the actually-useful traps: Frost Trap and Freezing Trap. None of which can be used in combat, by the way, just for the lols apparently.
Forget about ever using them on a boss either because, of course, bosses have a debuff limit and even if they didn’t, as already established, they certainly aren’t worth the mana cost and that only gets worse as you get more gear. But hey, the DoT can keep people out of stealth, right? Just like Serpent Sting, Flare, and Hunter’s Mark! Sounds pretty redundant if you ask me.
But yeah, I’m sure that because there’s probably one situation out there where it’s slightly beneficial to prepare an Immolation Trap if the stars align and the moon is crescent (basically just harder levelling mobs for a bit of a damage boost) it’s a great ability to have and all these blatant flaws in class design are actually pArT Of wHAt cReaTEs tHE HUgE SkilL gAps and therefore good things. Do note how often you pull this excuse out of your behind to defend literally any and every flaw of Classic throughout this post and others.
Oh, really? Because it’s so mind-bendingly difficult to get a swing timer and to a) only ever use Aimed Shot and Multi-Shot and b) don’t use them when the bar is filling up?
Classic Hunter gameplay is utterly mindless. And don’t use PvP as an excuse. A whole lot of situational crap comes into play in PvP in BFA, too. Most of the game is PvE. Most of the players are PvE. “Rotation” as a concept in general is only relevant in PvE and that’s the word you chose here. So you cannot keep dismissing this area where classic is stunningly weak because PvP exists. Hunter gameplay in PvE in both Classic and BC is utterly bland and mindless. It’s just auto-shot weaving while you watch your DPS fall further and further behind with each boss because Blizzard failed to make the class effectively scale with gear.
There is no choice, period. You know exactly what pets you take (especially given the grand total of 3 stable slots), exactly what talents to take, and exactly what pet skills to take. You can keep machine-gunning every buzzword you’ve saved up into the thread but that isn’t going to change that. There is a right way to play the class and an infinite number of wrong ways.
As for punishing mistakes: lol. You’re in a raid of 40 people. Hardly any minor individual thing you do matters. Do note how quickly the raid content was annihilated in the first week. Most of the difficulty in Classic is artificial difficulty in actually forming a full 40 man group and all the preparatory grind. Once that’s out of the way, the content itself has little challenge compared to modern raiding. If you follow the basic outline of picking the designated cookie-cutter MM build and sticking to the Aimed Shot/Multi-Shot/Auto-Shot rotation all day you are set for all of classic. You can skip over literally every micro-optimisation people come up with like melee weaving, FD + trinket swapping, clipped v.s. full rotation, etc etc and it will make next to no difference at all in your chance of beating the boss.
Even in PvP most of the time you are going to be fighting people in a lower league of skill and/or gear and given most of the PvP content is in the form of raids (world PvP battles and battlegrounds) individual choices matter even less. God speed to the Hunters who make the PvP montages of them 1v1ing various actually-skilled players from other classes but that’s not representative of the overwhelming majority of Classic content.
Stamping your feet and declaring that you will never play BFA isn’t nearly as dramatic or impactful as you think it is especially given you have repeatedly said in other threads that you won’t even play a Hunter in Classic because it’s an inferior class.
Nah, it’s pretty much true, actually. They are blatant penalties for playing a Hunter. Our cost of maintenance is absurd compared to other classes, even those that themselves have pretty large penalties in the form of reagent costs or lost bag slots.
What a ridiculously contrived string of nonsense you use here to argue the majority prefers the Classic WoW chore extravaganza. Never mind the fact that you make unfounded assumptions about both Classic’s long-term population and the proportion of players playing Hunter, but you’re also assuming that everyone who plays a Hunter in Classic specifically likes those timewaster mechanics and prefers them over not having them. You know damn well this argument is weak as hell so kindly stop wasting everyone’s time.
Oh, yeah? Why can’t I loot my ammo back from enemies? That’s something done by many RPGs that are actually interested in immersion, but they never even bothered.
The immersive value provided by these mechanics is minimal. Real immersion comes from how the class theme and identity is conveyed through its core gameplay. That would be like having active mechanics that actually interact with your pet instead of just letting you pretend it’s a static DoT the whole fight. Things that could be immersion-breaking don’t include, say, not having to stock up on ammo all the time (and carry literally thousands of bullets/arrows with you everywhere despite how ludicrously UNREAL that is), but rather things like arbitrarily not being able to either used ranged attacks due to being too close while also not being able to melee hit due to being too far.
Even describing these mechanics as “gameplay” is too far.
We’ve been through this in another thread but you chose to ignore it all in that one so you’ll just do the same here.
I was actually talking about the immobile gameplay of Hunters such as not only having all the casts e.g. Aimed Shot being immobile (something you decry about modern WoW but excuse for Classic, btw) but also having purportedly INSTANT CAST spells like Multi-Shot being mysteriously immobile along with Auto-Attack itself, despite every other physical class having a mobile auto-attack (yet again this is SOMEHOW a good thing despite being obviously inconsistent and arbitrary because it’s sOMeThiNg yOu HAve to tHInK aBOuT!).
But on the subject of the world: blah blah, more pretending that everyone was just frolicking through the meadows making friends and journeying through the terrain, apparently oblivious to the fact that flight paths, mage portals, and summons still existed and people still spent the majority of the time camped out in a major city anyway. Dump in the usual buzzwords “meaningful” and “immersion” and you got yourself a delusional Classic fanatic argument.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate how I like to throw out the line “frolicking through the meadows” to mock this romantic bullcrap whenever it pops up yet here you are literally and sincerely talking about how travelling on the ground lets you NOTICE THE FLOWERS. Holy moly. There really is no border between satire and sincerety anymore.
Yep, there it is again, predictable as ever: buzzword soup about something being INTERESTING and requiring THOUGHT to excuse a gameplay shortcoming.
Wing Clip doesn’t exist in modern WoW because Concussive Shot can a) be used in melee and b) have 100% uptime. It would be utterly pointless to have it still around. The only kiting tools Classic has that modern WoW doesn’t is various stun/snare procs attached to talents. In every other way modern WoW has more including knockbacks, Disengage, and the aforementioned full Concussive Shot uptime. We suck against melee because Blizzard keep buffing melee, period. But it’s not like we dominated all melee in Vanilla, either. Look at Warriors. I would honestly argue we perform worse against them in particular in Classic v.s. modern WoW.
Honestly I would argue it was the worst version. Underdeveloped, half-finished, buggy, and a ton of useless chores that add nothing. Furthermore, not only does the core second-to-second PvE gameplay suck but it’s also exactly the same no matter what spec you take. Don’t get me wrong: it was GREAT for its time and there really is a lot of value in the situational utility but that just doesn’t carry it. Every single expansion afterwards had it better, and as much as it pains me to say it that includes Legion and BFA.
I don’t find it engaging at all. It actually feels more disconnected and less engaging than the later, more active and fast-paced versions of the Hunter. Nothing anyone says changes the fact that when I log in for raid nights on BFA I feel a sense of relief and empowerment when playing that version of the Hunter… a version I still hold to be a downgrade over MoP and WoD! The Vanilla one just feels weak and restrained all the time and I find myself having to force myself to keep going at times.
Apparently I will because you just spent another whole post propping up a bunch of obsolete mechanics that were all absent from MoP just as much as they are from BFA.
I rarely use them because frankly they are a big mana drain. It’s slower and costlier to blow all my mana every pull or two and have to drink more often so I heavily moderate my mana spending. Most of the mobs are dead within 15 secs anyway and I only have so much mana. I’ve used Viper Sting against harder casters, though.
Whenever I do use stings, usually on elite mobs, it makes up an exceedingly small percentage of my total damage. Like, a-couple-auto-attacks small. Which only makes sense because it doesn’t scale with ranged attack power and cannot crit.
Levelling is generally not what we mean by PvE, anyway. In actual PvE (dungeons and raids) there is a very low debuff limit on the enemies so no raid is going to allow you to take up a valuable debuff spot for a weak DoT or whatever. The stings are far more PvP oriented than anything, with Viper Sting being the one that really shines.
I am aware of melee weaving. Not many people did it in actual Vanilla at all. That’s more of a recent micro-optimisation that relies on some significant gear and talent priority changes (e.g. using a 2-hander instead of dual-wielding) and can only really be pulled off on static fights with little movement and no qualms about having ranged DPS standing on the cusp of melee range (although to be fair “mechanic-less static boss fight” describes most of Vanilla boss fights).
Yeah and a lot of Hunters don’t. Call me crazy for failing to see what’s fun about having to spend copious gold on keeping an icon on your pet frame green.
Honestly: the training of abilities is about the one thing I wouldn’t mind because it at least serves some gameplay purpose in enticing you to go to places and try out new pets, but I would still lean towards not having it.
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Although YOU didn’t see it happen in vanilla it was very much a thing. As for not stinging while leveling, that’s still wrong. Watch Joana’s speed run to 60, he had the previous record, he used sting all the time.
Yeah you didn’t take a debuff during raids, but as far as PvE being about raiding, it is a reasonable percentage in comparison to 5 mans, and actual leveling definitely not the majority.
You actually didn’t have to spend gold to feed your pet man… i don’t know where this misconception is coming from.
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Re reading your post, it’s cool you don’t like classic man. You enjoy what you have, and I enjoy what I have. But the things your saying are extremely wrong. You don’t know the rotations, you think you HAVE to spend money to feed your pet. All of your opinions are based on misconceptions you have on how the class performs these rotations.
You say immolation trap is pointless, that’s wrong. Is it used all the time? Definitely not. Its situational. I don’t know man, it seems like you have a lot of opinions and that’s fine, but make sure they’re not based on wrong facts.
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Carefull, while I will agree that classic hunters are VERY broken. Game Play was FAR more deadly from Classic thru Lich King. The ability to effectively use traps and kiting tactics were REQUIRED for survival.
Current hunters NOT in PVP have no reason to even learn how to kite anymore. CC is no longer a class roll. THAT is mindless.
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