im usually a plate wearing person but I have an itch to play a hunter on classic hard. I know with friends and guilds I would be able to come for groups for anything but I am a fairly competitive person and I want to be able to perform.
Not just talking about hunters current state but throughout the phases of classic, are there real reasons to bring hunters to raids, do they do competitive damage with most classes, pvp etc just tell me what you guys think.
The main reason is the use of Tranq shot. Only Hunters could have it. You need to win the Tranq Shot recipe in Molten Core to learn it.
The most dominant DPS specs for Classic Hunters is MM. The rotation is just spamming Aimed Shot while bringing in some Multishots and making sure Auto Shots are not clipped. The single target DPS is decent. But if your Multishot can hit 2 more targets, that’s where we could top. Single Target DPS Patchwerk fight mechanics are dominated by Rogues/Warriors. More than 5 targets, Mages dominate the damage meters. 3 target fights, if we can hit all 3 targets, Hunters dominate such fights.
They said Hunters DPS scale poorly with higher gear. I need to confirm that.
On PvP, there is a potential to top on killblows if you are not disturbed from range. The utility for PvP: Scatter Shot, Wing Clip, Concussive Shot, Serpent Sting (anti stealth) are there. But Classic has one of the worst mechanics… you cant lay trap when in combat. You have to use your feign death to trap. I dont know if this is no biggie to other hunters, but on me, it’s a big thing.
That’s why I find Classic Hunters a bit sucky as compared to other versions of Hunter from other Expansion. To me, The Burning Crusade Hunter or the Wrath of the Lich King Hunter were the best version of Hunter.
I actually thought the BC version of Hunter was really bad. They weren’t careful enough with Steady Shot’s addition so the class just became a rotation of Steady Shot and Auto Shot. I really didn’t like the clipping nature of Auto-Shot before WotLK; it led to these extremely static rotations, and the design of the rest of the toolkit led to a situation where you would only use a small part of it in PvE. It was really disappointing back in the day when I found out that Serpent Sting was something that was never to be used, for example.
The class suddenly got really, really good in WotLK, though. It’s a very stark contrast between the WotLK revamps and the Legion revamps; people were, for the most part, very happy with how WotLK changed Hunters whereas there was a lot of controversy when 7.0 and Legion dropped. I prefer Focus much more over Mana, though, so my favourite iterations of the class are the ones before Legion that had Focus, in particular the MoP iteration.
I will say, as a BM Hunter, I am having a blast in Classic. I may not top the charts in terms of DPS, but I tend to fill a utility role in terms of trapping, Healer Protection and Tranq Shots when necessary.
Another fun aspect is pet taming and training. This is one of the things I missed with out pets in retail, though that said, I am not a fan of the non instant pet to character leveling. This makes the pets you have raised to 60 more valuable.
Currently I have the following the pets,
So far its has been fun and I would recommend giving it a try.
Dorf or Orc are the two races I have selected for my two Classic Hunters. The Dorf Treasure Finding racial and +5 to Guns has been nice.
Orcs +5% to Pet dam, Bloodfury and Hardiness has been helpful.
Good luck and enjoy.
As of right now I’ve benched this hunter I’m posting on and rerolled warrior. Until they fix the feign death bug I have no plans to return to it because it’s so incredibly clunky in pvp it’s nothing like it was in classic