Community Council discussion on Hunter design

[Allieddeath-blackrock]

@Ghorak-laughing-skull

When you say “leaning”, are you talking about a specific type of content/area of the game, or are you talking about [design] theme?

Which area of the game did the full SV specialization perform best within.

World Content
Instanced PvE (which has two wildly different states, they being: Dungeons and Raids.)
PvP

@Ghorak-laughing-skull

This is not the same as saying that “this is where it found its’ niche”. This is you saying that X+Y skills, combined with Z talents, were decent enough for the purpose of dealing damage in the aforementioned areas. “Niche” implies increased strength, in this case. Again, choosing to rely on those melee skills + talents for the purpose of dealing damage, would not by any means amount to more than what you could get out of sticking to your ranged attacks.

My entire post was written in a PvP context. You brought up Group PvE, which I showed how 11/16 of the talents have little to no use in it and are practically irrelevant in a min/max raiding build.

Let’s clear some stuff up about Hunter PvP.

The Hunter Class, including SV, wasn’t required to force an engagement in melee due to the critical contribution of MM abilities, and I never suggested otherwise. But in nearly every engagement in PvP, the Hunter would never have 100% ranged uptime either, more like 50% or less ranged uptime under offensive pressure.

This lack of relative ranged uptime wasn’t limited to us kiting melee classes, but to line-of-sight issues, in addition to other casters like the Frost Mages, who would root us in place and sneak into the deadzone, nullifying ranged uptime. Kiting, LoS, deadzone exploitation, and being forced into melee range each nullified ranged uptime.

This is where Survival gets rolling. We didn’t worry about being snared, we didn’t need to run away, and we can choose to kite while the other Hunters had to kite. That’s the key difference.

This head-canon about “Stick to ranged” was hardly an evident reality on the ground, unless that pack of Alliance wasn’t focusing you, because under high offensive pressure you can’t maintain a high ranged uptime. This is why all Hunters failed miserably in all but 5v5 Arena back in TBC, and even then, stood back behind better designed classes and drained the opposing team’s mana with [Viper Sting] while pitifully soaking up heals.