So… I was thinking the other day…
Were hunters originally designed by Devs to pull in raids?
And what about AQ40? Do you think they had in mind for us to pull with pets inside AQ40?
or do you think players eventually found out that pulling with hunters were the safest and most efficient way for raiding?
Some of my oldest wow memories are pulling into freezing trap as a hunter in dungeons back in OG vanilla.
Not sure what people did in raids
I was raiding in early 2005, we had a hunter raid lead and he pulled.
I don’t remember the pet pulling being a thing but maybe some did that too. I used to use eyes of the beast to have fun messing around with the other faction back then.
I think so, and the only problem that took place post 1.9 was the overbloating of gear that made Hunter worse than it should be due to the fact that warriors scale way too good.
Because of this healers became stronger than they should be and in turn warriors were able to “Fury prot” their way to victory, additionally fury DPS but that’s less a problem.
Me too! I absolutely loved chaining the freezing traps to build out CC for my group. Everything was so different back then, we used CC because we didn’t know how to handle mass groups. I actually kinda miss it. Sure if you chain pull and cleave you can get through the dungeon faster, but it just doesn’t have that same sense of adventure, lol.
I did the pulling for my group back in Vanilla and it was kinda fun, but these days our MTs just pull and it’s completely fine. I suppose if you’re trying to speed clear, having a hunter do it so they can FD if the timing or pull is bad is helpful, but I’ve just never been in much of a hurry. So hunter pulling in raids, outside a few niche pulls, doesn’t seem super necessary. It’s just a thing they can do or not.
Back in my day 
we used detect magic to mark our polymorph targets.
Needed detect traps up to see traps, and needed to actually CC targets pre-nerf dungeons and raids because Elite NPC’s hit plate who did not have shields equipped like they had the armor class of a level 1 rabbit.
almost like the game was supposed to be an RPG
now just do whatever is efficient because the game has been solved
I’d consider the Feign Death ability to be evidence that hunters were always designed/intended to be raid pullers.
Designed specifically for that reason alone? No. Hunters could pull, period. It was a part of their role.
Back in the vanilla days when Blizz would show daily comics from users, there was one where the mobs in molten core would see a hunter cat, chase it, and die. With the other mobs going ‘‘should we help?’’ ‘‘Nah lets just go 1 by 1’’.
So it definitely happened with pets too!