Such a great post. Wish I could “like” it more than once. The art of playing a Vanilla hunter is worth acquiring. Hunters have one of the best toolboxes in the game.
I was always astonished to find players who never bothered even reading their spellbooks. Many had no idea they could do certain things that hunters can do that can turn the tables in battle.
Oh but don’t worry some one is bound to say Leeway was this effective for everyone is Vanilla and Batching is working perfectly…
Getting charged at 40 yards is not authentic, nor is getting cleaved at 20 yards…
Which only demonstrates how misguided, delusional and/or in denial they are.
Why there is no one presently involved in WoW development who can even make the Classic hunter class work properly.
The Great Pruning of 2015 (same year as the disastrous “no flight ever” debacle) was so thoroughly asinine, they actually made it impossible to function fully.
After WoD if you wanted to tame Savage, for example, you couldn’t – Savage is an invisible mob whose footprints you had to track… but to tame the mob you needed (1) hunter’s mark and (2) a freezing trap.
Anyone even passingly familiar with the hunter class and attendant abilities, including taming and available pets, would have considered this before neutering hunters and stripping them completely of their basic toolkits.
Since then, all classes feel essentially the same, despite having different abilities.
I also disliked the removal of buffs – In addition to removing some great buffs, the act of passing these out was part of a social ritual that helped furnish the cement that bound the community together.
Meh, retail sucks.
BTW Good post.
You could still deadzone kite a Tauren warrior in vanilla bud, it was just a little harder but not by any means impossible.
This modern incarnation is just garbage.
You’re right. Nothing like breaking up an incoming attack only to have it execute from the next map over.
Nor is it authentic to sheep a mob but have it blow a lightning bolt at you through its little sheep lips.
But that happened in Classic, not in Vanilla.
Because you would use polearms which icnreased your melee range making deadzone non existant.
But they scrapped it out in beta.
It is a bad design which makes playing a hunter always a disvantage in competitive scenarios with absurd unbalance ways to solve it… and was the reason they gave hunter a lot of CC in TBC then a lot of Burst in wotlk till realising this wasn’t working very good at all.
I usually used either 2HS or polearms… in Wrath some pally need rolled my darn polearm…boy I was hopping mad… LOL
All classes felt the same before the pruning tbh.
Too many abilities doing the same exact thing was a major issue.
Also in WoD all hunter specs had traps, they were remvoed in legion and re-added.
MoP class builds were some of the most fun.
Except that we have A TON of burst in Classic; damage is not and never really has been a hunter issue.
Hunters are insanely good in Vanilla, but in Classic where you cant execute vanilla era technique because the game server is busted; this is where the problem is.
Dead zone is fine, heck we depend on every melee class having a deadzone; its not just us that has one.
Dead zone is a fantastic design IF you know how to manipulate it because it adds soo much depth to the counterplay between hunters and warriors.
Take away the dead zone and shizzam it’s world of MeleeCraft; this is not fun for anyone.
I was wondering why I don’t hate hunters in Classic.
This explains it!
It literally works far less of the time in classic, on pservers and in vanilla, your FD+trap worked so well it was basically playing a hunter 101.
It being bugged really fundamentally hurts hunters in pvp in a massive way, its nice when you arent a hunter because I also like easy kills, but its bad for every single player who decides to roll hunter.
And if we really want to shi- on one class, we can all agree rogues deserve our spite much more than hunters do.
You could say that in any expansion though.
People loved wotlk SV hunter
Cata paladin
SL/sl lock tbc
etc
MoP was ok time to be a feral druid, but terrible to be ret pally, especially for pvp for instance.
I couldn’t tell the difference from playing most of my classes in MoP gameplay wise, it was way way too homoginized.
Ya you have a ton of burst everywhere in classic.
Deadzone is fine in classic because balance is non existant and there is no real competitive scenario.
Also you say how deadzone is fine in classic but classic cant do the same techniques… soo its def not fine lol nor a fantastic design atm.
They took away deadzone and casters are fairly heavy on rated ladders and still bursting people a lot. Difference is people can do something about those bursts nowadays otherwise my hunter would kill anyone on a single double tap+rapid fire combos.
Indeed, I feel a better design for the deadzone would have been (in hindsight) if you are out of melee range. That deadzone is extremely painful if a player or mob closes the gap, more so if its a player, and is able to viciously kill you and you not being able to fight back… this is why my hunter is an engineer (also for bullets while leveling and some nice guns and goggles) for the trinkets like the Net-O-Matic root and shoot!
Hunter dead zone is the only thing that balanced hunters. No dead zone is just stupid imo.
Exactly! We went from hunters to a ridiculous melee class with a 41 yard range… IMO eliminating the dead zone was idiotic.
Hunters are always complaining that they aren’t OP enough.
What about melee? They have a 5-42 yard dead zone. Should melee be able to hit you from 42 yards away?
Fixed it for you.
If you’re a hunter and you’re letting an enemy player sit in your deadzone, you deserve to get whats coming to you. A hunter has so many options to kite and remain at range, that it is their own fault they are getting deadzoned.
I’m honestly surprised there’s so many people in here advocating for the deadzone - I played during late vanilla all the way til now and I’ve always seen nothing but complaints and good-riddances about it. What changed?