Hunter is a fundamentally confused class, and that confusion is first expressed through Blizzard in the class and subsequently through the passionate people who play the class. One person thinks x about Hunter, and knows it in his Heart of Hearts to be true, and another thinks y about Hunter, and knows it to be true. Since becoming active on these forums over the past few weeks, I’ve read a lot of posts and a lot of differing opinions.
It seems to me that there are two divergent camps in the Hunter world, two camps that a little akin to American political affiliations in their inability to reconcile. However, within these two camps exists even more divisions and opinions. I don’t claim to know them all, but here’s my understanding of it:
There are those who think Hunter is about literal hunting. The “Go out into the woods with your camo pants, orange blazer, duck call and shotgun” kind.
And there’s the type of Hunter who thinks that the Hunter is, and always was, all about the pets. Because, seriously, there is no other class that allows the empathetic connection between player character and beast from the wilderness. All other pet classes have extraordinarily limited pet selection compared to Hunters (And I believe this is one excuse Blizzard has conveniently used throughout the years to say to themselves "Well Hunters already get 5 million different pets to choose from so we’re just not going to give them any attention this expansion in terms of “Class fantasy.”)
These 2 fantasies are not mutually exclusive. I myself am of the “Survivalist overseer of the Forest with my lifelong companion tiger along my side” type, but combinations are pretty diverse.
The problem is that, without extreme overhaul and a serious look at the class’s design from Blizzard, these two fantasies cannot come together - because to cater to 1 is to neglect the other.
When you finally give “pet” oriented hunters a bone, then “hunting” oriented hunters freak out, saying that they don’t want pet maintenance or any of that crap. When you develop the “hunting” oriented side of things, then you just ignore the other side as well (But, hey, us pet oriented Hunters are used to it by now).
What are some solutions?
I can come up with suggestions based on 2 routes of development:
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Split the class even more between BM and MM/SV by developing BM even more. I’m not gonna go over some my own suggestions but if they were implemented just for BM, that’d be an excellent start. What if pet maintenance was only for BM, for instance? Just some thoughts to get the juices flowing.
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Add a 4th spec to Hunter, bring back old SV, and call the new one Ranger.
Or, bonus number 3. Add another class which can’t tame pets, and call it something like Ranger… or something. I don’t know.
Point is I’m just sick of this, okay? I am.
I feel like there’s oldschool hunters and there’s new hunters. I feel all the oldschool hunters appreciated all the old RPG elements of the class that were taken away over the years, and that, in reality, Blizzard didn’t really check with the community before making these sweeping barbaric cut-it-down-with-an-axe changes to the class. I mean, they just outright gutted features instead of finding creative ways of reworking them and making them exciting.
And then I feel like all the new hunters, all the hunters that came in after Cata and all of that… And, heck, even the super baby hunters who’ve only been around since Legion or something and they never even played old SV. And I feel like those hunters are protecting their pride against all the oldschoolers by fiercely claiming that, no, all of those old RPG elements of the class weren’t really appreciated and people were glad when all of those thing were gradually removed over the years.
And it’s like - is there any other class with this kind of philosophical and sociological divide? Are mages this way? Are mages starved for more class identity? Do they feel like they’ve been shorted by Blizzard’s laziness or desire to appeal to the mass market as opposed to people who actually want good RPG elements? Maybe it’s because I haven’t played mage for 16 years and thought about ways to improve the class on a near-daily basis, but I highly doubt it. I kinda feel like the whole mage fantasy has been pretty much fulfilled. You know? And yet, here I am, at least, still almost fundamentally disapointed with my favorite class in the game.
And why is it my favorite class? You gotta ask yourselves these kinds of things. It’s not because of what it is.
It’s because of what it could be.
And that’s a really crappy feeling. It would suck even for just one expansion, but instead Hunters, a vast majority of Hunters who’ve just given up on the prospect of things ever changing, are stuck feeling this way for 3, 4 expansions.
At what point does promise expire and the player just leaves? Would it be better to just migrate to a different class, a class that you may not necessarily enjoy as much, just so you can feel the relief of having a completely realized class fantasy and identity? What does contentness in your class actually feel like?
All more or less rhetorical.
Thanks for reading.