fun fact, the hunter identity stems from other games and what hunters have been throughout history. what other games have done is relevant.
name 1 other game that has a pet user that uses a ranged weapon, so the rest of the class can compare and contrast, and not just take your word for it.
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Guild Wars 2
Blizzard based their hunter class on a game that came out almost 8 years after wow…
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your post above did not specify that
No it didn’t but let’s be for real here. The conversation is about what the hunter fantasy always was. And the claim was that
So, if we’re going to get to where the hunter identity originally stems from we’re going to need to find we’re stems from, not what other companies have taken as inspiration.
Edit: I also said we’d compare and contrast.
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Fair enough.
Dungeons and Dragons and any MUD (multi-user dungeon) that stemmed from that. There are hundreds of them and they were the precursor to graphically designed MMOs.
Yeah no, not letting you get a pass on that. Specifics or it didn’t happen. We’re comparing and contrasting today. Also which version of DnD? I don’t know much about them but I know there is more than 1 version that people play that all have their own rules and classes.
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Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition - Ranger’s Guide - Author Rick Swan. You honestly sitting there thinking WoW came up with this concept originally or you just trolling cause you lost this conversation and derailed this thread?
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duck hunt. you shoot things and your pet fetches the loot. and you know what inspired duck hunt? real life hunters. both those who use pets to help hunt and those who don’t.
it’s almost like a hunter is a take on how humanity survived in the past which involved many various methods such as using animals like wolves, group hunting things like mammoth, or spear fishing.
edit: we can also use runescape, old arcade games where you hunted without a pet, etc. hunting with a gun isn’t unique to wow. hunting without a gun isn’t unique to wow. what’s unique to wow is the rotation and the art style. i hope you realize that things like hunters are based on reality and prior history now.
Amusing that you think because asking for specifics to compare and contrast is some how an indication to you that I think wow came up with and concept originally. I mean, you do know what comparing and contrasting is right?
It’s where you take different things and you compare their similarities and contrast their differences.
Like this one, in ADnD handbook under fight about weapon specializations
No other character class–not even ranger or paladin–is
allowed weapon specialization.
You also do know that DnD also didn’t come up with everything is has originally? Let’s talk about the ranger. Probably the most iconic ranger, Aragorn, has existed since long before DnD. The Lord of the Rings books were published in 1954 and DnD didn’t come out originally for another 20 years. And Tolkien had been working on it since as early as 1917.
Edit: love when the forums mess things up.
In reference to famous rangers the book references Robin Hood, probably the most famous archer ever. Also Jack the Giant Killer, who killed a giant by dropping a draw bridge on a giant and hitting him in the head with a pick axe… very rangery… And finally the huntresses of Diana. Roman god of the hunter, while she is only associated with dogs by turning a guy into a dear and setting his own dogs on him, they did use hunting dogs in rome, so shrug
the ranger can use any weapon and wear any armor, several of his special
abilities are usable only when he is wearing studded leather or lighter armor.
Half way consistent with wow here. Clearly there is no limitation on abilities with armor though.
Okay here we are, something useful.
Rangers are adept with both trained and untamed creatures, having a limited
degree of animal empathy. If a ranger carefully approaches or tends any natural animal,
he can try to modify the animal’s reactions.
So yes, rangers can tame and use animals. Not that I was ever denying they couldn’t. But it’s not a base part of their class. Nor are they a specialized into using ranged weapons like hunters have always been.
Okay, that’s a fair one, I will admit. But that’s also right in line with what hunters where at the beginning of wow. A ranged weapon user with a pet, minus the fetching the ducks. That said, when you hear the word hunt, I imagine unless you are a duck hunter, duck hunting is not what you jump to. When I hear the word hunt with no qualifiers, I think of someone sitting in the woods waiting for an waiting for a dear or something to run by. Or you know, something along the lines of Elmer Fudd, but less getting owned by the bunny.
It’s almost like the original design of the hunter class was taken from several different inspirational places, melded into 1, and then giving a specific fantasy by Blizzard that they have no backed off from, but make stupid decisions mechanically.
It even says in their hunter class page, that hunters in wow use ranged weapons, despite having updated it’s features to include melee things. If the fantasy for wow hunters wasn’t to be a ranged weapon user exclusively, why not include at least a passing mention about it in their general class description?
But hey… melee hunters gotta justify it to themselves somehow.
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it’s almost like blizz is lazy and doesn’t actually bother maintaining their website and resorted to a third party when it came time to update their forums.
the original wow hunter wasn’t ranged only though. it had melee abilities as well. it just happened that in vanilla fashion, the melee stuff wasn’t balanced well and was useless compared to ranged and such hunters went more and more ranged as the years passed.
that’s because you asked for a game where you use a gun and pet. runescape is an example of using a ranged weapon without a pet. and there are various types of bounty hunters that use stealth and melee techniques/silent weaponry like blow guns. there are multiple types of hunters.
i’m for a melee hunter but i want a good one and i want my favorite spec back (ranged survival). you should really stop blind hating people just because they have a different opinion than you.
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Says you. Your opinion counts, but it doesn’t count as everybody’s elses. Sorry, you’re wrong and survival is a justifiable fantasy for anyone who wishes it.
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They have literally updated the page since suvival went melee, but yeah, they just didn’t want to put effort into the rest of it.
The original hunters had melee weapons and abilities yes, but they were always a ranged class. Go on classic right now, and try to melee a melee dps as a hunter, let me know how that goes for you.
This is a case of earlier game design. Hunters had the advantage of using a ranged weapon with instant casts so they had a weakness, in that they could only use that ranged weapon outside of 8 yards from their target. Well to prevent hunters from being completely useless in melee they gave hunters melee weapons and melee abilities, to make them not 100% useless in melee.
Correct, I did say it was a fair example of what I asked for.
Never said their wasn’t. But we’re talking about wow hunters.
Who’s blindly hating? Turns out, when you post things, people can post their contradictory opinion to what you posted. And that’s not hating, that’s called having a different opinion. They are then allowed to argue their opinion and debate yours. It’s called a conversation.
But it’s not my opinion.
A ranger in dnd can operate without an animal companion a survival hunter in wow currently can not.
If you want to be melee, there are plenty of other melee classes to be, that do melee better. That said, I’ve never advocated for getting rid of msv. My opinion on that has always been give RSV back as a 4th spec or make a new class for msv where it can truly be allowed to shine.
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A survival hunter in wow currently can operate, just not at maximum potential. They’ll have to wait a long while for that focus regen, that’s for sure. Will they be at maximum potential in DnD without a pet? Depends on the GM.
So what you’re asking for is hardly even a Hunter. One wonders why you’re even bothering with this class if you seem to hate the most prominent and identifying features of it. This probably isn’t the class for you.
Ridiculous argument. BM is consistently one of the more popular specs in the game and it is the pet spec. It’s not played much because it has minimal appeal among long-time Hunters due to being melee and it doesn’t have anything nearly special enough to warrant other melee players rerolling to it.
No they did not because when they added Lone Wolf all the specs were ranged. When Survival went melee it lost Lone Wolf because it wouldn’t have made any sense at all to have a Hunter spec that doesn’t have the most basic elements that define a Hunter.
You can forget discussing what other RPGs do with Hunters or anything else because I don’t care. In this game, World of Warcraft, Hunters were from the very beginning defined as ranged weapon users with pets. Having Lone Wolf at all is a step too far for some Hunters. Having no ranged weapon is a step too far for many more. Having neither? I don’t think a single person who genuinely likes the class and what it stands for can agree to such a thing. And that’s why I dismiss you and Aruk as people who evidently aren’t interested in playing a Hunter spec but rather making a 3rd Warrior DPS spec in the Hunter class. If you want a Warrior spec, go play a Warrior. This class has well and truly had enough of people who aren’t invested in it at all deciding its direction.
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To add to this: it’s not even solely what they write about the class. It’s also evident through how they handle the class in game. Despite all the effort in reframing Hunters as no longer a purely ranged class we still have a bow as our class icon, we still start off as ranged, we have no baseline melee elements, and whenever they add new baseline elements such as the unpruned abilities and covenant abilities in Shadowlands they are invariably themed around being ranged. Survival itself is mostly ranged at this point with only a couple token abilities keeping it melee.
Despite Survival, Hunters will always be a ranged class.
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You missed the part where I said I was fine with the pet (but you didn’t let that stop you); only that lone wolf ought to be an option for survival as it is with marksman.
Upthread, someone wondered why the spec gets so little attention from the player base; a melee spec that is pet dependent is my guess as to why.
Blizzard determines that, not us. One could just as easily argue that lone wolf doesn’t make sense at all, for any hunter spec. Let us not pretend that they haven’t been making it all up as they went along.
The original hunters in vanilla had melee as an option; blizzard just balanced it poorly.
You don’t like melee survival, apparently. Well, some people do.
Correct, but…
This is where you are wrong. It wasn’t balanced poorly, it was balanced as intended. Hunters from the start were always meant to be a ranged class, but because game design philosophy back was different, every class had a weakness. That weakness was ranged attacks for hunters required to be more than 8 yards away. And to make hunters not completely dead in the water they gave them the ability to do some melee. Otherwise once anyone got inside that 8 yard range, hunters would be obliterated with no way to defend themselves.
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