Lay it to me straight friends and lesser friends, is playing Hunter still fun and engaging enough to play? Or should I give it a hard pass. I dont care about pvp or getting the highest damage. Im thinking about playing a hunter, but I also know pruning has left many classes barren and all I really see are doomsday post here so im not sure if i should make one or not.
Thanks.
I think survival hunter is possibly the most fun spec in the game.
Bm is better and a lot of people find it fun.
Mm sucks
Hunter is fun.
Most Hunters I see right now are BM Hunters. I am a BM Hunter and thriving right now… doing only Dungeon Finder: currently at Mythic +10/+11, Heroic BoD Conclave, Normal Crucible of Storms. Somewhat easy to be invited on Dungeon Finder as long as you have a decent Raider io. They want your Lust Pet both on Mythic + and Raid. Single Target and AoE DPS is very decent so far.
On 8.2, Nazjatar and Mechagon, BM is sweet easy. BM has a lot of pets that can tank. Dying on PvE World is somewhat next to impossible whether you aggro the whole area or not. Pet can sacrifice tank while you run away from range or just do feign death. And you also have a tanking follower… really easy to survive. Got Revered and now flying for just a week. Was able to solo the waves of mobs surrounding Murloco… can have the best flying Seahorse in Nazjatar very soon.
On Survival, I am not a fan up to now becoz of the same reason… theyre melee. Rogues and Demon Hunters are the current melee flavor for Mythic+. Ret Palys, DKs and Warriors also want a slot on Mythic + or Raid. Gotta be hard to be invited on Pre-made dungeons coz you would be the least favorite among the melees. But if the raid group or Mythic+ group doesnt care of group composition, Survival can be invited.
MM Hunter. I dunno. They play without a pet. That’s one factor they are not needed in groups if they cant provide Lust to the group. Not sure how good they are with the new Essences. Roaming around Nazjatar without a tanking pet must be rough. It depends on how good is their NPC follower in tanking. If your expert on handling mobs/tons of mobs by kiting them all, sure why not? But no matter how they argue, BM Hunter is really easier and efficient on open PvE World.
Nope, hunter the worse class ever. Stick with your cuddly panda monk.
Thanks
I mean I play every race, but monks areeee pretty great and pandas are cuddly youre right.
I would recommend that you try it out.
I’ve played as BM myself since the start of Legion(when I lost my old SV spec).
The spec itself is okay if you ask me. At times I feel that something’s missing. Though that’s mostly when I raid, I would like for the spec to have a bit more depth. Both in it’s core as well as in terms of talent choices.
As of right now, most of the talents are basic stand-alone stuff. If you like this, sure.
For open world content, questing/leveling, it’s more than okay. There isn’t really anything missing there.
Again, it’s not a bad spec IMO. Just that it has potential for more to be added.
I find Marksmanship to be straight forward. Despite that you never need to have any downtime with it, it still feels slow when playing. I would say that most of that comes from Aimed Shot. I’ve never really been a fan of casting. I like having instant shots as that’s what I imagine for the class.
Again, if you don’t mind the Aimed Shot casts, and if you like big hits. AND, if you have no real interest in your pet, MM is the spec for you.
Survival, is a very niche spec. I feel that it tries to hard to be both melee and ranged at the same time, not succeeding in anything really. Although, this is just my opinion. And, as we all know, opinions vary a lot. Some love it.
Considering it’s supposed to be a melee spec but you have so much leeway in terms of what you can do from afar. Some very much like this.
You’re gonna notice that the spec has some similarities to that of Beast Mastery. If you like playing with a pet and if you like getting into the thick of it.
Go for Survival.
Noone else can really tell you what to do. Try them yourself. It’s the best way to determine what you prefer.
Do it. All 3 specs are a blast at the moment with survival being my favorite. Survival feels like it can fight at 30yd no problem.
bm is good ans suv is pretty fun.
It can be depending on the content. I am a filthy casual. I have mained a shaman and hunter since vanilla and this expansion has me feeling sort of meh about hunter in general but that is just a personal opinion based on my own personal tastes.
I have always loved BM. BM is all about pets. I really dislike how blizzard neutered pets. Everything is homogenized/normalized. There aren’t any real unique pets anymore with unique abilities. The coolest thing about BM seems to be the pvp talent tree dire beasts. And when you aren’t in wpvp/instanced pvp it feels really bad not having dire beasts.
We lost our charged lightning graphics and anything that made the spec seem flashy. It honestly feels like I just hit cobra shot a billion times while trying to maintain 3 barbed shot stacks and the occasional boring kill command.
MM feels ok. I haven’t really played MM since cata so I for one am not an expert on it. But holy crap does it feel good when the stars align and you have cds. Outside of that its like an arms warrior its boring to me.
SV… i am not a fan. I was truly a fan of the old range sv. I actually gave melee SV the benefit of the doubt several times. This expansion is definitely way better than previous but its still not for me.
TLDR; it’s worth playing depending on what you want out of the game and what content you are doing.
MM is fun SV is incredibly fun! In every aspect of the game.
MM is not as bad as people say it is in PvE. It has very high single target – highest in the class, in fact, and very comparable to some of the better DPS specs out there. It’s mobility isn’t too bad, either. There weren’t any fights in BoD that felt crippling as MM. It’s a bit of a slower playstyle than BM and cooldown management is simpler but it is guaranteed to be GCD-capped because of Steady Shot. I’d actually give it a try.
It is, however, as bad as people say it is in PvP arenas. It’s actually pretty good in battlegrounds, but ultimately worthless in any situation where it will get focused.
Remember: Lone Wolf is an optional baseline passive. You can still summon a pet for questing and bloodlust. It is a DPS loss, but on single target it’s only a minor one. It is true that it’s a big DPS loss on multitarget.
However, BM is indeed still much better for soloing. The main reasons are the AoE. The most obvious part is the target limit: MM is still limited to a maximum of 6 targets for AoE and BM when speedrunning solo content will be pulling more than that all the time (my 110-120 run often included pulls of 10-15 full-strength mobs). The less obvious but critically important part is that the AoE damage is coming from the pet. This means both pet threat and Ferocity leech which is often under-appreciated. That leech is the main reason I’m able to handle such a high number of mobs at once.
I should also add: the reason why you see a lot of doom and gloom about Hunters these days is because for a lot of people it feels like a straight downgrade v.s. what we had before Legion. There are numerous examples. Masoschism does a good job at detailing them. In short:
As for the last one: the elephant in the room is Survival being a melee spec that plays nothing like its pre-Legion ranged spec, and this is pretty much the single most divisive issue with the class over the past couple of years. As you can see, for some people it’s the best thing ever and totally makes the class for them. For others, it’s a loss of their favourite spec and it totally breaks the class for them. I’m in the latter camp but you might like it.
Um, no. No, it can’t. You WILL have problems if you try that
I think that Bepples nailed it pretty well with those two posts.
BM is much better for SOLOING both on AoE and Single Targets. Look at Nazjatar or Mechagon’s level 121 elite rare, my BM can now solo them. I can chain heal my pet until the elite dies.
MM’s pet is soft. It dies quickly. And if it dies, MM should start kiting. But Hunter’s abilities were already pruned. MM cant kite elite targets anymore.
I am just saying, whatever MM’s reasoning, BM is better and easier than MM on World PvE.
Well, yeah. My post agrees with that. The leech interaction works in single-target as well, BM does more pet damage, therefore it gets more passive leech healing. The point was the difference is especially pronounced in AoE situations. I killed 2 mil HP rares easily as Marksman, too, without the pet dying. However, I can’t speed-pull 10-15 mobs at once as MM. It’s not equipped to handle that like BM is. And that’s where most of the difference lies. Because, let’s be honest, on single-target elites BM and MM will both kill them with ease.
Not really, unless you’re in a mass AoE situation. Once again, the only core difference is that much more damage is being done by the pet as BM so if the pet is ferocity it will be getting a lot of passive healing. Otherwise, BM also has spirit beasts in case there’s some splash damage to the Hunter (e.g. Harvester rare in Mechagon). In single target situations an MM pet probably won’t die. There are very few mobs in the game where the ferocity healing would actually be a difference between the pet living and dying.
As for kiting: yeah, we’ve lost abilities, but most of the important kiting stuff is still there. We still have Concussive Shot (which now gets a duration increase from Steady Shot) and Tar Trap. We don’t have our knockback trap as a baseline anymore but we do have Bursting Shot. That only really leaves Scatter Shot which is now a PvP talent, but that’s unlikely to be a make-or-break ability when it comes to kiting.
Now, some elites can be immune to knockback and slow effects, but that just means you would still have trouble with them before all the pruning.
There’s nothing that has been pruned that results in us no longer being able to kite elites. That’s an exaggeration.
Yes, and my post said that too. The problem is your earlier post heavily implied MM could not use a pet and did not have access to Bloodlust.
Umm people will give more info as above but I’ll give my 2 cents
Survival. Is now Melee if you did not know. This spec is my main spec that I play. While melee, half the kit is ranged. You are deepened on your pet. It died, you are eff. I find the spec to have a always something going on. It has nice movement and escapes.
Beast-mastery. One of the easiest hunter spec and to many, the dulls. However it does well for itself.
Marksman. This spec is not doing well, however It’s harder then BM. When I play MM, I used a pet. MM does more damage without a pet but you loss that nice tank and you die petty easy.
I have fun playing MM a ton. I also enjoy playing bm and survival. They are all extremely fun in my opinion, and they are easy to level as well. They also deal good damage. Capturing and taming pets and naming them is also extremely fun 
If you play it wrong, it does suck. Play it right? It’s awesome.