Hunters have always been basically a meme to a lot of people in Vanilla/Classic. If they don’t do well, they get dunked on. If they do better than someone else, they get dunked on and are broken. If something goes wrong in raid, it’s probably a hunter getting blamed. It seems like so many people don’t think hunters deserve any loot or respect and are the easiest class to play- despite having one of the highest skill caps and requiring understanding of some of the most niche game mechanics to master. Even in TBC when hunters were meta, I had to stop playing mine come wrath because of the amount of hate hunters got- regardless of how much i loved the class and BM as a spec.
SoD was a great opportunity to help refresh that reputation and put them in a respectable place in the eyes of the player base, at least in vanilla era.
I don’t think you guys have done them any justice in this regard by validating people’s incorrect assumptions about the class with nerf after nerf and offering no real added playstyle changes or direction for players that love the class and don’t necessarily want to play a marksman that tags along as a raid buff in every iteration of the game.
Hunter is the only pure DPS class left in SoD. Give them options and let people who enjoy the class feel powerful. Take inspiration from TBC hunters. Give us Legion hunter abilities to spice up BM. Give us an actual tank spec and don’t nerf it to the ground as soon as people complain about it. Because people are going to complain about hunters anyway. Especially at this level bracket where they are at their strongest. It’s only downhill from here unless you can offer us something truly different from Vanilla.
Anyway, this post made some really solid points. I feel it’s worth including.
This is purely a product of being level 25. This was always possible even before runes existed. It’s just not going to be the case later on, so all these nerfs are trying to fix a problem that fixes itself. Nerf wind serpents if you want. I agree they are stupid broken.
SOD had almost no actual thinking go into it, anyone that has ever twinked in the 19/29 bracket in classic know hunters get ridiculously good without the new abilities
The people that design this version of wow are really bad at making anything fun so they have to copy and paste stuff from other versions of wow which are fun onto the base game while doing very few new cool things
This is the most dumbed down version of wow and it’s only goal is to farm monthly active users (once a quarter) by increasing the level cap. If you zoom out SOD is about shareholders just like everything else blizzard does.
You are using too much of your brain on this when the people designing it are treating it like school assignment they only need a D+ on.
Hunters were always strong in the 19 and 29 bracket even in vanilla before you were born. But it was never their pets killing everyone and everything in sight, it was their kiting ability. Hunter pets are out of control and the hunter community is a joke if they don’t see it.
Consider this nerfed rune. Is it unplayable now? Or is it still the BiS rune for that slot. If after being nerfed, it’s still the favorite choice, then maybe the rune really was a problem.
Its phase 1, and hunter pets were crazy broken. It was not a false assumption. I do agree that the runes were probably one of the least interesting though.