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2008-09-30 22:44:48
It's Been Fun (A Hunter's Eulogy)
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Introduction
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When WotLK was first announced I was plagued with an issue. One issue that I'm sure quite a lot of people will go through or may already be going through the thought process of it. it's been very difficult and I've finally made up my mind...

What character will I be leveling first to 80?

I have two level 70's, a Hunter and a Mage.

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Back Story
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My Hunter I've been playing since Pre-BC. I loved the class idea mainly because of its ranged aspects and I never really liked casters because of their tendency to be "glass cannons." I'm the guy that's always the sniper in FPS's. And since I came from an FPS background, I'm very competitive and PvP is my drive.

I didn't raid much because of my job so I got what I could outside of MC/BWL. I remember doing that crazy chain quest and getting that dragon item from UBRS to get my Legguards of the Chromatic Defier, and farming DM Tribute runs to get my Barbarous Blade. All so I could PvP in the legendary but from 0/21/30 spec. LOVED IT!

Then BC came. I had a new account and a new Hunter this time an Orc instead of a Troll. Leveled to 80, and started arenas! This was back when there were only two arenas and Tornadoes were running around after a set time in Nagrand.

Season 1 was down and was starting to get the hang of things. Then Season 2 and even got up to 1998 in S3 with a Druid in 2v2. Lost a few games and then I quit WoW... frustrated at the mechanics that hurt hunters so much in arena's.

A couple of months later, I came back leveled a Mage for solely PvP because my buddy was a rogue and we were gonna run Mage Rogue. As I was leveling I would get on the tournament realms and PTR's and make premades of 70 mages and do arena's and duels when I was bored of leveling.

Got him to 70 and did straight BG's and arena's. Only did the PvE I had to to get my cloak from badges and rep for head enchant. And did arena's on the side of 10 a week to get what level points I could.

This was at the beginning of season 4.

I played both extensively and I always found my Mage to be a TON easier in arena than my Hunter.

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WotLK BETA
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I was keeping track of both Mage's and Hunters in Beta. I LOVE my Hunter still and after reading the changes of both I was EXTREMELY excited about my Hunter. Even more so because of the lackluster changes to Mages.

There was hope! I was talking to friends and guildmates who I told I would never PvP with my Hunter again and provbably not even bother to level in WotLK.

But then even more great news... there were posts on the Hunter Beta forums! Lots of them! Everyday! And the best part was... they were listening!

"Deterrance should be a trainable skill!"
- Done

"Master's Call Should be used while stunned"
- Done

"Still having mana problems=("
- How about the new Viper? 100% damage converted to Mana!

It was great! Survival talents were amazing, especially Hunting Party! Now everybody would want Hunters in the raid! Before we were wanted for only MD. And it seemed like this would solve our mana problems in arena!

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The SIlence and The Pain
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"Hey Devs! Where'd you go?"
-

"Nerfed Hunting Party? Nerfed Viper?"
-

"Nerf to Survival tree and explosive shot and lock and load?"
-

"Hey Devs, what are you doing to the Hunter class? What's you direction?"
-

"................."
-

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The Conclusion
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We are... and will always remain... the forgotten children of this game. I'm currently in Beta, as you can tell... and this last month has completely broken my heart. The Hunter class is officially dead to me. I have more fun on my mage than I do on my Hunter and I have finally decided that I will now level my Mage, who hit 70 at the beginning of season 4, over my Hunter who I've played since vanilla WoW.

I said before WotLK went into Beta that I would be completely fine with them completely overhauling the Hunter class. Get rid of mana, change pets (which has been at least attempted, but not completely satisfied yet), and skill consolidation or a complete redo of skills because when I play beta I can't even get everything keyboard and have to resort to clicking abilities when my mage can do more with less buttons.

I want to play my Hunter in a competitive PvP environment, but unfortunately, Blizzard doesn't seem to feel the same way or either they don't even know what to do, which seems completely evident with the latest patches and lack of information concerning the direction they want to take.

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Problems
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Our biggest problem has been and will remain to be mana. We deal physical damage and yet we're plagued with having to use mana. I must use mana to Wing Clip, to shoot an arrow, to lay a trap, or to even throw a flare into the air. We know this because that's why we dropped two of our most important stats, Attack Power and Agility, on our weapons to get INTELLECT on 2 ONE-HANDERS and sacrifice a DPS LOSS to run an arena match in AotV just so we can use all of our abilities.

We have more abilities than I can put on my bars, and you keep giving us new ones. Add in the new pet abilities and its overload central. it was bad enough in BC to have to use every ability on my bar and know when to use along with watching my pet and CC's, but in WotLK I can't even keep complete focus because I can't remember what new spells I have since I have about 20 new ones. I have a post around here somewhere that lists my keybindings, and that's not even all of them. I have more than I listed!

"Lock him down!" As Mega and a lot of others have stated, we are easily controlled. Drain... control. That's all they need to do. Get us in Viper on Beta, stay close or LoS, or just kill him!

"He's doing 50% less damage, GG. And I'll just LoS so he has nothing to shoot!"

Pets. Scales horribly. I know this. Blizzard knows this. Will they fix it? Not till after release as it's been said. Sooo... let me get this straight. Something is obviously broken. Both sides know it. We can't fix it... seems like a pretty big issue... but you're not in any rush to fix it? Cool.... Thanks? Moving on then.

The battle of the Global Cooldown. Want to know the worst part of having a bajilion abilities and not even enough room to use them and having to resort to long macros that use 4 abilities? Having every single one of them on the global cooldown. And not just any GCD, the 1.5 GCD. Not even a 1.0 GCD. I might actually be content if we had a 1.0 instead of a 1.5.

Traps, Hunter's Mark, Tracking, Silencing Shot, Aspects, Flare, etc etc. Too many abilties... not enough time. Here's a scenario.

I have track hidden to try and find the rogue. I throw a flare, lay a trap, switch to humanoid tracking when i get the rogue out for that talent I put only 2 points in to actually help me, silencing shot a Cyclone, and switch to aspect of the monkey and put Hunter's Mark on the rogue... I've wasted 8.5 seconds and the only damage I've done was on silencing shot. Something wrong with this? I think so...

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The End
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I'm done =/ I hate to say it, but I am. I'm tired of it. I'm going to stick to my Mage and then level an unholy DK to replace my hunter.

Funny thing is... we get the name Huntard because Hunter's are given the rap of being "retarded"... and it's true... I am a Huntard... for having stuck around this long on a broken class. I should have done something smart and leveled a Warrior or Druid instead.

Good luck Blizzard and good luck to the Hunter's that continue to stick it out or the ones that quit because they don't have or want to level an alt =(
Avatar of Bossfight
Bossfight
2008-10-01 09:58:20
Re: It's Been Fun (A Hunter's Eulogy)
Q u o t e:
And Ghostcrawler, if you're reading this, we're doing this because we lose the class, and I'm sure you know this. But with communication broken down as it has and the complete overhaul of deep talents now and the asking us to wait until after release for some changes, its hard to stay.


I am reading this, but I'm not asking you to stay. I will offer that "threatening to leave" posts don't have a big effect on the development team. We don't do the research to find if you have actually left or not. We also find that people move on from the game for various reasons, and ultimately we can't be held hostage to that kind of tactic for getting in a change you want.

I'm sorry you feel communication has broken down. To my knowledge, this has been a lot more communication than you've ever had with the people actually responsible for class design. It just may be one of those things where a little communication is worse than none at all. We may do things differently next time.

I will say, best of luck. :)
Avatar of Ghostcrawler
Ghostcrawler
2008-10-01 10:10:52
Re: It's Been Fun (A Hunter's Eulogy)
Q u o t e:
Get some of the top raiders and pvpers from each class fly them out and give them a weekend to sit down and talk with dev and design crews.


We do that. We just don't do it in these forums.
Avatar of Ghostcrawler
Ghostcrawler
2008-10-01 23:42:14
Re: It's Been Fun (A Hunter's Eulogy)
Q u o t e:
Why respond to this post instead of, you know, all the other well written ones asking for explanations to the terrible nerfs the class has suffered in this build and the couple previous as you gradually dismantle us into something even more sub par than before? Or even respond to some of the good points made in THIS post instead of just slapping us all with "QQ more"?

It's hard for me to believe that after a week of silence when a patch comes and nerfs the class further the ONLY new blue post actually tells us to cry more. That's just harsh. I wasn't even down on continuing to play my hunter before, but...harsh.


I responded because it's a common tactic for players to threaten to leave. I wanted to point out that it probably doesn't have the effect you think it does (or else why are you advertising it to the community?)

I find it odd that you'd characterize my comments as "QQ more." I was hoping in some small way to clean up the forums without the moderators having to delete threads. We have too many "I'm leaving" posts and they don't accomplish much. If you've had enough, well I am sad, but then go ahead and leave without the fanfare.

Then I stated that I think it's slightly ridiculous to complain about or demand more developer communication here. I'm not a community manager, and even they can't respond to even a fraction of the posts they read every day. It's the blessing and the curse of having such a huge community. On the other hand, we still have managed to be here to a much greater extent than we ever have been before. I've probably made 20 posts tonight. No, we don't drop in every day. We can't. It might be fun to hang out and answer questions and debate the design of the class for an hour a day (x 10 classes remember), but then when are we actually going to, you know, go work on the classes? When you think about it for a minute, you don't really want us spending our time in here at all. :)


Avatar of Ghostcrawler
Ghostcrawler
2008-10-03 23:20:07
Re: It's Been Fun (A Hunter's Eulogy)
Q u o t e:
GC, other than mana concerns in PvE and all the comparisons to other class that are whooping us in DPS in PvE (DK's, Ret Pallys, etc..) virtually ALL the true complaints are about arena.


I can't imagine too many people think that DKs (Unholy I presume) and Ret Pallys are balanced. We won't leave things like that.

Q u o t e:
I am not sure that all the Devs understand just have frustrating arenas have been for us THE ENTIRETY of THE BURNING CRUSADE. We have felt like unwanted red headed step children for OVER a YEAR.


Arenas were not kind to hunters. We do get that. We talk about it all the time. Did we buff hunters too much now for Arenas? I have no doubt you'll disagree, but it is a concern. We need to actually see a lot more arenas (with fewer broken classes in them) to know how things stand. We are trying to make it better, but it's also possible to overdo it. Good for you I guess, but bad for everyone else.

Q u o t e:
NO OTHER CLASS HAS THIS KIND OF PENT UP FRUSTRATION OVER ANY END-GAME ASPECT OF THIS GAME. PLEASE, understand this! Cut us some slack. When people say they are leaving this game, they generally have been considering it for THE ENTIRE PAST YEAR.


On this, though, I can't agree. I am sure you can find plenty of classes with that kind of frustration, because they let me know all the time. Resto druids were good. Feral and balance not so much. Paladins of all specs never had a great time.

Q u o t e:
I am a competitive person. I LOVE PvP gameplay. And I feel rather neglected and spit upon too. Yes, you guys don't know if people leave or not and truly can't really care if they do. BUT, you can understand hopefully why this issue pops up a lot in the hunter forums, and if not, I really think you need to readdress the psyche of this class after 4 seasons of second class citizenship in WoW arenas.


You've probably seen some of the posts by Tigole and Kalgan on this topic. We're not entirely happy with the microscope that arenas put on class balance. We could spend our entire time just balancing for arena, and neglect any other aspect of the game. It is something we talk a lot about -- how to fix this problem.

Q u o t e:
I would LOVE a direct reply to this, or an entire post. THIS is 90% of the reason that hunters have sensationalist posts. Please make it a bigger priority to let hunters know that you guys CARE and are working HARD to achieve balance and equal footing for us in Arenas. I think you'd be amazed at how the tone changes around here.


We do care and we are working hard. I wouldn't be posting this right now if that wasn't true. My experience so far has been that many hunters here want a list of demands met, and it just doesn't work that way.

Q u o t e:
One thing I noticed that might have been fuelling this recent surge of "DO THIS OR I QUIT" postings, has to do with some recent additions, especially in achievements, where that exact phrasing (tongue-in-cheek or not) was used, and met with a dev response of "sure, done! :D" I think it encouraged people to try the tactic for bigger changes. It's stupid, it's childish, but there you are.


Yeah, that makes sense. We try to talk to you in a casual manner because ultimately we're just gamers who love this game probably as much as you do. But it's also a pretty heavy responsibility to get things right. When we choose not to implement your suggestions, it's not out of spite. Believe me, I know that if I could respond to every request with a "Done!" then hunters would be giddy and offering to ship me cases of gin and wash my car. That would feel awesome. But then at the end of the day, I might have wrecked the game. I might have unbalanced things, or made the game too complicated, or caused a technical strain on the server that makes the game experience worse for everyone. In short, we have to be really, really careful. This game has a huge audience and is very succesful. It's easy to live in terror of making a mistake.

TDLR: Don't take it personally when we don't implement your idea. We almost certainly had a good reason for not doing it.

Q u o t e:
Costumer service: You're doing it wrong. You said it's not your job, then why are you doing it? Because you want to apparently. Well then relay the right information to those who can do something about it and provide us with their answer. And this is not a shot at you personally (even if you just said it), but no one should ever say what their costumers say is ridiculous, even if you don't agree with them (and even if it IS ridiculous).


Our customers say ridiculous things all the time. :) Look, I'll shoot straight with you, but I'm not much of a coddler. But the person "who can do something about it and provide [you] with their answer," that is me.
Avatar of Ghostcrawler
Ghostcrawler
2008-10-03 23:55:27
Re: It's Been Fun (A Hunter's Eulogy)
Q u o t e:
C'mon Blues read this! Bumpage!


I see what u did there.
Avatar of Ghostcrawler
Ghostcrawler
2008-10-04 00:07:07
Re: It's Been Fun (A Hunter's Eulogy)
Q u o t e:
Simply and absolutely untrue. Paladins were the king healers of Season 1, and they were always a great asset to 5v5 teams through season 4. They sucked in 2v2 and 3v3 after Season 1, but they always had 5v5 as a team size where they were very good


Okay, true enough for 5s. But last I looked there were several hunters in high-rated 5s too.
Avatar of Ghostcrawler
Ghostcrawler
2008-10-04 00:23:00
Re: It's Been Fun (A Hunter's Eulogy)
Q u o t e:
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Q u o t e:


I see what u did there.
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What did he do thar?


He bumped a very active thread that had like 5 blue posts in it. It probably wasn't in imminent danger of slipping to page 2.

[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]
Avatar of Ghostcrawler
Ghostcrawler
2008-10-04 09:42:04
Re: It's Been Fun (A Hunter's Eulogy)
Q u o t e:
The only real example I can give and backup is that of mages. My mage on live, I am perfectly happy with in PvP. Always have been, and yet people CONSTANTLY QQ on the mage forums. And the same is actually going on now for the WotLK Mages. For weeks and weeks I had been telling my Rogue friend that Deep Freeze would get nerfed and that it actually needed to be nerfed and it finally did.

At that point all the mages went on a riot complaining about it. I made a post saying it was fine and I swear I almost started a riot there, so I quit posting there =) I just observe now.

But my point being is that, although every class does "QQ" some, there are certain classes that actually mean it when they do. We have problems. You guys know this and have the numbers to back it with the current build. And although mages cry, I think they're perfectly fine. I absolutely LOVE playing my mage in arena.


Agreed, Bossfight. That is what we are up against. I don't want to poke a stick into a fire ant mound here. but just for sake of argument, imagine mages were totally OP and still QQ'd about their abilities and we gave them one that made them even more OP. It's really hard for anyone of any class to use the "Well, we are OBVIOSLY weak and everyone agrees." Just doesn't work that way. When you think about it, this is a place were you can come actively lobby the game designers to buff your class, and sometimes get results. While I'm not accusing any of you specifically of being disingenuous with your feedback, the risk is always there. Very few players call for nerfs for their class. (But some do.)

Q u o t e:
Also it seems like there may be poor communication between developers. I'm sorry but if i was in a meeting and someone said "lets give rogues the ability to disarm traps from 60 feet away" I would be like "$^@(% are you retarded? they can already sap us or our pet through a flare..." Things like that annoy us.


Sorry, but no. I know we don't offer a lot of insight into our development process but nobody sits around making bad decisions on their own. I'm not saying your example is a bad decision, but we are in very tight communication. I visit other offices maybe 30 times a day -- and we're talking right next door, not down the hall. I probably get 50 people in my office a day, and that doesn't count the 100s of emails. I'd say 95% of our job involves working with other people.

Q u o t e:
The whole "well you shouldn't be in melee range" statement doesn't really hold ground when you give other classes more ways to reel us in than we have getaways.


Okay, but is anyone going to argue that it's advantageous for hunters to be in melee? It's going to happen, sure, but it's not in your best interest for it to happen. The warrior has no way to damage you from range, except heroic throw, which is arguably a ranged ability less effective than your melee abilities. His only hope is to close to melee, in which case you might disengage, wing clip or trap him. If you're also dodging or otherwise escaping a bunch of his attacks, then what is he realistically supposed to do? Your strength is range, and his strength is melee.

Yes there are more ways to get in melee then there are to escape. For games to be fun, offensive has to win out over defense. If you never got touched, and he never got touched, the game would be pretty boring. You'd never see big numbers flying off, and probably to compensate, when an attack did connect, it would need to instagib someone (this is close to the state of things before resilience by the way).

The rock paper scissors of things is that melee take a lot of damage while they are kept at range, and then are very dangerous to the caster when they close the distance. It's the classic archers vs. infantry setup.

You may be too weak against warriors or whoever at the moment. But I also suspect all of you have killed a few dudes in your time before they could even get close to you.
Avatar of Ghostcrawler
Ghostcrawler