Since basically Vanilla, hunters have always been the class that is stereotyped as easy to play. The AFK/Autoshot class, the Spam Buttons class, and so on. When I first made this blog waaaaaay back in the day, I liked to focus on the idea that this wasn’t entirely the case. Things like trapping and pet control and rotations were actually very complex and required a fair amount of practice to become skilled at.
These days, a lot of this stuff has become very streamlined. Trapping is rarely needed and when it is it lasts much longer, can be launched with trap launcher, and so forth. Rotations are priority based and no longer have to be carefully timed and woven inbetween auto shots. And so on.
So this raises the question: is the modern hunter class easy to play? Is there truth in the stereotype?
Maybe. The basics feel easy enough to me that I don’t know if I need to write any guides anymore – but then again, this could very well be me being biased due to the simple fact of having played one class in one video game for a decade, so it comes easier to me by default.
Beast Master Hunter, at least, does have some subtleties to it, though. I went and wrote a guide about the nuances of using Focus Fire because it’s actually pretty complex. It’s one of the more complex hunter mechanic thingies that I’ve seen in a long time and it makes me happy. There is also the whole thing with priorities and when to use what, which, again, I personally feel is pretty intuitive but it may just be me because I have seen some people with questions about it.
So are hunters easy to play? I don’t know. I do think that they’re a very forgiving class right now because they are very strongly tuned. But I don’t know if forgiving equals easy. Maybe it’s not even an important question. Maybe the actual important question here is “Are hunters fun?”.
And the answer to that is going to come down to you, personally, but for me, well…
Yes. Yes they are.
Even ten years later!
Moment of honesty here. My BM Hunter on Silver Hand has never used a trap, not in all the years I’ve been playing. Didn’t even know they existed at the start and never got the hang of them. Now I can spam with the rest of them and got to 100 second (after my sassy little DK) and I still love playing with it but I won’t claim to be particularly “good” at huntering, I just enjoy it and try not to die too much . . . So fun? Oh yeah.
I find playing BM (because i refuse to play anything else, after being MM in the beginning of WoD i said NEVER AGAIN) pretty easy but, like you, i’ve been hunter since WoW released. I keep seeing people in my raid groups playing hunter and doing quite a lot less dps than me (many times in better gear and weapons) so i have to say that for most people it just seems easy, cause they don’t know how to make the most of it. Hunters can look like they’re doing a decent jog even if they’re not even close to the damage they were supposed to be doing.
Thanks for the comments 🙂
Hunters can move with sacrificing damage per second, and don’t even need to stay within kissing range of the mobs like every other class that can do that.
I’d be curious to ask other range classes just how much they would give up for this ability. (Or you could just ask a Warlock who played through Mists. This literally happened… until they took it back and we got a “Fox Aspect” CD instead.)
Hunter is a class that from the very beginning had unique core gameplay strengths– very many of which have actually been buffed, while nearly all its significant weaknesses have nerfed or patched out or granted new counter-abilities.
I’m sure it’s balanced in arenas at least. That’s the part of the game that matters most right?