Dear level 36 hunter in Scarlet Monastery,

No matter how many times you insist that I’m wrong and that your addon is right, Strength is still not for you.

Love, Pike.

(It is possible that I am beating a dead horse here, but when every one of the last three or four hunters my warlock has PuG’d with have been hunters rolling on Strength gear, it needs to be repeated. I would, however, like to congratulate any low-level or newer hunters reading this. Because if you are reading this, it means you are willing to do research about your class, and I /salute you.)

While we’re on the topic of blogs, I also want to mention that I do in fact read every single comment that is posted here, thanks to Gmail notifications. I even read the ones made on really old posts. I just wanted to mention that because I’ve been getting some comments on older posts recently, and I wanted to make sure everybody knew that they are all read and quite appreciated.

Anyways, I’ve been coming up with a lot of things I’ve wanted to write about lately; but I think this post is just going to focus on… bad hunters. Yes, hunters seem to have a bad rap for having the highest quantity of bad players. To be quite honest I’m not surprised. The amount of people I’ve run into who don’t have “Hunter 101″ down is astonishing. (I think Hunter 101 probably consists of one sentence: “Send your pet in to hold aggro for you and shoot things from afar.” Seriously I think some hunters have not yet made that connection.)

I once grouped with a level 40-something hunter whose strategy in an instance went like this: use multi-shot or volley to get as many mobs as possible to aggro onto you, and then melee everything. Yes, I’m serious. Now, it’s one thing to be a self-professed delusional hunter and do stuff like that for fun , but it’s another thing to seriously use that as your main method of attack in an instance. (For the record, that guy wound up aggro’ing everything in a particularly bad room and everybody died except me, and I even managed to dispose of all the offending mobs. I was pretty proud of being able to survive such a bad wipe. It’s moments like that– moments where the odds are stacked against you, and you experience the thrill of coming up with a way to survive– that really make me love being a hunter.)

It’s even worse when other people are grouped with bad hunters and then they feel less inclined to group with hunters again, later. My boyfriend occasionally runs instances while I’m gone or busy; many times I have returned home to be met with “Pleeeease get on WoW and group with us, we just had to kick this horrible hunter who can’t use traps/feigns death at the worst times/can’t control his pet/keeps wiping us/*insert something else here* and we need you.” It’s flattering that he and his friends turn to me when they need a reliable hunter, but it’s sad that it’s so hard for them to find reliable hunters in the first place.

Now maybe it’s just easier for me to pick out bad hunters because hunter is really the only class I know much about. Maybe I’ve grouped with lots of bad players of other classes and just haven’t noticed because I’m not very experienced yet. But I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I have met poor players of other classes (the rogue who was out-DPS’d by my pet, when I was Marksman-spec’d, comes to mind… granted I don’t know much about rogues, but that struck me as rather, erm, less-than-stellar), but bad hunters are just everywhere. It sort of makes you wonder why that is so. Maybe this is just one of those classes where you really need to have a “Eureka!” moment before you finally get it. Or maybe it’s a more gradual process… or maybe it just depends.

There are definitely good hunters out there, though. And it always makes me happy to see those. As I have said before, that’s what I’m aiming for… being a good hunter. I don’t think I’m there yet but at least I know I’m not bad. It warms my little huntery heart to see really good hunters in battlegrounds, even if they’re of the opposing faction and beating me into oblivion =) So keep up the good work, guys!