Hunter Advice?

Orgoloth

Hey!

I’m growing a little dejected as I level Hunter, and thought I’d ask for some advice as I rarely see Hunters online. There isn’t much discussion in searching the forums. I’m almost 80, and have Shapeshifting transd. 

A few questions - 

-Am I always going to feel so squishy? Both in bashing and PvP I feel super vulnerable and die all the time. 

-What should I be doing in PvP? The gist I have is “sting people, and try to rupture”. Is that about it? Should I instead be doing something else?

-Does anyone keep the pet around? The bat doesn’t seem to do much. 

I tried Hunter because the flavor of turning into a giant spider is cool, and the combat strategy seemed simple enough. 

Ryc

Orgoloth said:

Hey!

I’m growing a little dejected as I level Hunter, and thought I’d ask for some advice as I rarely see Hunters online. There isn’t much discussion in searching the forums. I’m almost 80, and have Shapeshifting transd. 

A few questions - 

-Am I always going to feel so squishy? Both in bashing and PvP I feel super vulnerable and die all the time. 

Most likely, Hunter is one of the squishiest classes in the game, that's vaguely by design, but still a bit absurd.

-What should I be doing in PvP? The gist I have is “sting people, and try to rupture”. Is that about it? Should I instead be doing something else?

I haven't looked at hunter in awhile and never played it, if nobody answers this or the following in the next day or so I'll take a look and give some feedback

-Does anyone keep the pet around? The bat doesn’t seem to do much. 

I tried Hunter because the flavor of turning into a giant spider is cool, and the combat strategy seemed simple enough. 

Hunter has a very high skill ceiling, and the floor is generally also considered fairly high, so it may not be an optimal class, but it's more important you enjoy what you play than anything else.

Zith

Hunter is in a bit better place nowadays with ringmails but yes, you will be squish. If you lack defensive arties you will have a hard time if you are the first target. 

Your aim is to add "brainmelt" afflictions to your target and kill them with that. At your disposal you have triggers which is the bread and butter for the class. Its a bit tricky to get used to the mechanism but once you start to master hunter its not a bad class at all. Tanky? No. But you have some handy utility and the affliction rate with the finisher is quite powerful.

But Ryc is right, you need to know how to track afflictions, period. Without that the class is not a good choice because you will not be effective enough. You CAN of course use sting in order to sneak bloodpoison in for rupture in teams but you'd be more effective doing something more simple in another class and do damage meanwhile. 

Btw, some abilities are still bugged for Bat and or in typos (I try to file reports as I see them). So don't give up to much and give Zith a tell when you see him for some discussions about the class if you want.

Kalynthari

Orgoloth said:

A few questions - 

-Am I always going to feel so squishy? Both in bashing and PvP I feel super vulnerable and die all the time.

Yes, it's the trade off for being an affliction powerhouse. Yes, good curing can make you turtle almost indefinitely vs hunter but in groups there's no real way around not dying to brainmelt.

-What should I be doing in PvP? The gist I have is “sting people, and try to rupture”. Is that about it? Should I instead be doing something else?
You'll need Supremacy, at least, to transcendent before you're really able to do much of anything with hunter. At the very, very least, up until Trigger to be able to get an idea of what the class does. The idea is to use triggers to build afflictions- rupture is possible but as Zith said, in groups most people are gonna die before you can rupture. You can stick a bloodpoison or two and frontload sting damage, if you really want. But Hunter's main purpose is affliction and cure denial.

-Does anyone keep the pet around? The bat doesn’t seem to do much.

Bat is key to virtually every strategy a hunter has. Without it you can't use any skill in the Supremacy skillset.

I tried Hunter because the flavor of turning into a giant spider is cool, and the combat strategy seemed simple enough.

Hunter is probably the most complex class in the game if your aim is to get good with it. In groups you can get by with much less effort. Make sure to keep the 'Discern' ability up, it'll help you keep track of their afflictions a bit better. You can also throw in basilisk probes when you think you won't lose much, to see what their afflictions are like.

Zith

Damnit Kalynthari! Stop answering the questions with easy and clear info, you make me feel like I rant

Gjarrus

Most of my experience is from helping Wysrias with testing ages ago, since it's a fairly rare prof nowadays. The only real change since then is moonaura isn't a must-have for speed anymore.

Survivability

It has okayish passive tank (Ringmail+scales, resistance, weathering, vitality, bounty, chilled armor since demonic) with some good survival abilities (fitness, might, leap - but no proxy fly like Outrider) and the ability to tank off of its affliction rate a little. In general, you're going to feel squishy until you get aspect with at least your minis maxed. You'll still feel a bit brittle if you take aggro in a team fight until you start layering on more defensive artis, rituals, and whatnot.

PvP Strategies

1v1, you have two main strats.

First is brainmelt: you backload your aff burst with triggers, instability/insanity, and shock then give the affs that'll make the target cure, build up a stack of 5-6 supremacy affs, and unleash the pain of pretty substantial psychic burst (and sensitivity counts for extra yay). You do some dps through your offense, but brainmelt is going to be effectively an insta on a lot of people, and it only eats 1 aff to do the damage so you can chain multiples. Half the lock affs are supremacy affs as well, so lock+sensi puts you at 4.

Option 2 is to aff into bloodpoison with poison mind to block the cure when you get towards 4 for the rupture. I've seen this one less, so I can't honestly tell you how doable it is except it seems like it should be? Might depend on how people prio the poisoned blood. Shock and insta/insanity are also handy here.

You have a little bit of utility to help with this. You can chip off some armor if you need to get more value out of your dps, you can track to any target outside, lure is pretty stellar, you have a few on-entry mechanics that help. Discern helps sometimes.

Teams:


If you can track,  you can end up kill securing like a boss in some situations. Unlike summoner, you don't have the hiccup of a unique pipe aff, so anyone who can feed you supremacy affs will lead into fast brainmelts. In testing, me and Wysrias got the time to about the same as a 2-man enlighten (~10s). Rupture is less feedable, but it could potentially work out around the same and can be faster with multiple hunters.

Bat

Kalynthari

Gjarrus said:

Most of my experience is from helping Wysrias with testing ages ago, since it's a fairly rare prof nowadays. The only real change since then is moonaura isn't a must-have for speed anymore.

Natureaura was speed, noob. Moon's always been toxin return.

In my testing the rupture strat was okay on people a first/second time... If they're even remotely smart it won't really fool them more than that. A well-timed shield shuts down the strat entirely.

Hard-prio slickness>poisonedblood>impatience is a good way to stall kinda hard vs Hunter, as well. Slick to stop lock shenanigans, blood to stop rupture stacking, impatience to stall out brainmelt (alongside good shielding/hinder). You can do some pretty cheesy stuff with shock and triggers, but all-in-all it's not a difficult class to live against now, with the removal of fast statpack (and hasn't been difficult since its removal).