I was leveling my mage in Southern Barrens a bit last night, and there, right before my horrified eyes, I had another sample of that sorry excuse for a huntard, the sadly still-too-common Melee Hunter.
Now while I have a whole complement of hunters spread across 5 servers (I had to check) all sitting around level 24 and 43 (go figure), I haven’t really put in any serious playtime on my latest one, the mandatory Altitis hunter on my new server. In fact, the poor orc is still sitting in Durotar at level 6, waiting for me to tire off leveling my fishing or my mage. He’s been there since I PCTed in, two months ago.
I made him a couple of days after taking the mage to level 10, and while I fully appreciate that the pet changes everything for a hunter, right after the mage those first early levels feel dreadfully sluggish to get through. Of course, that experience isn’t unique to the hunter in comparison to our little fireball-throwing apprentice, but I digress.
Thinking about it (which you know is almost of tectonic swiftness, what with my limited brain power, read: 2.5 years in the game and I just realized the bleeding obvious), those first 9 petless levels are probably to blame for this aberration of a ranged class, the melee hunter. Indeed, until you get your first animal companion turning you into a potential duo of death and destruction, most fights end in close combat with a raptor strike and a couple of sword or axe swings (which is the part making those early levels so frustratingly slow).
Design induces melee hunter behaviour, something which may follow players around through their whole career. Hunter is one of the two classes (the other being druid) who don’t get their class-defining traits before level 10, whereas all others have the key elements of their gameplay available at level 4 at worst (unless you count bubble-hearthing as class-defining for pallies, which would leave them deprived of core elements till level 6). A not-too-clumsy warlock for instances gets his first pet at level 2. Warriors, Paladins, Priests, Rogues, Mages get their class-defining gameplay elements right at creation. Shammies have to wait until level 4 until they can plant totems.
Aside from the fact some starter zones obviously can’t support a young hunter’s need to tame three different kind of beasts, and the fact that you have to travel to your racial capital in order to learn how to feed and train your new companion, there doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason to have 1/7th of the class’ progression path made melee like it is. In a similar way, druids get access to shape-shifting too late in their career (and unlike hunters, take until level 20 to start leveling at a decent pace). Melee hunters are a design-induced aberration, perpetuated by players who don’t know or don’t believe better.
A fatality? Unfortunately yes. With more than three years after the Go-Live, a reworking of something that low on a class’ progression is about as likely as me killing Kil’Jaeden. However, next time you meet a melee hunter, just remember that his 10 first levels induced that behaviour, and that you’ll have to prove him with hard numbers that shooting at things from a distance is actually much better for him.
All in the spirit of Winter’s Veil, of course.
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5 Responses to “Melee Hunters: an Aberration due to poor Class Design?”
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/agree
my hubby loves melee with his hunter *sigh* he does know how to play his class properly too mind (Kara fir eg) but he constantly needs to be reminded that he;s a ranged class… it’s like he’s regressing back to those first 10 lvls lol.
and he wonders why he dies so much when farming… /groan.
/disagree
People will do pretty much anything the game will let them do, if they think it is fun. I don’t think it has anything to do with the first 10 levels.
In fact my personal experience was the exact opposite, I had such a hard time in levels 1-10 and such an easy time afterwards using my pet that I did everything possible not to melee, I didn’t even bother leveling my weapon skill!
Only when I got to 69 and got the Crystalforged Axe did I level my weapon skill and now I see how useful melee can be sometimes, e.g. when fighting 3 or more mobs. And my axe does fairly nice damage too
So based on my personal experience I would expect hunters to avoid melee due to bad experience at levels 1-10, not try to repeat the experience…
Now melee hunters can be annoying but have you ever met a “I-don’t-use-a-pet” hunter? OMG I wanted to kill that guy… thankfully he was kicked from the pug pretty quickly…
Kinda agree with “Solidstate” above in some way. Players will always tend to do what they can get away with doing or whatever they feel is fun for them. What’s fun for one player vs another may not be the same thing. If that player is playing on his own not in any group though their playstyle may not be ideal to many people its in a play form that’s fun for them and in how they choose to play the game.
I’m a player that loves to melee. I play and main almost at core as a melee class, I like to swing cold steel blades that for Is fun for me. I also understand how to play some and certain classes. I have a lvl 31 BM Hunter who I play for fun when I feel like playing him rarely at that. I like to shoot his guns and arrows with pet attacking. That’s Fun! Sometimes I just like to fire off shots just for fun at a mob because its fun. Sometimes when my pet has mob almost dead at like 10 percent its just about dead the mob its fun for me to just head in at melee and get one or two points of weapon skill on my melee weapon. I know exactly what I’m doing when I do that when soloing and for the skill points. That’s not something I’ll do in a group for obvious reasons.
There’s people like me who try to master whatever class they’re playing and read the net (and blogs!), and there’s those who take WoW as if it’s some sort of Doom and just play and kill and such…
Hunters are not really that bad in 1-10, if you know and use one single thing: Max-range! If you start shooting at max range and (at 6?) you start using Concussive Shot too, then you’re just fine and usually don’t need to melee much.
From my experience with several chars, I recommended an RL friend to start WoWing with a Hunter. He progressed fairly quickly, until the moment I found him on his 3rd or 4th pet complaining that they would run away!
I then teach him some basics (hadn’t done that before as I didn’t expect him to level up so quickly!), installed some add-ons, gave him some advice on gear choices, told him to check petopia to learn how to tame new abilities and then he proceeded to level up. He hasn’t played much lately, but that’s due to lack of time.
It all boils down to how GOOD you want to be. If you like to play your class properly, you google around and find your answers; if you play WoW like you play 1st person shooting game, then you won’t do that research and ultimately you’ll suck at playing that class… I’ve tried to set some hunters in the right way (because bad hunters are those that you can spot at a distance!), and if they take my advice, they learn and some have. If they don’t, it’s their problem.
Most of the classes shape and evolve over time with what their optimal combat strategy is. The game expects the player to take the new skills it gives them and learn how to use them, and does not teach them what to do explicitly.
For example, warriors have a defining role of a tank, and early on –regardless of spec — are capable of fufilling that role. But defensive stance is an OPTIONAL quest, and furthermore so is learning abilities like Sunder Armor, Shield Block, and Revenge. To an early novice warrior that is only concerned about solo levelling, there is no compelling reason to pick up tanking skills, and yet at level 20 if the want to try Deadmines/WC they are expected to use them.
A smart warrior quickly realizes that these abilities were given to him for a reason and picks them up. Similarly, a smart hunter will pay attention and notice that he kills enemies much faster shooting at them with his ranged weapon than he can waiting for melee + raptor strikes to pile up. It’s not a matter of number crunching, any hunter paying attention to the flow of combat will quickly realize that they are much slower with their melee weapons. They then place themselves at the maximum possible range and use all their abilities given to them, saving Raptor Bite as a last resort for when an enemy gets in melee range. Early on this is enough, no pet necessary.
Design wise, the hunter gets 2 melee abilities before level 10, one of which doesnt even deal damage and the other is an upgrade to Raptor Bite, but gains 3 new unique abilities before level 10 that focus on increasing their ranged weapon damage. Additionally, their starter ranged weapon far outdamages their melee weapon.
So the design of the hunter is clearly not pushing them into a melee role. The only other explanation for melee hunters: they are player induced. A player who isnt trying to find optimal strategies to playing their character is just going to do as they please. So even if hunters started out with their pet at level 1, you would still have hunters running around meleeing things, because “me and my pet melee’d everything so well in the starting area, why should I bother to change strategies now!?”.