Why do people say hunters are "middle of the pack"?

[Hogmanlolz]

It irks me a little bit inside when I hear this. Its like I put so much into my hunter spending like 3k gold on all the enchants and gems , thinking I could be #1 in DPS and total damage and people say it will never happen. I would think with the +10% Aspect buff that could happen but everybody says no hunters will still suck. Any thoughts why?

[webwierdo]

Blizzard is getting better and better at balancing to the point where personal skill will have the biggest impact, not your class choice. Also fight mechanics vary enough that the best class on one fight may not be the best on another. Having said that, there has to be a #1. The best player will do more damage playing the "best" class but few people will ever reach the skill cap where the only thing holding back their DPS is their class choice.

[Xionyus]

Blizzard is getting better and better at balancing to the point where personal skill will have the biggest impact, not your class choice. Also fight mechanics vary enough that the best class on one fight may not be the best on another. Having said that, there has to be a #1. The best player will do more damage playing the "best" class but few people will ever reach the skill cap where the only thing holding back their DPS is their class choice.

I completely agree with this guy. Some classes will be better for certain fights and I truly think Blizzard is trying to balance everything to the best of their ability. It's coming down to skill and your rotation and not just 'I'm going to play an arcane mage.' I do think that hunters don't scale as well with high end gear, not as well as other classes do, but I'm hoping the aspect buff will help that in 5.3.

[boogie]

People say hunters are "middle of the pack" because they are. Check out raidbots. Assuming equal gear and skill you cannot pass certain specs on other classes without luck or boss mechanics that suit you better than it suits them. That being said, it's not a huge difference in most cases and hunters are very useful.

[aHeeRo]

Being #1 DPS means two different things the way i look at it. #1 Overall of any class which don't think hunters will ever see. maybe maybe not Who knows? Compete with other hunters with parsing. Try to strive to be #1 in your own raid. I know Hunters Sim lower than a Mage and Warlock, Doesn't stop me from beating them in my main raid.

Honestly people see sims or Raidbots and think their class is weak or something. Think hunters are alright right now, with 5.3 we'll be further up. Should worry about progressing as a player imo. Get great at everything you can do and move on from there.

[mistahwilshire]

We'll continue to be middle of the pack until we have a unique and/or great raid cooldown.

That's one of the largest reasons we were benched so often in early Heroic progression this tier. In top contending guilds this tier Hunters were gear soaks with very few exceptions.

[Daetur]

Hunters have some strengths that make up for us not being "top of the meter" assuming equal gear and skill. We'll perform better on, for example, movement fights because we have essentially NO dps penalty for moving.

However, I agree that one of the class's weaknesses right now is that we lack any form of a raid CD- closest we had was 5x Spirit Beast Stampede before the healing on Spirit Mend was nerfed, and even that was pretty damn weak as a raid CD.

Don't forget that "middle of the pack" is assuming equal gear, equal skill and (correct me if I'm wrong) a Patchwerk-style fight. If any of those things are in your favor, you can top the meters on a hunter.

[YuneKirby]

In top contending guilds this tier Hunters were gear soaks with very few exceptions.

With that said, not having a hunter or enhancement shaman in the raid greatly increases the drop chance of agility mail gear, in my experience. LOL >_<

[webwierdo]

That's one of the largest reasons we were benched so often in early Heroic progression this tier. In top contending guilds this tier Hunters were gear soaks with very few exceptions.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you, (or agreeing I really don't know either way) but this statement really should have no bearing on how the game is designed or balanced. This would affect maybe 100 hunters in total.

[Krachaboras]

I know Hunters Sim lower than a Mage and Warlock, Doesn't stop me from beating them in my main raid.

That doesnt means that hunters are ok, that only means that lock and mage in your raid sucks.

[Cybran]

Because we are. You need to make your finger's bleed if you want to be on par with Warlocks and Mages.

[Kiea]

Hunters are middle of the pact now, with the buffs in the next patch, we should move further up and be pretty competitive, but trust me when I say, come 5.4, we will once again be "middle of the pack" and the reason behind that is we have awful scaling in comparison to other classes.

If you look at hunter's scaling, what do we scale with?

Agility gives attack power, cool, every other class has that.
Critical strike gives crit chance, cool every other class has that.
Same goes for Haste, and mastery is kinda meh in terms of scaling for most classes.

But if we look at a Boomkin forexample, their scaling is insane, haste, it makes them attack faster AND gives more dot break points when a cap is reached.
Crit for Boomkins make them gain more starsurge procs, and more crits with single target nukes, extending the duration of your dots, giving you more starsurge procs, this is so much scaling, and hunters don't have it.

Mages have really good scaling with crit aswell, and all other casters have dot breakpoints too, I'm not too sure about how the melee classes work in MOP as I haven't played one yet, but they don't seem that strong either, whether that is scaling or just low damage I don't know.

If Blizzard wants for hunters to not be middle of the pack at the start of every new patch, then they need to make us scale, ATM the best scaling spec is MM, because hunters have so many instant casts, survival and BM don't gain that much from extra haste, yet MM gains a lot from haste, as their only instant cast is Chimera Shot, that they want to use anyway. They also have Piercing Shots, which does scale like Ignite from mages, more crits not only increases damage, but also gives more Piercing Shots damage.


I really hope they either gives us some procs off Serpent Sting as survival, or make our dots scale with haste.

If blizzard just gives us the 10% attack power buff this patch, mark my word, we will gain another attack power buff to AotH come 5.5.

[Exac]

Hunters can attack while moving with no cost, so of course they're weaker on low-movement fights. Hunters are strong when it counts. The two hunters we run are always at the top of the charts, with equivalent gear and slightly more skill.

[Kibu]

Hunters can attack while moving with no cost, so of course they're weaker on low-movement fights. Hunters are strong when it counts. The two hunters we run are always at the top of the charts, with equivalent gear and slightly more skill.

Then you have a different problem...

[Kiea]

Hunters can attack while moving with no cost, so of course they're weaker on low-movement fights. Hunters are strong when it counts. The two hunters we run are always at the top of the charts, with equivalent gear and slightly more skill.

So can Warlocks, but they just move at 70% speed, but if they activate Burning Rush it makes up for that, and with the amount of selfhealing /shielding they have, it's not a problem to keep it up when needed.

Mages can also use Scorch while moving, compare it to how hunters were with Aspect of the Fox.

Elemental shamans can move quite easily and do damage, even better next patch.

The only ones that really get hit hard by movement is Shadow Priests and Boomkins, the rest can work around it quite easily, and few fights require extremely heavy movement that people cant accomplish by using a couple of instants.

[Deleted]

what is incredible in my opinion,is this:why all those classes that will get 10%ap(retri,hunter,ena ecc.),take this buff ONLY in 5.3?and 5.0,1,2??what?was so hard to understand that this buff was needed?and if was hard,why now in 5.3 and well,not in 5.2 or 5.4?with this buff no one of those classes will however be at same level of lock,mages,rogue ecc.,ok,no problem,but before this?how much was heavy the difference?how many raiders heard :"today we don't need you,stay at home"to bring 5 lock in 25 man??with those damned weapons that never come out,more a less than mediocre class....oh,w8,we cast while moving,so op...sorry for bad english

[rzzr]

The 10% buff in the next patch is because Blizzard is too lazy to solve the scaling problems that hunters have.

[Dunee]

if our dots would scale with haste and serpent sting crits have a chance to either activate a free mainshot (chim/explo/killcom) or give back some focus that might help a bit... having cobra shots able to overflow serpent sting like festering strike for UH warlocks (though not to same extend) might also help with those burst periods of too much focus while having 10sec left on serp sting.
having your cobra shot being able to push serpent sting up to 22sec or 150% of it's casted duration would be amazing QOL, and having them scale with haste/crit in some way might make them feel like actual dots



besides this they should shift a lot of our dmg from passive stuff like autoshots/cobra/steady onto our actual on use abilities, since it's simply not rewarding enough to click them in time, since the difference between pushing glaive toss every 15sec and not doing it is so small that you can do your rotation wrong I lose about 5k from not using glaive toss or 3% dps, which could be accounted to lack of procs or just lack of crits..

[Glurp]

In high end guilds Hunters are middle of the pack. In low end guilds where the player skill is much lower Hunters have the ability to be top quite easily just because playing the class requires almost no thought, just play whack-a-mole with all your buttons and you're fine.

[Drakoes]

Coming from a 9/13 25HC raider, I think hunters are somewhere a lil bit above the average in T15 HC, but that's not to say we are downright terrible and don't have any fights where we can shine in. I'm obviously assuming equal gear and skill amongst the other DPS competition in the guild - I raid with 2 other Hunters as well. One of us did get benched for 1-2 fights during progression, but it was very minor.

Note that I am *not* ignoring the fact that we still suffer from some core issues with the class that have plagued us for ages, such as our scaling (even if it wasn't for haste and RRPM in this tier so far) and even the need and attractiveness of raid utility CD's outside of pet buffs in 10man guilds and even MD.

As some people have pointed out already, we're one of the classes that suffer the least from movement. I wouldn't say we're the kings at this, as I've seen warlocks doing other things better at the same time - they can still cast whilst moving and have much higher single-target DPS than SV for the most part. Sometimes, I like to go as far as thinking we're a weaker version of them right now, because casters just tend to be stacked more in most high-end guilds and are always in greater demand, since some of them also bring utility to the table in 25's and have that DPS to 'begin with' you could say.

Just my thoughts on this matter.