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!