angryraidleader.com

I was hesitant to make a post picking on hunters. It’s like picking on somebody with Down’s Syndrome. But then last night’s raid happened. It was one of those perfect raids that every raid leader dreams of. We burned through trash, one shotted everything, and got our second kill of Teron Gorefiend in a fight that was perfection in every way. We only had one wipe all night and it was due more too bad luck than any mistake that I could see. At the end of the raid someone made the comment, “You only yelled once tonight!”

Yeah, just once, at a hunter. Despite everything else being perfect, we had two close calls last night when hunters screwed up a pull and pulled two packs onto us. So now, I have to tell hunters what I think of them. Plus, let’s be honest, everyone likes to make fun of hunters.

You suck in so many ways, I don’t know where to start. So let’s just start at the beginning. Did you put any thought into your character when you picked a hunter? Those of us that play on the Horde side are convinced that when you choose Alliance, a short questionnaire pops up:

• Do you want to be able to level while taking a nap?
• Do you have trouble pushing buttons and like the game to run on auto pilot?
• Do you have trouble counting past ten while wearing shoes?
• After removing your shoes, do you forget what number you were on and have to start over?
• Do you think it’s a good idea to get to level 70 without knowing how to use 90% of your class abilities?

If you have answered yes to any of these questions, the night elf hunter is made for you! If you have forgotten how you answered the questions just play a hunter.

Everyone has an opinion as to which class is the easiest to play, paladins, rogues, and warlocks come to mind. Or resto druids in 2v2 arenas. But if you’ve ever led a raid, you develop a special place in your heart for hunters. A dark shriveled place, devoid of love.

Unless you’re willing to go all out stacking Agility and spec as an expose weakness hunter, you only bring four things to a raid.

• Misdirect
• Traps
• Kiting
• Feign Death

So how is it that 99.9999% of hunters have no idea how to use these abilities when they start raiding? You don’t see a majority of mages that don’t know how to sheep, shamans that don’t know what totems are for, or rogues who don’t know how to stab. But every single one of you shit for brains hunters has to be taught skills that you should have figured out while you were leveling. So let’s take them one at a time, so I can focus on the different ways in which you are stupid.

Misdirect – Your most important ability in a raid. You can pull, usually from very long range, and the aggro from your first three shots goes on the target of your misdirect. Sounds simple enough, but you find new ways to screw this up on a daily basis. In the last year of raiding, I’ve had two hunters who hadn’t even trained the ability. Those who did train it, manage to misdirect onto the wrong target with annoying frequency or cast it before the raid is ready to pull so it expires. But my personal favorite is when I call for a misdirect and the hunter pulls a deer in the headlights, and just stands there while 24 people wait, and wait, and wait. Usually accompanied by my voice steadily getting louder and louder. “Pull it. Come on, pull. Pull. Pull it! Pull it moron! PULL THE FUCKING MOB OR I’M GOING TO RIP OUT YOUR LIVER AND USE IT AS MY FOOD BUFF FOR THE NEXT HALF HOUR!” But there’s no way for us to practice! It’s not fair that you yell at us. We can’t learn this until we start raiding! Oh really? Go pick any monster, cast misdirect on your pet, shoot the monster. I’ve cracked the code! Eureka!

Traps – With the exception of one very annoying Shadow Priest, I hear more whining out of hunters about crowd control assignments than any other class. The best example of this goes back to our Karazhan days, when one of our two hunters had his traps broken on every pull, followed quickly by his death, and an exasperated complaint on Ventrilo, “Someone broke my trap again!” Curious as to how this poor picked on hunter could have such bad luck, I started watching him on the pull instead of the bad guys. And on every pull I saw the same thing. He’d drop his trap in front of him, pull a mob into it, and then whack it with his axe. Hey genius, nice auto attack. When we started our second Karazhan raid, and I put him in the learning raid, as opposed to the progression raid, he quit in protest. Huge loss. I cried for days. Yes, I know your traps are on a cooldown, and I also know that your traps break before that cooldown is up. This means that you can only CC effectively for 1-2 minutes. You don’t have to give me your little prepared speech whining about how tough your job is every time I chew you out for not controlling your CC target. Stop crying and deal with your shit. I’ve played a hunter. I know there are 4 or 5 things you can do when you run out of traps. Keep reading and one day I’ll put up a post explaining how you can suck less. Tool.

Kiting – How do you suck so bad at this? You have tons of instants, the ability to move 30% faster, and sick range. You can drop traps that slow mobs, plus several of your shots can slow your target or stop it dead in its tracks. And yet I still see hunters in Mount Hyjal that are supposed to be kiting, stand toe to toe with a mob swinging their melee weapon and backing away. If I wanted someone to do that, I’d pick a tank maybe, or a melee dps. You’re ranged dps, why are you hugging that mob. Want to know a secret? When you die a few seconds later. I’m happy. Let’s see, how could you possibly practice this skill? I don’t know. Maybe go pick just about any target in the game. Kite it!

Feign Death – It’s painful to me that you fail at using this ability. It’s so insanely powerful, so central to your skill as a raider, so simple to use, and yet you suck at it like a $5 crack whore. You have the ability, barring a resist from the bad guy (about a 1 in 6 chance on level 73 bosses), of completely wiping your aggro every 30 seconds. No other class can pull this off so often. And yet you somehow manage to get the stupidest ideas about how to use this ability. My favorite being, “I don’t Feign Death because I save it for when I pull aggro, so I don’t die.” This argument will kill your raid leader’s brain cells. Please avoid it. If you Feign Death BEFORE you pull aggro, then you never pull aggro yes? But you don’t get why that’s important because your fucking stupid, as evidenced by the fact that you play a hunter. A stupid, stupid hunter. I can remember when my guild was learning the Lady Vashj fight, about 20% of the time we would have one of our two hunters die in Phase 1. And they always had some elaborate excuse as to why it wasn’t their fault. But since I have an addon I like to watch called Omen, that showed me their threat. I could see how they would run right up to the tank’s aggro and fly past him, and never once did they use Feign Death. You want to impress your raid leader? Score in the top 5 dps consistently on boss fights, and use Feign Death every time it’s up until the tank is so far ahead of you that you could be shooting nuclear bombs out of your bow and you’d never pull aggro.

Learn these four insanely simple skills and maybe, just maybe, we’ll stop calling you huntards.