Let’s just set the tone here… make the first post in this blog give anyone who stumbles in here a good idea what they’ll find.

Yes, the Big Bear Butt is a feral druid, and has been for two years… through bad patches, and through good.

But I want to complain about a hunter right now, so give me some room for ranting.

I have a hunter alt, a wee little 68 level hunter with a cute little kitty that I use when I want to blow something up. Now, I am NOT a master hunter. I freely admit it. I read the Big Red Kitty blog, and I read the hunter forums, and I roll with a guild that has some damn good hunters. I know what a good raid hunter is, and I’m not one of those. I am a good solo hunter. Thats all my hunter is to me, a fun alt to roll with, and relax while blowing stuff up.

And let’s be honest.. after playing as most any class in WoW, solo playing as a hunter really is easy mode.

Okay, not in terms of effective group play, no, not at all. In fact, if you are a hunter in a group, your play is quite complicated and intense if you are doing it correctly. Chain trapping, kiting (such as on Drakkisath in UBRS), misdirection pulls, proper pet offtanking, threat reduction, there are many tools that the skilled hunter can bring to a group, and it takes a lot of talent, skill and practise to master them all.

But that right there is where I think there is a problem. These tools are valuable and necessary in groups. But for solo play? Not so much. And in solo play, the drive to learn them just isn’t there.

For the soloing hunter, all encounters, if approached carefully, are kept at a distance. Crowd control skills and your pet let you approach a group of three mobs of higher than your level with disdain, if not outright arrogance. Drop a trap, send your pet in, have it build aggro and then switch targets, build aggro on that one, take it down with ranged, then switch back to first target, dropping a new trap when your first is broken… HoTs on your pet… 5 minutes later, three dead mobs that never even touched you.

There is such a large cushion for hunters that solo.

I know for a fact that a good friend of mine that played one as his main toon, casually, wore as a matter of course armor in all slots that ranged from 10 to 20 levels lower than him all through to 60… and had not, at level 60, realized that there were higher ranks to pet skills. He had tamed a cat at 10th level, and he kept that pet until he was 60… and never found a need to switch. He did sometimes remark to me that it was hard for him to keep from pulling aggro from his pet, adn he kept many different ranks of ammo for different situations. But he was Beastmaster specced mostly. With the DPS of a good BM pet, he should have rarely if ever had a problem with aggro management. But with the tools he had solo, he never learned any new pet skills except those taught directly by trainers, and never noticed the lack.

And why whould he have known? Unless you are getting your butt whooped consistently and go forth in search of knowledge, most folks I know that play games live quite well without sites like http://www.gamefaqs.com/. He never trolled the forums, in fact I think the only website he would visit for information was http://www.thottbot.com/ for quest item locations.

Anyway, back to the point. For hunters, the solo game is really no challenge. You can play quite effectively solo with your pet without ever training new pet skill ranks except growl, armor and health, and without upgrading much gear much besides your ranged weapon.

Ah, but what happens to our poor solo hunter when he has exhausted all that the quests have to offer? When the only content left to play are group quests and instances?

Well, you get what we had earlier today. A simple Hellfire Ramparts run. The lowest level challenge instance in outlands to date. A few friends had played the game to 70, and had a lot of fun… but they only like to do instance runs with friends. PUGs are just… no. And being that they live across the globe from normal server time and their friends, well, it means that having a nice block of time to run an instance can be a challenge.

But the morning had come! My friends, a 70 Warlock named Kemangi and a 70 Mage named Tikky, and of course the 70 Big Bear Butt, were bloody well going in there and get them their first instance quest chain done. After this one, we’d try to find time to go through Blood Furnace next week. (Hey, we’re casuals. Getting everyone together for a single instance run each week is doing pretty well sometimes.)

The temptation was there to simply three man the instance. After all, with so many humanoid mobs and the Warlocks VW, it wasn’t as though we’d have much difficulty. But instead, we decided that maybe some lower level players in the guild I am in might like to go along… and after giving a shout out in guild chat, a 61 Priest was happy for the chance. But the request for more players for a good ol’ ramps run brought another player as well… a 63 hunter.

Personally, I was delighted. I know from my own hunter just how magnificent a force multiplier a hunter can be. Especially if he is beastmaster specced. The question rolls out… ‘Just for my own curiosity, how are you specced?’. ‘BM’ is the reply. Excellent! So we’re off.

The group forms, and right away I sniff trouble. The hunter is aready in a group, in the Coilfang Slave Pens. He announces they are on the second boss, but he’ll be ready soon. Before I can reply to that bit of info, he sends another tell. He has left the group and is ready for an invite.

Now, call me kooky, but to me that means he just abandoned a group he was a key member of, during the second boss fight, to join our instance run. Why would I NOT expect him to bail on US?

“I had to leave”, he tells me, “The party leader was being a dick”.

Okay… well, always try to think happy thoughts. I wasn’t in his group, so what do I know. And I have certainly seen some bad attitudes in PUGs before. So okay, what the heck. He is a guildie, even though I haven’t seen him much before… how bad can it be?

I’ll spare you a blow by blow account. I’ll start by saying, I have never before seen a group of mostly 70s get wiped in Ramparts before. Nor have I ever seen the entire first boss area aggro at once. But thanks to a little hunter ability Blizzard calls ‘Scare Beast’, but that I shall from now on call ‘Suicide Switch’, we found out exactly what happens when the hunter uses it to fear a non-elite hound on a pull.

I certainly have a Big Bear Butt, but due to my own arrogance, I was not actually in my tanking gear. Oh woe is me, I was main tanking in cat/DPS form and gear. yes, I was cocky, I know.

But in my defense, up to that point, there had been no problem at all. I was even finding it helpful, when the hunter kept crossing wires with the marks, and sending his pet to attack the same mob I was tanking, and leaving his marked target free to smoosh the casters, again and again and again, leaving me to need to move fast and DPS quickly, and use my blessed mangle to drop the mobs faster than they could get to the casters.

In short…. we had a hunter that, when told his cat would be assigned to offtank the big red ‘X’, and we would expect him to drop his freeze trap and apply all ranged DPS to the main Skull target first… would invariably send his cat after the skull. And do ranged DPS to the skull. And ignore the X to let it run straight for our cute little 61 Priest.

And Ice Trap? Never used it. Freeze trapped and AOE Fire Traps every time. Unasked for, used em anyway, usually using the AOE fire trap next to the sheeped mob.

Now, this is all behavior that, while distressing and even terrifying in a group that is taking on an appropriately leveled instance, really wasn’t too bad in Ramparts. Just annoying. Ok, so the 10+ aggroed enemies and boss was more than annoying, since my repair bills never seem small, but still no big deal. It certainly did cast his earlier comment about his previous party leader in Slave Pens being “A dick” into sharper focus, though. If this was how he was running in there, then yeah, I can imagine the party leader had a few choice comments to make.

No, it was his attitude that made the entire thing become a parody of the epic ‘Huntard’ run. Throughout the entire run, every time there was any difficulty, pause, or moment to regain mana, the comments would flow from his keyboard. “Can we speed this up?”, “Too slow”, “Why bother marking targets?”, “I’ll drop the trap when you bring them down here, not before” (coincidentally dropping it too late and being out of position, but ok), and a stream of commentary on how poor just about every aspect of his other runs were. Never once, the entire time, did he make a single comment to acknowledge that maybe, just possibly, he had yet to do what we asked of him prior to a pull.

Let’s revisit that first boss battle. Oh yes, indeed. The hunter, all 63 levels of him, kept advancing far into rooms. This time, while moving forward early and we were not ready, he aggroed the mobs on the left corner of the room. He instantly proceeded to fear one of them, a hound, which turned right back around into the room, aggroing the whole thing on top of us.

As I shifted to bear, and howled and growled and pulled them all in on top of me, and Swiped and danced about, and as the brilliant Mage and Warlock sheeped and VW’d and AOEd like crazy, and the Priest somehow kept me alive… the hunter went Feign Death and typed ‘Run lol’.

We almost made it, too. If I’d been in tanking gear, it would have been easy. As it was, the Mage and Warlock went down, and then so did I… with only a few mobs left. The Priest clearly typed “OOM” and ran back a ways to try and run out of the instance… and the hunter popped out of Feign Death, rezzed his pet, and then finished off the last two mobs. And as I watched him struggle to handle the two mobs, he found the time to type, “Priest, can you give me a hand or what?”

To a Priest that had already typed OOM, and who clearly, when casually glancing at the Party portraits, HAD NO MANA.

I can only assume that he expected her to hit the mob with a stick.

After the battle was done, and we were all rezzed… the hunter gave forth with his thoughts on the battle.

“Priest, where were you?”

I may have led a sheltered life up until now, or perhaps I have merely been blessed.

But for the first time, truly the first time, I had an inkling where the epithet ‘Huntard’ came from.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 18th, 2007 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Druiding, Humor, Recap, Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.