Latest dev chat news for hunters

[Llewrend]

Originally Posted by Tens

[22:20] <Tens_LOTRO> For Hunters, you can expect boosts to all of your melee skills (such as buffs to compliment your ranged abilities), lower costs to crafted traps and oils, and an upgrade to Merciful Shot.
[22:20] <Tens_LOTRO> We are also looking into ways of addressing DoTs breaking Fear.
[22:20] <Tens_LOTRO> (So don’t throw out your wounding bows just yet!)

Lower costs, buff to merciful shot, DoT's possibly not breaking fear, all good. "Boost to melee skills" sounds terrible though.

Personally, I've removed all melee skills from my quickslots except low cut. Every group gets a hunter to do ranged damage, not to pretend to be a champion. Ok, the part about giving buffs to ranged combat sort of softens the whole thing but still, try going to throw a melee attack at Thaurlach with your medium armour to get a bit of a boost to your next swift bow... Brilliant.

I think Turbine should seriously re-evaluate the in-combat job of a hunter. Right now it's single target ranged DPS, which is spamming of 3-5 skills; a champion does that also and loads more. Other than that hunters are little more than taxis.

Any similar/different opinions? Please explain why also.

[MéLAnoR]

Thanks for posting log Llewrend , i prefer not to comment before getting more info cause getting buff to melee skills may not be a bad step , giving hunters more versatile combat play and options.Hope it's something improving our ranged skill inductions not just more damage output.We dont need close combat high damage output skills but complimenting ranged abilities if something decent.
Hope they fix the DoT fear bug and check why our CC skills are being ignored/resisted etc..
Cheaper traps , oils sounds good but imo we really need more options regarding in combat traps as bound skills not just consumables.
I wonder how they ll improve MS , hope they make us able to use the skill more frequently.
that's all i can say for now.

[Scappydog]

Agree m8. If I'd wanted to melee I'd have rolled a Champ. Buffs from melee skills might help when soloing one on one, but what we need is reliable methods to keep mob/mobs at range. How the hell are buffed melee skills going to help when you have 2 or 3 mobs pummeling on you because your traps have been ignored or RoT has broken. Unless those skills are so buffed you can finish the mob off with them. But then why are we a ranged class?? I would much rather see reliable roots/traps added than buffs to melee.

Depending on what these buffs are, is it going to mean another respec? More weeks of tinkering with your gear/traits to get it right again? Maybe the 2% Elf Sword damage racial will finally be slotted , but wait I don't have a sword!! Mind you, that probably doesn't work either, like the +2% bow damage one.

I still consider Bards Arrow to be useless as a Legendary, even if they do sort out the DoT problem, and not worthy of the name.

No comment to make on Merciful shot until I know what the change will be. But if it means I can add it to my quickslots again then fine.

Will be interesting to see how they can implement reduced costs on crafted traps? I will only buy crafted traps if the resist rate goes back to what it was pre-Book 11.

[zimoo]

I'm guessing either cheaper vendor materials (which frankly won't help at all...) or a lower number of gatherable materials needed per item.

[HardOnails]

buffs to melee skills.....

why dont they just go the whole hog, everyone knows they want to do it, ban hunters from using ranged weapons

as for the crafting reduction, big deal, i still have to waste valuable game time messing about gathering mats, crafting traps, waste gold buying pots, and for what? how does this fix our broken class

we are still the only class with no damage mitigation ability in combat

the more changes that are made the more we becoming a "kiting" class yet we are still screwed by the loss of focus when moving and the super glued feet on auto attack when moving

each patch turbine proves yet again they have no idea what they are doing with the hunter class

please remove the pvmp and put us back to how we where - FUN... Im feed up with nurfs and pointless changes because of the R2 wargs with 10 hours played whinning ....

i never thought i would say this as im one of the biggest lotr fans on the planet but well done turbine just like AC2 you lost the plot totally ....

[Elisar]

duno where they got idea to buff melee skills? i never saw hunter using melee and i think that will never change. they wont buff melee so hard it will replace our bow skills so no one will be using them anyway.
they should remove our terrible melee skills and give us 1-2 new bow skills, and if they wanna buff, they can make that Agile Rejoinder to do at least 200-300 damage (since its parry skill).

[Belion_]

^agreed

i hate our melee skill i can run up and do 50 dmg with a melee hit or stay at range and do 230 with a auto attack from my bow gee go figure

[Sirak]

in principal I am not so unhappy about what they say.

- merciful shot needs improvement
- melee skills, if they really buff them, fine
- lower costs for traps, fine
>> additionally I hope to see a buff for
- bards arrow
- barbed arrow (the DoT is just too small at high levels)

[Daguras]

I'm not interested in melee skills... only use them for getting agro of a nearby minstrel or the odd lowcut. Rarely a mob gets close enough and when they do a quick scourging blow is all thats need to finish them off (except goblins/orcs who get a Blindside when they try to run away).

As for ranged skills, Merciful Shot is already sweet but an upgrade would be OK although I'm not sure exactly would be changed (I'm quite happy with 1000+dmg crits TYVM).

Some kind of very short root (like BAs pin shot) and a silence or interrupt would be nice. A stackable DoT would also be cool... or maybe more variety, like wounds, disease and poison (with as much variety as the NPCs inasmuch they can add block/parry/evade/mitigation debuffs). Maybe the silence shot would even stop a mob calling for help when the fear runs out or is a reactive skill (need crit ranged or something, maybe). Sounds fairly balanced and could give hunters a lot more combat options both solo and in groups...

An extreme range shot would be nice too... big cooldown, low(ish) damage and 60 metre range

Cheaper traps is OK too, but preferably give the obvious traps like tripwire to Woodworkers or make them a skill and make us less reliant on Historians (who NEVER post anything useful on AH anyway.. except for the odd ripoff merchant, or people levelling the craft).

One thing that really needs looking at is Class traits... only about half are useful at the moment and other classes use them to define their play style. I'd like to be able to balance my hunter between extreme ranged single target nuking with loads of crits and more support like better fear, roots, poison/disease cure etc.

Not even thinking of effects to PvMP, since the game is PvE oriented.

[nightbyday]

buff melee skills... oh right let me think when would a hunter want to melee and not shoot as there is no dead zone?

On greys... for Fun
errrrm
errrm
ermmm
on spiders or fast intrupt mobs
umm
errr
In Pvmp (i thought no changes to the normal game would be for that)

hunters are ranged, with weak melee skills... champs are melee, with weak ranged skills. Now if champs have heavy armour becuase they get up close and prsonal what do hunters have?

a buff to merciful shot WHY???
raid/fellowships it is not very often that i hunter will have enough focus left for that shot on a boss fight and the induction time mean on normal fights it better to use penertrating. On big bosses 25% hp can be 25k+ are hunters are going to steal aggro for no reason for a shot that won't finish a mob... i could go on more about the benefit of buffing this shot but why bother, lets just say thanks for the buff but no thanks

fears and dots, has to be addressed.

lower costs on oils etc.... err the jacked up prices on AH is the issue here

based on suggested:-
i would like to see a melee buff that stuns (dream)
base auto shots buffed (slotable trait?) so a hunter shots faster harder :P
Dots no break fears (so those times when we use light oil etc another prof cpould mezz.fear and not have it break due to a hunters 'incompatence'.