With the release of the new talent trees in Dragonflight, a lot of classes gained significant utility options. Hunters were somewhat left out of this equation, as we only gained a few minor spells that ultimately have not been very useful in Raid or Mythic+, such as
High Explosive Trap or
Sentinel Owl. This has overall put Hunters in a worse spot relative to other classes compared to previously. Hunters already lacked a unique raid buff and was on the lower end in terms of general utility. With Dragonflight, we also lost access to
Wild Spirits, a very significant part of our viability throughout Shadowlands, as it gave us a unique burst damage profile which was powerful in both Mythic+ and on a lot of raid bosses. Finally, the Evoker class was released, which has some notable utility and the ability to compete with our spot in both raid and Mythic+, a spot which was already contentious. This problem has recently been exacerbated by Augmentation Evokers, who quite possibly will take up multiple raid spots due to their good support capabilities and extensive and unique utility kit. This has left a lot of people asking: Why would you ever bring a Hunter to group? This is ultimately a problem of utility which I will explore.
What this article will aim to show is that while Hunters have quite the few "utility spells" on paper, most of them either have very rare actual applications or are currently outclassed. I'll break down all Hunter utility spells and their usefulness, to accomplish this. While this might seem like a long list, it quickly becomes apparent most of these spells lack concrete uses. It will also discuss how this relates to raid buffs and the lack thereof for Hunters.
The M+ Perspective
Consistently Useful and/or Impactful Utility
Firstly, we'll discuss what can be considered our "best" forms of utility in Mythic+. In spite of this, they are often redundant or outclassed by other class utility.
- Primal Rage - This is often one of the main reasons to bring a Hunter to a group and it's of course very important. Other classes might be able to bring it, but given how Mythic+ only allows five different classes it can be a useful form of role compression. Then again, the release of Evokers and later Augmentation have made this notably less unique. Blizzard Developers themselves have noted that they don't consider lust a large part of a kit because of this redundancy. If this is the best utility we can offer, it doesn't bode well. Marksmanship also loses some DPS to use it and Beast Mastery loses valuable defensive utility.
- Tranquilizing Shot - This is one of our better forms of utility overall. It is nice being the only class with both a Soothe and a Purge effect for the purposes of role compression, although it's not consistently useful in every single dungeon. It is also useful during Raging weeks. The 10-second cooldown and the fact it only removes one stack of buffs can be a little annoying in places compared to other similar spells, leaving it a bit underwhelming ultimately.
- Binding Shot - While an AoE stun is always reasonably useful, this is probably one of the worst ones. The activation requirement makes Binding Shot difficult to work with as you can't stop important stationary casts such as Hail of Stone without additional support from knockbacks. This also shares a choice node with Scatter Shot.
- Single-Target Crowd Control - Hunters have decent tools for shutting down individual mobs. We're still not the best class at this, and our options are all somewhat awkward to use:
Scatter Shot - Shares a choice node with Binding Shot and only briefly stops a cast. Also removes DoTs which is often a negative.
Intimidation - Mostly solid although on a long cooldown compared to other classes. Also not realistically available for Marksman.
Freezing Trap - Works fine for long-form crowd control and skips, but is hard to use effectively to stop a mob in a pack since it's easy to accidentally hit the wrong target.
- Scare Beast - Only useful for the Incorporeal affix, so it's fairly niche. It also has a cast time and randomly short range.
Occasionally Useful Utility
The following is stuff that is "occasionally" useful in Mythic+. This isnt a reason to invite a Hunter but rather small niche things that works maybe in a handful of places.
- Aspect of the Turtle - Has occasional uses as a form of utility rather than a personal defensive. This includes bosses like Sporecaller Zancha where you can clear a lot of Mushrooms easily.
- High Explosive Trap - A knockback is overall nice but brought down by being awkward to use effectively and sharing a choice node with Intimidation, meaning it doesn't really get used that much. Mobs can easily move during the travel time which can make them fly in random directions.
- Feign Death and Camouflage - Can be used for skipping mobs and packs for the group, but this can be done by other classes or even just a Night Elf. Feign Death can also occasionally be used to skip boss mechanics.
- Entrapment - Useful for the Spiteful affix and for specific enemies such as the Nokhud Warspear last season, but overall fairly niche and doesn't work well outside of these specific scenarios.
- Mortal Wounds - Useful for a few specific mobs and bosses like the Overgrown Ancient last season. Often redundant. DPS loss to provide for Marksmanship.
- Misdirection (For Marksmanship and Survival) - Helping the tank maintain aggro is always nice but rarely ever required in a group.
- Wailing Arrow (For Beast Mastery) - Comes at a small (~0.5%) output loss but is overall a pretty okay form of utility for Beast Mastery. The cast time and low duration makes it hard to be reactionary with compared to other crowd control.
Weak Utility/High tradeoffs
Finally we have the category of utility that is very rarely useful in Mythic+, or has too high a tradeoff to realistically ever use, but could reasonably be counted as "utility".
- Wailing Arrow (For Marksmanship) - Comes at a much larger ~3% DPS loss, so too costly to ever reasonably pick.
- Misdirection (For Beast Mastery) - Since Pet Damage doesn't get misdirected, this does very little for Beast Mastery, especially in AoE where it would be the most relevant.
- Bursting Shot - A knockback is nice to have, but not at a ~4% DPS cost.
- Sentinel Owl with Sentinel's Perception/Sentinel's Protection - Technically easy to pick up if you don't need other utility but does very little due to the weak effects and long effective cooldown.
- Pet Pulling - Occasionally pets are able to help pull certain enemies more easily. Examples include Mists of Tirna Scithe and Iron Docks in Shadowlands.
- Flare - Can reveal a few packs early, but doesn't really amount to much.
- Tar Trap - Quite a weak kiting tool by itself since it's stuck on one point in the ground and has a decently long cooldown.
- Master's Call - Awkward to bring out since Cunning pets are worse defensively and it takes time to both dismiss and summon new pets. Also a short duration for the effect. Finally, not useful that often.
Conclusions
Anything beyond the first category here is ultimately fairly niche and doesn't really factor in as a reason to bring Hunters for most group. Most stuff listed here isn't that useful in practice.
Utility in Mythic+ is often down to "role compression". Due to the limited spots in 5-man groups, it's less about having one unique thing you can do and more about having a solid kit as a whole, one that hopefully fits in with the general Mythic+ meta. Hunters suffer from having too many awkward utility spells. This can include things such as swapping pets, taking notable damage losses or awkward activation requirements like
Binding Shot. At the same time, our notable utility isn't that difficult to acquire elsewhere at the moment.
The Raiding Perspective
Consistently Useful/Strong Unique Utility
This lists the unique forms of utility that are a consistent reason to bring a Hunter to raid.
Occasionally Useful Utility
This lists stuff that is usually powerful over a few fights each tier, but can vary a bit in strength depending on fight design.
- Aspect of the Turtle - As a utility tool, Aspect of the Turtle is frequently useful for soaking dangerous mechanics intended for groups or tanks, like on Zskarn, Neltharion and Sarkareth. Out of these it is mainly unique and useful on Zskarn as the only other mobile Physical DoT immunity other than Divine Shield and Blessing of Protection. It does also somewhat sucks to have our main form of raid utility also be one of our defensives, but we're usually tanky enough regardless.
- Freezing Trap - Probably the strongest single-target Crowd Control in the game as it's the only one that can hit any target (except for Blind, which is worse). It also has some unique qualities that are occasionally useful like the ability to be pre-placed. It was last useful on Lihuvim and Anduin Wrynn. It does say something that one of our main forms of raid utility was last useful two tiers ago.
Redundant Utility
These are the utilities that are reasonably useful, but are fairly easily provided by other classes.
- High Explosive Trap / Bursting Shot - Somewhat redundant even if a fight requires a knockback effect. As both of these come with downsides (Difficulty to use/DPS loss to take), it's hard to justify taking as anything other than last resort.
- Primal Rage - Lust is obviously very important but you'll find that a raid group without at least a Mage, Shaman or Evoker in it is very rare (Especially since those classes are optimally brought for their raid buffs). Hence it's difficult to consider this as utility in raids.
- Wailing Arrow - Not as commonly useful in raid as in Mythic+ and also more redundant. Still a DPS loss to pick up, so it'll rarely be worth you picking this up for Crowd Control over a class that doesn't lose anything. Also still has the same problems of being short duration and with a cast time.
- Misdirection (Marksman and Survival) - Nice to help adds get to tanks but rarely ever required.
- Binding Shot - It's easy enough to find better sources of crowd control than this without the awkward activation requirement. This is enough to make it essentially unviable on fights requiring AoE stun rotations such as Sarkareth.
Niche and Weak Utility
All of this utility have had "occasional" use, but sometimes only one encounter per expansion, if even that. Alternatively it's just very inconsequential.
Mobility as Utility?
Often it is stated that the ability to cast while moving can be seen as a form of utility for Beast Mastery in raiding scenarios. The issue with this perspective is that it still all boils down to a numbers game. If another class can do the same job and do more damage in spite of the extra movement requirement, you would prefer that class. While many Hunters might have enjoyed disarming traps on
Zskarn, this was more so a consequence of
Aspect of the Turtle's usefulness on this one fight. It is quite rare that you bring a class to a fight purely based on its ability to move and cast.
Conclusions
For raiding the idea of utility is slightly different. Often times just having one unique buff or debuff as a class is sufficient, or even something as consistently powerful and unique like Warlock
Demonic Gateways. This is where Hunter often falls flat, as it has nearly nothing unique it's able to do that is also frequently useful.
Freezing Trap and
Aspect of the Turtle are our best bets here, and even those aren't often unique or relevant enough to make a Hunter worth bringing. We also have a wide category of niche utility spells that are maybe useful on one encounter per expansion. This somewhat shows that a lot of Hunter utility isn't well suited for modern day wow raid design, as several of these feel like they work on pure accident.
Raids also has a larger issue with redundancy in utility. Even if Hunters have an AoE stun and Bloodlust, the larger group sizes mean that it's very easy to find that utility through another class.
The Damage Profile Problem
Another aspect of utility that might be spoken about is the damage profile of Hunters. Having good damage in general is of course nice to have but having good burst or unique damage forms like spread AoE can help make a spec useful when its utility is lackluster. This was often the case for Hunters in Shadowlands thanks to
Wild Spirits providing us with a nice bursty damage profile which was especially nice for 2-4 targets thanks to
Fragments of the Elder Antlers.
Right now, the damage profiles are simply too lackluster to make up for the lack of utility. Beast Mastery lacks any semblance of burst and the talents that would provide a cooldown are simply too weak right now. Survival does have a few build opportunities for burst but also builds that use no cooldowns whatsoever. Marksmanship has some burst and good single-target but instead suffers from being the most RNG-heavy spec in the game, which means it can be inconsistent for meeting damage checks. It also has hard-capped AoE, which makes it difficult to thrive if doing large pulls in Mythic+.
Final Conclusions
This article was meant to show that Hunters, while having a lot of "utility spells" on paper, does not really have the required toolkit to keep up and be a desirable class in most PvE situations. The current raid buff philosophy feels inconsistent as Hunter is left behind, and Augmentation only accelerates this problem. Should nothing change, high-end raiding guilds are/will be looking remove Hunters from their roster, and while this level of min-maxing often isn't necessary in lower-end guilds, it is often copied. On the Mythic+ side of things our toolkit seems outclassed at the moment.
Firstly, Hunter could use a unique and impactful raid buff. Shamans and Death Knights are somewhat in a similar seat, but those do have stronger and more unique base utility kits to make up for it somewhat. A raid buff could be something simple as a raid-wide stat buff, or something unique like the old
Aspect of the Fox (although this was/is way too powerful - and was already given in nerfed form to Augmentation Evokers in
Spatial Paradox). Even minor stuff like making
Roar of Sacrifice usable as a external damage reduction in PvE would be welcome.
Furthermore, due to the general inflation of utility for a lot of classes, it feels like the current Hunter kit is a bit too meager. Most of our utility has some kind of awkward downside or weakness that makes it impractical. Ways of fixing this include: Baseline Buffs to utility spells (Stuff like
Sentinel Owl and
Tar Trap), removal of awkward limitations (
Binding Shot), making pet-related utility more usable (something like
Wild Kingdom in PvE) and moving utility from spec trees to class trees (
Wailing Arrow and
Bursting Shot).
Finally, Beast Mastery could use a usable DPS cooldown and Marksmanship could use a more consistent damage profile. More than any other class in the game at the moment, Hunters are at the mercy of having good enough "raw damage" to make up for our lack of utility, which doesn't feel particularly great. Of course, any class could be considered if they produced the best damage in a particular form of content, but Hunters are the only class wholly dependent on it.
