Hunter Q&A with your host, Zombie Columbus

[Kongas]

Including this:

Re: Block stance vs. Threat stance, and Engage questions

You'll get widely differing views on threat from Guardians depending on how good the DPSers (in particular Hunters as they have no threat management skills like Champs and Burgs do) that they play with are. In my experience even with 28% threat stance and near perfect gear you still wouldn't be able to hold aggro from DPSers that go all out, certainly not with any kind of consistency (tanking is all about standard deviations after all), by just building threat normally.

[Elrantiri]

I dont see any fight where you'd go all out anyway, at least not constantly.

At lightning you will have to move around so you dont stand in lightning areas for too long.
At Fire and Frost you'll most likely be thrown around a bit and in Challenge you'd probably swap a bit between boss and adds
At Acid there are phases with adds
Shadow has both adds and requires you to move once in a while
Saruman has many mobs where you'll probably tank the first target while the tanks get solid aggro on the other ones.

[Lestache]

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...gage-questions
This thread is filled with guardian tanking goodies.

As far as I understand it for single target bosses it's a matter of giving the tank 5 secs while he uses Fray and positions himself, then you pump out DPS like a mad man. The tank will Challenge the boss and use reactives if possible, then at the end of Challenge he'll Engage and swap to Threat Stance. After this he'll tell the champs to use Ebbing Ire for even more threat. This should put the guardian well ahead threatwise no matter what kind of DPS you're throwing at the boss.
My own Guardian is only lvl 25 though so I cant say I'm an expert in that area

EDIT: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...33#post6094833
This post is probably the most descriptive of how to handle aggro in a single target bossfight.

EDIT: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...76#post6096076
Post with graph :]

Yep, that'd be the method - thanks for covering for my laziness.

(The Champ thread post doesn't offer any more than what you see in those posts.)

[Lestache]

I dont see any fight where you'd go all out anyway, at least not constantly.

At lightning you will have to move around so you dont stand in lightning areas for too long.
At Fire and Frost you'll most likely be thrown around a bit and in Challenge you'd probably swap a bit between boss and adds
At Acid there are phases with adds
Shadow has both adds and requires you to move once in a while
Saruman has many mobs where you'll probably tank the first target while the tanks get solid aggro on the other ones.

It's probably not terribly helpful in Lightning, even for those groups that have figured out how to not have to move a lot, mainly because the Champs aren't generating enough aggro to really make Ebbing Ire as powerful as it is in more stationary fights.

Fire & Frost - until we actually have a beatable challenge mode, most groups are zerging one boss as quickly as possible, so the method would help. It's also quite possible to have 10-11 people never get hit with a rock toss, and corruptions should be cleared quickly, so there's no reason to get thrown around. I believe that one German kin has mentioned downing the first giant in just over one minute - yeesh.

Acid - a number of groups are zerging the boss to kill him in less than 1:40, so this method is perfect.

Shadow - it'd be a nice way to zip through that first 15% of morale really quickly, but yeah - after that there are adds to deal with.

Anyway, sorry for the derail - I know that y'all are disappointed with various things about your class right now. I just had to jump in to point out that (I believe) that strong DPS should require a strong tank.

[rilvandir]

Have you ever given to thought about hunters going further into usage of stealth skills?

Short answer, no. Longer answer, pushback from the Hunter community when even a new AOE skill is introduced tells me that messing with Stealth would be looked down upon. Keeping Camouflage as a thematic one-of skill feels like the right place to be for now.

This is quite a telling remark. What on earth has stealth to do with AOE?

[Kongas]

This is quite a telling remark. What on earth has stealth to do with AOE?

Quite. Nothing at all except to reveal his utter lack of clues concerning the class he is supposed to be 'developing'.

Anyone who has ever played hunter at end game would know without even trying it that split shot is practically useless. It is not 'AOE' if it effectively requires the targets to be stationary and forming circus pyramids. It also requires it to do more than mildly irritate the targets to be useful.

That's why we 'pushed back', because it's an almost complete waste of a quickslot (as opposed to the total waste that is Hunter's Art) Not because we're hidebound conservatives unable to understand the awesomeness of his proposals. A dev more experienced in the class would have instantly understood that changes in game mechanics that gave more dps while leaving us desperately vulnerable to damage needed aggro management improvements.

Instead he took it upon himself to turn what was a competent ranged off-tank into a glass cannon. As a customer who has invested much time and treasure into playing this class I really don't think companies should fundamentally change a class nature. Particularly without serious discussion with those of us committed enough to the class and game to hang out here.

More broadly it illustrates such a gap in understanding of the class between board and dev that it calls for a change. Let's face it - we don't have a dev at the moment.

[Elrantiri]

This is quite a telling remark. What on earth has stealth to do with AOE?

What he meant was that when the hunter community was negative about introducing a new AoE skill, he doesnt think he'll be populair if he applies changes to our current stealth skills.

I still think Split Shot has its uses (specially in Faron set to use between each RoA if mobs are close together), but Hunter's Art is just useless.

[Bond007]

The only usefulness of Split Shot is because of how it's tied into traits (AoE trait) or set bonuses (Faron). Other than that, sadly it's just a meh skill, and without those tie ins, it'd be just as laughable as Hunter's Art

[VincentVanPort]

What he meant was that when the hunter community was negative about introducing a new AoE skill, he doesnt think he'll be populair if he applies changes to our current stealth skills.

I still think Split Shot has its uses (specially in Faron set to use between each RoA if mobs are close together), but Hunter's Art is just useless.

Yeah true. If changes to stealth would be implemented as poorly as Split Shot and HA, then he can fear "pushback" rightfully so. He did not have to behave like an insulted child just because his additions to the hunter class were completely useless. They are and undoubtfully so.

Although I believe that you could not really do anything bad to stealth right now. The skill has its uses but suffers from the fact that it takes four seconds to cast when you include the animation, before you can do anything else. The bane of the hunter I guess.

There would be far less outrage if the skills implemented would work properly.

[Kongas]

The only usefulness of Split Shot is because of how it's tied into traits (AoE trait) or set bonuses (Faron). Other than that, sadly it's just a meh skill, and without those tie ins, it'd be just as laughable as Hunter's Art

Yea. The tie in to set bonuses had a real feel of 'I'm going to MAKE this skill useful. Just you wait.' about it.

[Issachar44]

It seems to me that Split Shot was conceived solely as a tool for grouping. The assumption was that we'd use it to attack mobs surrounding the tank. The area of effect is *intentionally* small so that we don't accidentally break CC on mobs a short distance away from the tank. If it has minimal usefulness for solo play, that's okay. (So does Beneath Notice.)

But even though the basic idea is good for group play, the skill just doesn't offer enough benefit to bother including it in rotations. I think it really needs to apply some kind of effect. A skill that debuffed a few mobs around the tank would be useful enough that ZC could even increase the cooldown time.

As for Hunter's Art, I don't have any use for it at all. I recently reorganized my skill bars, and couldn't justify including either HA or Split Shot.

Both skills are design misses. But they could be fixed!!! (ZC, please consider this!)

[Kongas]

It seems to me that Split Shot was conceived solely as a tool for grouping. The assumption was that we'd use it to attack mobs surrounding the tank.
Both skills are design misses. But they could be fixed!!! (ZC, please consider this!)

I hear what you're saying but 2 quick shots have 0.4 second longer induction than one SS, do more damage and crit better with QS legacy. Not sure why we'd want to mildly annoy a couple of targets on a tank rather than seriously damage one of them either.

But that's the problem - to lift a phrase someone here has used before - before SS came along none of us have ever thought 'gee - something that does minor damage to two targets standing really close together would come in really handy right now.'

New skills should fill gaps and address weaknesses if they don't add a useful new capability. This does none of those things - and like having a long animation on hunters art pull aggro - was self-evidently a bad idea as soon as it was first conceived.

At the same time game mechanic changes were creating obvious new weaknesses and compounding old problems. To waste limited programming resources on two things that were obviously of, at best, a contrived usefulness in very limited circumstances, was a poor decision.