Hunter's Status as an Underperformer

(hawkeyeguy99) #1

Hunter is a ton of fun for me and probably one of my favorite mercs to play right now despite the fact that he’s supbar to every other recon out there. But my favorite Alaskan crossbow shooter severly is underperforming in terms of support xp earn rates. Considering that Vaseline can earn 80xp per spot for literally just throwing an egg in the general direction of the enemy, I don’t understand why Hunter only gets 60xp per spot when he has to actually hit his target to make it work. Here’s my suggested changes to help bring him more into the meta:

XP - change from 40xp per spot to 100xp per spot. This allows him to gain support XP at a more reasonable rate when compared to the other recon mercs who gain this support XP at a much faster rate in higher quanities.

Spotting - increase spot time by 2-3 seconds. This allows his spot to be useful not only for him but also for his teammates. Currently his reveal is so short that he is useless as a team player to reveal enemies. His spotting ability should act as more of a marking tool to allow his team to focus on one enemy as opposed to simply a glance at their whereabouts.

What are your thoughts? I’m not sure about the spotting change, I’d like it but it may make him OP as a recon.

(x3onn) #2

I wouldn’t mind those 2 changes. Shooting corpses would give too much XP though.

He wouldn’t become viable with a spotting buff. He’s great fun to use like you said, but he is still trash in his current state. First thing I’d do is increase the projectile speed, it’s too RNG to hit a moving target right now. Not sure about the damage numbers.

(hawkeyeguy99) #3

Agreed on the shooting corpses thing. When he was first released and this was possible I’d farm the heck out of that and get ridiculous amounts of XP by shooting downed players. That shouldn’t come back, but once they did remove it his XP potential went into the trash.

(Jigstraw) #4

I mean, hunter’s probably the most balanced xp wise already. Vassili’s spotting ability is insanely broken and they need to cut spotted exp and spotted assist exp in half already, because I shouldn’t be able to get 9k support exp in a single match with Vassili. Aimee is in a similar situation, but to a lesser degree, since at least her spotting ability needs a direct line of sight, meaning that it IS vulnerable to being destroyed, while Vassili can just throw his out of bounds and nobody can do anything about it.

basically what i’m saying here is don’t compare hunter to vassili/aimee and say he’s an underperformer. You’re comparing him to mercs that are drastically overperforming.

(Press E) #5

Spotting XP should be heavily nerfed for all the other recons really, rather than buffing hunter’s XP to match it. 80 XP per spot and then 100 XP if someone else kills them, If you kill them you also get the combat XP on top of all that, which is just stupid.
Yeah, spotting an enemy is useful. Debilitating one as Aimee is even better. But there’s no way it should be valued more highly in terms of XP than just killing that person, especially since all that’s involved in it is throwing a ball or even just looking at a person

As it is it’s pretty easy to topscore as a recon without ever shooting anything, which should obviously be the main purpose of a recon merc. If you can’t snipe people, you shouldn’t be rewarded for playing vassili anyways, in the same way assaults don’t get rewarded if they can’t kill. Spotting is useful, but not as much as a medic or engineer in the right spot.

Wouldn’t mind uping his spot duration though

(Xenithos) #6

I like these changes, and unlike most people in these forums I’m actually fine with the support exp you get from being a reconnaissance in DB. It actively rewards showing enemies.

I would go one step further, allow him to be an Aimee-Hunter Hybrid, OR increase spot time by an even greater amount. So basically, you hit someone with a crossbow, they’ll be debilitated, OR they’ll be visible to everyone for like 8 seconds or something absurd. Don’t get hit by a hunter, he TRACKS YOU. The downside is the moment you hit a different enemy, it stops tracking the person. This way it’s balanced if you’re fighting multiple people, and/or isn’t too powerful so you can’t just peg 3 people and see them for forever.

(hawkeyeguy99) #7

So after playing him some more yesterday I realize I made a mistake in my original post. He doesn’t even get 60xp per mark, it’s only 40. Now I get this can stack for shooting the same target multiple times but this is very rare as often a fully charged shot is needed to get the jump on people and finishing off with the slow-firing and hard to predict unzoomed crossbow is very impractical and will get you killed. I still stand by my original XP change as 40 is simply not enough to be viable.

(HadronZodiac) #8

I agree with this problems, I even put it in my review of hunter.

His spot is short and half the time not even noticed by the team, i thinking 90exp per hit would be fine if you can consistently hit arrows. And make it a length of 3.25 seconds

(Teflon Love) #9

I like the current Hunter. He is completely useless in most cases and typically fights for the bottom score with some 3/27 Vassili. Hardly anyone picks him and even fewer people know how to play him well. He’s by far the least annoying merc in the batch of recently released mercs.

(WatchAsILead) #10

As everyone already said, Hunter is fine, The other recons need a spotting Xp nerf

(RectalTerror) #11

But that’s what needs to change, not the other way around. It’s vassili and aimee that need to change.