Hunter History

Hunter History

Mordor: My first hunter was meant to be a low-level farmer that would supply ingredients to my cook. After a decade of changes, Fanrel suddenly became my second character to tour Middle-Earth in preparation for the Mordor expansion. My adventure was rather simple with a fast-moving class using the infamous rapid fire and barrage skills. Then right before the moment came, someone decided the hunter class was too powerful. It started with little changes to blood arrow. Purge Poison went from removing three to two in October 2016. On June 4th, my gameplay was butchered when they added cooldowns to how often you could use the barrage skill. The interesting blue tree was torn apart as they increased the benefits of the red tree. Fanrel was just passing through the Black Gate into Mordor and couldn't take down the first few orcs in Udun. Without knowing what to do, the character was shelved and I left the game for six months.

Minas Morgul: Then came a second chance with the hunter when another expansion released. Adjustments were made to lower the difficulty of the game. I made the decision to switch over to a red hunter. Then they started running the Remmorchant raid on Bullroarer and decided curing poisons in the raid was too powerful March 2020. They added a cooldown to the basic skill and extended the one you received as a yellow hunter. Another problem rose when hunters were trying to complete the Houses of Lamentation by themselves with one skill that removed corruptions every 60 seconds and another that couldn't be used until the opponent's morale was brought down. So, they modified a lot of cooldowns in May 2020. The company saw the need to make some further changes to adapt for their future content. This meant that every class needed to reliably have both a corruption-removal ability and interrupt when entering inside an instance by themselves at level 20. The patch on August 2020 did three momentous things to the hunter: (1) they retracted the "melee followed by range" two-strike combo of blindside and made the interrupt usable from a distance, (2) Blood Arrow was obtainable at level 20 instead of level 50, and (3) moved the corruption-removal ability from Mercy Shot to Blood Arrow.

Revamps

Company: In December 2020, EG7 obtained Standing Stone Games with the desire to capitalize on the game in preparation for Rings of Power in 2022. Amazon was spending a lot of money on the show. They hired Raninia as executive producer in May 2021. Right before he left the company a year later, they hired two system designers in April 2022 - Orion, who was there when the game released, and OnnMacMahal. They had a goal to revamp each and every class starting with the minstrel in September 2022. The captain and the warden came in March 2023. The beorning and guardian came in August 2023. The lore-master in July 2024. And finally the burglar and hunter in July 2025.

Communication: However, there was a major problem taking place. The developers were having a hard time keeping a line of communication open to the general public. On September 2022, Orion posed the question on the forums in hopes to improve the situation. This went beyond not seeing all the changes of the game in Release Notes or explaining new features clearly. You see, OnnMacMahal originally started a thread for captain feedback in August 2022 and didn't make another post until January 2023 right before Bullroarer opened to the public. If a conversation wasn't happening on the forums, were the developers talking with players elsewhere? It seemed that they were making posts in the Ghyniverse Discord channel ever since they joined the team. I counted a total of 3,500 posts from OnnMacMahal filled with questions, gags, information, pictures, changes, and personal details. It didn't take too long before Cordovan saw the benefits of the platform and pushed for legal standing to manage an Official Discord in February 2025.

Hunter Delay

Proposals: After seeing complaints on the forums, Orion wanted to make it right by publicly offering the players a number of options. In April 2023, he posted two (technically three) ideas on how to change the hunter class. Orion's first response to the thread was how a blue line hunter was designed as a "mid-range mobile harasser" while red line hunter was a "classic stand and deliver style ranged damage dealer." Yellow hunters would be minor debuff and crowd control. The second list posted a few days later had some very radical ideas where blue became a passive tree and hunters could force taunt enemies. A couple weeks later after the transition to the new forums, Orion posted a third thread with the idea of adding abilities for camouflage.

Complications: So, why did it take so long? If the developers were able to push out five class revamps within a year, why did it take two years to get the hunter revamped? Perhaps the first reason is how the team was progressing too fast. Severlin stated between the verge of finishing Update 36 and moving towards the expansion that they wanted time to make some structural changes to the class. Then in the middle of developing Corsairs of Umbar, Severlin admitted in a stream with Bludborn that they lost two developers to Blizzard. Now that Severlin was acting as executive producer, Orion volunteered to be content lead and develop his first raid in a long time. He then passed his notes to OnnMacMahal. Known only to those inside the one Discord, OnnMacMahal told everyone that he already committed to developing the lore-master March 2024. If that wasn't bad enough, OnnMacMahal was given the task to balance the instances ahead of the level cap increases on the legendary server. While he didn't get around to a lot of changes at the level 50 cap, there were extensive changes for Moria, for Mirkwood, and In Their Absence Instance Cluster.

New Hunter

Developer Bias: There has been a growing theory that OnnMacMahal favors the raiders. He was the one that worked on monster classes for the Ettenmoors and likes to converse outside the official forums. His changes to the class stuck close to the original concept Orion posed by making blue hunter a skirmisher with benefits for melee, red hunters a standby turret with boosts to damage, and yellow hunters with a number of support skills. There was some extensive work done, even bringing back the old Agile Rejoinder that was removed when classes were worked on in 2013 with the introduction of trait trees. Although OnnMacMahal has expressed his distaste in a number of skills before, he is willing to make compromises. He mentioned before how he rather throw out Motivating Speech from the captain entirely but recognized how many players viewed it as a staple of the class. He thought about removing the minstrel's Melody Stance until hearing from the number of players who use it in their groups.

Yet, OnnMacMahal still implemented some of his ideas that he felt improved the class overall despite the feedback. He wasn't afraid to explain his reasons either on the Release Notes, on the forums, or in the Discord:

Stances are removed - Over the years, players have generally landed on either Precision or Strength as being the “best” stance and then stuck to that stance 100% of the time (until a balance patch changed the stances themselves). The stances themselves never meaningfully altered any skills (Quick Shot only received relatively minor changes, and Hunter's Art was removed years ago - no other skills were impacted by your stance) and they were arguably made obsolete by trait specialization trees. Given that they add very little to active gameplay, these skills are being phased out completely.
Improved Focus removed - The buff conferred by “Improved” Focus has always been a bit awkward. It gave you a big damage boost but only for a few skills in a quick opening burst, and it required you to channel Focus beforehand. It was arguably too strong in PvP (where an opening burst sometimes begins and ends a fight) too weak in PvE (where your opening 5 second burst is often just a tiny fraction of a combat encounter’s total time) and frustrating to use on landscape (where you’re free to channel Focus as much as you want, but stopping to do so before every pull becomes tedious).
Most traps removed - In Ghyniverse Discord, he stated that laying down traps is "somewhat antithetical to actions taken while engaged in combat with an enemy." He does not like invisible traps that no one can see or target. He felt traps are "a bit of a mechanical and performance nightmare. It's not possible to make a triggered trap even detonate on its centrepoint, and you can not guarantte which targets they hit." He did not like how the yellow hunter applied roots when they "have almost no impact on ranged mobs... do not even let you precisely target enemies." He wanted to have "a serious attempt at bringing hunters into the support category, giving them the core tools necessary to actually support a group."
The increase of run speed is now available for all hunters with a catch - Find the Path used to require five trait points to increase it from 15% to 30%. OnnMacMahal has a somewhat contradictory approach to this ability. He states that this ability is a trap choice trait that doesn't belong in a tree but also feels the skill is too powerful to maintain a full 30% run speed to an entire group. So a full 25% run speed is what we received in the patch. As a compromise, you can go a full 35% speed at any time in or out of combat for 10seconds every minute with the exclusive blue hunter Fleetness skill. Cry of the Hunter now increases your run speed by 20% instead of 10%.

Mechanics: So, what are some other big changes to the class?

Blue hunter has more melee-focused damage - Although there aren't any new melee skills despite the return of the healing-focused Agile Rejoinder and Scourging Blow being something that has been there from the start, the bar for damage is going to be lower for those who chose not to use the skill since the peak is higher now that there is a tracery for melee damage, a trait in the first row of the yellow tree that offers a chance to build focus from using melee, and an increase to melee damage in two different traits in the blue tree. The skill Scourging Blow itself does more damage than before if you have applied Barbed Arrow and Exsanguinate. The exceptional +50% crit chance with the Wounded Prey trait from using Huntsman's Shot was removed during the feedback process and never made it live. You may apply a Lingering Wound while using Low Cut, but this is more of a perk than a requirement.
Hunters barely have any skills left to prepare before a fight - There are no buffs from using Focus or Camouflage. There is hardly any reason to use Camouflage anymore. The only setup for hunters is the "set trap" skill which no longer is a basic skill but requires one trait point where tripwire used to be in the yellow tree (and still usable in combat). Tripwire is now a yellow tree exclusive and transforms to a "throw" skill in combat. OnnMacMahal will not debate on the removal of other traps yellow hunter used to be able to use before the patch. Heart Seeker and Burn Hot are both now red tree exclusive. OnnMacMahal expresses that there isn't a reason why a blue hunter would use such a skill.
Almost every sort of utility or support skill has been shifted to yellow hunters - I was completely taken back by the number of abilities they now have to control the field of battle.

Bard's Arrow (fear) and low cut (slow) are probably the two things every hunter has available at the trainer.
Yellow exclusives include tripwire that used to be in the first row of traits (stun), pinning shot that used to be for red hunters (root), dazing blow that removes a corruption (daze).
Skills that are now traits are Distracting Shot that used to be available for all hunters (daze), new skill blasting arrow (daze), Low Cut used to red but now for everyone without any focus restore mechanic but requires a trait point for the effect (root), Set Trap used to be for everyone but now a trait (root), piercing arrow (slow).
Skills that yellow hunters always had include Deadly Decoy (stun) and rain of thorns as a trait (root).

Without stances, Quick Shot slow had to be replaced - In the first row of the yellow tree is Hindering Shot that applies a slow up to 30% for barbed arrow. As for the heal, take your pick. All hunters have blood arrow. Blue hunters have Press Onward and Agile Ajoinder. Yellow hunters have Kingsfoil Knowledge, Strength of the Earth, and Piercing Arrow.
A couple of things that were standard now require traceries - Blindside no longer restores focus unless you get the tracery that turns it exclusively into a melee skill (with its fancy poke animation before they changed it to range). Cry of the Hunter no longer dazes around you unless you get the tracery.

Development

Bullroarer: Implementations of the hunter class had a rather rough testing process. Although OnnMacMahal pitched the changes in the beginning of May, he didn't start making changes until the end of May. While he did not like the concept of oils being these non-reactive buffs that didn't interact with other classes, the idea of temporary oils that lasted a few minutes was immediately crossed out from the notes after the overwhelming negative feedback within the first hour. Class changes weren't available during the first build. There was a time when they were even telling players not play a hunter since they were in such a broken state. A number of things still weren't ready by the fourth build. Kingsfoil Knowledge still wasn't implemented by July 7th. Traceries were only added in the fifth test phase. Players were posting all kinds of feedback in the Bullroarer Hunter channel in the Official Discord from tooltips showing the wrong data to traits not properly applying to skills.

Problems: Patch Day was a nightmare. Standard downtime was extended an hour, then to an unknown time, discovery of a problem with the build that extended the time to 6pm, a mismatch of the game worlds, to finally opening at 9pm. When reviewing the Release Notes, you might have noticed OnnMacMahal saying that certain figures can't be shown such as in the case with Upshot. Some tooltips still aren't showing everything like in the case of Deadly Decoy or the amount of damage in Huntsman's Blades trait. Yellow hunter traits aren't being properly applied like the new Kingsfoil Knowledge and Tripwire (as well as its other variant Tangle-dart). With the removal of the One Trap, the minstrel's ability Call to Greatness doesn't refresh anything for a yellow hunter.

Gameplay

Blue Hunter: There are two types of abilities in the tooltips - Focus Builders and Focus Spenders. One gives you focus and the other spends it.

Builders: Rotate between Lingering Wound (stacks three times), Exsanguinate (trigger required), quick shot, barbed arrow, and improved swift bow (gives two focus instead of one).
Spenders: Use Rapid Fire to get free costs with Penetrating Shot once as it lowers enemy mitigations by 3% for 10 seconds (refreshes timer if you use it again). Tier up barrage three times to initiate cooldown and Huntsman Shot (after using lingering wound).

After you use barbed arrow, exsanguinate, and huntsman shot, get into melee range and use Scourging Blow. I wouldn't worry too much about Volley, but you can then immediately use Swift Bow to get the most out of the increase in damage (since it only applies to a range skill).

Red Hunter: Things are going to feel long without some of the previous induction reductions to function. You do still have the trait Fast Draw that reduces 30% after spamming Quick Shot or Long Draw three times. Use Burn Hot to power up Heartseeker which gives you 5 focus for Upshot. Then cycle between skills to lower the cooldowns of those two skills. Watch when you use Swift Bow as it increases the chance to use Mercy Shot by 20% (or 26% chance with the tracery). Do not be afraid to stand still when enemies hit you since Plant Feet now lowers damage 20% instead of giving you a 5% evade chance.

Yellow Hunter: There are plenty of different toys to play around with now that you lost all your traps. To a certain degree, the entire tree feels like it was designed as a passive tree that helps blue and red hunters. Make good application of your dazing blow and Horn of Orome to remove corruptions. If you are in a group, you will want to use Hail of Arrows, Explosive Arrow, and Bard's Arrow (with The Black Arrow trait) for the debuffs.

General Tips: There's a few things that might help you out as a new hunter:

Do not underestimate the campfire skill. It restores your vitals about twice as fast as regular food.
Unless you are a red hunter, I suggest getting yourself a range extension "word of power" tracery.
Purge Poison for the fellowship is a trait that is now available to obtain outside yellow hunters.
Strength of the Earth restores about the same of a potion after a full channel.

Traceries: Down below is a chart of what each of the traceries transformed into with the patch.

A lot of traceries increase damage: Focus Spender, Focus Builder, Ranged Skills Critical, Merciful Shot/Huntsman, Swift Bow, and Bleed. Red Hunters: Swift Mercy Chance (only increases 20% chance to 26% chance), Burn Hot, Heart Seeker, and Upshot. Blue Hunters: Melee Skills (increases damage 20%) and Barrage. Yellow Hunters: Suppressing Stings (reduce outgoing healing boost).

Situation traceries include melee blindside (removes range but adds focus) and Cry of the Hunter daze. Strength of the Earth at least provides vitality on top of the boost. Quick Shot Focus doubles the 20% given to 40% chance in the blue tree. One trait into Blasting Arrow increases it by one second but the tracery adds 3 seconds on top. The Fleetness tracery adds 4 seconds to 10 seconds but has evade rating.

I don't believe lowering Intent Concentration cooldown 20 seconds, lowering Distracting Shot by 10 seconds, increasing Press Onward heal by 10%, or boosting the puny heal of Kingsfoil Knowledge are worth slotting into your legendary items.