Learning how to Hunter: Part One

When I hit level 70 and started taking part in more dungeons and raids, I quickly began to realise that my regular play style wasn't really suitable anymore, especially with the emphasis in BC dungeons being placed on Crowd Control.

When I took part in my first ever real dungeon group (fortunately with some guildies) I got asked to  trap something, and after a miserable attempt to manage this (I got the mob trapped... about 2 seconds before everything else was dead and the tank pulled it) I realised that I had quite a few vital things to learn about being a true hunter and I needed to learn them very quickly if I intended to continue to take part in these sort of things.

So I began looking at researching my class properly. Just having a glance around at a few resources for specific things wasn't good enough. I needed to really focus on making myself a better player all round. So I found myself turning to one of the pillars of hunter society, BigRedKitty.

BigRedKitty was one of THE hunter bloggers of the time. His blog was hilarious, informative and interesting. It was entirely thanks to him, that I became the hunter I am today, and it was a sad day when he announced he was leaving Warcraft, and blogging about Warcraft for the foreseeable future. He taught me about shot rotations, stat priorities, raiding and dungeoning, hunting for rare-spawns and all manner of other hunter skills and tricks.

One of the most important things I ever learnt from BigRedKitty, that I have never forgotten, was how to chain trap. (I also learnt that "hunters are the superior class, foshizzle"as he would say, but that's irrelevant for now)

Long before trap launcher (but after the dreaded feign-trapping skill that so many vanilla hunters had to learn) there was chain trapping. The art of taking your target away from the group and keeping it trapped for a long as you possibly could.

With BigRedKitty's guide to chain trapping at hand, I wandered around the lengths of Arathi Highlands slowly but surely, pulling raptor after raptor into freezing traps until I pull one raptor into at least 2-3 traps in a row. When the time came once more to enter a dungeon, and the announcement of "Dali, trap the square" came over party chat, I found myself putting my new found skills to the test.

There have been only a few times during my years of playing Warcraft where I have felt such a sense of achievement as when I managed to pull of a successful chain trap in a dungeon for the first time, and subsequent times as well. Chain trapping became of my favourite things to do as a hunter in a dungeon - I had a greater purpose then just dpsing. I was bringing something else, a skill that not everyone could do, which was highly valued in groups. I will admit I got incredibly jealous when we had a mage in the group cause they would often get CC priority over myself. But you win some, you lose some.

I was rather disheartened when Wrath came out and chain trapping (or indeed any CC) was not essential anymore. While some groups still asked for it, over time it became a dying skill, and by the time Cataclysm came out and the trap launcher was released it was rarely done anymore.

I feel that Chain Trapping was one of those skills which really defined being a hunter. Being able to go into a group and chain trap without hesitation was a great feeling, even more so when it was acknowledged by others in the group as a job well done. These days I sometimes feel like there are no more of these defining skills which made you take your class and their abilities seriously, where what you can bring to a group is an expectation and not something that you can take pride in, knowing that you poured time and effort into learning something, and you can see the result right there in front of you.

As corny as it may sound, the day I successfully chain trapped in a dungeon for the first time, was the day I strated to feel like a true hunter. 

Ah nostalgia :)

Happy Hunting!