Huntsman balance

I personally find huntsman a lot of fun to play but it feels objectively inferior to mercenary and foot knight. Mercenary has unmatched wave clear and great team support, foot knight is a flexible tank with the most reliable stun in the game. This is compared to huntsman that is kinda the middle child of the careers. It is good for killing specials and elites but waywatcher is objectively better because of her better accuracy with the bow and seeking shot. Boss killing is the only thing that huntsman is really built for with the career skill but most teams can manage to deal with bosses just fine without huntsman. It just needs more utility overall so that you are not sitting there hoping there will be a boss so you can be useful. One way you could improve the class might be buffing the career skill to also help more with patrols. If it had shield penetration at reduced damage or removed friendly fire when active you could just shoot at patrols without the risk of taking a quarter of your teammates health I think huntsman would be a lot more viable. Also, huntsman might be a bit better if the bow was a bit more accurate so if nothing else it could compete with waywatcher. Thanks for reading and I absolutely love the game. Keep up the great work Fatshark!

I think both elf and huntsman are both in good spots, both having their strong points and slightly diffrent roles. I’ll ignore the mercenary and foot knight comparison because they should be compared to IB, Slayer. Zealot or even unchained / handmaiden and that’s a totally diffrent thread, however, for the record, I think huntsman is the best career kruber has in its own role. So I’ll compare huntsman with waystalker and BH since those are his direct competition (ignoring beam pyro for obvious reasons). The slight diffrence in roles is that BH and huntsman are ways to deal with CWs while waystalker is pure special killer with homing ult, so waystalker vs pyro and huntsman vs BH would be a better comparisons but since pyro is way overtuned I’ll focus on the other 3.

Huntsman vs waystalker:
+/- They are diffrent vs specials, huntsman bow one shots most specials (everything but gas and sorcerers) with a body shot while elf needs a headshot. Elf bow is faster and has perfect aim while krubers bow can troll you at long distance but mostly works really well if you use it correctly (not charging it fully + reduced spread talent). Huntsman bow one shots SVs, pens monks and is similar against berserkers.

++ More and safer boss dmg, waystalker is dependant on getting headshots to do close to huntsman level boss dps.

++ The best career vs chaos patrols which are the biggest reason for wipes for good groups in legend. Huntsman with tripot and ult can kill 2-6 CWs with first ult and 2-4 with second, more or less dealing with the patrol alone if any1 can tank it for a while. Elf has nothing special against CWs, melee is the best option.

– Huntsman without godlike aim can run out of ammo on maps like into the nest. Elf can’t run out of ammo no matter how much it spams.

– Elf has homing ult for special killing.

Huntsman vs BH:
+/- Huntsman can deal with long range specials, better at midrange specials, worse at close range and melee specials.

++ Boss dmg

+/- Huntsman is better against CW patrols but BH is better at killing lone CWs, ult one shotting them or 2 shotting with repeter / volleybow.

– Longbow weapon switch is reaaallly slow, mostly cant take it out when ur in close combat while BH can easily quickswitch to repeter and delete berserker or some other special in close combat.

– BH can’t run out of ammo.

BH, waystalker and huntsman all have fantastic melee weapons so im not gonna compare those since its way harder and don’t see any one in particular being much better than the other. (falchion, glaive, halberd)

I think all these 3 careers are in a good place, all having diffrent strengths and weaknesses. If I were to suggest some changes, outside of the obvious volleybow quickswitch bug and elf lvl 25 talent fix, I’d wanna see nerfs to scrounger, so it would only proc once per action instead of BH getting 10+ bolts for shooting a volley into a horde and shotguns getting full ammo for bashing a crit into a horde.

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My problem with huntsman is that I feel all his ranged weapons except bow are kinda mediocre.

And with bow I wan’t that accuracy penalisation on zoom gone, it makes no sense to me. If its supposed to lose accuracy then remove the zoom also because its pointless and misleading.

Nah. Huntsman is pretty good now.

I’ll even say that by legend he completely outclasses the WS.

At about 20m it’s still accurate enough to bodyshot. After that zooming really doesn’t help aiming. Anyway, adjusting your FOV may help, but there aren’t many distant targets that will survive a charged bodyshot from Kruber’s longbow.

Also how much of a difference does his special ability actually make? With longbow it doesn’t really feel that much different but perhaps i am wrong.

The devs stated +50% dmg (when reduced from x5), but as far as I tested with dummies it’s actually about x3 dmg.

In-game tests show a significant damage increase which also increases cleave (possibly it acts by increasing power).

Having tried it a bit more I have to say its one of the more boring active abilities also, especially among the ranged focused careers.

Having played more than 60 hours of Waystalker, 30 hours BH and now only 10 of huntsman on legend I have to say huntsman is the second best boss killer auf the bunch but can have its moments of chopping off 30% of a bosses HP with a headshot and his ultimate (Into the Nest boss instantly dies against you). He also requires less aim because he is somewhat inconsistant and does not run out of ammo with Scrounger and Taal’s Blessing.

All in all I really like the career and think out of the 3 on Legend WS is currently the weakest one.

The way I see it is it goes like this:

  1. You have the Ironbreaker. Duh.
  2. You usually want a long range special sniper. Sometimes specials spawn in weird spots and only solution is Burning Head or Trueshot Volley cause nothing else is going to curve ball over that rock formation or around that corner. So that’s either Waystalker or Pyro.
  3. Raw damage. This usually pretty much goes to Bounty Hunter. Everyone knows what a well played BH is going to do on a match.
  4. Utility slot. This is kinda where “anything” really can go. Merc Kruber for his utility, Knight Kruber for CC, Witch Hunter Captain if he’s your jam, etc.

Where does Huntsman fit into that? He kinda fits into the Bounty Hunter role of raw damage. The issue here is while Huntsman could probably beat out Bounty Hunter on boss damage for every other purpose the BH is simply going to blow him out of the water with piercing shots, auto crits, ammo return, and otherwise. This is largely because Huntsman is tied to a bow, and while Bow excels at a single target it’s not so great at anything else (even groups you gotta work things down one at a time).

So you can bring him in that Utility slot, but there’s a lot of other options pretty great at that slot. More damage and boss clear is always great but so is Knight CC or Merc Utility as well as competition from either Sienna’s or Kerillian’s classes.

Killing bosses is great and all, and Huntsman is okay for sure, but over all he really needs more over all utility performance on his ranged weapons. More pierce would go a long way to make ranged horde performance better. Maybe roll back a nerf or two on his ultimate now that stacking damage multipliers are capped. That kinda stuff.

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There is another thing where huntsman by far outshines any other career in the game, chaos patrols. That can be a reason alone to take huntsman instead of BH in a good team, when you know hordes will be under control by other players and SV pats are easily managed. BH is for sure better for random pub teams but in coordinated team, huntsman can save ur group from almost guaranteed wipe that face spawn chaos patrol can sometimes be in tight corridors. In a good team most wipes are from chaos patrols or boss with a lot of other stuff. For boss situations huntsman burst can also be better than BH waveclear.

If I were to try to make a team that has the least chance of failing it would consist of IB, Pyro, Huntsman and fourth one is whatever because those 3 can handle every situation already, so WS / BH / Merc

Huntsman has the best boss deeps since 1.04 where BH boss dmg got nerfed with repeter nerf. Volleybow can’t do as much deeps as tripot double ult huntsman and neither can elf. (elf could be close with 100% headshots tripot double ult)

For me huntsman is the worst ranged class because of cripplingly low ammo capacity on most of his ranged weapons and the fact that his ranged weapons are pretty much just worse versions of other characters’ ones. All he has going for him is higher damage with the bow, but that doesn’t matter most of the time since other characters can just keep shooting until the target is dead. Ammo return on headshot is not that useful because none of his weapons are particularly accurate and going for headshots is not always the best tactic anyway. I find that most people who praise huntsman basically play him like mercenary and only shoot at blue outlines which makes him seem underwhelming compared to other ranged classes.

Have you tried Concoction + Off balance + Shrapnel bomb 20% damage trait + Hunter trait on weapon with bounty hunter against bosses? He melts bosses faster than huntsman.

There is another thing where huntsman by far outshines any other career in the game, chaos patrols. That can be a reason alone to take huntsman instead of BH in a good team, when you know hordes will be under control by other players and SV pats are easily managed. BH is for sure better for random pub teams but in coordinated team, huntsman can save ur group from almost guaranteed wipe that face spawn chaos patrol can sometimes be in tight corridors. In a good team most wipes are from chaos patrols or boss with a lot of other stuff. For boss situations huntsman burst can also be better than BH waveclear.

To which, again, yes the Huntsman is good at clearing single targets one at a time. However these things you and others bring up are things that don’t always happen. You don’t always get a Chaos Patrol that spawns directly on top of you with your Ironbreaker’s Taunt on cool down. One could probably even argue that hordes/patrols spawning directly on top of you is a bug that will be fixed meaning skipping patrols will largely be common again like in game one. You don’t always get a boss even (but to be fair, on average you will).

However what you do get every game is you get lots of horde waves. You also get lots of light packs with multiple storm vermin in it that while you can certainly one shot all of them you have to do it one at a time, slowly (bow draw to full power to one shot and forced reload is around 2 seconds timed), and hope the rest of the things are under control. You also get lots of specials you may not have direct LOS to and need to be able to punch your way through a horde to hit them.

The point being, again, the Huntsman lacks utility in his ranged weaponry. Sure he’s very great in these very specific scenarios that can and do happen but is pretty lackluster in the rest of the scenarios that make up the bulk of the game play.

i find his passive aggressively useless. Its inconsistent, requires tons of skill, and rewards just with the free shot, IF you kill with headshot, which is too small. And if you don’t do headshot, you just have a useless skill.
For me, its like saying “you are not too good to use this passive”.
Many other passives are better, rewards you more and more consistent. But not this one.

Headshotting bosses isn’t that difficult, and hordes are always stacked up and running straight at you, so headshotting them is simple too.