A few months ago I wrote my first ever column about hunters. It wasn’t too complimentary and went on to become one of the biggest hitting columns SK-Gaming has ever seen. I haven’t been back to read the comments since it first came out but it caused what you might generously call a heated debate.

In my defence, this was written back when we still had ranged stun, ridiculous Explosive Shot damage and, if I remember rightly, Bestial Wrath still was on Readiness.

Since then, love for the hunter community has hardly grown. The artists formerly known as the artists formerly known as eMg brought hunters into the limelight in the best and the worst ways at the same time. Used to years of being non-existent on the tournament scene, hunters were delighted to see someone pushing the class into contention. Almost everyone else (except shamans) just saw a skill-less cheese spec hitting big red kitty and hoping something fell over. Usually it did.

For the record, I still hate Beast Master hunters. But my opinion of the class as a whole has changed recently. My own hunter is my 2nd oldest alt but never made it to max level at any stage. BM has always (?) been the best levelling spec but I just found it too boring and not interactive enough, as well as feeling dirty for just pressing ctrl+1 and little else.

But the new dungeon finder system is by far the best thing ever to happen to WoW levelling so I grabbed myself some heirlooms, spec’d Marksman and started the grind from 67 to 80. It’s been pretty fun so far.

As an esports enthusiast, I obviously went for a look around the hunter forum on Arena Junkies to see what to expect when I finally get to 80. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have bothered. Just like every other class forum, it was full of how bad hunters are and how x class destroys them.

But one thing did catch my eye, which is the worry that hunters will get nerfed because of their synergy with protection warriors. The poster’s reasoning was that Blizzard don’t want to nerf a very important PvE class and would rather make PvP players suffer. Whether you buy into that or not, it raises the age old debate about Blizzard’s priorities and the direction of WoW itself.

The way I look at it, however, is that this is a perfect case for the argument that the game should be effectively split in two. Keep the tournament realm up all year round and patch it independently from the normal game. I know this is unlikely to happen, but we can dream.

One of the difficulties would appear to be the extra work load. I’m sure Blizzard might have to hire a few new guys, or at least increase people’s workload. But it’s not like they need their main design team to work on arenas. As long as balance was watched more carefully, and maybe a new map was added, perhaps once a season, I think most arena players would be happy.