Malakhi's post
Here is my humble suggestion:

Give hunters dual wield. That alone would make them much, much more competitive.

You could mess around with flashier bow type stuff, but I think the reason hunters are so weak is because they give up the classic melée class advantage (dual wield) and don't get the burst/malediction/damage reduction potential that the other single wield classes get.

So there's my Santa Zulg 2011 request: give hunters dual wield

I wanted to say that I'm against this because I think dual-wielding hunters with dual-serpent-strike would be grossly overpowered. I rather like the uniqueness and flavor of hunters and I agree that something needs to be changed, but not adding the dual-wield skill.

If anything, I think a three-part change to aimed shot would fix hunters quite a bit. They're a really defensive ranger build, which is nice, with one of their greatest downfalls being the lack of lagging ability.
- Increase the accuracy of aimed shot based on the amount of observes you have built up. How many observes you need would depend on your intelligence, thus allowing bow-hunting viability with elf/wood-elf hunters. Since an "aimed shot head" is lag and nasty maledictions, greatly increasing the accuracy of this would help land kills
- Give bows a damage bonus based on weight and strength, which should make a storm giant ranger slightly more feasible (Heavier bow = more durable, stronger string. Higher strength = pull string back further a la The Rock in The Scorpion King)
- I'd also like to see increasing "aimed shot torso" to trip lag instead of 1 round lag.


Overall, hunters are a finesse-kill defensive ranger build. They shouldn't have the PK win count of a savage or beastmaster, but they shouldn't have the PK loss count of a savage or beastmaster either. I think their effectiveness relies greatly on the ability of their primary skills to work (i.e. timed attack, aimed shot) and giving them some way to reliably lag (i.e. tweaking aimed shot)