Dragon Hunter in ZvZ

[Vyce.2014]

I'm wondering why Dragon Hunter with LB and a few traps are not considered meta in ZvZ. The range, cripple, CC, and damage all look pretty great.

 

I acknowledge that support firebrand is pretty OP. But if I want to bring damage, CC, and stability, why not DH? Especially if when you compare it to a Hammer Herald...

 

What an I missing?

 

 

[RisenHowl.2419]

 

You aren't missing anything, the meta is just slow to catch up =D

[Sonork.2916]

Trap DH has been a meta DPS in ZvZ for awhile now.  LB is fine but can be hard to dmg people outside of hunters ward with all the projectile hate, staff can be used in it's place and offers a bit more reliable and consistent damage + utility.  Scepter/Torch is the main DPS weapons for the spec along with the 2 traps and spinny sword.

[Buran.3796]

   Is not surprising.  In large groups long bow's projectile attacks can be easily negated/reflected and the soft cc removed/ignored when each squad has at least 1-2 players spamming atability and cleanses.

   Characters with ranged large AoE attacks which pulse damage/conditions over time are stronger in zerg vs zerg because they can exhaust the amount of cleansing and defensive tools the enemy group has. I'm not saying that in a very coordinated group can't work, but if you want to break havok in ZvZ there's other classes with better tools than the DH. But there's not a better class for team support than Guardians, so unless your wan't every group full of Guardians and spreading their roles between support and attack, the most common scenary is to chose your priorities (not all the players sun Guardians), so from your Guardians the Commander usually demands support, and from their Necros AoE damage & cc.

[subversiontwo.7501]

I'm sure you'll get as many takes on this as there are people with oppinions on it but, I'd put like this:

DH was meta during winter/spring 2020/2021. It still sits in a good place (as does core played similarily), however it may no longer be meta. When the power Guard builds surged up in popularity they edged out the Scourge a bit. Scourges were still very good and you did want a handful of them but when DH rose it became less of a norm to have Scourges in every single party. They got relegated to sit inbetween their damage- and ripping role so they ended up competing with Breakers and Chronos for part of their role and DH or other ranged damage options for another.

That didn't hurt the Scourge too much as you didn't really need 5 Breakers and Chronos in every squad and you never needed double 1200 spikers in every party either so Scourges kept fitting in in either role and you could have them in most parties. When the may patch hit the damage reduction on the Guard was enough to edge the DH out and return demand for Scourges back to one for every party. Overall, I'd say the may patch is an example of a good balancing effort where norms were affected without ruining anything.

Ed. for some servers that aren't as attentive to changes, Risen's comments also apply, some servers never really got around to use DH before the nerfs because these things can be quite conservative. Especially these days when ambitions are quite low and many servers just defer to meta-sites. As always, the meta sites does a good service but they are generally not the end-all, and they often just curate trends as they move from closed to public knowledge. For example, I'd say that Panq's video here did more for spreading the idea of damage Guard to public consciousness and it likely landed well before any meta site adopted it in listing. So it could just as easily be argued that it has been on meta radar ever since that video landed. I'm giving it a bit of a margin with my summary at the start of this post.

Edited October 8, 2021 by subversiontwo.7501

[ArchonWing.9480]

Longbow skills are mostly projectiles which is easily negated  and the effectiveness of Hunter's Ward is diminished vs groups with high stab uptime It can be nice if you do it as they buff up but you'll get a lot of angry people chasing you xD. But at the end of the day a DH can never replace a firebrand so it instead competes with other DPS.

The standard is Staff, Scepter/X because the damage is symbol based and does not get reflected. Your autoattacks being reflected is pretty trivial and you use it in conjunction with Zeal's symbol traits.

Traps are highly effective for similar reasons but generally requires more organization so that you can actually land them.

Edited October 15, 2021 by ArchonWing.9480

[Caid.4932]

Its kind of always been on the border of meta in some form hasn't it? It has enough weird little quirky tricks that are useful to have even if its only from one player. Its gotten pushed to the side by firebrand primarily but its always been usable at worst.