Hello! Level 30 Hunter here with over 180hrs of play time. Hard mode and normal raid beaten (no exploits) From personal experience, as well as opinion, [i]Bladedancer[/i] is useless. Especially in hard mode (cannot rez teammates). [b]A)[/b] stealth is useless for 90% of it except the maze - I stealth to the chest and wait while everyone dies trying to get to it. [b]B)[/b] your Super, Arc Blade, is nice for say a bunch of goblins rushing ya, but against minotaurs and pretorians, you have a likely chance of dying. Extremely ill advised to try to arc blade much of anything in hard mode. Thus, I prefer [i]Gunslinger.[/i] [b]A)[/b] Golden Gun allows you to keep range between you and tough mobs - distance is important in hard mode. [b]B)[/b] Triple Jump is always a win. [b]C)[/b] Faster reloads with Chain of Woe makes a huge difference when you have tons of mobs swarming your conflux. [b]D)[/b] [i]Throwing Knife.[/i] Get a crit with that and it's a beauty thing - also fun to throw past your buddies. You know they'll smirk at the noise of it flying by their head. I am a die hard [i]Gunslinger[/i] because I absolutely love having that golden gun range. Don't get me wrong, I have [i]Bladedancer[/i] leveled as well for those clutch stealth revives in Nightfalls and whatnot, but for the raid I just don't see much use out of [i]Bladedancer. [/i] [spoiler]Personal opinion, of course.[/spoiler]

Since I play primarily as a Gunslinger and just now started trying Blade Dancer, I will only give their perspective in raid. 1) Golden Gun is excellent for crowd control and taking down big adds fast. Granted I usually ran with Achylophage, but 3 shots with combustion (and maybe Keyhole since Vex like to line up) can quickly clear groups of mobs. Also, if you feel so inclined to use your super on the bosses, you're one of the 3 subclasses that can hit them from range. Also, helps conserve ammo killing oracles in the portals. GG will also wreck ultra hobbies at the end. Use GG to clear adds to generate orbs for teammates. 2) The tripmine grenade is awesome. Stick one to a group of Vex for some nice clear, or put it near that hallway by left conflux as an alert and deterrant. If you stick one to a minotaur it does great damage as well. 3) First big negative is the throwing knife. I will argue that this melee is the most underpowered melee in the game. You cannot get precision kills against the Vex with it so Knife Juggler is out of the question. Circle if Life is complete trash so that leaves you with only one melee modifier: Incendiary Blade. Therefore you have a moderate ranged melee that applies an underwhelming solar DoT. Blade Dancers can get invis or quick melee, Void Walkers get grenade energy on melee hits, Sunsingers and Strikers get more devastating melee, Defenders get shield buff for melee kills. So Gunslingers have trash for melee. 4) Gunslinger's Trance and Chains of Woe mean Gunslingers rock their guns better than any other subclass. Your low stability guns will be massively buffed with 3 stacks of Gunslinger Trance and high stability guns such as scout rifles will have almost no recoil at 3 stacks. Chains of Woe increases reload speed and at 3 stacks you'll reload that MG or HC almost as fast as an AR. This means in terms of pure gunplay you will clear adds better than any subclass. So really, Hunter's only real job is killing shit. I am consistently the top performing player in my raids as a Gunslinger. Leave support to Sunsingers and Defenders.

You guys get cloaks and if you end up in a group who will cheese you'll be useless.

Watch this video - Two guardians doing the hard raid. The person's perspective you watch from is the hunter's and is one of the most skilled people in the game. Without golden gun I don't think it'd be possible. He singlehandedly clears all oracles in the portal by himself while simultaneously handling the relic by dropping it and picking it up before the 5 seconds are up all whilst going blind.

Advantages of being a hunter: -Awesome -Capes -Not as dumb as oafy Titans -Not as nerdy as pansy Warlocks -Turn invisible -Quick and Silent -Capes -Great survivalists -Ninja assassins -Capes are cooler than napkins/skirts and belly dancer jewlery [spoiler]Did I mention the capes have hoods?[/spoiler]

Gunslinger imo is the best class in both aspects of Destiny (pvp&pve) if you're looking for consistency. GG one shots oracles on normal mode, in hard mode you might have to be Lvl 30. I'm not sure if OHKO has been confirmed by anyone in this thread yet, but below that it takes two shots. (Edit: 2 GG shots kills oracles in the time gate portals during atheon's boss fight. templar's oracles unknown.) GG keeps you ranged from mobs/opponents Gunslinger's land mine grenade does a ton of damage if you can stick it. Just be careful not to be close to it as it can OHKO in higher levels to you, smaller enemies, and a huge portion of health on majors/ultras. This makes boss fights little easier if you're continuously using your grenade cd(cool down). Throwing knives are great, it's a ranged melee and has instant cd reset if you precision kill. Damage is mediocre but with practice you can get kills(both PVP and PVE) real quick with the right execution. It works in conjunction with Chain of Woe and Gunslingers trance. Three abilities can activate with a good throwing knife, and you can carry two if you'd like! GG is a good counter on some supers. Takes 3 shots to destroy Defender bubble and two to kill a sun singer warlock. If you're running the achlyophage symbiote helmet you can use 4 GG shots, so the highest kill streak while in super is 4. Unless you're running the perk that explodes enemies or pierce through targets (two seperate class perks) and your opponents are cluttered together. Gunslinger can have more hops than blade dancer, as well as armor and agility stats I believe. These are all the the points of gunslinger I like over blade dancer. Arcblade I think looks good on paper, and may just be more of a class that is flashy and requires a lot more precise execution to get in quickly and get out. A guerrilla tactic or assasin style of play. I only see this viable in PVP but I haven't seen much else brought to the table by the blade dancer besides the sticky grenade, which may or may not stick. For me personally the blade dancer is just a fun class for me to go around with a lightning charged knife sticking my foes. But maybe we've just been seeing people use the class wrong (in PVP) at least. EDIT 1: I meant Gunslinger is the best subclass for hunter, not the best class in Destiny among all the classes. EDIT 2: Confirmed by YapperFlapper GG kills oracles with two shots at Lvl 30 in raid in the time gate portals fighting Atheon.

[quote]Hi all, I'm curious to hear others opinion, especially high level hunters (I'm a hunter). Since I started the raid I've noticed a few things: 1) special on both classes are basically useless. 2) every other class has something that deals plenty of damage to help. 3) all we can do is run and jump fast. So for raid, how do you find your Hunter excels? What are the advantages of being one in the raid, if any? Would be great to hear everyone's opinion. Cheers![/quote] Dude, in the raid there's this part where it's a maze, and if some kind of ghost harpy sees you, your 6 man team gets stared to oblivion. (In other words, 6 man fireteam, 1 is seen, everyone dies with him.) but hunters? They can become invisible. [i]Blam-ing invisible.[/i] [spoiler]I wish my titan could do that..[/spoiler]

They have full cloaks/capes. None of this buttcape business Titans have to put up with. One of my favorite things is invisibility. Keeps you off the sensors that people rely on so dearly. Also really great for reviving. I'm basically the team medic.

For me, and this is just generally how I think of the Hunter and how my experiences have been, I find the Hunter has 'subtle' uses that differentiate it from the others, just as Warlocks are subtly different than either, as well as Titans. All three classes generally do the same thing, at their core. They kill things. They all have generally the same styles of grenades, they all have a certain Melee ability, and their supers, generally, can be either useless or useful in the Raid depending on the circumstances. Titan, Hunter, and Warlock all have a 'I press button kill things fast' type of Super. Gunslinger, Voidwalker, Striker, all are pretty equal, however Warlock and Hunter have ranged 'kill things' supers. With Hunters having generally the longest range. While Arcblade does have about the same range as a Striker, it can be modified with Razor's Edge to include some range on it. To justify 'my' Hunter: I have the longest range one hit kill super of all the classes (generally one hit, I know more than one shot is required to kill Minos and the like). Unlike the other classes I also have a long range Melee Special (my throwing knife, which if used properly extends my 'melee' range far beyond the other classes). While fairly tricky to use, my Proximity Mine packs quite a punch, which can clear out a clustered path quite reliably. If I need to, I can swap to my Invisi-dancer which when used right, will allow me to stay out of aggro while picking off key targets. Most take Invisibility for granted and don't use it to its full potential. I can also use invisibility to revive someone in a tricky spot without fear of getting slaughtered, in those 'rare' occasions. While I'm on my 'Invisi-dancer' I can throw out my Razor's Edge Arcblade to fling some wide arced crowd killers if things get heavy, not to mention the general dodge-and-cut of the super that, if the right target is chosen, can take out a possible threat with relative ease. As someone below me stated, all of the subclasses have tools, and it's more about how you use those tools, than what tools are provided. I don't consider any subclass worse than another, they're all equal in my book. There may be more 'perceived' uses from one super or another, but upon proper analysis, they're all on even terms.

I run a "Wrecking Ball Rush" class [spoiler]Blade dancer QuickDraw (All weapons drawn immediately) Agility + Toughness Shotgun (+2 Agility) Auto Rifle (+2 Agility) Rocket Launcher (Fast reload) Arc grenade [/spoiler] In PvP this gives you ultimate control of CQC, and let's you hold objectives or even rush enemy snipers down. And for PvE I run reg golden gun. XD