Thanks for the mention, i would love to contribute to this topic since Hunter is quite lackluster from what it can be… (good luck if you wanna do missions as a C3).
It’s really painfull to fight bosse as a pure Hunter but that’s only one of the issues that the class has and everyone can see that most of complain are about life quality over lack of power (after all it’s not an offensive class). Hunters dosn’t offer enought for its limitations (along with bug that provides further limitations) leading to a state that you’re great only at some few things (i won’t get deeper at it since the topic here is Hunter x Bosses).
Right now if the boss doesn’t fly the Hunter can’t be usefull for its party because it can’t interact with them aside with Rush Dog and Pointing (which is a double edge sword), from the 3 offensive skils at C1 only one is “reliable” (doesn’t scale with Hunter’s stats) and it won’t get any better at C2 or C3.
There are some arguments that COULD be considered to keep the current state but none of them is reasonable enough to justify.
Bosses shouldn’t be affected by CC - other classes that have skills with simillar effects don’t have to deal with their skills having no effect like Fire Pilar (R3 - C2 Pyromancer) and Gravity Pole (R5 - C3 Psychokino) that still deal damage, if you go further you can even take Dievdirbys as an example of Rank 3 class that can still apply CC to bosses.
Bosses stats shouldn’t be reduced by debuffs - then we should question why Lethargy, Deprotected Zone, Monstrance, Zalciai and Umbro Thrust can make bosses weaker while Coursing still leads to a ghost cast.
Balance towards PvE would make the class overpowered at PvP - however there are specific limitations/nerfs to some skills just to ensure that PvP can be healthier for both sides.
The real source of Hunter’s frustration is that they lack tools to interact with bosses at a minimum level (being straight to the point, they feel useless to the point that they could just AFK and it wouldn’t matter to their party) and the that’s so bad that any change would pleasure them, grating either the stat debuff or the damage that the skill provides (if not at least allow the C2 skill to deal damage) just that they can feel like they’re part of the team (or that they don’t have to suffer at quests).
tl:dr
Things that can make Hunters feel better without breaking the game.
Allow Coursing to damage bosses (even with less damage/higher DoT interval) and/or apply the status debuff.
AND/OR
Allow Retrieve to damage bosses (even with less damage/higher DoT interval)
In a nutshell - 0.000000000000000…1 > 0
(still it’s would be only a band-aid for this specific case, the class really needs a full review)
I think the major issue right now might be how the skills are programmed, after the last patch Companions adquired some CC immunity which bugged Growling (apparently the skill aplies CC to the companion to trigger the effect) and as far as i know Wugushis can’t apply more than one DoT to the same target and the same could happen with Hunter (however i’m not sure about the interaction with elite mobs since the principle is the same).
To be honest they could even change Retrieve to a C2 attribute of Coursing (Coursing: Retrieve) and get Hunter a new skill (a Companion special attack perhaps).
