What Exactly is a Huntsman ??

[Heatstroke]

Ive build a CrabberMind, Bane, Fortunata and a Widow..

but what the heck is a Huntsman ?

Thanks

[Octogoat]

A huntsman uses mostly soldier attacks.

[JJDrakken]

21 hours ago, Heatstroke said:

Ive build a CrabberMind, Bane, Fortunata and a Widow..

but what the heck is a Huntsman ?

Thanks

 

Huntsman Spider is Bane Spider, who only uses the Rifle Attacks.  Like Huntsman Spiders you face in game. You use Rifle Attacks and Buffs/Armors out of bane.

[High_Beam]

He's a hero of course.  Got his powers form a magic sack of corn he got for saving a chunky elf.  It gave him strength and speed and of course shiny teeth.

[High_Beam]

All kidding aside its an Arachnos Soldier VEAT that eschews becoming a Crab or Bane and generally avoids their powers.  In my case, the Violet Huntress hated the look of the crab arms and the mace sucks thematically for me.  Still a solid character, lotta fun.

[kelika2]

i have two huntsmen

one ranged and permahasten build.  and bane spider only for buildup

one melee and defense build.  buildup, stealth and placate from bane

[gameboy1234]

I think a "huntsman" really is just a word the original dev team came up with because they thought it sounded cool.  A huntsman is an advanced Arachnos soldier.  Almost like a special forces soldier, he's not an ordinary grunt.  However he's also not the heavily cybernetic Crab or the Fortunata.  He's still a regular person, just well trained, and wearing power armor and using equipment (the guns, grenades, and the maces) rather than something more exotic.

 

Basically a huntsman is anything you want, it's your story.  But they should be "regular" if high ranking soldiers with special equipment, rather than "powers."

 

[The Trouble]

On 11/14/2024 at 10:53 AM, Heatstroke said:

Ive build a CrabberMind, Bane, Fortunata and a Widow..

but what the heck is a Huntsman ?

Thanks

For various reasons (some unexplainable) neither Bane nor Crab appealed to me.  Trying out a Bane just gave me a feeling of "Why not just make a Stalker?"  I admit that this is a vast oversimplification of a Bane - especially due to their melee/ranged versatility and strong buff/debuffing - the gameplay result for me gave me that sensation.

 

Focusing on the ranged rifle attacks just clicked for me, and Huntsman ended up feeling really satisfying.  I've uploaded a build in this forum if you're curious to try it out.

 

So in short, Huntsman builds are a specific flavor of the Bane branch.  Much like your CrabberMind.

[tidge]

A while back (on Homecoming) I played the heck out of my VEAT soldier and ended up using all three builds to explore different options: Crabbermind, Bane, Huntsman (mostly).

 

(mostly) Bane was my least favorite: it ended up being too slow in clearing rooms (for my taste), and I found it to be a PITA to keep alive (solo) against rooms filled with +N enemies.

 

Crabbermind was fine; I felt like I was doing better with large spawns. I had no misconceptions about the nature of the pets going in (they are NOT henchmen, and they aren't "Controller" type pets) so I ended up feeling like they did what I wanted them to do.

 

My favorite was the (mostly) Huntsman. I felt that I was able to leverage the gun attacks rather effectively. Because I already had the spider arms forced upon this character, I supplemented the gun with the Spider attacks.

 

This was a while ago, but I came to resent both the Spider backpack AND the Mace. If I was going to roll another VEAT soldier, I'd choose ONLY Bane (to not get stuck with the spider arms) and avoid Mace attacks as much as possible. Even leaning hard into the Leadership powers it wouldn't be easy, as IIRC there are a few good powers that still use the Mace animation (Surveillance?)

[Linea]

You can use the Aether costumes to hide the crab legs, but you do have to be happy with the limited resulting costumes.  This lets you have a larger pool of powers to build from and still not have to deal with the fugly legs.

[Octogoat]

Kaizensoze makes some excellent huntsman builds there's also this build that is pretty good:

 

 

 

While I love huntsman I wish we had the opposite animation option and could have everything fire from our arachnos shotgun.

[Crysis]

Back in the day on Live, Huntsman builds were just becoming "a real thing" and then when Homecoming launched, Redlynne threw up this thread which revitalized the concept at least for me.

 

 

I don't play near as much as I used to but over the past few weeks I dusted off my Huntsman, who had sat at level 50 without incarnates for years, and leveled up my incarnates and did a couple of respecs.  The character backstory is that my character was the "Camera Guy" you see in the Miss Liberty Task Force, the one who filmed that idiot Aeon live giving away the secret to beating his trap and got yelled at for just doing his job.  He was drummed out of the Arachnos corps and is now a freelancer as a result.

 

At any rate, I love gun-based heroes in the game, and I'd never been happy with Crabberminds or Bane builds.  So this scratched that itch.

 

I've been -very surprised- how effective of a solo'er this build is.  I take on everything at +4/x8.  Some mobs are a bit more challenging given the nature of my attacks, but after incarnates were leveled up, I could slip in a lot more Procs.  Being a very high recharge build they aren't optimized to go off all the time, but they go off enough to be worth the slotting.  I'm damn near unkillable as well with positionals and S/L +DEF all being in the 50's or higher.  I think I've died once from vet levels 1-22 mostly soloing.  

 

At any rate, this is how I ended up.  Credit goes to Redlynne for the original build I based this off of.  You can get by with cheap damage IO's, I just have so many purples I threw them in once I respecced.  Near perma reinforcement pets, or can be perma with slightly modified slotting and if you remember to hit Destiny and Hasten (I don't have Hasten on Auto) whenever they are up.

 

 

Disgraced_Camera_Guy_SOA_WolfSpider_FINAL.mbd

[tidge]

Self quoting...

 

On 11/21/2024 at 9:28 AM, tidge said:

This was a while ago, but I came to resent both the Spider backpack AND the Mace. If I was going to roll another VEAT soldier, I'd choose ONLY Bane (to not get stuck with the spider arms) and avoid Mace attacks as much as possible. Even leaning hard into the Leadership powers it wouldn't be easy, as IIRC there are a few good powers that still use the Mace animation (Surveillance?)

 

 

I *did* revisit the VEATs, and I pretty much did this... up to the point where I felt like I needed the Mace to improve DPS, and then I just accepted that my character sometimes was clobbering enemies with a mace.

 

What I enjoyed most about this approach is that there is a lot of potential for a gun-wielding character; this is manifest in the large number of enemy groups that use pow-pow guns; Longbow, Arachnos, Family, et al. The leadership and survival buffs available to Hunstman/Banes are excellent!