How to Hunter Basically

Sample Palette, according to Curtz

Hi, this is AAAAAAAAAAAAA, and I'm here to talk about how to play Hunter, basically.

General Game flow

A balanced warrior adept at close combat with high ATK and DEF. Skilled in the use of melee weapons. Good for beginners.

A Hunter is a melee specialist. With a high ATK, hunters is best fit for melee weapons. With a high HP and DEF, they are also comfortable as a front-liner. Although, with their reliance on melee weapons, this also means that Hunters spend a lot more time running around than other Types. Speaking of melee weapons, melee weapons fall into a few different categories: a two-handed weapon with a big ATK and wide swing; a pair of twin weapons with a low ATK, but high hit count and fast attacking speed; and a one-handed weapon with decent ATK and decent attacking speed. Each weapon in the same category has similar functions, but has subtle differences which affects their overall performance.

Typically, a Hunter palette consists of a chainbreaker weapon, a chaining weapon, a gun for utilities, and a TECHNIC weapon with various support technics.

General Tips

• Melee attacks and Ranged attacks can miss enemies (dealing 0). This is a common issue for Hunters, as they have a lower ACC multiplier compared to Rangers and Vanguards.
  • Damage from otherwise big damage weapons (such as Axes) would be significantly lowered, and their chaining ability will also be hampered (0s don't add to chain).Ranged weapons of relatively lower inherent ACC (such as Twin Handguns) or not up to level (for example, if you run out of Extend Points to allocate) will be significantly less useful.
  • This problem is solved primarily via Rebirth bonuses. It can also be remedied via the use of Zalure (which lowers enemy EVA), utilizing Handguns or Daggers (both of which provides boosts to ACC) and weapons types with inherently higher ACC, such as Twin Daggers. ACC boost Abilities and Modules can also help early on, but generally provides too little to be useful in the long run.
  • Attacking an enemy from behind will also always hit.
• Each Melee weapon has 4 to 5 equippable Photon Arts. Photon Arts is linked to Triangle, and is the primary way for Hunters to deal damage. Therefore, the choice of Photon Arts is quite important to a weapon's, and by extension, a hunter's performance.
  • There are a number of important aspects to Photon Arts: attack, accuracy, number of hits, stages, and pp consumption.
    • Attack and Accuracy is fairly self-explantory. Beware that Photon Arts with low accuracy % is even more prone to missing than usual.
    • The more hits the better, of course. Unless the hits are really slow with narrow hitboxes. Make sure to try out any Photon Arts you intend to use.
    • Each melee Photon Arts can have 1 to 3 stages: Photon Arts with multiple stages allows the player to input triangle more times for more hits. Later stages also have a lower pp consumption and higher damage than earlier stages. This means that they effectively have a manually prolong-able chain-break sequence.
      • This means that Photon Arts with more stages are better for longer chains, as they can potentially put out more hits more quickly.
        • Most chains below like 20 or something will expire before Stage 3, so a great stage 3 may not see much use. It's possible to use Foverse to sneak in a chain count of 2 or 3 before the stage 3 hitbox connects, but it will still lose power as the previously accumlated chain count does not apply to it.
      • This does not mean that Photon Arts with less stages is naturally worse: the quality of the Photon Arts is more dependent on the hit count, its damage, its attack speed and hitboxes rather than how many stages it has.
• Due to often being in proximity of enemies, Hunters are more prone to taking attacks compared to other Types. Therefore, Guarding is a vital asset in any Hunter's toolbox.
  • Guard reduces damage to 70% (90% for Shields), making it a hefty tool for damage reduction. Unfortunately, the PP cost for it can be a bit steep, since a lot of Photon Arts already cost a ton of PP. It can also be used to cancel some extra animations for weapons or Photon Arts.
  • A Perfect Guard reduces damage to 0 without consuming any PP, making it immensely useful. However, using it can be a bit diffcult, as the player need to read the enemies' attacks in-between their own attacks, and Guard have a different valid input window dependent on the weapon used.
    • Triggering a Perfect Guard using Shields will trigger Shield Arts, which deals a lot of damage to enemies nearby and adds 1 chain count to all enemies hit. This can be very useful if the player can use it consistently.
    • To practice Perfect Guard, try soloing low-rank missions using Shields only, to learn timings for enemy attacks. Shield Arts is a great indicator for if Perfect Guard activated or not. Afterwards, try soloing low-rank missions using weak weapons to learn the timings for those weapons categories.
• Since a melee-oriented playstyle will naturally involve a lot of running and moving, it is a good idea to bring weapons that can be used while moving, to minimize player downtime. Weapons usable while strafing, such as Handguns and Wands, are great candidates for this purpose.
  • There are also a few Photon Arts that allows the player to spend less time running: Tornado Dance, Shisoku Tenkai-zan and INSERT CLAW PA HERE. However, they have a base PP cost of 90, which can be a huge issue for Races less talented in PP regen.