I have a consolidated professions suggestion thread here : Forum - [Proessions] Balancing and improvements (lorwolf.com) But considering the fact that this week is the hunting week, and hunting is probably the profession in most dire need of improvements, I figured it warranted its own thread for now.

Team building

While feedback of beta and EA was implemented for level 1 hunts, anything beyond level 1 remains nearly impossible to do. Well, a slight nuance, it is nearly impossible to get the right team together to get 100% chance of success, and from my own experience, anything below 100% success, means pretty much 99% chance of failure. (Not sure if I am just incredibly unlucky, or success chance is off) And since failure means spent stamina, food and hunting tokens (and waiting time!), but 0 loot or experience, all is wasted. So reiterating from beta and EA, make the necessary synergies required to hunt easier!

Considering all synergies are fixed and not something we as players can customize, and considering the fact you cannot swap out companions while they are on a cooldown (which is beyond frustrating on so many levels and affects so many different parts of the game!), trying to get the right team for a hunt is incredibly tedious. Add onto that that anything beyond level 2 requires the same amount of synergies as is possible with a maximum filled team, you need to find exact matches. Which there often aren't. And if they are, well you better hope it's not a super rare breed, retired or moonstone exclusive companion and you already have the right companion attached to the right wolf. Which it often is not. And then you have to wait for hours or risk wasting all the stamina and food in return for nothing.

Long story short; the synergies required for hunting need to be lowered!

Potentially added we should be able to pick from companions that aren't attached to that specific wolf at that specific time. Maybe add a minimum required level to do so, but we need more flexibility.

Loot

Then the loot… Even if we ignore the frustration of trying to build the right team to get a viable chance at a successful hunt, even if that was incredibly easy to do, the loot of hunting still isn't worth the investment required (in this case talking about the stamina it requires, the food you often need to add on top of all that stamina, and the time it takes to do a hunt).

I just finished a lv5 hunt, because by some miracle I managed to get the exact right companion and wolves combo to get 100% success chance (the moonstone exclusive blue enderling, a jocol and a volmyr - so not a cheap combination to have). Apart form the 200 stamina it used up (luckily not 300 cause 1 was a companion), the 75 stamina worth of food I had to add, and a bunch of hunting tokens, I got a handful of trinkets and some experience. No food, no pebbles. Nothing. That is simply not worth it. What are we even hunting for, if the loot we get is subpar to and requires less frustration and stamina than the campaign? At this point I am only hunting to level up my hunting, and considering the issues that gives with team building for the higher levels, even that isn't worth it anymore.

The loot needs to be way better, and maybe even less investment required to go hunting in the first place (100 stamina per wolf + added food? Way too much)

Leveling up

With cooking, leveling up gives a bit of a speed boost. With farming, leveling up unlocks extra slots, with mining and fishing, leveling up unlocks new areas. I elaborate on this more in the consolidated suggestion linked above, but honestly I feel like the boosts leveling up provides should be more consistent and more rewarding. Unlocking 2 new areas in 35 levels is beyond boring. Make leveling up worth it! Specifically with hunting, every few levels an extra hunt could become available (already a thing, but it would be nice if the levels at which it happened would be streamlined across all professions), every level could give either a speed boost, or a + 5% chance at success if you don't meet the requirements fully (this second one might not be as necessary if the difficulty is changed based on the first paragraph, but would still be nice).

QoL improvements

The first would be to show the stamina of the wolves in the selection screen.

The second would be search and filter options. The first thing I'd like to filter is the synergies. If I need to have a support beast, I don't want to wade through my ocean of jocols. I don't even have that many wolves yet, but I image, especially with multuple pages per den, and multiple dens, trying to find the right team is going to be a right pain as the game gets older and packs get bigger.

Another I'd like to search/filter for is level. Some hunts don't have just a synergy requirement, but also a level requirement. Being able to search for a higher level wolf to fillt hat gap would be very useful.

If you have a very good memory and know exactly which wolf you want to add, perhaps a simple name search as well.

TDLR;

All in all, at this point I do not enjoy hunting at all, and I'd rather not use the feature. Sadly we are currently in the hunting week and there are a couple of neat companions exclusively bought with hunting tickets so I have to. There are quite a few ways to make hunting less frustrating and more rewarding:

• Less synergies required for 100% success chance (not just for lv1 hunts but for all levels!)
• Ability to equip companion not attached to the specific wolf (if anything, only companions of a specific level have this available)
• The loot needs some drastic improvement
• The investment (stamina plus any items/food) needs to be lowered
• Leveling up should a. give a speed increase or success chance increase, b. unlock more hunts (not just the 1 at level 15, and preferably at consistent levels compared to other professions)
• The stamina of wolves should show in the selection screen
• Make it possible to search/filter based on name, synergie and level in the selection screen.

Hunting and farming feel like what games would have called “noob traps” back in the day, where there are several useless avenues that make players' efficient use of the systems annoyingly narrow (farming anything but corn in its rarity tier, for example, leads you into babysitting crops for longer periods of time and with greater initial investment of resources for food that rewards the same amount of energy as the shorter, less intensive growth period of corn-- there is more to be said about balancing cooking as well, where you have to wait until higher and higher cooking levels to not burn certain types of food… only for it to give the same amount of energy as the food you made at level 1-- but those complaints about balance are better reserved for the whole profession thread I suppose) . There are very few sets of hunting rewards at the moment that are worth the energy and items put into them, even before you get into the various frustrations listed above.

The balancing of the game in terms of benefits for leveling anything-- wolves or profession ability-- has been consistently wonky or just nonexistent, and this problem is not new. I'm sure we'd all love to see a very serious overhaul and refactor of several of these systems before the game is too much older.

Please. Hunting is my nightmare. Half the time the lists won't load for me to even pick a team. The other times I just feel like I'm wasting time, energy, and resources. While I manage to get by there are plenty of users who don't have the right combos or resources for a hunt to go wrong- even for someone who can handle some losses it's still annoying. I honestly wish synergies would be completely removed from it.

Support on Hunting needing a rework. I remember commenting about it in EA; the synergy requirements for a hunt must, theoretically, have 100% exact matches. I don't think the synergies should be derived from what players currently have in their den, but each hunt should have synergy requirements that can be accomplished by a wolf synergy block + a companion/wolf synergy block etc.

For example, I don't know the level/name of the hunt, but there's one that requires 3 x Healer + 3x Support synergies and has 2 slots. There is no way to reach 100% on this hunt. You can fulfil 4/6 of the required synergies, but that's as high as you can possibly go.

There's a few ways to fix it. You could keep those two synergy blocks, but add 2 more slots, which allows the player to potentially send the two companions that can 100% fulfil the requirements. Or, the requirement is changed to swap out one of these blocks with a wolf breed block, so players could potentially send the right breed and companion to 100% fulfil the requirement. Or, a total rework where you can just send companions alone (maybe only once they're reached level 10) so a wolf doesn't take up a precious slot. Either way, it should be possible, it's just resources or player choices that prohibit reaching that 100% success rate.

Beyond team building, I support pretty much everything else too. I think Stamina should probably mirror the Mining and Fishing cost (25), progression should be uniform with the other professions too, and of course, the rewards aren't worth it beyond event tickets right now.

@/DetectRascal (since quoting doesn't work yet, I just have to make do like this)

“For example, I don't know the level/name of the hunt, but there's one that requires 3 x Healer + 3x Support synergies and has 2 slots. There is no way to reach 100% on this hunt. You can fulfil 4/6 of the required synergies, but that's as high as you can possibly go.

There's a few ways to fix it. You could keep those two synergy blocks, but add 2 more slots, which allows the player to potentially send the two companions that can 100% fulfil the requirements. Or, the requirement is changed to swap out one of these blocks with a wolf breed block, so players could potentially send the right breed and companion to 100% fulfil the requirement. Or, a total rework where you can just send companions alone (maybe only once they're reached level 10) so a wolf doesn't take up a precious slot. Either way, it should be possible, it's just resources or player choices that prohibit reaching that 100% success rate.”

While I agree that adding more slots to a potential team would make it easier to get all the synergies required, it also means a. you still need a wide variety of wolves and companions to match them all and get that team filled up, and b. you'd need to invest even more stamina for rather underwhelming payouts. I don't mind this for truly higher levels, which may imho require some difficulty, but I'd much rather they lower the synergies for the lower levels to make it actually accessible to newer players. (And for the record, I think lv10 is still low, considering I've already reached lv20+ on most other professions after less than 10 days of playing) But I guess all in all, apart from a logical difficulty curve that should come as levels progress, the amount of synergies required should be less than the amount of synergies you can get from a full team. (So a hunt allowing for 2 team members, should alwyas have less than 6 synergies required for a succesfull hunt; preferable 2 or 3.)

And yes, at the very least it should be theoretically possible to get 100% success on a hunt. I know exactly which hunt you mean and it is beyond frustrating that you basically get softlocked out of the game, and you can chose to either reroll or take a shot which will probably fail. Either way; it costs you, the player for what is basically a designfault.

Yes, please. Impossible quests help no one with the rewards being so limited.

It would be nice if having high-level wolves/companions could compensate for missing synergies. Like, if I'm doing a level 1 hunt with my level 10 wolves and level 9 companion, maybe that hunt should be 100% chance of success even if I only have 2 out of 3 synergies.

I think the hunting experience would benefit from letting us choose from all our companions, and not just lock us to the companion of our chosen wolf. I’d be okay with it being restricted to companions above x level.

Maybe some missions could require 2/5 team members to be wolves, while other requires 4/5 team members to be wolves, and so on.

Yeeeeeeah definite support. I've seen some that that have combos that are impossible to get 100% on, especially since there's at least one synergy that no wolves have; the one that looks like a skull. Maybe later ones can be more “impossible”, but I've seen ones that would be hard to do at levels 2-3. That's a bit much.

I do like the idea of being able to assign any companion, no matter what wolf they're attached to. It would help immensely, especially with how many possible combos there are.

Also yeah support on the better prizes for some. I did a level 10 treasure hunt (was surprised it was a success at a 70-something% chance) and got a couple trinkets from it. Not even food, a couple trinkets for a two hour hunt.

I've been avoiding hunting up to this point (the holiday) cause it took a long time to realize that companions can help, but it only barely improved my experience with it. I also find the rewards to be embarrassingly lackluster ;; once I finish the last hunting holiday task I'm probably going to shelve hunting until it's either improved or the next holiday

So yeah, massive support on making it better balanced and worth the effort! I get significantly more pebbles and rewards doing daily tasks and exploring within the same amount of time as it takes for a hunt to finish. That amount even dwarfs hour+ long hunts through just a few minutes of said grinding. There just doesn't seem to be a point to hunting for me. One could theoretically argue the meager reward is the price of “convenience” since you don't have to actively do anything while you wait, but hunting is entirely built around timers, so it seems weird to punish players for interacting with a mechanic the intended way. You also sometimes have to invest more resources than are gained so…? ;;

Support for a general rebalancing of synergy/energy/food requirements, and rewards. I'm actually okay with high level hunts being impossible to hit 100% on, provided they actually provide good rewards on success. As it is though hunting in general doesn't feel worth it. It costs too much, too often has too high a fail chance, and rewards too little. Tweaking any one of these would make it feel much better.