You say this as if you aren’t just that same old heckler that everyone know by now who exists to deride anyone who wants ranged SV back. I still remember you from before I quit.
My arguments don’t rely on the numbers. They are just supported by it.
Even if melee SV isn’t currently the absolute least popular spec in the game, it dropped from being consistently one of the most popular to consistently one of the least popular.
Even if there was an underlying reason for all players leaving the game, the hunter class as a whole still dropped more than any other by a large margin. So there must be some explanation as to why hunters dropped more than other classes. The most obvious is that they didn’t want to play hunter anymore, and the most obvious reason for that would be the changes that affected the class.
Even if Blizzard doesn’t want to release numbers detailing melee SV’s failure, we still see them doing exactly what we’d expect if melee SV did fail. They are diluting the melee SV spec with tons of ranged abilities. If melee SV was a success then they would be doubling down on what it was in Legion, rather than moving away from its melee focus.
These are called deductions. I’m allowed to make deductions about things that I observe. If you can’t refute these deductions without just relying on vague “No you’re ignoring something” without ever providing that ‘something’ then I have no reason to take you seriously.
Yes, it was. I’ve mained hunter since mid-wrath, and SV was consistently one of the most popular specs in the game, or at least one of the most popular specs for the Hunter class, which of course the most popular class in the game.
Heck, looking at wargraphs now, hunters are the 5th most popular class in the game, whereas hunters had always lead the pack in popularity. Hunter was the most popular class in the game for a long time, consistently. It was hunters, warriors and druids usually near the top. Warriors and druids haven’t really moved but Hunters dropped all the way to 5th. Yet people somehow still think that hunters are better off now than they were prior to Legion? What a joke.
I love how you try to use the hunter class to support your argument. Yes, hunters have always been one of the most popular specs, and it wasn’t and isn’t because of SV. It’s always been because of BM. There are significantly more people that have always played BM as opposed to the other two specs.
Just to provide some interesting context from another SV discussion:
Warcraftlogs first gained widespread usage going into WoD. So you had an expansion where Survival was by far the dominant spec in Highmaul, lower end of the pack in BRF, and completely fallen off a cliff in HFC due to everything they forced on the spec.
So let’s take BRF. In that tier BM was by a pretty good margin the best Hunter spec and, given that Hunters were then the most popular class (not anymore, as Spinnerdh points out), this meant as more Hunters gravitated towards BM it was the most represented spec in the game during that raid. Survival and MM were still playable, though, and so neither was particularly abandoned. Look at the parse data going back the entire tier and calculate the average. Keep in mind that SV was a decisively suboptimal spec and way less people used WCL then v.s. now.
You’ll find that Survival netted an average of 655 parses a day back in BRF.
Today, its 47 parses a day.
655 v.s. 47.
It really puts the unpopularity of melee SV into perspective.
I must ask at this point if you have even played hunter for any meaningful length of time. BM has always been the black sheep spec, at least prior to WoD/MoP. Pet pathing and other pet mechanics served as a hindrance to BM hunters who raided and did dungeons. It was unreliable and clunkier than the other two, and linking so much damage to the pet caused problems in both target swapping and flight phases.
What exactly are you basing all of these claims off of? You seem to make a bunch of them but never really back them up with either links nor reasoning.
There are a lot of people who play this game and don’t raid at all, and guess what a lot of them play on their hunters? Unless you want to try and argue that most players raid, especially at a meaningful level. That would be fun…
By the way, Bepples, the one you are literally white knighting all over this forum, completely disagrees with you. He has literally argued BM wasn’t a blacksheep spec. Get your stories in order boys.
Then give us better numbers. Until you can do that then your nitpicks are completely irrelevant. Show numbers that better represent hunter mains and their specs of choice than raid parses and boss downs.
You also claimed that he said that melee SV should be removed. I asked you where he said that, and you still haven’t responded. I’m not really obligated to just believe anything you say when I know that you are willing to lie to try to make a point.
If he did say that, then we can disagree on it. But that doesn’t really matter since it isn’t really the point of the discussion. The point is that old ranged SV was one of the most popular specs in the game prior to being made melee.
You expect me to go dig through his posts? Do it yourself lazy.And I’m not obligated to provide you with the information your too lazy to find on your own.
What, we don’t have proof of that? Neither do you for the point you’re trying to push. Survival was routinely a popular spec. I don’t know whether it was more popular than BM or vice versa outside of raid because it was impossible to tell. But I knew plenty of Hunters to play it and it was a perfectly common choice to see out in the world. You don’t have any standing to pretend that SV was totally abandoned outside of raiding and was only played for its high damage.
All this talk about the Hunter specs and whether they’re popular or not…
Guess I’m gonna jump in and go solely off my faulty memory!
Vanilla — I recall that SV and MM both were reasonably liked for PvP. I know people wanted at least one MM for raiding due to Trueshot Aura. I barely remember anything regarding BM other than being popular for leveling.
BC — BM was the king in everything PvE. MM was liked in PvP (I barely heard about SV at all during this expansion), although BM did okay.
WotLK — patch 3.0.8 was known as “The Great BM Nerf.” Years later, I still remember all the ridiculous drama surrounding this. SV started out with a bang, but MM slowly took over the spotlight in raiding due to ArPen. SV and MM both were liked okay in PvP. People stayed far away from BM.
Cata — this expansion was a weak one (slightly, not too terribly) for MM, whereas both SV and BM were liked for raiding. But even then, I recall that there were a few MM hunters in the raiding scene. I didn’t pay attention to PvP during this.
MoP — all three Hunter specs were pretty balanced during this expansion; all three specs has had their moments in both PvE and PvP from what I remember. MM lagged a little bit behind BM and SV in terms of popularity.
(I seem to recall a lot of discussion in the Hunter community during MoP where it was pointed out that MM was only really popular when it’s the strongest spec. When all 3 specs are well-balanced, MM has a tendency to fall behind.)
WoD — it was quite a roller-coaster ride for BM and even worse for SV with the gigantic “bug fix, really! We swear it’s a bug fix” nerf that SV got in time for the final raid (seriously, tanks were out-dpsing SV). MM became the favored raiding spec during this. I ignored PvP totally.
Legion — oh, the drama. The drama! MSV had a pretty narrow niche early on in Legion and for a good while MSV was the top performing spec… except very few players actually played it so few people knew how strong MSV was. BM was favored over MM in most content, largely due to MM’s pain-in-the-butt Vulnerable mechanic (however, MM was capable of outperforming BM. Players just really hated the mechanic). During latter Legion, MM became the favored spec for Mythics due to the “meme spec.” Also, there was that infamous week halfway through Legion when Blizzard nerfed MM’s AoE capacity (after already having nerfed both MSV and BM over the previous months), leaving all three Hunter specs performing SO badly that the Hunters were getting benched and removed from raiding teams. PvP, MSV was very very strong but still struggled a little. BM and MM had an even harder time.
Seems accurate. BM was also good for entry-level raiding when you had no gear, but because it had next to no gear scaling MM became the PvE spec of choice.
There was talk of a viable SV build in T3 due to the agility scaling of Lightning Reflexes (no, melee lovers, it was not a melee build) but from what I heard this wasn’t really in practice at the time and its viability is way more questionable than initially believed.
Truth. 41/20 BM was totally dominant for the entire expansion. I actually HATED this at the time. It’s the first time I really started to pay attention on how to properly play a Hunter in PvE and it worsened the class for me. I stuck to MM religiously, which was fine since I didn’t do any serious raiding.
I don’t know what things were like in PvP. SV was put on the map due to its Expose Weakness talent. I think I remember seeing one raiding SV Hunter the entire expansion. I never thought much of the spec at the time and didn’t care for it.
I feel bad about this now but I was happy at the time when BM was nerfed. I still had a grudge against it due to BC. When 3.0 came out I was all about Survival. It just got Explosive Shot and it just looked and sounded awesome; combined with Lock and Load it felt like Hunters had a dynamic playstyle for the first time and not just repetitive weaving rotations. Survival started off strong in the first days of 3.0 but took a couple big nerfs, mainly due to the absurd passive AoE Explosive Shot provided at the time (it used to have an AoE component), so I guess you’re right in that it literally started with a bang. Switched between MM and SV for most of the expansion, mostly leaning towards SV.
MM was actually the spec of choice for Firelands. I don’t remember what was going on with BM in this expansion; I didn’t play it at all. I do remember playing MM at some point in Dragon Soul which was odd considering SV was totally dominant during that patch, but I didn’t play my Hunter much and I think I just felt like playing MM at the time. I definitely levelled most of the way to 85 as Survival.
I actually made a new Hunter in this expac (the current one I’m posting on, but not named "Bepples yet; the original name was some obnoxious Latin name) just to level from the start as Survival because it worked so well with the Focus change. My original Hunter was a Night Elf.
Not accurate: MM was in the dumps most of the expansion, although it was pretty good in PvP. There were very few MM Hunters in raiding. BM and SV were just too good most of the time so it was a competition between those. MM’s damage just sucked, especially from Chimera Shot. And Blizzard didn’t seem to understand how to meaningfully buff MM; they kept buffing Aspect of the Hawk seemingly not understanding that it would buff all three specs at once so MM would still remain underpowered.
WoD really was a roller coaster. On launch MM was the only viable spec. Then some hotfixes came and SV was suddenly the best spec. Come Blackrock Foundry it gets more balanced but BM takes over since it got an insane tier set bonus that made it considerably better. Then HFC comes and nukes SV while giving MM the best tier set and a considerable buff. Add to that an ecounter design philosophy that heavily favoured MM on top of the legendary ring that screwed specs with little to no CD burst (e.g. SV) while favouring specs with 2-minute CD phases (e.g. MM) and MM became the only valid raiding option for Hunters for the entire patch. Not a good situation. I’m still really upset by how this turned out especially since it would be the last patch of this Cata/MoP/WoD class design that was so enjoyable.
SV was still king in PvP though, particularly in rated PvP where you didn’t have things like the set bonuses and the legendary ring. Honestly, as bad as the Serpent Sting nerf was, by far the worst thing acting against SV in that patch was the legendary ring. BM was also mostly abandoned in the same patch and it got buffed. The ring was just incredibly badly designed and we pointed it out to them over and over again to no avail.
MM was the king spec for Emerald Nightmare but on Nighthold release with the tier sets and some buffs BM started to take over. By 7.2 BM was the top spec, but later on in the expansion it became much more even and you had a situation where MM was theoretically better but more people generally played BM.
SV crested in Nighthold as well where its damage was really good, it had low gear and legendary dependence, and Nighthold was ridiculously melee-favouring (many bosses flat out didn’t use their worst mechanics against melee, including the last boss). But, like you said, there was zero audience for Legion Survival and, to be frank, the spec was horribly designed even if you liked melee. So almost no one ever played it.
I think you’re referring to the week 7.1.5 launched. Hunters were literally the bottom 3 spots on the logs out of all specs in the game and they had to rush in emergency buffs. A really bad time for our class in general
We are all going off of our memories, so ultimately citing spec popularity is a wash. That said, class representation is something we all know. Hunters have always been the most popular or one of the most popular classes in the game. For many expansions we were on top, #1, in terms of popularity. But now we’re #5.
Can anyone dispute the deduction that the relatively decreasing amount of hunter players is related to dissatisfaction with the class? Could there be any other reason as to why we would see this large of a drop in the class’s popularity?
I’m just hoping the debate between you and Darkeforge doesn’t continue to flood this and other SV-related forums, no offense intended to either of you.
Says the guy who brings it up in pretty much every thread as well.
Incl threads where none of us have even posted anything in…
The topic of the return of RSV is most often brought up in threads where it’s perfectly in line with the subject of the OP(because the OP has brought it up for discussion somehow)
Or
When some MSV-fans start posting about how perfect MSV is; with the extension of also talking about "how much more sense it makes as a melee spec, or “how much better it fits the class” etc. etc.
If all they’re doing is saying that they like MSV, that’s just their opinion and there’s no point trying to argue with it.
But the thing is, they most often also complement such praise with additional motivators for why it’s so good or why it makes so much more sense now.
With that, it’s no longer just a thread about the current SV. It becomes a discussion about the present as well as the past.
You might not like it, but it’s perfectly in line with the topic as a whole.
They sort of already have. Not with numbers but with words.
They’re saying things like
“We knew going into Legion that we were making a niche spec.”
“Most hunters want to be ranged…”
“Changes like what was done to Survival was taking spec identity a little too far”
And so on…
Got a source for that?
Still…
Got a source that supports your claim?
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but yeah…it was done to drive players away from the spec before deleting it.
And given the talking points of those people over in the MMO-Champion thread right now it looks like for some people it really did convince them that ranged SV was always a dead spec walking. Makes perfect sense now why Blizzard did all of that.
