From Gamescon 2017 and Lead Developer Ion Hazzikostas:
Q: In general, how do you feel about the balance of the classes right now? Warcraftlogs says Survival Hunters are the least represented spec right now, and are there any concerns about some classes or specs?
A: Representation doesn’t necessarily matter as much, I think. We knew with Survival Hunter that we were making a niche spec. It is a melee spec for a class that has traditionally being range. I think that a lot of existing hunters, they are all hunters because they want to be a range class, and so we don’t necessarily expect them or want them to feel like they should be changing; but for new players picking up that class, it is an intriguing option; and we have seen a lot of Survival Hunters doing extremely well at very high levels of play. So the fact that they are not playing as often, I don’t think reflects upon their potential so much as it just does where the audience is at right now. That’s not much of a problem.
But apparently it did matter because they did a second fairly dramatic rework of the specialization for BFA trying to make it more acceptable to the players they discounted when they made the change only to see a marginal increase in representation.
Per his own words they knew that they were making a specialization that didn’t appeal to players who actually chose the most popular Class in the game because it offered the only mobile, ranged, physical damage play styles thus in essence feeling like melee in terms of rotations but with the benefit of being able to see more than the bosses ankles and buttocks.
So they deliberately chose to remove 1 of only 3 options of a unique play style, theme, and aesthetic in order to add a 13th version of a melee DPS and 19th version of melee fantasy in general. Which would be like Coca Cola removing Diet Coke in order to make Diet Cherry Root Beer because “some people” might like that, regardless of whether or not “more people” preferred regular Diet Coke.
This is further compounded by the fact that they then took the remaining 2 Hunter specializations and over-specialized them to polar opposites removing much of the class similarities.
Beast Mastery lost most of it’s ranged attacks, and in particular nicer looking attacks and hard hitting attacks in order to become what amounts to a pet buff bot.
Marksmanship went to slower, less “bursty”, more “caster”, and more or less more immobile while also being more mechanically annoying.
Neither of which would be a problem if there was still a middle ground between all pet/little player damage and no pet/all player damage not fun to play.
I went from multiple Hunters and Hunter mains to zero ranged characters at all. And none of my all melee characters are Survival Hunters because, in my opinion, the older and more established melee specializations have better (and more concise) fantasies, play styles, and aesthetics/animations.
