We are running into the changing of the Old Guard vs New Guard in regards to the devs. It is highly unlikely that there are many people still around that worked on the original Hunter Class Vision. Change brings both good and bad depending on prescriptive but the chance is there and that is all that we really have.
Yes yes it is, they should rework one of the rogue specs into a ranged spec.
I saw a video on a sub ranged spec that would be like a dark ranger. It sounded cool and would add another ranged into the game.
Off balance the whole survival going melee thing perfect idea.
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No, it’s not a fair point. Don’t even begin to pretend this is reasonable and that I’m agreeing with you as you go along with this. You’re imposing a ridiculous double-standard that mysteriously never applies to other specs in the game that have similar foundations such as the Warlock, Rogue, and Warrior DPS specs. Using special munitions is absolutely a distinct identity worth exploring and all the proof you need of that is in its pitiful exploration in modern WoW since Survival went melee.
Survival started off with the identity of being a resourceful utilitarian. That made sense when their spec philosophy included utility/support specs, but at some point they needed Survival to have a damage dealing toolkit. Exotic munitions is a natural extension of the resourceful theme it started with. It already had buffed traps and Wyvern Sting too and until that point the “special shots” (i.e. the ones dealing magic damage) were underutilised because they spent much of Classic/TBC scaling off spell damage instead. So it made a lot of sense.
All Hunters have pets, too; that doesn’t make BM’s identity defunct. BM just focuses the most on pets. Same goes for ranged SV and exotic munitions. All specs had Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting (until WoD) and BM had Cobra Shot, but SV was the one with Explosive Shot and Black Arrow on top of that, a mastery that increased magical damage, and the unique interactions with Serpent Sting that made it strong including the initial tick and Serpent Spread.
Because in MoP and WoD, barring specific exceptions, talents were classwide and most of the spec’s unique functionality came out of the box. Spec-specific talent tiers came in Legion which is also when they made SV melee.
No, it isn’t, actually. The three Rogue specs are in fact different approaches to the Rogue archetype and that level of exploration is valuable; this is precisely the reason we have specialisations of base classes in the first place. Specs are not meant to be entirely independent micro-classes. That’s a Legion philosophy that explicitly didn’t work. If you’re still operating under this standard you’re 3+ years behind on class design discussion.
They should not make one of them ranged because you have three established and valued melee specs, just as they shouldn’t have made a Hunter spec melee because you had three established and valued ranged specs. We should not be changing spec’s roles at all (with the lone exception of changing SV back to ranged). This is the sort of thing that needed to be sorted out in Vanilla, not in the game’s 2nd decade.
Luckily, the spectacular failure of melee SV has made another such move very unlikely. In a way Survival was sacrificed so none of these other terrible niche spec rework proposals could never happen, like some sort of spec messiah.
If you’re referring to Nubkeks’s video, he also said SV should be a tank. Not the best source of solid, workable class ideas.
It takes some god-tier delusion to look at the Survival situation and think “job well done!”. Consider the thread you’re posting in along with the multitude of similar threads going all the way back to 7.0.
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I have no idea what you mean by this.
In my second post that you clearly saw, I agreed with this. I think that’s a something they very easily could’ve fleshed out for RSV, since it was headed in that direction, but don’t think it was ever really there. There are plenty of specs that did not have well-developed identities; Disc was a mess, Demo didn’t have much going for it for a long time, and Balance was- as best as I can tell- a grab bag of “nature-y stuff.” Survival was a confused spec too.
And MM had Chimera Shot. So SV had like…one…more magic shot. Like I said- SV was definitely heading in that direction, and there was a lot to build off of. Serpent Spread was fun, Lock and Load was fun; it’s fine to hate MSV, but ultimately my point is that I think some people that miss RSV- for completely legit reasons- are overselling the notion that it had some strong and fleshed out identity as a spec. I think it was finding a direction, but it was still a bit confused. Blizzard clearly thought so, and it’s pretty darn rare that Blizzard decides they haven’t delivered on something and the community says “no, no; you totally did. It’s great.”
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When the Legion pre-patch went live, the Hunter Class experienced major changes. I think the changes were made with more than one goal in mind, and that mind wasn’t fond of Hunters.
Push players away from playing Hunters? Not really, though it had that effect. I think it was believed that MM Hunters needed to be weakened, coming into the new expac, they were just too good.
And, with the new expac, new things had to be provided. Someone saw a way…
Survival had a small player-base, compared to some, and superficially sorta played like MM, (it didn’t, but some twit thought so.) and MM needed some changes anyway, and so…it was decided to give MM some of Survival’s abilities, so that the loyalist Survival core could play MM and feel at home 
, and MM would be changed/different enough to be NOT so good, and the SPEC Survival, could be something… new… and they all lived happily ever after. 
Really.
What happened to MM was an overhaul, and not a good one, and nor, do I think, was it meant to be. What happened to Survival was closer to obliteration.
Hunters have a ranged weapon, pets, and traps. just saying.
It was fleshed out to a degree suiting of the era where we had it. That being the pre-Legion era. The paradigm of class and spec design back then wasn’t to make specs into completely different entities(for them to have entirely separate toolkits, etc.).
The Hunter specs were perfectly fine for what was intended at the time. It’s true that what they were would not hold up going into Legion, due to it’s increased focus on spec identitites, but that’s besides the point and is a moot point since what we have now should not be applied to what we had prior to Legion.
The thing here is that the name Survival stems from the old talent category as it was from fairly early days of Vanilla. Back then the entirety of the category was about providing talents which focused on increasing our survivability, on a class-wide basis.
Back then, we did not have dedicated core specs that came with their own separate toolkits/playstyles.
Survivability in itself can be defined in many ways; you can increase your survivability through talents that provide straight defense, talents that increase your damage, talents that provide improvements to utility etc. etc.
Once they started to add more defining talents(in WotLK), the immediately went down the road of making SV into a “Munitions Expert/Trapper”-esque theme, this was further defined as time went on and more and more was made into baseline elements tied to the spec itself.
“Survival” as a name for the spec we saw from the end of WotLK - WoD, or even after when it became a melee-spec, does sort of fit, in the sense that it still does focus on survivability, just not in a way that resembles what was originally intended, before the era of Core Specializations.
But either way, the name itself is easily changed to fit the core theme and is in all honesty of less concern.
Throughout MoP and WoD we did not even have a talent-system that was based on spec-specific talents. The vast majority of them were shared amongst all 3 specs.
But before then, RSV certainly held multiple talents that have never been a part of anything other than SV(be it a talent category or a core spec).
See above. Again, that era had a completely different focus on how specs were designed. Specs weren’t intended to be completely their own thing(incl talents). The actual Core Specializations were their own thing, but anything outside of those, was intended to be shared amongst all specs, so there’s no point in arguing that those parts weren’t entirely unique, because it wasn’t the intent.
That only became a thing with Legion.
The things you said points towards this being an opinion of yours. If it’s not then…fair enough. But considering how you write, I can understand why some people, incl myself, would think otherwise.
Like I said above, it was perfectly fine for what was intended at the time in terms of class and spec design.
Going forward into Legion, they would have needed to add more to RSV as well to make it follow the criteria set for the new era.
The problem is that they didn’t…
Same as above.
Like all other specs, RSV was being further developed and was given more defining elements of it’s own. But when the time came to really double down on that; on individual spec identities post-MoP & WoD, instead of doing to RSV what they did to all other specs in the game, they opted to delete it from the class in it’s entirety.
THAT, is the main issue.
People can argue all day about how RSV was lacking parts that made it into it’s own thing entirely, and they are right, because before Legion, it was never intended for that to be the case.
For example, if they had done something like in the link below for RSV, when you compare that to current MM or BM, or SV for that matter, there would be no argument of whether the Munition Expert/Trapper-theme could be it’s own thing within the class:
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I think that’s a great point. I will maintain that I still think SV was not as developed in terms of what it would look like as a ‘standalone’ spec than others; like Discipline, Combat, Balance, etc. it suffered from having an overly vague name, I think, but they definitely could’ve taken what they had and expanded on it. So the next question that has to be asked is "why did Blizzard decide to completely scrap RSV entirely when there was- we all agree- enough there to build a standalone RSV spec around?
I’m only half joking in my suggestion that they liked the idea of Talonclaw and then needed a spec to wield it.
Or maybe they grossly overestimated the salience of the old ‘melee hunter’ meme.
Because blizzard is run by people who don’t understand hunters or hunter players and thought “didn’t people use to play melee hunters back in the day?” Not realizing it was a meme that literally no one took seriously back in the day. Then they were all confused about why no one wanted to play it and came up with the excuse “It’s fine that it’s not popular, as we meant for it to be a niche spec.”
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Hyperbole and Assumption combined does not add to a discussion. Which is it? Blizzard ignores the forums or they read the forums but are too daft to comprehend what they are reading? Do you realize how that story sounds after reading it for the upteenth time for 15 years?
There have been a few theories on the release of MSV and sadly it had nothing to do with proper testing, feedback or communication from the development team. There is a reason, someone knows the reason but for some reason will not release that information. No one on this forum may ever know the root of the MSV release.
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You realize that the people who run wow now are not the same people who ran it back in Vanilla right?
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Edit: What I wrote in your quote there, I meant for it to say “because before Legion”, not “before WoD”.
Anyway…
If you insist on that standpoint, feel free to expand on why you think that was the case.
What, in your mind, was missing for RSV to feel as developed as other specs(prior to the Legion-era). Keep in mind that, again, the idea of fully unique playstyles as a concept was not a thing prior to Legion, by intent.
Agreed, the name “Survival”, like I said earlier, is a remnant from the old days where it was a talent category that focused on survivability; on improving those areas of the class as a whole.
And, again, the name is of less concern as it can so easily be changed to something more fitting. “Munitions” does the job quite well. It’s accurate, it’s on-point, and it follows/meets the same guidlines as the names of other specs for other classes(mainly how the name strongly points towards which part of the class is the primary focus of that particular spec).
I’ve said this before but, in short…
Most likely, by the time they had decided to go forward with the new philosophies of “spec identity first” (what we saw in Legion) when it came to the hunter class, they had a clear vision for BM - it being THE spec to focus on gameplay surrounding beasts/pets. Marksmanship have always held a thematic focus of a sharpshooter, so that was easy to continue focusing on.
But when it came to Survival, even though they were “aware” of it’s intended theme as the Munitions Expert/Trapper, they probably weren’t all that sure about what else to do with it, and so…in comes the guy who says “hey, the intent is to focus on spec identity, let’s make a melee-spec for Hunters. That for sure will give it an identity of it’s own compared to Beast Mastery and Marksmanship”.
From that point forward, they no longer bothered to look into what RSV could have been, what could be added to it, because they were only focusing on it’s replacement anyway…
When it comes down to it, MSV was just an easy way to meet the criteria set for Legion class-/spec-design.
The excuses they’ve given since are just flawed afterthoughts and…well…excuses made to somehow justify the removal of RSV. Despite how nothing they’ve said actually holds up.
Worth noting is that the guy who initially created RSV with it’s theme as a Munitions Expert/Trapper, that guy being Chris Kaleiki - who left Blizzard a while back, at the time of Legion-development he wasn’t involved in the Hunter class anymore, so the new dev(s) who took over did not necessarily share his vision for the spec, nor the understanding of it’s continued development.
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This guy gets it.
Well on the plus side if they never bring it back to a LK-MOP “ish” version of RSV I only have to sub for classic\BC and hopefully Wrath, and can use the money I would have spent on buying SL or any other expansion on something more fun, like on clearance fidget spinners 
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Name one profitable company with over 1,000+ employees that has 100% turnover from 15 years ago. Just because you recognize a few names from a press release doesn’t mean it is a clean slate.
It did exactly what blizzard wanted become a niche spec,
Also if your wondering why blizzard did the change it was because of you.
They knew how much you specifically liked the old survival and they didn’t appreciate any of your feedback so they decided to go melee just so you won’t play it anymore.
They are still cheering and celebrating you abandoning the spec. While everyone else has a blast harpooning everywhere and throwing nukes and being melee
The fact that you view ranged as a core aspect of the class is the opposite of open mind and proves my point exactly.
Look you want to say Hunter should be 3 ranged specs… fine. What a fairy tale character SHOULD be can be the hill you die on. Congrats.
But guess what… some of us let that go 4-5 years ago and just enjoy the game. We don’t care whether what you think should be…is. and neither does Blizzard. And you know what that freedom gives us… FUN.
And MSV for those who can get over a break-up is FUN.
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I mean, you’re speaking of being open minded but you seem still under the impression that everyone who hates it hasn’t tried it, when that isn’t the case.
Hell, I don’t even hate the current spec lol.
It just seems like the pot calling the kettle black, you know? I don’t want to take away from your fun. I don’t think what happened with old SV and taking away the fun of many more players was a good idea either, and the current spec should have just been a 4th spec as an option from the get go.
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I agree it should have been a fourth spec. They managed to break feral apart between cat and bear they should have been able to do it for survival.
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blizz will never make a 4th spec and probably never make SV ranged again. every class designer there thinks “arrows are all the same we have MM”, while simultaneously having 10 caster specs that all shoot a different colour filler spell + a few procs.
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Eh, I actually doubt that to be honest. The current dev team will not last forever, and it’s clearly an issue that isn’t going away within the hunter community. I suspect somewhere down the line they’ll do something to placate the community if nothing else.
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