Just make sv use both melee and ranged weapons at the same time with animations based on range and be done with it.
(Though change the 2 hander into a single one hander)
Gameplaywise it is fine, numbers can be adjusted, the visuals are what has problems
I’m well aware of that. The only reason those existed was because ranged abilities had a minimum range at the time, and thus hunters needed something to do when that frost mage got up in your face. The only reason they existed was to enable you to get back to range. That’s why Wing Clip was so central at the time, someone got up in your grill, you snared them and GTFO’d back to where you could actually do something useful. Staying in melee range was death as a hunter, even as Survival spec.
It did, but that still doesn’t make us spellcasters. There were a bunch of odd things like that in vanilla, more there for flavor and lore and RP reasons than sane game mechanics. Same reason warlocks had a melee stone, as I’ve pointed out before.
Yes, and then you could run the heck away from it before it was triggered. You couldn’t even drop traps in combat in vanilla, so if someone was in your grill, Frost Trap was locked out already. You needed to have it down way before then, ideally at a choke point. You standing in that choke point was suicide.
I do remember. I also remember them failing hilariously at it. Every single raiding hunter that was in even a remotely serious guild was ranged DPS. You simply didn’t run melee back then. Melee hunters were less desirable than DPS hybrids, and that’s saying a lot.
Again, because of minimum range. That manual specifically points out that, despite the existence of those melee abilities, the class was a ranged DPS class. Again, I’ll point out that that exact same version of WoW had warlocks having a melee ability as well. Clearly they’re a melee DPS class too, right?
None of which play like they did before. Frankly, none of the covenants have much impact, and precious few of the legendaries affect gameplay at all. The dominant legendaries atm for both BM and MM are just passive damage (SST has some edge gameplay in cleave, but on single target it’s entirely passive with zero gameplay or attention needed).
Yes, for the same reason people would complain if Kill Command was made into a 30s cooldown, or if Pyroblast was, or if Ice Lance was. Shifting a central ability, used every few seconds, to a couple of times per minute is not a good change. And that’s ignoring the fact that the ability also works completely differently.
Why? /10 chars
/shrug. Would look cool in my opinion. Also stat gain from bow AND a 2hander MIGHT be a bit too much.
https://i.imgur.com/qq5uLRQ.jpg
#EpicPaintSkills
I’ve never played MSV so I can’t really comment on the gameplay, but it’s clearly a niche/meme spec at this point. The only time MSV has been top dog for hunters was BFA PvP… in which Hunter was bottom tier. The spec was dead on arrival and has stayed there.
I’d bet money if Blizzard finally made MSV an S tier class in PvE A LOT of Hunter players would be extremely irate if neither BM nor MM came close. My guess is they know this which is why it still has never been the strongest spec. MM, BM, and RSV have all spent time being the best spec for PvP/PvE on certain tiers and seen a lot of play.
RSV was my favorite spec and I’d love to have it back. The only concern I would have for 4 Hunter specs is that Blizzard can’t even devote enough resources on the current 3. The state of the entire class has been kind of depressing for years now imo.
Also - After reading this thread I’m amazed you guys are still responding to Brigadester. He’s either extremely dense or a blatant troll. Either way it’s pointless.
We still have things that support this in the game right now.
With the new leveling experience, they added a tutorial quest focusing on teaching you about traps, about making them as well as using them. As a part of that questchain, you’re tasked to seek help from a mage nearby to add the element of frost to the trap you just made, to make a Freezing Trap.
In the RPG, it’s the same with the shots we fire. Nothing speaks to how we’re the ones to actually infuse our shots with magic, but rather, we just fire them. Any references in-game, points to how hunters seek out schooled magicians to do this for them.
As for Vanilla, even the base resource system we had; Mana, was a last minute band-aid fix because the original system they intended for us to have; Focus, wasn’t working out as they wanted. I can’t imagine it was any different when it came to the abilities themselves. They just didn’t have time to work out everything to where it made sense, based on what the class was in itself.
For years, we’ve seen how certain parts of our class/other classes have been…less-than-ideal. Abilities/talents/effects not working properly or not being properly balanced.
If they were to add 1 more spec to the class, I doubt it would fix the above, but it also won’t magically break us completely. There’s no evidence of that being the case. The most likely scenario, if they were to add this 4th spec, is that we would be roughly where we are right now in terms of balance and functionality; Far from perfect, but not broken.
I can easily accept that if it meant that I could get RSV back.
The thing is, until they step away from the overwhelming amount of time and resources they spend on these borrowed-power systems, we will never get to a point where everything is working as it should or with closer-to-ideal balancing.
Funny think about that leveling experience, actually. It starts you, unconditionally, with a ranged weapon, not a melee one. Literally the very first quest requires you to use Steady Shot on a target dummy a certain number of times. Melee isn’t even an option until level 10, when they just magically fling a polearm at you out of the blue if you spec Survival. Yet another example of the devs clearly seeing hunters as fundamentally a ranged DPS class.
And Blizzard reinforced the idea of their melee combat. If we really want to dissect the manual we can look at preists and assert that just because they have some damaging spells to help them level or kill things doesn’t mean that shadow should be a dps spec. Or omg why did they make disc a unique healing spec by healing through damage! BRING BACK MY BUFF BOT. PI used to be a disc only spell! waaaah!
Explosive shot, Serpent sting and Lock and load are all still in the game. Flayed shot does the exact thing black arrow did. If you miss those spells/abilities they’re there.
Again look at disc priests. They were buff bots. Now they’re fully fledged healers look how far they’ve come to being their own unique spec.
So if you have no investment or interest in msv maybe stop whining about it?
In the begining the spec had focus on fighting back when caught in melee range above anything else, so when they decided to add more distinguishing abilities in preparation for the era of actual Core Specializations with dedicated playstyles, is it really that strange that they went with adding…Melee abilities?
Going to back to what I said about people trying innovative builds that tried to melee as survival. Anyone that legitimately went survival was probably trying to make it work in melee with traps and such.
See above.
This game was not designed with the aspect of hardcore raid min/maxxers that’s a new gen concept. Wow was made for (can you believe it?) FUN.
So you’re telling me you want to be a min maxxer and if rsv was in the game and wasn’t the best dps spec you wouldn’t be it because it would do less damage than the other hunter specs? So are you complaining for clout?
Yawn… Pyro was a 10 sec cast and hit a lot harder. Deep freeze was replaced by ice lance hitting less. Wanna get into shifting abilities? We can dig deep. Ret dps used to have to seal swap, execute used to use all your rage. Slam had a cast time. Lava burst used to hit hard now it hits like a wet meatball. Don’t get me started on how many times they changed aimed shot.
Someone having an unpopular opinion doesn’t automatically make them a troll. Somebody has to break up the circle jerk of BRING BACK RSV DELETE MSV. Otherwise yall are gonna be in your own constant echo chamber and continue basking in your seething hatred for anyone actually enjoying something you all hate. There’s lots of things I can say about people hating on minorities of anything but this isn’t the forum. 
Uh. no. No they weren’t. People went SV primarily for PvP functionality in Classic and for PvE support in BC. Not only do we have guides and videos from the time but you can see how people play SV today in WoW Classic.
You’re trying to be more detailed and put more effort in your posts now but unfortunately for you it means you’re now telegraphing your ignorance and inexperience with statements like these.
Classic isn’t Vanilla no matter how hard people want it to be. It was a completely different environment back then. There are guide’s and videos on lots of things, back then people tried to pvp a lot of different ways further cementing my claim that people were trying innovative builds.
I know you’re trying really hard to prove hunter is ranged only and that they cant change it cause maybe you have some sort of need to assert yourself into any engaging conversation talking about msv. Melee survival isn’t new and game manuals aren’t gospel. Especially for an mmo that has been around and changing for the past 15+ years.
Are you under the impression that melee for Hunters wasn’t a giant meme even back then? Because it absolutely was.
It absolutely was! So was 2h and tank enhance, shadow priest, moonkin, kitty tanks etc.
They just decided to make it an actual thing later down the line. Does current survival need some work right now? Yeah, probably a little bit. Does it need to be scrapped cause it doesn’t fit the hunter fantasy? Absolutely not.
It’s not even the same level. With Shadow Priest, Moonkin, and Druid Tanks (which actually were pretty good for dungeons, actually, unless you mean someone actually trying to tank in cat form) there was a clear and explicit intent on what those specs were meant to be and they each had a major flaw that prevented them from being any good, e.g. Moonkins didn’t have the mana regen to hold up. Melee Hunters, on the other hand, were the butt of a joke. Everyone had a story of the noob Hunter who started fighting in melee to save ammo or whatever, and people would put out videos of themselves managing to kill some 10 FPS keyboard turner as a melee Hunter as a flex. But I can assure you no one took it seriously, and for good reason. There was no intent, either explicitly in the written material or as a fact of the class design, for Survival or any Hunter build to stick to melee combat. Hunters were just meant to use ranged weapons, period.
It seems to me your vision of what classic was is just some romantic vision based on ramblings from Esfand or Nixxiom. From someone who did actually play at the time: this wasn’t some utopia with no elitism, theorycrafting, or metas. That might have described the first few months, but it didn’t take long for all that to form and things like Hunters being ranged were very basic facts of game design known by most players.
No, abilities named Explosive Shot and Lock and Load are in the game. That’s not the same thing. Again, that’s like arguing that WoD-era Rapid Fire is still in the game because MM has an ability by that name.
Covenant != class ability. Also, it’s hilariously undertuned, and has been since beta. We can’t look to borrowed power for things like that, because borrowed power is by definition exclusive to just this expansion.
Ya, and Survival evolved into exclusively a ranged DPS spec. Now you’re arguing that it was right and justified to undo all of that under some false pretense that vanilla Survival was all about melee combat (despite Classic being there literally proving you wrong right now). Maybe get your arguments straight? Should we be respecting the direction that specs evolved since vanilla? Or should we stick to the devs’ original vision of the spec in vanilla?
Either way, ranged combat makes more sense than melee, ironically.
[citation needed]
You’re guessing and expecting us to take it as evidence.
Wat. This game was designed on the coat-tails of EQ and similar. Vanilla was only about hardcore raiding. Literally the only end-game activities in vanilla were raiding and PvP. That’s it. The game expected you to no-life it, to spend hours farming for raid, and to spec into one of the ~9 raid-viable specs (or the similar number of PvP-viable specs). The game today is literally a million times more casual-friendly that vanilla ever was.
Where are you getting this min-maxing thing from? I’m not in the group of people that’ll play only the absolute best, period full stop. But I’m also rather dis-inclined to play something that’s massively behind, especially if it’s not really any more fun. In this particular case, if they actually brought back a spec that replicated the playstyle and gameplay of WoD or MoP RSV, I’d absolutely play it, provided it wasn’t kneecapped like late-WoD RSV was. If it were as close to top as BM currently is, 100% I’d be playing it.
6s, but sure. Not like we have an active index for it.
Anyway, you’re dodging the point. You asked if a 30s CD on a spec-defining ability would be a problem. Yes. Yes it would. Damage isn’t the point here. You seem to keep confusing how hard an ability hits for the gameplay surrounding the ability. The cooldown on an ability much more directly affects the feel of it than the damage numbers.
You know what, you’re right. They’ve changed a bunch of stuff. So no harm in changing SV back to ranged, right? You’ll just take that in stride, right? I mean, you’re so all about how much this game has changed, and that we should accept those changes. So clearly you’ll be 100% A-OK with them changing SV back to ranged. Right?
Oh, you don’t like them changing things you like? Weird how that works.
You know, most of the commentary has been add RSV as a 4th spec. It’s people like you that make me want to delete MSV. Even if RSV was added as a 4th spec and MSV got all the TLC it actually needs, peeps like you would still be out here campaigning to have it deleted for whatever reason.
People like you make me increasingly apathetic about the wants of MSV advocates. If y’all are going to be this toxic and combative about requests to add RSV without removing MSV, I really don’t care whether MSV stays anymore. Go ahead and delete it. Ship you off to some other class to polute their forums instead.
It’s literally the exact same code base. If something worked back then, it’d be working today too. The fact that it doesn’t today means it also didn’t work back then, people just didn’t have the resources to know better back in 2004.
Except 2h enhance was actually effective, if a fairly one-trick pony heavily reliance on RNG. 2h enhance could straight up one-shot just about any class in the game if they got a lucky Windfury string.
This statement, you know its not true. No way no how could we tank like a warrior or even be close to being on par. True, once you allowed plenty of argo maybe…but bloody O…people do not let you get argo now let alone in classic. One glaring problem … no taunt. Unless it was undead. By TBC we could tank. But to say we were on par in vanilla is a very far stretch. Like stretch Armstrong stretch.
I do not bring that up. Some do, I do not. I played with the crap fantastic melee abilities ALL hunters had, the deadzone, ect ect…but I am on the side of when the dev’s changed this nearly 6 years now, it was decided it would be a hybrid melee and range. In all honesty, most of the damage you can do is from range. Of course to shed focus and deal damage, raptor which is one of the main abilities have to be done in melee. Even then you can go eagle and do range. Before you go nuts, yes SV is Melee. But it is a 80/20 melee spec. You can still do range as needed. Hell you can strap on a bow and use arcane/steady if need be…
You are correct. I bring this up because you love to shove the classic manual in everyone face and say "SEE!!! Its right here !!! SV was range !!! Yes, yes it was. But just as Paladins change from the original or were made to work as the original description stated, Blizzard decided to change SV Hunters (going on 6 years) to be what they are now. The book does not mention it, the smattering of melee attacks do not support it, but it was decided and it happened. Done. End of story. If the Dev’s decide to change again, then again, done. End of story. The issue here is some of you just can’t let go. And even if they had a 4th SV range spec, 98% of you complaining would not use it if it was not the meta spec.
It 100% is on the same level. Spriests were turned into mana batteries before they actually we changed to a solid dps. I meant kitty tanks in the same vein that rogues tried to dodge tank. And there were pvp videos of many different meme interactions back then. Hunters in general were the butt of every joke but people still did off the wall things like stack spell power to get mega heals on your pet to solo content or spam arcane shot.
I have no idea who Esfand or Nixxiom are and you seem to misunderstand elitism back then. Theory crafting was a thing but resources like raidbots and simming were non existent. A very very small percentage of players even saw endgame content compared to classic now. From someone who did play back then people were serious about the game for different reasons than metas or min maxxing. No one looked you up on gearscore or raider io before inviting you. And hell no it wasn’t a utopia I refused to play classic cause I knew people would be way more toxic in it now than they were back then.
Did I say explosive shot now is wod era explosive shot? No I just said explosive shot is still in the game. They changed the cd and its a talented ability boohoo. Rapidfire is still in the game they changed it yes but its still there.
They’ve kept borrowed power from other specs/classes you might get to keep your flayed shot. I guess black arrow was borrowed power to eh bud?
Really? Looks like a melee spec to me these past few years.
Yes I am, sure I will, Yes we should, and yeah why not both?
Ok, ben.
Did you really play back then? Probably not a lot of people did way more effing around than hardcore raid min/maxxing.
Play style is not massively behind. Speccing SS over master marksman isn’t a massive crutch. Neither is using explosive shot or flayed shot. You are choosing not to play it cause its not the best if you do not care about the best the build/play style is there its just not titled survival since that’s the thing you keep getting hung up about.
You pressed button when it randomly procced and lit up on your action bar? Make a macro that changes the icon of aimed to shot to explosive shot and it’ll feel the exact same after a lnl proc.
Looks at thread title “Ah you’re right this thread wasn’t meant to bash on msv it was intended to talk about adding a fourth spec.”
I’ve already said they should have added a fourth spec. /facepalm
I didn’t say anything about the code of the game. Classic is fundamentally different because of the people playing it and resigning to metas and min maxxing. Most people still playing are are just raiding or doing to stream for attention. People wanting to play it to feel the nostalgia burnt out months ago.
Then they made it not viable because they perhaps didn’t intend it. You know what did did make viable? MSV.
This is fact.
“My experience was different from your experience so clearly it’s not true.”
Okay… back then it was common practice to allow the tank to establish aggro before starting to DPS anything.
Not really, because there is really only 1 way to measure a tank.
Did they hold aggro and not die? Turns out, again as long as allowed to establish aggro, paladin tanks were just as capable of tanking as warrior tanks in dungeons. The lack of taunt made it so they couldn’t really raid tank, but they were more than capable dungeon tanks.
Not meaning to pick on you specifically, but more this sentiment since I’ve seen it tossed around a few times. I don’t buy this at all, to be frank. I’m currently playing BM because I like it the most out of the three hunter specs. It certainly isn’t meta. A third of the hunter population is also playing it, despite it not being meta.
I’m genuinely curious why people think play a 4th spec if it isn’t meta? You can still have a spec be popular and not meta. BM is the perfect example of that actually.
So your pug group would list LF Paladin Tank !! Maybe in your guild, but not in a pug situation. Heck even in my guild, once I acquired the blue set, I was allowed…in a pinch…when the Warriors were not on, but a pug ? No. Also you must have run with some very very discipline groups.
Sorry I am just not going to agree with this, and I guarantee if you went into the Warriors forum or Paladin forum saying this, they would say the same.