Maybe their design goal was not popularity. Parity between specs is not their goal, nor should it ever be. Ever.
It’s good to have classes/specs with varying degrees of difficulty. Legion wanted to make each spec more distinct, and they succeeded. Survival is more like a hunter/rogue hybrid … I personally think it works (though SV needs more survivability, ironically).
They had three specs historical for being easy. If you wanted to get your girlfriend into the game, you recommended Hunter. It’s a meme how easy (and how bad) most hunters were. High floor, low ceiling (though in arenas they were just okay). They made a spec that is low floor and high ceiling. Obviously most people won’t play it.
I don’t know why you’d think “lots of people playing it” would ever be an internal success metric. I can assure you, it’s not.
I am currently playing survival in WOTLK and you basically come in and out of melee doing a in and out weave. So out for explosive shots\black arrow and other stuff then in for melee hit and traps to proc free explosive, pretty dam good.
Some people like the pure melee, but it is very few. Basically its the least popular spec and its been that way since legion…
Here is some data for Mplus all keys for the last 2 weeks:
Survival hunter parses : 38,234
MM hunter parses: 904,751
Pretty much the same thing for raiding, survival has the lowest representation out of all specs since legion even if the DPS is in the top 10, it will have the same representation, unless hunters are forced to play it if MM\BM is weak.
But least played means nothing. They’re will always be a least played, and most players gravitate towards easy / biggest numbers… Which SV rarely has in PvE.
And I think that’s okay.
I don’t think player populations should be spread evenly across all specs, and I don’t think that’s a goal of the devs.
It’s a hard class to master and rewarding when folks do (and always decent in PvP)… Classes like that need to exist. If you don’t want to master it, there are easier specs to take on. And that’s okay too.
This really isn’t an accurate description of WotLK SV. The only thing you ever run into melee for is Explosive Trap which is a 24 second cooldown, and if that means spending more than 3 seconds being unable to use ranged attacks it’s not worth it and you just stay back and use Black Arrow instead. The melee swing timer is now shared with the ranged one so you’re losing ranged auto shots by going in to Raptor Strike or whatever. It’s not like how it worked in BC.
There’s also the fact that you’re putting yourself at immense danger in PvP situations by running into melee.
This sort of “it’s not meant for everyone” talk is a major red flag. Every content creator drops this take when they’ve produced something people don’t like.
There’s no objective measure for what counts as good or bad, but generally if a video game or something in it gets avoided and isn’t enjoyed by many people it’s considered to be bad. After all, what’s the point of sinking a bunch of time and effort into something hardly anyone enjoys? This is ESPECIALLY true for something that used to be widely enjoyed. That means there’s a whole lot of people who used to derive enjoyment from it who now don’t. The change effectively subtracted more player enjoyment than it generated.
More variety within the class, maybe. Not within the game. As your “hunter/rogue hybrid” comment implies, it’s less variety across the whole game because we already have a lot of specs that fight with melee weapons while Hunters are the only ones that fight with ranged weapons.
As for Hunters, this is a good lesson as to why variety isn’t automatically good. We gained variety but we lost something far more important. It would give us even more variety if Survival were a tank or even a healer, but that would exacerbate the issue: many Hunters (I would argue most Hunters) don’t identify with the spec any more. It doesn’t feel like it’s building on the Hunter foundation but rather taking away from it. Why would I want to play a spec that’s claim to fame is essentially being a handicapped Hunter? There were far more effective ways of achieving more variety in the class than this.
You seem to be coupling being melee with being difficult. They are mostly independent things. They could make a different and challenging ranged spec. In fact if they went into a heavy multidotting route with ranged SV that would open the door to more challenging gameplay.
Least played is one thing but Survival hunter literally less than a percentile of people play it… its beyond least played. The other problem is it never fluxuates with dps its always the least played always at the bottom. To me that just means its a bad spec (not generally fun)
Its a problem because they could make a more fun spec that is more enjoyable for hunters as a whole.
Behold the dude living in the past who just can’t let it go.
Oh wow, I have a hunter alt that I am working on and happen to enjoy survival. Fun spec in spite of your consistent whining. Never know, may just end up being my main, having alot of fun so far.
Sucks to be you Bepples, I’ll be over here enjoying my SV hunter.
If you want to be on the back burner of ambition there’s nothing wrong with that at all, but I can’t speak for plenty others. And I have to be careful since I’m something of a filthy casual myself. But in the past three expansions I had to square up with some of the best players around in open-world. I wouldn’t be having fun for long if Blizzard didn’t give the minimal attention to the class. Casual content can only get me so far before freezing.
We wouldn’t mind you being the “free rider” in that case, but I would try to appreciate how some want to make SV the very best it was meant to be.
I’m not entirely sure how to take that… is that in reference to survival somehow?
I mostly do m+ and routinely get KSM, but I do like the way open world content is designed this expac, helps get into endgame much faster and is much more engaging this time…
But as for my hunter, I daresay I’ll take it into PVP and m+, interested to push survival in both those content forms, don’t have the time to raid these days
I mean it plays even better than it did in SL with less reliance on bombs, a fun priority system that changes according to certain factors… its pretty good. Could definitely use some tuning though
But sure, some dps traps or something in the mix would be sweet if we’re iterating
Yes and no. How about Deterrence for starters? Why was that gutted? And to be frank, I don’t know how I survived the past three expansions as a Hunter main playing Marks.
But yes, class-wide skills specific to SV’s toolkit were gone, and Aspects from the BM side also took a major hit. Cheetah for the longest time had been trash and Turtle is trash.
Forgive me for saying that KSM is not the hardest thing to do, though it could be if you pug it(for that fake difficulty). A sympathetic band of friends and guildies can hook you up.
Working as intended, which actually means that open-world is marginalized. You know, if I start DF a year late like I did with SL, I can get friends to completely skip me out of open-world. “We’ll tool you up in M+ after you ding 70” and that’s the end of that!
The best of luck with that. It’s too bad Mad Bombardier didn’t get imported at least. I might have stayed for that.
Bombs did GREAT damage, particularly AOE with the Cluster leggo. In Quake Team Fortress terms you were the Demoman spamming MIRV nades. When I ran SV in M+ in 9.2, friends of mine were amazed that I was almost never in melee(though sometimes to get the CD reduction with Carves). They saw that I did high DPS for my lesser gear.
Depending on how things went, I almost never had the time to do Stings and much less Strikes or Bites.
But I thought that this would be a new way to do RSV: to make it a grenadier. And that would be unique: there’s no class that uses explosives as a weapon past and present besides Hunter. There’s Engineering but that’s just a profession. I really thought Blizzard was going to “market it” last patch.
But nowadays weapon exclusivity is another problem: you can’t do Killshot with guns/bows as a SV, and you can’t do Barrage, Arcshot, and Steady with a 2Her. I at least thought Blizzard was aiming for a middle-of-the-road but that failed too.
Demo might have that market cornered with some of their special summons, i.e. the fel lord summon. The problem with traps is that the effects are not exactly immediate. We already have uptime issues as it is sadly.
And people have been expecting a Tinker class to get more into that style…
My whole look on it, if you like melee survival, enjoy it. People on the forums love to crap on the spec but they can’t stop you from playing it or enjoying it. Nor will Blizz ever change it back, if they wanted to they would of done it already. Some people just can’t accept change and nothing you say will ever change their mind. But that’s their problem, not yours. Arguing with them is pointless, they are set in their ways. Obsessively so. To them enjoying something they don’t isn’t acceptable. So they will write up these essays on why you’re “wrong”.
Play the class/spec you want. You pay for your sub, so put these highly opinionated people on mute, switch to some good music and enjoy the game the way you want.
This is a totaly guess by you, you have no idea what blizzard may do.
People on the forums miss old survival and there opinions on the removal of it is valid.
You have no argument to the most common point to why the survival rework was a failure… It has the least amount of players by a mile and has been the least played spec in the game since its rework. Survival existing as melee just means 1 less bow spec, you make no good arguments against the main arguments people have against melee survival.
You come into a thread about fixing survival basically saying dont listen to them play whatever you want… I mean come on~ Nobody is telling anybody not to play survival this thread is basically about reworking or fixing survival, so your whole statement invalidating peoples opinions in a place where opinions are warranted is completely out of place.
You seem to be confusing “thinking differently from you” as “being mistaken” which is why I would wager that you’re a fairly miserable person.
Every single RPG has classes with varying levels of difficulty. This is an unarguable fact and it’s good design. There are people with disabilities and different skill levels and playstyles… No MMO dev if ever, and I mean EVER, trying to make all classes require equal amounts if skill.
And if you think melee isn’t more difficult in the majority of encounters, then I don’t know what to tell you. This has been true is most games as well. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, though.
Blizzard set out to make a district, unique hunter spec that has easy more utility and is very difficult to master, based historically on the “PvP” tree… And they succeeded. Is it perfect? Nope. But I can guarantee you that they knew it wouldn’t be played much. No way in hell they thought everyone was going to flock from BM to SV after the changes.
Just watch bicmex play and you’ll know the spec was successfully designed based on actual success metrics.
What spec would that be? BM and MM seem to cover most hunters archetypes and if you don’t enjoy those then why even play hunter?
Obviously a very difficult class with a crap ton of buttons and almost no group PvE utility is going to be played less… Unless their damage is insane (and if their damage was insane people would complain to high heaven, and the loudest would be hunters “forced” into the spec). Blizzard knew what they were making. Survival was the PvP tree for the longest time and they wanted to go back to that. Tons of utility, tons of tricks, but harder to play and mixing melee and ranged.
I dont know, something fun that people will actually play, Maybe a Gadget Gun spec, Duel pistol mid range, Change it to Dark Ranger that uses magic arrows and daggers. Who knows, but all i know is the survival we have had since legion regardless of DPS performance has been the least played spec in the game by a mile.
They have had good damage more than MM and BM and they still have low representation. Also MM and BM both dont have Group Utility that is actually useful now days, the largest difference is range and that most groups prefer range.
Um. For the longest time SV wasn’t even a spec… It was the tree with PvP stuff in it. No one “played survival hunters” … They played PvP builds that invested deep into the survival tree. And NO PvE raiding spec invested into survival. That wasn’t even an option.
Here’s my point though.
What is your argument against current survival Hunter design that isn’t “I don’t like it” or “it’s not played a lot” or “hunters just use bows, man”… Because those aren’t arguments.