… So what? Was the intended goal behind the rework to make it the most played spec in the game or something? Do you have some secret dev information behind the rework that we don’t? You understand that popularity doesn’t mean something’s inherently good or bad, right?
Again, so what? What makes your opinion on how many bow specs there should be objective in any way? “I FEEL like Hunters should be ranged!!1!” Isn’t an argument. Hell, what do you think people hunted in real life with, before the existence of bows? I’ll give you a hint: It was a long stick with a pointy end.
The reason no one addresses your “arguments” is because you don’t have any. You have feelings masquerading as arguments. You don’t care about improving the current class, you care about living a decade in the past.
A spec that focuses on augmented projectiles and enhanced traps. A spec with a primary focus on dealing damage over time, as opposed to what all 3 current hunter specs are about; varying degrees of burst oriented profiles(even though they’ve managed to remove much of BMs burst capabilities as of DF) and front-loaded damage, as their primary focus. And no, I’m not saying that such a spec would/should be completely lacking of burst, no spec should these days.
What was Survival prior to Legion had a perfect base profile to suit the aforementioned concept, and it would’ve been the natural path of development for the spec, had they stuck with it, going into Legion.
Uhm, no.
What you’re speaking of, for the most part, existed only in Vanilla and, sort of, in TBC as well. Even though TBC also came with changes to the SV category that made it much more useful in PvE as well. Like what’s been said already, pretty much every single raid team prefered to have at least 1 SV hunter in TBC. Either way, this isn’t even remotely close to a 5 year period. Vanilla lasted for a little more than 2 years, going by the NA launch.
SV got it’s own dedicated playstyle with the WotLK pre-patch, and with Cata, they introduced Core Specs for all classes, including Hunters.
I’m not sure what motivates you, making up these claims, when anyone can easily look it up and see how they’re false.
Also, as for your statement on “returning SV to its roots”, I hate to break it to you but the roots of SV in vanilla were entirely based on the core class fantasy of the time, which was primarily focused on ranged combat. You could spend every single talent point in the SV category back then, and it still wouldn’t motivate you to deliberately move into melee, if staying at range was a possibility.
except it was ranged in tbc and wotlk. heck, it was even ranged most of vanilla, once they realised lacerate sucked and replaced it with wyvern sting in september 2005 (patch 1.7 baby!). since wow came out in nov 2004, melee sv was “the first ten months of a 18 year old game” (eight months if you’re european and started playing in feb 2005). wow! such roots! many history!
i realise that you’re a pvp-er, all you do is pvp, you’ve talked before about how boring pve is and how you don’t understand it so you probably did get forced into melee range a lot in that a pvp context. but even then your tools were intended to help force you back out into range, not potter around a warsong gulch trying to raptor strike a warrior to death.
i mean, that’s one definition of “success”. unique flavour is not enough to carry a spec. they could delete guardian spec and force bears and cats to share a single tree; that would be “going back to its roots”. it would be “unique”. it would also be a monumentally stupid idea, hugely unpopular, and create lingering resentment on both sides of cat and bear fanbase.
Lol fine. 4 years of live service. Mea culpa for off the cuff math.
And I never claimed anything any melee versus ranged. I’m talking about design philosophy. Because they had ranged abilities once upon a time means nothing to me.
My main thesis is “no is playing it” is a poor argument. No RSV advocate has every actually argued anything other than “I don’t like it” which is objective, or “it’s the least popular” which doesn’t matter (and is obvious why… When you make one of the easiest classes have one of the hardest specs, of course it won’t be popular), or “hunters should have bows and guns” which is also nonsense, as proven by countless other fantasy RPG “ranger” archetypes.
?? To SURVIVE, you !!!
Toxi, at times, you’ve seemed to have some snap… but damn…
Hunters DIE in Melee.
I was shamed into not calling you an idiot, by the way. Sorry.
Took two edits to get this right?.. You really torched me. grats.
Like I said: average SV forum defender. Hardly plays the spec, but insists it’s great and worth keeping around.
Yes I agree with this: Survival fans, please stop posting on the forums and go play it. Allow the forums to be 100% crapping on Survival. This will be a great look for the spec and help its development.
You’re attacking a strawman again.
Like I said in the last post, you’re conflating a difficult spec with a melee spec. You can have a challenging ranged spec. No one here is arguing that Survival should be a boring and unchallenging ranged spec. Go look at what people like Ghorak are actually suggesting for ranged SV.
I already posted this and I really don’t like to repeat myself, so from here on out if you insist on ignoring what’s told to you and reposting crap arguments like this I’ll just copy paste my responses.
Melee is something that can help make a spec more difficult, but that doesn’t mean a spec needs to be difficult to be melee.
They did claim that they knew it would be unpopular, true, but they said that after the rework. Honestly I think they’re lying, not least because it was said by liar in chief Ion Hazzikostas. I think they genuinely expected melee Survival to be a hit. When you look at how people were posting about it in the lead-up to Legion before there were any representation statistics to point to it seems people sincerely believed it was going to be huge. I don’t know if Blizzard shared that sentiment, but they’ve expressed plenty of similarly delusional beliefs in the past.
In any case, none of what you said necessitates SV being melee. They could make a unique utilitarian Hunter spec that was difficult to master while also being ranged. I looked through your post history and it seems you have a long-established habit of assuming a tight coupling of SV being melee and SV being unique, fun, challenging, etc.
What “success metrics” are we talking about here? Because it seems to me the SV community is a niche mix of a handful of power users and a bunch of melee players picking it as their alt.
Again, once the “adoption isn’t our goal” lines start being dropped, that’s a red flag. Every single hack content creator ever drops that excuse when they produce crap that no one wants. You think Blizzard will ever actually admit that they screwed up? To this day they argue that they made the right decision with their initial Shadowlands covenant restrictions.
You know there were in fact Survival iterations between Classic and Legion. Just saying, because it seems you’re unaware of them.
It kind of does. They spent a whole bunch of time and effort taking a formerly low-maintenance widely-enjoyed spec into a high-maintenance little-enjoyed spec. They multiplied their workload while ultimately pissing off more players than they pleased. There’s really no perspective that calls that a success other than “I really like melee”.
I’m repeating myself here but I can’t stress enough how common this “popularity isn’t our metric for success” excuse is. It even goes beyond just video games. It’s spin-doctoring to the extreme. You should know better than to fall for it.
Why do people think this “Hunters used spears before bows” argument is a good look for Survival? It’s implicitly saying Survival is a worse Hunter. It’s stuck using an obsolete and antiquated hunting method while other Hunters can use the more advanced weaponry. An extremely poor fit for a spec that’s meant to be about resourcefulness and opportunism.
Besides: I’m pretty sure we weren’t using literal grenades before we discovered ranged weaponry.
Hunters should be ranged because it’s a very broad concept that needs a central thematic element to build around. Ranged weapons are something no one else uses and they’re a great fit for the class. It’s a unique, interesting, and immediately recognisable underlying element of the class: so iconic to the class it’s literally the icon you had to click on to get to this subforum. Meanwhile, melee weaponry is already done and dusted by 12 other specs in the game. There is no valid reason at all to change one of our only ranged weapon specs to melee.
How are we to conclude that making SV melee improved the class?
I’ll remind you that you’re posting in a thread called “Can we fix Survival Please?”. Even if we pretend making SV melee was a good decision, it clearly hasn’t worked out well even for people who want to play it.
Living in the past implies people are irrationally hating whatever is new. As someone who backed just about every major change to the class up to Legion, I can assure you no one here is assuming change is automatically bad. We just aren’t assuming change is automatically good either. Change has to stand on its own merit, and the melee SV change has no merit.
Let’s be frank: SV Hunter fans are routinely some of the most dishonest and delusional people you’ll ever encounter on the forums. It’s no surprise they’re posting revisionist history again. They live and breathe it. It’s a coping mechanism for melee SV turning out so badly.
I have to wonder if playing SV makes people become more dishonest/delusional or if that’s just the type of person the spec attracts.
Like has been explained already, your argument of SV being the “PVP tree” only holds true, sort of(not really), for essentially the original Vanilla game. By the time TBC came out, plenty of hunters were playing SV even in PvE. Again, that’s roughly a 2 year period in total.
And on that note, when you say “PvP stuff”, that’s your subjective view of the design. The actual design/compilation of talents in the SV category, post 1.7, had a core focus of increasing your survivability through improved defensive capabilities and utility. Saying it was just “PvP stuff” is a side-step from the actual design philosophy you mentioned.
This was your claim, which, I assume, is your basis for calling the rework a success:
Again, see above, your argument of the original SV category being “PvP stuff” or saying that current SV, the spec, or the Legion rework for that matter, that either of these constitutes a state of how they’re “going back to the roots”, aren’t even remotely true.
This is further backed up by what you now also said here:
You ignoring the primary focus of the class as a whole, and how the actual design of our various talent categories back then were fully intended to build on that core class design, to focus on individual aspects of that core, you ignoring that fact just further disproves your arguments/claims.
Proving that you either don’t read what other people have been saying, or you do, but you then proceed to ignore it because it doesn’t suit your arguments…
And again, this is assuming that the rework was SPECIFICALLY done in order to increase player count in it, which is a baseless assumption. If the goal of the rework was to add diversity of playstyle to the specs of the Hunter class (Which I’d argue is significantly more likely than numbers), than the rework has unquestionably succeeded. You’re hyper-fixated on numbers because it’s (Illogically) advantageous to you, and that’s why purposely presenting the argumentum ad populum as if it’s not fallacious. There’s no legitimate argument for why a hunter spec can’t ever be melee.
Because RSV posters like yourself constantly talk about “Class fantasy” as an argument for why hunters can’t be melee. Arguing that hunters can’t use spears because it doesn’t fit the fantasy is both inaccurate and historically revisionist.
Though if you want to switch your stance to a modernist argument for why hunters can’t use spears, you have to apply that stance to everything. What about bows? There’s no legitimate reason to be using those when firearms exist, guess we need to scrap bows! Wouldn’t want to be an “Inferior hunter”. And what about warriors? From a modern perspective, it’s nonsensical to rush in with a sword when guns exist! Obviously all of warrior should be reworked to use firearms and wear flak armor, like any modern-day “warrior” would do!
You can’t pick and choose your modernist arguments. Either swords, and bows, and spears, all magically work equally as well as a gun, or they don’t. You need to pick one.
Above is what the actual thread is about, as quoted from the OP. Requesting access to skills that we have but can’t use, and higher damage because they feel we’re being neglected balance-wise, while still having “so much fun” with it.
You know full well that balance and class design aren’t the same thing. We’re both fully aware that the strongest class in the game isn’t necessarily the best designed class in the game, and pretending that they are is completely absurd. C’mon man, you can do better than this. You don’t have to like melee hunter, but don’t pretend these “arguments” are anything more than a near-decade old disdain for the rework.
Is your argument that the devs spent the time and resources on reworking a spec, SPECIFICALLY, with the intent that it should cause the sum-total popularity of the class as a whole, along with the game itself, to be reduced, all for the sake of diversity?
Even though the definition of ‘diversity’, in this matter, doesn’t require SV to have been reworked to what it became, in order to reach that aforementioned goal.
To take an analogy, as an example…
A company that manufactures cars comes to the conclusion that a certain sub-model of a parent model of cars that they make, it has to be reworked in order to stand out from the other ones. So they decide to remove the engine in its entirety. They also switch out the tyres with ski-style mods.
By all accounts, they have successfully made that sub-model of car stand out from the other ones. However, can you honestly say that the modifications, the result of what they amount to, that it would be a success in the eyes of most customers? If they had previously sold that sub-model on the merits of its engine, and its handling capabilities on the road, do you think most customers who’ve bought older versions of that model would come back and by the new one? Do you think said modifications would attract many new potential customers?
An important note here to the analogy. Prior to the decision to go through with the rework of that car model, there weren’t really any complaints from their customers on the appearance, or the performance of said car.
RSV was obliterated, replaced by MSV, and what has changed?
The Hunter population has dropped.
Huntards, once common, have pretty much disappeared.
If MSV is one of the “hardest specs” but oh,so fun, shouldn’t the Huntard numbers have increased, or at the least, remained the same? You know, fun to play, but hard to play well = newbie “huntards”?
I’m glad you’re having fun! Perhaps if more forum-survival fans took a leaf from your book and played it instead of posting endlessly about how much fun it is, it might finally rise to the lofty heights of being the second least most popular spec in the game for two seasons running.
Well, I say MSV , along with the dumbing down of MM, lowered the bar for what passes as competent play for the Hunter Class.
You implied MSV is a more difficult spec. So, more Huntards.
Nope, just lower standards… all the way around.
I think survival is unarguably the most difficult hunter spec (at least for PvP). We can argue whether it’s good or should be that hard… But it’s definitely the hardest.
I think it’s easily one the hardest of all the specs to play at its full potential.
And because it’s so hard, way fewer people play it. Kind of a no brainer.
Though I don’t deny that fewer people play it also because it’s not a pew pew ranged build. I just don’t think that matters
Play it more than you, and regardless, doesn’t change how I plan to play my hunter - and I’ve been playing alot of SV lately, got my 70 gear crafted, almost 70… lol.
Yeah I do.
I’ll check back in once I’ve gotten my SV hunter to your apparently hightened standards, lmao, and we’ll see what you argue about then.
Lowered the bar? It has a much higher skill ceiling than the other 2 specs. It requires higher levels of competency to play properly, lol.
It is the more difficult spec of the three, there is no debate.
