Difficult was taking the hacked-up remnants of what was left of the Marksman Spec after The Legion re-write and the half-assed back-tracking done for BfA, and making a go of it.
My Spec has been held BACK for YEARS to make MSV look good.
I resent that kind of treatment. The RSV players were Dis-enfranchised. I think they hold their own resentments.
Fixing Survival might should start with addressing these two concerns.
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It didn’t, but I can understand why you thought as much, because my point with what I said there wasn’t as much about the intentions of the devs, but rather your belief that the arguments put forward by Bepples and others, are what they/we believe to be the sole merit upon how to measure success. Or at least, that’s how you come off, with what you said before.
My point was that any company working on the basis of making money, as with the one we’re currently talking about, they’re not going to spend the amount of time and resources on, for example, a rework like in the case of SV, without at least a moderate expectation of [it] somehow increasing their bottom line. I’m not saying that such companies couldn’t make a decision to go through with something even without a prospect of making money. I’m saying that they wouldn’t do something like a full spec rework, down to the very base core structure, if they didn’t think that it would be beneficial in terms of revenue. Or, I guess, they could, but that wouldn’t be very smart now, would it?
We actually do know their motivations for the rework. Both me, Bepples, and several others have made posts about said reasons in the past. Or I should say, we know their motivations based on what they’ve told us.
I’ve also spoken to Chris Kaleiki, a former dev, who worked there at the time, who gave his thoughts, and observations on their reasoning for the rework of SV. He also happens to be the dev who initially realised the pre-Legion version of SV, as the munitions-expert archetype it portrayed.
You deleted the reply, so I couldn’t respond with quotes to your thoughts on the analogy.
Anyway, I do admit that the part where I suggested their intent on completely removing the engine, it would be a bit excessive, sure. But it still holds true to the main argument of how such changes, or anything even remotely close to them, wouldn’t be beneficial to their sales, nor their customers.
Why? Because any such changes wouldn’t adhere to the interests of the current target customer group. And any target customer that would somehow be interested in said changes, it would be such a small target group that by no sound logic would it be motivated to go through with it.
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I think most of us would agree that the true WoW experience is after max level and almost always in instances. What you said isn’t wrong on paper, but you still got to deal with the rest of the community. You and me can both say play w/e you want, but your raid leader says tool up and git gud on Marks/BM or you don’t run, or flat out say we’re not running any Hunters and pick another DPS. That’s why it matters: the naysayers are really trying to open more doors than close more doors after max level.
We all know how unforgiving the outer community can be and that’s somewhat already self-evident. I mained Hunter for 7 years and I’d fight for what’s right. A top 50 raid leader could wipe his unwashed butt with our feelings about how bad MSV is in concept and performance.
I try to go beyond “Play whatever you want” to “If you want to raid Mythic, you can do it. If you want to get Glad, you can do it. If you want to push past M+20, you can do it.” And sadly without certain connections those doors are closed to the utter vast majority of Hunters, let alone SV.
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That is thing you have players guessing why SV hasn’t turned back to ranged. I have no idea if Blizzard has some sort of population threshold for a class, i.e… if less than X % of players is playing X then we better make big changes.
My guess is blizzard or at least whoever is in charge of class design is happy with how SV is and going by the fact at least from Legion to DF, SV is still melee, I don’t see SV going ranged again- I will add I would be fine if they brought back Ranged sv as another option, I would just hope blizz would take the time to balance all the specs.
You see all this speculation, population numbers, dps etc… but wait wild idea it could simply be that blizzard is happy with how SV plays-that could simply be it, there is no conspiracy, this is not blizz ignoring the people who want ranged SV, simply they are happy with current melee SV.
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get good? Idk why people can play the spec so well until it comes to a forum poster then suddenly its made of glass and cant dps and is bugged and is broken and .
also I dont even remember you so? ya know, take that and stuff
“i PlAyEd SiNcE vAnIlLa” Marksmen was the only effective ranged spec back in 2005. Survival wasnt even good back then soo. You were a glorified Trueshot bot. Also always seems to be more vanilla players from back in the day then actual vanilla players who played.
if you played in classic you would know people at the time didnt even know about BIS or the best spec… we had warriors with int gear and healers with strength gear in raids. The majority of people that played had no idea what was going on let alone min maxing playing the right specs until way later into classic.
PVE wise survival hunter was the best hunter spec most of WOTLK until maybe ICC. MM was good in Classic and BM was good in TBC. I played a ton of Survival in MOP and it was fantastic. Got challenge mode gold with survival hunter.
Also survival had more representation than it does now… Survival is the most unpopular spec and has been that way since legion. It will likely get reworked again and im guessing it will get its melee removed.
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I mean you are just assuming that, Feral druid/Spriest is hard to play and has a huge representation in comparison to survival hunter… Like its not even close to how unpopular survival is, i think maybe it being difficult may be way some people dont play it but its highly unlikely with the how low these parses have been since legion and how the percentage of people that play them hasnt grown or changed is just a bad sign that its just unpopular…
I think difficulty is part of it but most of it is that most hunters likely started playing hunter either for the pet (BM) or for the Bow.
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I didnt play in classic. But I also know not every player in the game were stupid. Most of the player base sure but there were people who knew how to play the actual game hence why like 23 guilds cleared original Naxx
I was talking about Vanilla, not Wrath
congrats! Phoenix mounts were cool
and if it gets its buff again like last expansion people will still be upset with it so idc. Its not going to be reworked into range. Its too far deep into melee for that.
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Rawr ranged rabble rabble rabble. Rawr melee rabble rabble rabble. Pretty sure its been both has alway been both till Pandaria then returned to being both in legion. Only thing that sucks about Survival isn’t that it was given melee again its that they took away Survival ranged focus spender and gave us Aspect of the eagle. We should be a ranged class that has burst potential of a melee class with both gap closers and disengage We should be the bane to every class that fights at ranged but also a low skilled kiting class like BM. Ranged and Melee should be situational and Survival should alway be able to fight in way that gives its the most advantage.
Its called being ignorant because most people had no experience of MMORPGS back when WOW launched. Not stupidity. I am sure the first year of playing was difficult for you, now imagine that in vanillia wow with no online guides, Dail up internet, no online videos no communities, no in game help/ease of use features etc to help you out
So i just disagree with you plenty of people played a bit of survival, not everybody logged into Non existent websites and downloaded non existent addons to figure out what was BIS and what specs did the most DPS.
I do remember warcraftmovies. com. My favorite video was “Kirbyo(The Dark Lord)” which was a Demo WPvP video.
Definitely before YouTube though not too long before. And we were certainly all noobs, all the more myself as a first-time MMOer. However, since I mained a Warlock I could remember “SM/Ruin” being the cookie-cutter raid spec. There were some resources that suggested how much fire resistance you’d need for MC(250 for everyone except tanks that needed 300). It might have been more of a smaller knit collection.
Sure, but don’t act like those doors are open to every DPS when it’s really just the core meta specs; DPS DKs, Rets, Spriests, most Warriors, Warlocks, and Mages in M+ aren’t getting a ton of invites either. I sit in queue on my DK and Warrior just as much, if not sometimes more, than my Hunter. My Havoc gets in without any real wait, that’s for sure.
This isn’t really a “Survival/Hunter bad” thing but more of a “if you’re not a meta spec you don’t get in” thing for M+, and I’ve had much more success so far just boosting my own keys, and since I’m sitting in queue for effectively the same time as I would if I was searching, I’m basically neutral on time investment, too.
I can’t comment on raiding much since I don’t do Mythic anymore, but from what I’ve inferred from my guild, they likely wouldn’t want a Survival Hunter, but it’s not because “Melee Survival is a failed design” like some might believe, it’s purely a damage & survivability reason, though tier definitely alleviates the damage being not great.
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It’s no less the struggle to get into the limelight. We can’t have Hunter be the new “mushroom” class.
the first year of me playing was terrible. I didnt have a pet until level 53 because I didnt know you could tame them. But thats only because I didnt read anything including my own spells I just ran up and attacked mobs or shot them. This was in the last month of TBC mind you. But that was my own dumbness to the game, there were alot of good players who knew what they were doing. Vanilla was never hard, people just didnt have wowhead. Its just stupid, not necessarily ignorance.
obviously. But people who knew how to read knew what to do
This is like telling me I can’t call a program unoptimised because running efficiently isn’t the specific goal.
Games exist to provide enjoyment to players, and developers strive to put work in and produce a product that people enjoy. With Survival going melee, they multiplied the amount of effort they put in, both in the initial rework and all the subsequent maintenance and reworking after that. The result is a spec that far fewer people enjoy, plus all the controversy and division it generates. There’s no win for Blizzard here.
By this logic if they made SV a Healer spec it would be an even bigger success. You’ve engineered a “metric” that says they’re doing a better and better job the more different they make SV to the other Hunter specs. So I could declare that they failed by not making SV a Healer which would be even more distict. These are the sorts of nonsense conclusions you create when you start with a nonsense metric. Diversity/distinction is not the beginning and end of good class design. That’s delusional.
This sort of rewriting of success metrics is very typical of Blizzard and their fanboys. It’s the same as when they stopped reporting subscriber counts because they apparently weren’t a good measure for the game’s health. When Blizzard makes bad decisions and the measurements for success go down they just change the measurements for success. Here you’ve created a measurement where they can’t fail so long as they make something other than a ranged Hunter spec. The problem is this delusional circular logic only works for SV fans like you. For everyone else it’s transparent bullcrap.
Saying that using numerical metrics is illogical is such a characteristically Survival Hunter thing to say, don’t you think?If you read that aloud to yourself and thought it didn’t sound hopelessly delusional, there’s no helping you.
There are plenty of legitimate arguments as to why a Hunter spec shouldn’t be melee:
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It dilutes the class identity and most Hunters can’t reconcile it
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It necessitated a ton of effort and maintenance for an underwhelming result
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It resulted in a spec that excessively copies from BM, undermining the whole “we’re making it distinct” argument
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It’s effectively just a handicapped Hunter, defying the basic principle of specs building on their base class rather than taking away from it
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It reduced the already limited exploration of ranged weapon archetypes in this game
After 6 years of, let’s be honest, poor results, we’re past the point of hypotheticals and what-ifs. It just hasn’t worked out well, and the only reason you keep desperately insisting we just aren’t measuring success correctly is because you’re in denial.
This isn’t a game about human history. It’s an RPG, and in this RPG Hunters were ranged weapon users first and foremost from the very start. They built a framework of the class being a ranged weapon user with melee combat existing purely as a limitation (i.e. minimum range), then they consistently sidelined the melee aspect expansion after expansion until it was removed entirely. It makes absolutely zero sense to whiplash around to full melee for one of the specs. Even the initial SV Hunter tree with Lacerate as its end talent used a ranged weapon. It’s a recipe for disaster, and after so many years it’s clear it resulted in disaster.
Notice how you’re retreating to abstract concepts here. The fact is WoW treats all ranged weapons the same, while there’s a clear difference in capability between ranged and melee weapons. It makes absolutely zero sense for the class to start with only a ranged weapon at level 1, and then at level 10 you pick one of the specs and say “you know what? I won’t use this ranged weapon after all because early Hunters didn’t have them”. It’s appalling RPG class design. It would actually make a ton more sense if Hunters started off melee at level 1 and BM/MM granted you a ranged weapon, but melee Survival just isn’t worth mutilating the class over.
Lol? There’s a clear difference between capabilities of melee and ranged weapons in this game, you know. I think you knew how bad this argument was before you typed it. Let’s not stall the thread with useless crap like this, yeah?
Let’s be clear: I don’t need a lecture about argument quality from someone who has a grand total of 2 posts on the forums full of nothing but apologist rubbish.
Let us know when they finally “land the plane” 
You and I both know how dishonest a characterisation of SV this is.
SV primarily used a ranged weapon and was most effective at range in every single iteration prior to Legion.
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Precisely.
Take for example unholy DK, Nathria. Nerbat. Representation falls off because of tuning.
It has always been this way. Not a soul would say “we don’t want to bring one” of any spec if it was tuned to be A tier or higher.
Yea once again i am just flat out disagreeing with you that people in vanilla are stupid rather than ignorant. I think just calling all people that played vanilla stupid is just such a bad take.
It was a new game, no online guides, people played differently. People being new to a game and not playing optimally doesnt make them stupid.
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All this hate for Survival when it’s fun
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That fun was purchased at the cost of The Hunter Class’s sense of unity, harmony, and cohesiveness.
If a body can get past that, then yeah, it’s fun. Kinda like playing a warrior with a pet, yah!
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