If there ever had to be a class split into 2 different classes to fulfill 2 different class fantasies it’s hunter. not sure how many other classes deal with that that aren’t role changes where it probably should feel different, but it’s crazy how changing a spec feels like you’re just not a hunter anymore. playing a BM hunter should give me some idea what a surv hunter is like, and surv should give me an idea what mm is like, etc.
The only 2 that are kind of similar are BM and MM just one with pet and one with out, but who was ever looking for a melee hunter? No one I know chose the ONLY bow using class to play melee. most of us wanted pets too but MM is good option for those who didn’t. they really just need to make a ranger/tracker class and give survival to it, give them spec with and with out pet and heck throw a healing one in there why not and just give hunters a proper tanking spec for pets finally (will give them excuse to finally fix pet AI in game)
7 Likes
I think they are all similar. The MM and BM both use a bow and the BM and Surv both have pets. I really enjoyed leveling up my hunter from 110-120 as survival. It was different, yes, but it was good in that the pet did take a lot of the aggro. Maybe my dps was just low, but I liked it. I did change back to BM as I really prefer the range version.
Isn’t it kinda the same with the druid? One of the dps is melee the other is range.
You’re really making an issue of a no-issue… in my opinion.
Weird, I clearly remember my hunter having a melee weapon back in the day.
But I’ll play, let’s see druids have to choose between being a bear to tank, a tree to heal, a cat to melee, or a thunder chicken to range.
Shamans have to dual wield to melee but use a shield to cast?
Priests…well maybe it’s for the best we don’t pay to much attention to what priests do.
Nah, I think hunters are okay. It’s just that MM is crap and Surv isn’t competitive with BM.
2 Likes
It’s not even close to the same. Those other classes were designed that way from the beginning.
It would be more like if they took your fury spec and made it ranged and made heroic throw your main ability.
Or to be more accurate, take another pure dps class like rogue with all three specs as melee dps and decide to make one of them range for no reason. Not everyone is going to like the change.
2 Likes
Or took a rogue spec and made it a pirate with a gun?
1 Like
Yes, except the pirate rogue doesn’t have to equip a ranged weapon to use their ranged attack in melee range whereas the survival hunter obviously can’t use their melee skills with a ranged weapon 40 yards out.
I actually really love how different each hunter spec is 
It makes my choice feel meaningful and my game style feel different than the bloke next to me.
Fantasy-wise, all three hunter specs feel awful, so that’s a class-wide commonality.
Isn’t that bloke usually BM, though? 
Recently yes 
In Legion and BFA, BM has been the most popular.
I don’t see how it’s much different than any class that has a melee vs ranged spec that have different primary stats and weapon specialties. Needing a different set of gear on top of a different rotation and being able to run around vs having to stand and cast is gonna feel different no matter what class.
No different from Enh/Ele or Boomy/Cat except Survival used to be a ranged spec at one point. Shame they killed it, I liked the Lock n Load explosive shot spam.
2 Likes
It’s different for a few reasons. One, like I said earlier, they took a spec that many people (myself included) enjoyed and fundamentally altered it to something completely different and arguably not fitting in with the class fantasy of a ranged class. And it’s something that practically no one was asking for. I don’t remember any great outcry like there is going on with priests now or like there was with shaman before.
To say there is precedent for it because of vanilla is also wrong. Those abilities and talents were mainly to help us immobilize or impair targets long enough to get back to shooting distance. You weren’t going to be effective with it outside of being a gimmick build for pvp.
Also, it makes no sense in that if they really wanted a ‘rexxar’ spec, the most obvious choice would be bm hunter. It’s a no brainer and they went and did the opposite instead and took a spec that should be about traps, dots, and cunning and made it into another face smash spec.
Then finally there is the redundancy issue. There is nothing a melee hunter does that already can’t be done better by other melee classes and adding another melee to the already glut of them is crazy. You are giving up your advantage of being highly mobile and ranged to be a sub par melee. No thanks. It’s not what a rolled a hunter for.
3 Likes
I love how one of the expansion’s selling points was the return to class over spec and unpruning of old favorite abilities, yet they kept Survival as a nearly dead melee spec that has almost no relation to the rest of the class. Instead of, you know, bringing back it’s vastly more popular version from WoD like they did for Enhancement Shamans…
2 Likes
Hunter class fantasy is ‘having a pet’.
Both BM and Survival fill that just fine. The only difference between them is melee vs ranged playstyle. Honestly the rotations for the two are even pretty similar.
If you want to talk about a drastic change between specs, marksman is the furthest you’ll get, as it encourages you to put the pet away and uses entirely different abilities than either BM or Survival.
Not to mention using a 2h pole arm goes 100% with hunting “fantasy”. Just not people’s LotR head cannon. And not an insignificant amount of people over the years asked for melee weapons to come back to hunters.
Anyone else remember how mad hunters used to get at warrs when we could equip ranged weapons?
2 of them are boring and braindead and 1 of them is fun but melee and people hate it for it.
i just wish they didn’t butcher my survival 
3 Likes
Imo they are still similar it’s the same as
Survival hunter is just a melee BM hunter…
If changing from melee to range is all it takes to feel like a different class then shaman and druid are the same. But imo there is still shadow and holy priest which I would say is considerable different same as, demo and affliction warlock, unholy and frost dk.
1 Like
In vanilla there were plenty of people who wanted/thought they were melee hunters. And to their defense, the early survival tree was an absolute mess and was geared towards a melee/ranged hybrid playstyle that didn’t work