I didn’t quote the rest, as we’re basically saying the same thing but with a slightly different delivery.
For instance, if you say: “Yes”, and I reply: “Rawr! It’s actually Y-E-S!”, that sort of narrative cadence would be quite a silly way to conduct a debate.
As I said then, I found your take mostly agreeable and shifted the discussion elsewhere.
But it is here where we do encounter some ideological friction.
In terms of Vanilla SV, there wasn’t a hard, implicit bias towards escaping melee range. Escaping melee range was but one of several leverageable options that the Survival talents offered, those options being Imp. Wing Clip and Counter-Attack, which are not singularly constrained to setup a kite, but were certainly and effectively used to do so nonetheless.
My message is to think in terms of flexibility, not hard or rigid mental structures.
Deterrence is a defensive mitigation tool, but also an offensive tool at the same time, increasing the chance to proc Mongoose Bite for additional damage. It also slashed the damage output of melee classes in half while allowing us to return offensive pressure– a form of attrition, which allowed our high-burst melee profile to seal the deal.
Wing Clip is as much a tool to kite, as it is an ability to restrain an opponent in melee range to prevent their escape.
Neither did Raptor Strike or Mongoose Bite exist solely to escape melee range. What these primary damage skills did was provide a high-burst DPS profile with the 20% increased crit chance from [Savage Strikes] and the higher top-end damage provided by [Lightning Reflexes], which in context of PvP and World Content, is a perfectly fine damage spread, but would considerably lag in organized PvE as it lacks a sustained profile.
Personally, I always leveraged both ranged and melee burst capability, weaving in and out of the deadzone depending on what was on cooldown. In some cases, I utilized the toolkit to setup a kite, and in other cases, I completely dominated melee classes in melee range.