Imagine 5 years from now a brand new player falls in love with the hunter class. Interested in it’s history looks at how it became what it was and see that it once was Ranged. Goes to make a post here asking blizzard to make survival Ranged for his own reasons.
My point is, even without the rsv half of the community this will always come about.
Imo, we should both care what was and help with the now for betterment of the future but it isn’t inherently evil to ask for something back that was, without a public discussion or poll, completely rework a spec that was in the game for over a decade. Idk about you guys but having both versions in the game would be wild and badass
yes, i can picture it clearly in my mind. i can picture ion, slouched in his big comfy chair in his office. his feet are on the desk. he’s just woken from a nap, and if you looked closely on his gaunt and ghoulish face, you’d see the remnants of a milk mustache. it must have been then. the moment he decided: “let’s make survival into melee.”
You do realize this happens for every spec in this game and for every single video game that exists right? People will always remember old mechanics/abilities/whatever that were removed fondly. The entitlement here is off the charts.
I am not twisting any words though. I wonder who the immature one is.
I am not the grown man who spends his free time throwing tantrums, ultimatums and considers me and my feedback to be “the only credible feedback”. All for some playstyle of a class in a video game. Something that got removed 6 years ago!
You must Surely realize how childish this is? Are you surprised when people considers you and your posse entitled?
Anyway i am sure you will come up with some awesome reply trying to turn it all around and keep on whining about RSV. Good luck, seems like its been working well for the past 6 years.
I feel like Blizz making MSV being so contentious is partly stemmed from the feeling of what it represents.
When Blizz took RSV away in Legion, it was another instance of Blizzard “knowing what’s best” attitude they’ve been taking in the last few expansions. “It was originally meant to be a ranged spec so we changed it”. I can’t find blue posts or PR statements on why they changed it, so I can’t give exact quotes but I remember it being another instance of Blizzard telling you how you will feel.
Telling people how they will feel sucks. No one wants to be told their feelings or how you should be feeling. It’s the equivalent of you falling down and scraping your leg, you saying this hurts, and someone walking up to you and saying “Well, it doesn’t hurt that much.”
It’s a kid having a stuffed bear that they love and never go anywhere without. Then an adult comes along and takes their stuffed animal away and giving them some electronic new-age toy and being confused when you don’t like it. “We designed this toy to be fun and you should have more fun with this toy than that stuffed bear.”
People want* RSV back because it was something that might have been a little rough around the edges (what classes/specs weren’t at some point) but they liked it and it was taken away from them unceremoniously, then we were told it was better this way. MSV being in a bad place design wise is the crap frosting on the crap cake this entire situation has turn into.
If RSV and MSV were separate specs, I’m sure the general consensus would be along the lines of “oh, that’s cool. I’ll probably try that out at some point”. It would probably be a lot more popular if this was the case but instead it’s just a symbol of resentment towards developers “knowing what’s best” attitude.
Darthstinky (what a name lol ) is right with his comments about every class going through something similar to this, having massive reworks over the lifetime of the class. MoP Demolock is MASSIVLY different from today’s model, it’s just something that happens. I don’t agree with the dismissive, nihilistic execution of his posts. Just because you don’t care doesn’t mean others shouldn’t care too. That “deal with it” mentality is toxic and is a complacent mindset that rots away any sort of critical thought in its hosts, transforming them into mindless dribbling “no question, just consume” troglodytes.
The RSV discussion is here to stay, whether you like it or not. You should Just deal with it.
*beating the trolls, I’m not dictating how everyone feels. It’s a statement based on my observations about how a lot of people feel about the topic and should be taken exclusively as an educated guess and not hard fact. Feel free to feel another way or have additional feelings.
While we can’t say for sure, where their minds are at right now, they have made some comments on the matter, in the past.
I spoke to Chris Kaleiki, a former class dev who worked on the hunter class more or less since TBC(in preparation for WotLK), in a short conversation about the history of this class. Note that this was not any sort of “formal” interview or anything, nor does anything he said necessarily reflect on what the current dev team thinks of the matter. He said that, internally, they thought of the pre-Legion Survival design and fantasy “to not be quite as developed, and was lacking a bit (of depth)”.
Apparently, they had noticed “the few, but vocal, number of players who wanted a melee spec, and thought it would be a good way to break up the three specs available to us”. This was based on their change in philosophy of class/spec design, going into Legion.
He himself(Chris) did not agree with the decision to rework Survival to melee, due to how “it disenfranchised all of the players who were fond of the original gameplay”, from before Legion.
Having said that, here’s some of what they’ve come out and said in official interviews:
Q: You guys also oversee all the other classes. Are there any particular changes that you’re most excited about?
…
And then Survival Hunter…
Travis: It was another one that was missing its niche. It’s kind of like Marksman except more traps? Or different arrows? So it was kind of missing that “what is the core fantasy?”
Having it move into the melee space and actually return to its roots that was the vanilla Survival experience. You got your Raptor Strike and all that and having those come back and play a role, moving into melee, giving mobility like the Harpoon to draw you in – it’s like it finally gave them a unique identity. If this is the beast companion guy that you’ve always wanted to play then you’re going to have that role.
Generally those are the ones that probably got the most drastic changes but every single class – I think one of the things that’s fun to see is when you go into a five-man dungeon now and you can actually pretty readily, visually go: “Oh look the Rogue is doing his roll of the dice right now” or “Oh look the Paladin just threw his hammer.”
You get more flavor both visually and also as a player. That feeling of “What is that experience that I wanted?” and it delivers a little bit more for every class now.
Ion have also said something similar in a few interviews, when asked about Survival.
Reading between the lines, in short, they applied a certain logic to the design of the hunter class, a logic that wasn’t applied to all other classes/specs at the time. Basically, they thought that there couldn’t be two specs where both of them had a focus on the use of ranged weaponry. More importantly, rather than doing what they did with all other specs, by developing them to become even more defined in their existing themes/fantasies, they scrapped RSV/old SV without even bothering to try to make it distinguish itself further, from the other hunter specs.
Is the concept in [this link] “perfect”, from a design perspective? Most likely not. But it sure as heck wouldn’t play anything like current MM. The main point is that they could’ve done the same to SV, as they did to all other specs, going into Legion. But they didn’t…
This is why we’re still here, petitioning for the return of RSV. Contrary to the opinion of some, based on what they/the devs said, it wasn’t justified to remove the spec. Something that’s especially obvious, given what they’ve done with SV since. Note how they’ve stamped SV as the “beast companion guy”, which is how they had previously branded BM, since the start
Basically what it breaks down too is one or two devs, including ion, wanted a melee hunter spec and against the advice of 99% of the devs, they went with it bc no one outranks ion.
That is essentially how it went down.
So instead of returning the spec to its LK model and working it from there, they claimed it was “melee” before and switched it although nothing in rsv past has ever produced a melee playstyle. Ever.
See, this is every rsv supporter’s point. There was no reason to turn it melee. No one but a very select and vocal few wanted it to happen. It was torn away from a very large and loyal playerbase and turned into the crapshow it has continuously been since its introduction. Short of a few, 2 if i remember correctly, times when its been so overtuned people actually played it, its always been garbo. Msv has the lowest spec representation out of all the specs and has held that position for years. At the beginning of this xpac, its representation was like .001% and the nearest spec to it was feral druid at like .9%. Its had a full rework done, its now going through spec tree and that process has been a NIGHTMARE. Smallest tree out of all the specs so far, massive number of 2-3 point talents, no logical direction of builds, 2 button rotations, horrible capstones, no spec identity, meme playstyle like the ranger ReXxAr build, the enter tree consists of KC talents forcing it to be the melee version of BM, and a headache execute playstyle that i dont even think is a build anymore. While blizz has taken steps to make things bearable, its still leaps and bounds behind the other trees, even feral.
This is one strong reason why people want rsv back. We are tired of the garbage blizz continues to produce for msv. No before the trolls come in and say “oh they are doing it off of player feedback,” its the same thing as why it changed in the first place. A vocal few having too much influence. On alpha right now, blizz specifically picks the 1%, the white knighters, and the streamers for testing. These people make up a total of 5% of the hunter playerbase. These stupid… are the ones making the changes we see now.
The rsv war will never end until it returns as a 4th spec.
Are you genuinely trying to argue with me that you think there are no other examples from other games of things getting removed that players loved?
In LoL:
Max W Mid Khazix
Tank Ekko Top
Support Pantheon
DFG
Leblanc Silence
Zileans OG passive
Old Graves
And the infinite list of champs that got reworked
In CS:GO
Tuscan
Cobblestone
Aug meta
Krieg meta
Old AWP Movespeed (rip)
In WoW:
OG Second Wind Warrior
RSV
Perm Camo
Old Sp Iterations
Pretty much every iteration of all specs from MoP
Warlock Siphon Life
Should I go on? There’s only one on this list that people consistently continue to spam post about and derail threads with, take a guess!
And how do those folks feel about it? 'cuz I agree with you that things change. I myself don’t mind msv.
My point is that we should recognize those who have feedback about how something changed for them. In the same way people want msv to evolve in DF but it obviously needs work. Most specs go thru minor changes that add up over time to make it something different, evolving. Msv was a complete shift.
I still hear the echoes of warlocks who miss their Metamorphosis for similar reasons. Are they wrong for feeling and voicing over it? , nah. I mean down the line they can restore some fantasy for it because of that feedback.
We live in a world where we once had feral and guardian part of the same tree yet they recognized how much simpler it would be to expand on it. Imo, Survival is in a similar state right now. A Ranged spec who became melee but evolved back to be much more Ranged dependant, in other words closer to what it was rather than staying committed to the original idea. On top of that there IS a healthy community that supports rsv now so what’s the issue for them to voice it? I don’t know you yet, you come off a bit aggressive with your own opinion as if I’m attacking you personally when I’m specifically stating that a compromise would be healthy for the game.
You seemed to imply that there were no other examples from other games of things getting removed.
Players miss all of those things, and you’re right, now and then you’ll see threads of people longing for all of those things on different forums.
But there’s only one on this list where no matter how much time passes, the same 10-15 person clique continues to derail threads and make meaningless posts about something that Blizzard repeatedly continues to say isn’t coming back in the following expansion.
And as we just learned, for some of these people, there’s quite literally no end goal or purpose to it, just to troll.
Which is cool, people can troll if they want, just as long as we all know it’s for nothing but trolling.
The whole issue I have with this whole case of RSV/MSV is that the side advocating for RSV being brought back somehow thinks that it was the most awesome and perfect spec back in wotlk/mop. It really wasn’t. And Wotlk just proves it, go back and play it and say with a straight face it’s as perfect as you keep claiming.
Also the biggest issue is that you look at something bad (current SV) and claim it’s bad and that RSV should be brought back. How the change was a crime and how the people in charge should be held accountable yada yada yada. But you do know, that if the RSV-> MSV would never have happened the Mop/wod RSV would have gone through 3, soon 4, expansions of changes and small or large reworks. Right?
Look at almost any other spec in the game and there is barely any, if even one, spec that is the same now as in Mop/Wod. Crying for Mop RSV being brought back is just delusional and smells of anti-progress. I am not a fan of where they have brought hunters. Not at all. But I am not so stupid and narrow-minded that I think the response/reasonable thing to do is cry for them to bring it back to how it was 6-10 years ago. The game would be quite stale then if you ask me… I’d rather we perhaps focus on giving feedback on how they can make the current game better? You know based on what we actually have now. Not some rose-tinted memory of what was.
TL:DR not saying the class is in a good state or even that current SV is better than any previous SV. But to cry for it to be brought back to a old state instead of improved on, year after year and patch after patch must surely be tiresome? That’s not really how it works. How many ultimatums and tantrums you ever do throw.
a) You act like we haven’t played it since Legion. You can still play RSV you just have to break the ToS to do it.
b) This is mostly a strawman. No one’s asking for a 1 to 1 copy paste of MoP SV to modern WoW. It would need changes such as spec-unique talents. Ghorak has an entire write-up of a hypothetical modern Survival complete with a talent tree.
The point is continually dumping hundreds of hours of time and effort into melee SV is an utter waste. You keep defaulting back to this cliche “moving forward” line. Not every change is automatically positive progress. It’s possible to pick a bad design and double down on it and that’s what they’ve done with SV.
…well, yes, you are. You already know this clearly so it’s weird to respond like this, but just to recap: you dropped this stock-standard “You’re trying to undo progress!” line, I called it a cliche, and you responded with “Yes this whole drama about RSV sure is a cliche”. It’s immature and pointless yet it’s your go-to response on the forums.
It’s probably contributed to the continual sidelining of the melee part of melee SV, so yeah that is a positive result.
I see this happen quite often, actually. Newer players coming to the class, finding out what SV used to be, and asking why they ever changed it because it seemed so good in the past.
Melee SV fans seem to think it’s only the few of us on the Hunter forums that don’t like melee SV. In fact there’s a lot of dissatisfaction about the spec that just never gets posted to the forums. That’s how most contentious issues are. Most people don’t bother saying anything, positive or negative. That doesn’t mean everyone’s happy with things. Perhaps Blizzard should go and find out what the popular opinion is for a change instead of just making assumptions.
Most of these are poor comparisons. I think even you can see why permanent camo and siphon life is not anywhere close to Survival going melee. The SV melee rework was by far the largest single rework to any spec in WoW’s history, and the most contentious as well.
Yes all classes go through a lot of changes but pretending extent doesn’t matter is immature. Most specs in the game have a clear lineage of iterative development where a core identity and, to some extent, gameplay continues to be represented. I played a protection paladin a lot in MoP and I started playing it again recently. The class is heavily changed but you can see a lot of the same thematic and gameplay elements being improved and iterated upon. You can’t do that with SV; there’s a point where everything is thrown out and they start over. The only comparison that comes close is what happened to Demonology… which was also a mistake for many of the same reasons. Even then, it was a ranged DPS before and a ranged DPS after while SV was totally changed and largely in a direction that made it alien to its own class.
I remember you posted about this once before. It’s awesome that you got the perspective of the actual creator of the ranged SV we knew and played. Do you have a link to the original post? Because it’s difficult to find it again.
People pretending SV now is more like what it was in Vanilla is one of the most brazen class design revisionisms ever created. What’s even more incredible is that we literally had the playable classic WoW where people can go back, experience the class, and see for themselves how untrue it is and they still believe it.
I think one thing that surprised me was how a lot of these urban myths about classic and TBC still live on. I assumed that people would realise from the playable versions that they weren’t true but they still get perpetuated. Another example is the whole spiel about Thoridal being bad for Hunters. You have thousands of Hunters in classic BC right now getting Thoridal with major DPS increases and you still get people swearing up and down that the Golden Bow was better and Thoridal should go to Rogues/Warriors. The BC Hunter discord had to pin a post about it because they still always get asked about it.
Also, on the Travis Day comment: you have to love how he says they game it the unique identity of being the beast companion guy as if BM doesn’t exist.
His statement was arguably worse because he made a specific, unambiguous claim about ranged Survival that just wasn’t true. In Ion’s mind SV was all about unqiue CC talents until Pandaria at which point the removal of talent trees meant they had to copy over a bunch of stuff from MM. In reality 4.3 SV played the same as 5.0 SV and SV’s Explosive Shot and Black Arrow were never part of MM before Legion. This is far from the only time he’s said something blatantly dishonest. In fact for him it’s the norm.
Reading between the lines, in short, they applied a certain logic to the design of the hunter class, a logic that wasn’t applied to all other classes/specs at the time. Basically, they thought that there couldn’t be two specs where both of them had a focus on the use of ranged weaponry. More importantly, rather than doing what they did with all other specs, by developing them to become even more defined in their existing themes/fantasies, they scrapped RSV/old SV without even bothering to try to make it distinguish itself further, from the other hunter specs.
Is the concept in [this link] “perfect”, from a design perspective? Most likely not. But it sure as heck wouldn’t play anything like current MM. The main point is that they could’ve done the same to SV, as they did to all other specs, going into Legion. But they didn’t…
This is why we’re still here, petitioning for the return of RSV. Contrary to the opinion of some, based on what they/the devs said, it wasn’t justified to remove the spec. Something that’s especially obvious, given what they’ve done with SV since. Note how they’ve stamped SV as the “beast companion guy”, which is how they had previously branded BM, since the start
[/quote]
So again, if I was a dev and came to this thread, I would just click off it and do what I feel would be best for Hunters. Why? Because I would not want to read about something that happened, now going on 7 years ago that is not in game. What is even more funny is that these people seem to think THEY designed the game, and people being PAID to do it do not know what they are doing. Nope. Wow just happens to be the longest SUCCESFUL MMO running.
Once again, the DF will go live, Hunters will probably be a hot mess, and we will be back here complaining why the devs screw over Hunters. Well devs do not screw us, we do that all by ourselves. Because we cannot talk about how to improve Hunters without the minority screaming about changes made 6 years ago.
Honestly I gave up a while back. I just hope that things will come out decent enough were Hunters are not bottom of the barrel.
I think it’s fair to said old RSV have little going for it in terms of differentiating itself from the other specs. I remember, especially in Cata, thinking to myself something along the lines of “the specs are the same with different flavors. Keep X on CD, keep Y debuff up, keep Z buff up, A & B are fillers”
I’ve grown my opinion on RSV/MSV listening to others opinions. I miss the old RSV but they can 100% bring it back in DFs Talent system. MSV can be a cool direction they take but I feel like it should be more involved with its pet, as of now the pet is just there for KC to give you focus and mostly everything else is passive. If Blizzard can define the Hunter/Pet relationship in the spells better they can make it a better experience. I also don’t care much for WFB and think the MB gameplay plays more into the “ferocious” fantasy Blizz seems to want it to be.
) is right with his comments about every class going through something similar to this, having massive reworks over the lifetime of the class. MoP Demolock is MASSIVLY different from today’s model, it’s just something that happens. I don’t agree with the dismissive, nihilistic execution of his posts. Just because you don’t care doesn’t mean others shouldn’t care too. That “deal with it” mentality is toxic and is a complacent mindset that rots away any sort of critical thought in its hosts, transforming them into mindless dribbling “no question, just consume” troglodytes.