…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 
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