Community Council discussion on Hunter design

[Ghorak-laughing-skull]

@Bepples-barthilas

@Ghorak-laughing-skull

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)”.

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.

Hmm…

It took a while as I had forgotten which topic I posted it in, but here is the link: Is Melee Hunter going to be removed? - #336 by Ghorak-laughing-skull

@Bepples-barthilas

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.

I couldn’t say what prompted him/them to say what they said in that interview, but you’d think that the lead class dev and senior producer at the time would know enough about a class to be able to make accurate claims about its history. And yes, this is a bold statement of mine, but like has been said already, it’s enough to log into classic to find out that “no, the SV category in classic/vanilla did not promote the idea that you wanted to focus primarily on melee combat”. The “vanilla survival experience” did not have its roots in melee gameplay being the primary focus.

And secondly, Raptor Strike wasn’t even a SV ability. It was a class-wide situational ability you wanted to use, by design, whenever the enemy got too close for you to be able to fire your ranged weapon.

@Bepples-barthilas

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.

Yeah…

@Bepples-barthilas

@Ghorak-laughing-skull

Ion have also said something similar in a few interviews, when asked about Survival.

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.

Yep, agreed. Again, you’d think someone who is that involved in the game’s design and development, you’d think that he would know the history of this class. But really…something like this isn’t even hard to look up. Why would he even come out and say those things, knowing that they’re so easily disproven?

@Gunstrong-korgath

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 would argue not, that it isn’t fair to say that.

1. You’d have to base that statement on the idea that it simply wouldn’t be possible to design a modern spec, based on the core of old SV/RSV.

2. You haven’t checked the concept I linked you. Like it or not, it definitely wouldn’t play like current MM, or what MM looks like so far in alpha development for DF.

@Gunstrong-korgath

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.

You could bring back a few of its signature abilities/effects. But it wouldn’t be possible to give it any depth or further distinguishing features. Not to mention how it would negatively impact the spec you decide to put those new talents in, seeing as neither BM nor MM promotes the idea of what RSV was/could be.