And whether they do is still up to debate and appears in your case to stem from an inability to play melee.
Is an attack made worse for doing 177% more Attack Power and costing 25% less Focus than the version it replaces… just because it’s now melee?
Similarly, is an interrupt inherently better for having a 60% longer CD… just because it’s ranged?
Sorry, that latter question was rhetorical. I already realize you disagree with nearly all M+ players and a majority of PvPers on this count.
Just as, at present, even without any talents, MM’s and BM’s Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, and Multi-Shot are also all different.
No, that is also shallow if that’s where you choose to draw the boundaries. Rogues aren’t based solely on having Stealth. Druids aren’t based solely on having Shapeshift. Rogue has ranged actions available to it (first Throwing Knife as a utility-heavy finisher, then the various pistol attacks). Druid can play both ranged and melee.
Pets, Traps, and Aspects haven’t been mere tertiary tidbits of the class’s identity. They have always been central.
I have explicitly stated otherwise. Increased class depth does help.
My issue is with your idea that spec depth must be balanced against class features—i.e., that roughly half of every spec’s depth must come from their baseline.
That is objectively limiting. It’s asking that half of spec depth be Rank 1 crap, or, at best—even assuming that you throw myriad pieces from various specs into the class baseline—that the class in total, across all specs, provide far less freedom by which for players to pick both motif/theme and gameplay/playflow that they especially enjoy.
It rings no better than asking that Enhance and Feral shouldn’t exist, that Outlaw should have its ranged actions removed, that Fire shouldn’t get stuff like Flamestrike or Blast Wave “because they could just use Arcane Explosion and Frost Nova anyways”, etc. It’s unnecessarily limiting.
And as you just explicitly mentioned, that “loss of critical baseline capabilities” is solely:
- Arcane Shot goes melee and does more than double damage and only 75% the Focus cost.
- Countershot goes melee and takes only 60% long to recharge.
- Concussive Shot goes melee and gets 250% duration.
- Steady Shot is locked out but Kill Command gets 15 Focus generation and a self-reset chance to compensate.
That’s it. That’s your “critical baseline capabilities” lost — significant net buffs.
First, I agree that…
That being said, I don’t know why you cling to this idea that all melee is, by classification, only ever going to be inferior on the whole (or, refuse to look at things in the one frame of reference that matters—what a given spec brings on the whole).
Had SV been sufficiently compensated, yes, it absolutely would have made up for the fact that it’d no longer be “a full-fledged Ranged”. That is precisely what sufficient compensation means.
The approach of melee having alternate advantages compensatory to their being melee?
???
Which, had they just not programmed it backward (locking you into the stance, like Cleric Stance, instead of applying a cooldown to entering it, like BotD or Enochian), would have been fine and precisely what was asked for by Bards tired of being charged 15+% of their dps relative to other ranged for hypermobility that was useless in most fights.
It allowed Bards further gameplay (stance-dancing and window optimization) while giving them a way to, at relatively low cost, trade otherwise excessive mobility for further damage.
As such, rather than being taxed for simply existing whilst being a hypermobile job, they were charged only to the extent they were stanced into it (or, in this case, avoided the new stance). And not by much.
This is yet another flagrant reduction at best.
First, it was a half-GCD cast time only, so you were still far more mobile than most ranged.
The damage bonus was originally so undertuned that no one used it outside of the opening 2 GCDs and, by the end of the expansion, you still stance-danced for optimal play because the stance’s empowered per-weaponskill damage prevented you from using auto-attacks (which hit for roughly two-thirds each of a filler GCD). If you had no oGCDs and only filler to press, the stance was a dps-loss because AAs were worth more than its 30% damage bonus on weaponskills.
Atop that, all procced attacks bypassed the added cast-time and you could always use cross-class actions to ignore the cast time. Feint, for instance, was spammable and only 4.6% effective potency lower than your unstanced mobile spam (Heavy Shot).
- A Bard main,
- Because I, too, really like ranged weapon classes; I just don’t assume they’re somehow so inherently stronger on the whole than melee that no compensation could ever be reasonable and that Hunter should never be capable of both melee and ranged playstyles.
Only? No.
Do I believe, though, that it’s objectively less limiting for a spec’s depth not just to be its Rank 1 abilities? Yes.
Half is still pretty damn fettered. Sure, it’s not as bad as 85% of one’s Hunter gameplay just being from its shared roots, as per Classic, but it’s still, imo, painfully limiting.
I don’t want specs to simply be a matter of pick one of 2 CDs, pick one of 2 casted generators, a basically-passive or active DoT, one of 3 short-CD rotational attacks, and an AA-based, spammable-based, or CD-DoT-based proc chance for rotational attack resets. Those sorts of decisions should solely foundational, as they more nearly are now (with, further, some specs having, say, casted generators, some having CD-based generators, and some having no generators), rather than being nearly the whole of what a spec has to offer, as was the case before Legion.
I’ve been playing Hunter since Vanilla and was against forcing MSV.
That said, I wouldn’t have been against a fourth spec, and would have been okay with both BM and SV being allowed to go melee or ranged as they please. Moreover, even MSV did still feel like Hunter to me, but perhaps that’s because I also played other classes, both ranged and melee, and so what motifs and aspects of Hunter stood out as distinct to me had little to do just with its being ranged and instead had far more to do with Pets, Traps, Aspects, and its individual specs’ rotational qualities.
To briefly recap:
- SV was not sufficiently compensated for going melee, largely because they couldn’t decide upon what degree they ultimately wanted to make it melee. At this point, only its spammable is melee, which is odd mostly because its spammable can be either the spec’s burst window or its filler damage—near-total opposites—depending on one’s build.
- I did not like RSV being forced to MSV, but I absolutely did want to see a more complex and distinct RSV in WoD. If the then-existing RSV needed to be moved, it needed to split MM at its root to support its DoT/Procs playstyle, rather than the childs’ smears of RSV of disjointed RSV elements seen in Legion MM, or the melee addition should have created a 4th spec (be that Survival in BM/MM/SV/Pursuit or Munitions in BM/MM/SV/Munitions). Additionally, absorbing certain tier sets into the baseline would have gone a long way towards this, just as {creativity} might have gone a long way towards making RSV deeper and more distinct.
- I am fine with there being melee playstyles of Hunter, just as I am for Shaman and Druid and some Ranged class’s skills forcing them briefly into melee to use utilities (or, say, Arcane Explosion). I like that those who want that sort of all-in, speedier, positionally-sensitive, and more vicious take on a hunter motif as provided by going melee can have it.
