Community Council discussion on Hunter design

What? It was made melee in legion and is now a hybrid melee range that can stay ranged for 15 sec but I feel like it should do both if ranged damage is steady dot damage that melts hp over time then melee should be a burst rotation that an SV could combo in and we have a harpoon to get in close and disengage to get away.

  1. I mean b4 legion.
  2. No. Thats messy, illogical, blizz will just screw it up. Plus it would take another melee spot in raids.
  3. Its a melee spec right now, not a hyrid one. You only use the talent when u have to. Its not a basic necessary talent.

Actually it would take hunters and specifically Surv hunters back to where they were in Cata prior to patch 5.4 when they removed the minimum range for ranged weapons .

They were able to balance the 2 because the class was a melee range hybrid .

All they would have to do is give players the option of do they want main melee and off range or main range off melee.

A talent path should take care of the choice .

Yes and also Stampede .

I know MM really don’t use pets but a lot of us collected pets long before Lone Wolf became a thing and I think it would be a cool option in the class tree that would allow all hunters to use their stable of pets in say the opening attack of a boss fight and maybe near the end when Lust/Hero are popped .

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Oh, and we need Glyph of Tame Beast back too. Quicker taming would be awesome :slight_smile:

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Um. What?

Surv was NEVER a melee/ranged hybrid before the change in legion. In fact, hunters quit using melee weapons at that point bc of the removal to the range restriction. I kno bc i remember playing during that time an thinking thank god i can remove melee attacks off my bars.

Did you read what I said ?

No where did I say Legion . I said back in Cata prior to patch 5.4 when they removed the range restriction .

I played Surv on my other hunter during Cata until patch 6.2 when I changed to MM when Surv was broken to get it ready for Legion .

Toon was race changed during BfA from Goblin to Mag’Har

https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/character/us/stormreaver/weidmann

So technically prior to 5.4 Survival was a range / melee hybrid with the primary focus on range for offensive and melee for defensive.

I read what you said, but in reality your incorrect. During raids, you only meleed when a boss mechanic required you to be in melee range. However, most hunters were able to cheese out of them to stay in ranged.

Blizz never balanced surv as a melee/hybrid spec. Ever. In fact, hunters would be pissed off because blizz would make fights that required going into melee range.

In conclusion, while hunters did have melee skills and inevitably were forced to use them in melee range, blizz NEVER balanced surv as a hybrid spec. They didnt balance surv in such a way as to take melee attacks into consideration for the base tuning. In fact, hunters often conplained about having to be in melee bc of how much of a dps loss it was and how it was such a pain to keep melee skills on their action bars.

So, idk where your getting at, but your wrong.

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I think he’s thinking of the glyph in Cataclysm that gave you a damage reduction for a few seconds after using Raptor Strike.

As for the “hybrid” talk: it depends on your definition of “hybrid”. People think of it in different ways. To me a hybrid is something like Red Mage in FFXIV where there are distinct ranged and melee phases of the rotation and you have to switch between them. Some people see Hunters before MoP as hybrid because they couldn’t use ranged attacks up close and they couldn’t use melee attacks from far away. They still preferred to use ranged attacks as much as possible but knowing how to deal with the minimum range was important.

To that I say “fair enough”… but I really don’t like when people try to pretend modern Survival is a representation of what Survival was before MoP. That’s just not true. It’s an entirely different thing. However you spin it, every iteration of SV until Legion had a ranged weapon and preferred to use it as much as possible. Yes, it also had melee weapons, but the ranged weapon was still there and the preferred mode of fighting. That’s a stark difference to modern Survival and I don’t think having a fake ranged weapon in a few ability animations is enough to remedy that.

EDIT: Also some people who play Survival and call it a hybrid just have a tragic misunderstanding of what Survival actually is or are coming from it more from a roleplay angle. I’ve seen people talk about how you’re meant to play Survival at ranged and only come into melee sometimes. In reality it’s the other way around: you want to be in melee as much as possible and only go out to range if you have to, be it because of a boss mechanic or fighting a stronger melee class in PvP.

3 Likes

Realistically it’s the same concept now that it was in Legion, just with more ranged capability. The Legion version had a lot of ranged capability for a melee spec too. It wasn’t a stark gap between “melee” and “ranged/melee hybrid”. It’s still from a practical standpoint a melee spec because you have to be in melee range to achieve your full damage potential.

What Ingvaeonic meant was that before Legion it was never melee and that’s true. As I said in the post above every iteration of SV before Legion had a ranged weapon and preferred to use it as much as possible. Yes it had a melee weapon and melee attacks (as did all Hunters) but that’s a big difference to what it is now where you want to stick to melee most of the time and you don’t have a ranged weapon.

The general point is that past Hunter iterations are not good justifications for current melee Survival despite all the appealing to nostalgia.

10 Likes

Oh I know that I was just giving him a hard time since he said

When they obviously made it melee in legion more so than it ever was before that as a defensive utility.

If anything they should rename survival to big-game hunter since it uses a big spear and explosives perfect for giant beasts and just bring back Survival ranged as a 4th spec.

THis right here

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Death chakram with bag of munitions baked in should be a talent in the new tree. And camo should be baseline for survival!

Carve should be done away with and replaced with Butchery.

Butchery also needs more interaction with other talents and abilities.

SV would be my main or my go to alt if the Butchery playstyle was viable.

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MM feels way too much like a caster spec.

  1. Precise Shots, besides being a boring design, creates a 1-2 combo with Aimed/Arcane Shot. Very similar to Fireball/Fire Blast for fire mage.
  2. We only have one instant ability, which, as stated above, is used in combo with Aimed Shot. Outside of Precise Shots, Arcane Shot is basically useless. So we essentially have no instant casts. Having nothing but casted and channeled abilities is a caster thing. Hunters are supposed to be mobile. I know Rapid Fire is castable while moving, but comparing it to old Chimera Shot, it just doesn’t feel good.
  3. Double Tap is a horrible talent/ability. Now I feel like an arcane mage, having to line up all my cooldowns for a once-a-minute burst.

Besides that, I like Adreaver’s idea above of bringing back old Master Marksman in the place of lock n’ load.

I actually really like the theme of Legion’s MM hunter. In practice, it was bad, but with some heavy tweaking I think it could have been an awesome spec. They could have given Marked Shot a cooldown (30 seconds) and kept Chimera Shot. The spell priority would have been interesting. Above 70% and in Vulnerable windows, Aimed Shot takes precedence. Outside of that, Chimera Shot is higher priority… Mastering the spec would mean casting the most possible Aimed Shots, while still casting Chimera Shot as close to ‘on cooldown’ as possible.

Serpent Sting should have been made the baseline hunter ability, not Arcane Shot. A dot easily fits into all 3 specs, while Arcane Shot is redundant, or completely useless, for 2 specs.

In conclusion, I think the current MM build is lazy and boring. It’s performing decently right now, but to be honest it feels like it got good completely by chance and not because Blizzard actually tried to make good interactions between legendaries and tier set bonuses. We have a big focus spender w/ a cooldown, and a small focus spender, a big focus generator w/ a cooldown, a small focus generator. Double Tap is a bad talent. Way too many useless or dead talents.

2 Likes

Just add that option to MM tree. Replace aimed shot with BA, they already have explosive shot the rest is pretty much the same. Survival could only get option to dual wield

Come on man, that thing isn’t SV’s Explosive Shot. It’s a dev flex on old RSV players at best.

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For Survival and MM .

Plus MM should be able to get at least 2 shots off before it breaks and the furthest range MM should be able to target something should be increased to give it that sniper feel .

When they changed the Rsurv abilities in Legion and put them in the MM tree, they did a “You think you do but you don’t” to them and made them so bad that most weren’t taken .

Another I would of added to baseline is Stampede.

I know MM really don’t use pets but a lot of us collected them before Lone Wolf came a long and it would be cool to have something in our rotation that lets us let them out once in awhile with out nerfing our base damage by 10% .

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At this point I think pets should just be cosmetic. Add in a universal talent tree for pets.

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