I’ve deleted and undeleted this post.
I’m just disappointed, hunter forums. Do better.
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He knows it was just for 6.2 he just hopes you don’t.
I wonder if playing SV makes people become dishonest or if it just attracts dishonest people.
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If we did, they wouldn’t listen anyway. Too many negative changes and total disregard for other problems. I’ve seen you post for quite a while and think you make good suggestions that fall on deaf ears. Going to suspend my account again, I just don’t like the gameplay 21+ keys, the ring helps a bit, but borrowed power and damage reductions across the board… Not sure anyone is playing hunters on that dev team. Just stepping away because I thought SL was the reason to leave early in and then gave it another shot after 9.0, now it’s a shell of what it should be.
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It was barely serviceable in one tier. Logs are free. Also, assumption bot, I don’t main survival. I play it for fun occasionally or when boredom takes over. You see that is the thing about not being an ego driven maniac. I have no issue advocating for people who want melee survival OR ranged survival to be viable again.
What I can’t abide is people like you. Both on the internet and real life. I find you to be…unlikable. You think you are right about everything. You think your opinion is more important that everyone else. You steam roll conversations and force your way into situations. I actively avoid people like you every single day.
To me you are like Donald Trump made a wow account and started commenting on the forums. Pure, ego driven, madness.
PS: Nah, nevermind.
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I’m aware. I’m also aware that logs tracked it as it’s own spec. Guess what, it outperformed Survival in two tiers. LOL.
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Well in WotLK classic it’s on its second tier of being the top-played Hunter spec by far so evidently your assumptions are incorrect.
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It was linked by Ghorak before as part of a longer post but in case anyone missed it have a look at Watermist’s thread on Hunter class fantasy:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/class-fantasy-vs-spec-fantasy-a-look-at-hunters/1545514
You waited to see what my thoughts on the Survival Symbol were before mounting a
counterattack, as you didn’t know if I had some huge trap waiting behind the question.
You are for certain cautious, intelligent, and tactically aware–a fair opponent. You also managed to withstand my maximum-pressure heckling without a flinch.
It was a bluff–I actually didn’t have a huge argument in reserve, which is why I poked fun at you for avoiding to answer the question and even explained afterwards how it was a minor technicality.
I also cautioned against taking the symbol thing too far, which I feel you have mistakenly done–I feel you’ve dug an even deeper hole and now endeavor to discredit ALL Specialization Symbols in order to misdirect from the fact that regardless of what the symbol actually means, Survival’s icon STILL clearly represents a melee weapon.
March-on, Soldier. The ‘Anti-Symbol’ crusade awaits!
You are correct in that only the game developers have the privilege to communicate game design intention.
However, to what extent the game developers follow-through with that promise is anyone’s guess.
This is why the famous Game Manual quote: “A primarily ranged damage class” later grew to house a fully canonized melee specialization.
And how the same quote was in fact just a single specialization, and not the full picture.
Now lets take a closer look at what’s causing the friction between us.
Point 1: The developers have never provided a talent-by-talent expose’ for each Specialization in terms of design intention, which leaves us freedom to determine where each talent or ability may best be leveraged.
We the player base, and that includes you, do not determine where and when design intention applies. We may only use the tools and abilities provided to us by the game developers and use them where we think they best apply.
Point 2: If the foundation of your counterargument is based on: “Blizzard says”, then through no fault of your own, that argument immediately falls flat.
It is better to instead focus on what Blizzard has actually done, and disregard most of what they have claimed as its highly likely to be retconned.
“Believe none of what you hear, and half of what you see”, as the old saying goes.
Point 3: You used the '07 Blizzcon Interview as a premise to dismiss the notion that players felt Classic Survival was best suited for PvP.
Classic was released in 04’. Game Developer sentiment expressed in 07’ would carry about the same weight as RSV being changed into MSV in terms of how radically the game design had shifted from Vanilla to TBC.
Why do you hold this 07’ Interview in such high esteem but wouldn’t treat an interview about MSV as the law?
In light of these 3 points, the premise for your counterargument has been refuted:
You asked for a full-course meal, and I delivered. You ate half,
discarded the rest, then abruptly left. You didn’t even wash your hands before leaving! And now you come knocking the next day for another full plate of food!
Sus…
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You’re giving me way too much credit. I simply read what you posted and contemplated on whether to respond or not. Sometimes, it’s just about how I’m busy with other things, and revisit your topic at a later time.
I do, however, feel like you’re missing the point with what I said…
First of all, I only posted a few examples. Those are hardly ‘ALL’ spec symbols.
Secondly, I’m not discrediting a single one of them. I think they’re all perfectly fine for their inteded purpose. I simply don’t agree with the notion that spec/talent category icons have such direct ties to the core design and intentions for the gameplay associated with each category.
Again, they’re mostly just hinting at what can be found within each category. But, as we can see, they certainly weren’t defining representations of what the core design of the category focused on, in terms of combat role or core functions.
No, it happened because, by the time of the Legion class reworks, there was a different class/combat dev team in the house. The original game designers, such as Kevin Jordan, who were responsible for the realisation of the core design and fantasy of each class, had long since moved on. The guy who carried most of the hunter class development from late BC/pre WotLK and onwards, Chris Kaleiki, had also moved away from focusing on core class development, and was instead working on systems design, mostly(not exclusively) surrounding PvP.
The new(er) designers had no attachments to the core fantasy of the classes, and they approached each class with a different mindset. This has already been mentioned before.
Again, this relies on you looking at each talent category in a vacuum, and not as part of a general class fantasy concept. You have to get the whole idea of individual spec fantasies and archetypes out of your head. This wasn’t how they designed classes back then.
Each category simply focused on certain parts of the core class design. Allowing players to focus on the parts they enjoyed. For pure damage classes, and in some way, classes in general, they did not intend for you to create your own sub-class, in terms of fantasy or identity. They have said as much in the early Blizzcon panels. Feel free to check them out for yourself.
I guess this part adressed your following points as well. Except for:
They designed each talent and category to build on the core functions of each class. As they have said, repeatedly, in the past.
Key words here are “build on”, not “replace”, or “ignore”.
If this is what you think, then you did not read what I said. I never argued that players did not often choose SV for the purpose of PvP. Go back and read it again…
The parts of the 07’ class panel where they talk about class design philosophies, such as class inspirations, and talent development, they repeated those things with basically every class panel at blizzcon during those years.
As for the more recent interview, it was held with the head class dev and lead producer of wow at the time, neither of which were responsible for the realisation of the original classes. And on that note, neither was Ion(with his comments on the SV rework), nor would he ever come out and directly contradict what was said in a previous interview with a lead class dev, on questions regarding class design philosophies.
Again, in short, the later interviews weren’t held with the actual original class designers, which is why I don’t put much stock in those later devs when it comes to matters of the original class design philosophies from 04’.
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Now that I’ve played wrath surv hunter, I can honestly say LnL surv simply wasn’t that well designed, wasn’t really effective and wasn’t that fun to play.
However, modern surv still needs more work by a dev(s) that play the spec and actual like hunter…
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And yet it served SV well for 4 expansions and helped to create a spec that was widely enjoyed and respected across the game. More than what can be said about literally anything to come of melee SV. So sounds like your opinion of it is fairly exclusive.
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Very well. Then do you still find fault with what I wrote below?
If you find the post satisfactory in context of PvP, noting how only the developers can determine when and where game design intention applies, then we can finally wrap things up and go about our business.
Oh, thank goodness he’s gone! This must be the guy who ruined Survival Hunters and retconned our core fantasy with junk talents in WotLK. He was a revisionist, for certain.
These guys, I like. They have a more critical grasp of the underlying archetypes that were present in the Hunter Class since its inception. They’ve finally liberated us from Marksmanships’ constricting grasp.
Those examples were clearly ALL THE SYMBOLS 
“Final Thoughts On Hunter Specialization Icons”
It’s impossible for the playerbase to confirm the purpose of Specialization Icons. As players, we can only infer the meaning of specialization icons–we cannot deterministically define them
Hunters are first and foremost a physical dps class. Ranged, Melee, and even our Pets belong to the school of Physical DPS.
I discovered connecting threads between the Hunter Icons and the school of physical dps provided by each Hunter Specialization.
Do note that the following is laced with conjecture, but it still finds objective parity with the underlying facts.
These immutable facts are:
- [Beast Mastery] Tame Beast: Pets
- [Marksmanship] Ranged Weaponry: Volley
- [Survival] Melee Range: Mongoose Bite
Hunter Classic Talent Calculator - Classic World of Warcraft (wowhead.com)
We enter subjective territory from here on. Note that nothing of value can be gained except riled-up emotions when entering the subjective realm of debate.
Each party will endlessly lean on their stance which produces circular arguments.
Feel free to agree or disagree at your leisure.
[Tame Beast]
Unlocks the physical dps portion of our damage profile conveyed by pets. [Tame Beast] is effectively the root of the BM Specialization and is the point from which all Pet DPS and thus the vast majority of talent value for BM is sourced.
Summary: The BM Icon is the symbolic root of all BM abilities with exception to the Aspects. Representative of Pet DPS.
[Volley]
Although this ability isn’t flashy, it may represent the ultimate expression of Archery which invokes speed and agility to deploy hundreds of arrows in the targeted area.
The icon is also a Bull’s-Eye, that when taken together with the broader Class Icon: The Bow, effectively doubles down on the centrality of MM as a physical Ranged DPS and situates the specialization as the ranged locus for the class.
Summary: The MM icon represents Ranged DPS.
This is based on the fact that [Volley] requires a ranged weapon to actuate, and how [Volley] also deals the highest AoE ranged damage of any ranged ability in the class.
[Mongoose Bite]
[Mongoose Bite] requires the target to be in melee range to actuate, and it also deals Melee DPS. While [Mongoose Bite] requires a dodge to actuate, SV is still a DPS Specialization and not a true tank archetype. [Mongoose Bite] thus transforms a defensive stat in dodge into offensive melee damage.
Summary: The SV icon may represent Melee DPS.
Survival’s intra-specialization damage profile consists of over 90% Melee DPS.
Answering this is worthy of another thread in itself. But I will briefly contend that Hunters were never composed of a single, generalized archetype. You lean heavily into this idea as a premise, but I contest that you can’t find a lore figure that carries the complete package of all three specializations at once.
It appears that they pulled inspiriation for each spec from at least three different Hunter-style archetypes from WC3, they being: Rexxar, Sylvanas, and Tyrande – plus a smidge from the Diablo 2 Trap Assassin and Amazon.
Suppose if you delete Marksmanship. What would the Hunter Class be left with without Ranged DPS?
That would leave a remainder of Melee DPS and Pet DPS, which links directly to Rexxar.
Now delete Survival.
You would be left with Tyrande, her Sentinel Owl, and bit of Sylvanas.
Now delete both Beast Mastery and Survival.
You would be left with primarily Tyrande herself without the Owl, but with a few elements of Sylvanas in Silencing Shot.
I contend that Rexxar was always fully present in the class from the beginning, he just got covered up and overshadowed by Tyrande.
It’s tough to pinpoint a WoW-canon archetype for traps so we must look elsewhere. I’ve remarked on how similar Survival’s playstyle was to the Trap Assassin class in the Diablo Universe. She employed Martial Arts, Ranged Abilities, Explosives, and Traps but she also had an Evasion ability.
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Considering how you seem to be offended by the fact that another poster doesn’t adequately adress every single one of your points, and who happens to “intercede” in your…discussions, regardless of your continued twists and moving of goalposts…really? Again with the snide commentary and trolling?
You sure doesn’t seem to be against attempting to provoke other posters yourself…
To quote someone else:
What in the world are you on about now?
This is the opposite of how you argued your point earlier…
You literally argued that the symbol/icon of SV was intrinsic to representing the design features(and with that, the intended core gameplay) of the SV category. You more or less said that, because the SV icon was the same as the icon of a specific class-wide ability, that meant that the intended core gameplay which SV promoted was a melee dps centric profile.
But then, you turn around and say this(the quote).
Okay, so which part of the BM category focuses on gameplay, and increased throughput, through means of the Tame Beast ability?
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but did I not just say that the icons aren’t intrinsic to the core purpose and gameplay-related design of each category? That they are merely hinting at what is a part of the category/or point to a general theme; Tame Beast = Pets(pet related stuff can be found here).
Same as above. You have exactly 1 talent in the MM category that focused specifically on Volley as an ability. One. The rest is just general improvements to ranged attacks/shots, either through damage or utility.
Volley dealt Arcane damage…
Not sure where you pulled this number from. Either way, again, your intended profile was pretty much useless in most parts of the game, relative to the purpose of our main role as a damage dealer. The short answer is that you dealt significantly less damage if you stayed in melee range. If the enemy wasn’t hitting you, your contribution to damage came from melee auto attacks(sometimes enhanced by Raptor Strike).
Literally, the biggest source of your damage profile; ranged attacks, bigger than all the other parts combined, you apparently don’t want to use at all, by intent of design.
I never said that? I said that your notion of how each category was, on an overarching level, representative of a specific archetype, I said that this wasn’t accurate.
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Imagine how delusional you have to be to believe this.
When he “ruined” SV by adding “junk” talents that created the most widely-enjoyed, respected, and thematically-coherent SV spec the game has ever known and it lasted for almost a decade.
The people who came in after condemned SV to the shadow realm. It has never been a stable and coherent spec since.
I understand liking melee combat, but for some people the fact that the concept they love so much is so niche (melee Hunter) works themselves up into such a state that it totally warps their perspective on reality. You’ve long since passed this threshold.
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Did you say anything to Bepples when he got snarky with MikeSavage about his opinion on WotLK RSV? Nope. You let him attack retail MSV without a peep. The statement was more of a shot at Bepples, honestly. Remember how it’s a public forum and all.
You shared your opinion on game design, and I returned the favor, and now you’re all out of character. Chill out and rebalance. I thought you were better than that.
Do note that internally, I’m just as displeased with RSV overtaking my role, as you and Bepples are with MSV overtaking your role. The difference is, outside of a few flavorful pokes here or there, I mostly let it go. I don’t go around spamming anti-RSV stuff in every single thread I read.
Isn’t this an exploratory topic? I feel that you’re taking this too personally. Let the grass grow.
In addition, the crack about “ALL THE SYMBOLS” was to signal to you that the subject isn’t really that important as a contentious point.
I actually tried to square with you on the subject of Specialization Icons, taking your point of view and incorporating it with mine for a more balanced discussion on the topic. It seems you’ve misread my intentions. In a debate, there are no losers, only the less efficient ideas die. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any personal investment or bias towards one idea or the other. This is how constructive discourse is maturely conducted.
Did you actually read what I said?
I repeat: "We enter subjective territory from here on. Note that nothing of value can be gained except riled-up emotions when entering the subjective realm of debate.
Each party will endlessly lean on their stance which produces circular arguments.
Feel free to agree or disagree at your leisure."
Instead of just ignoring the post, you instead chose to angrily respond. Sus…
Yes, nothing I said in the quote is contradictory. The Bull’s-Eye symbol itself is what I referred to in relation to the broader class icon: The Bow, and how Hunters are a physical damage class.
I never said otherwise.
What part of intra-specialization is so hard to grasp. It’s a nuanced understanding of game mechanics that is 100% factually true and accurate that still stands uncontested since the first day I said it. Which you will then try to impose “design intent” without having the appropriate credentials to do so.
There’s a difference between conjecture and fact. I’m not qualified to determine what the spec symbols mean; no single player is qualified, for that matter. In the last post, I wanted to square with you on the subject and made adjustments to my narrative accordingly. Subjective opinion should be fluid, and flow around the facts. Not stand in place of them.
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Only you could possibly think this has anything to do with live. Only you. WotLK came out almost 15 years ago. Brittany Spears was at the top of the charts. George Bush Jr. was president. There were still 4700 Blockbusters open. Irrelevant is an understatement.
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Of those claims, only the first even has any indicative data.
What data have found gathered from players as to which spec, of every spec in the game, they most respected?
In what way was WoD RSV, for instance, more “cohesive” than MM or BM, let alone every single other spec in the game?
RSV had among the highest playrates for a long time. But that’s all the data we have.
Your other claims here are drawn from thin air or are, at best, work from warrants and frames of reference that you have yet to establish, let alone sufficiently argue the superiority of.
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Okay, how’s that relevant to the fact that you said those things in a reply directed towards me?
Then actually make a point to direct the comment towards him, instead of including it in a reply to me?
Way to sidestep the issue…
While I’m not entirely sure what your definitinon of “anti-RSV/MSV” is, if you do recall, I specifically argue that we should get RSV back as a 4th option for the class…
…not how you phrased it earlier.
You’ve repeatedly argued the “facts”.
Ironic, considering how you treated the subject in your initial posts.
Ehm…no you didn’t?
Notice how you said that the subjective part began further down? By definition, how you structured it means that the parts I responded to, you thought of as facts, not your subjective view. If you did not intend for it to be that way, then please do make a point to be more clear in your arguments.
You did not say anything about the physical dps angle in the beginning, nor did you argue based on how the symbols/icons are merely symbolical representations of the overarching purpose of the category(and/or class) as a whole. Either partially, or fully.
What I’ve argued is “intent of design”, as in the actual mechanics and elements we got to play with. This is when discussing the actual abilities/effects, what they promoted in terms of the game as a whole(not just 1 part). Any mentions of what the devs intended for the class are purely based on what they themselves said in those early days.
Anyway, I’ma leave this for now, as I’m not even sure what you’re arguing anymore…
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They say America is all about freedom so you’re free to take offense if you want.
It’s all up to you.
Remember how it’s a public forum? Apparently, when a person makes a post directed to a single individual, its somehow magically addressed to everyone at the same time. And right on que, much like I expected it would– Bepples got triggered and interceded in our conversation.
Correct.
That would be a politically moderate stance. The problem is that by consorting with Bepples and the other extremists who call for outright deletion of MSV, your more moderate approach tends to get drowned out.
If you instead took a more fervent stance against them, then perhaps we can draw terms for a peaceful accord. Ideally, hatred towards either RSV and MSV should not be tolerated on the forum, but don’t be surprised if we defend ourselves.
I said that the work you put into the [Munitions] thread was admirable. It would be a shame for it to lie in waste. I would even like to see something in that vein as either an MM toggle, or the less-likely 4th option–just not to the exclusion of MSV.
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