Current state of hunters

Classes Hunter
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No one is saying that melee SV is a bad spec. By all easily quantifiable measures it is the best hunter spec. What is bad is utterly destroying a way of interacting with the game. SV was sufficiently unique, and MM changed so much at the same time that an entire way of playing was simply removed from the game, whimsically. I personally quit the game over it for 2 years. Many thousands of people did. Most are still gone.

Was it a sound economic decision? I’d have to guess no. Losing a meaningful portion of your customer base is generally considered poor form in the financial department. There is no measure under which the implementation of a melee hunter at the expense of one of the most popular specs in the game was a sound decision.

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was it though? like do you have data to support that? a meaningful portion of its player base is a big stretch there regardless. hunter is a very popular class but in the grand scheme of things you would have to lose 75% of the player base (that’s actualy quitting the game, shelving your hunter doesn’t count) for that to have a serious financial impact. I went back 3 years on the forums to see what it was like when melee sv was first brought on. the anger was there but it wasn’t horrible. I looked at data and hunters numbers didn’t take a significant hit in representation. at least to the point where it would have seriously even dented blizzards bottom line financially. SV was unique ill give you that. but cant you say that now its even more unique? it stands as a spec all on its own with its abilities. and as long as they don’t mess it up too much from here its popularity will grow

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Not really no, and it is right to call me out. What I do have is suggestively supportive however.

  1. SV had > 3% of the population during all of WoD. Exact numbers I don’t remember, but that statement is true within the scope of my memory. During Legion it was < 1%.
  2. Legion subscription numbers were substantially decreased over WoD numbers with a large drop soon after the start.

Number 2 was likely in no small part due to the implementation of PvP templates (one of the most idiotic, anti-MMORPG design decisions of all time). I personally know two other hunter mains (one SV, one MM) other than myself who quit because of Legion’s hunter changes, and 7 other people who quit because of Legions PvP templates. That’s not enough to be “evidence”, but considering it was over half my friends list (of people I actively spoke with) it is certainly suggestive.

It is highly unlikely (statistically speaking) that (1) and (2) are completely unrelated. Again, that is not the proof required to make assertions as I have, but they weren’t really intended to be statements of fact, but rather what I believe based on the suggestive data I do have access to.

I would love to find real data that denies or supports my statements. I ultimately care only about what is real, not what is speculative. However, no one as far as I am aware in the public domain has access to such data. I, and everyone else, are free to create our own conclusive beliefs based on the data that is available (or memories of the data that was available at the time).

So you are right to call me out on lack of supporting evidence, but my anecdotal evidence trumps zero evidence supporting an opposing viewpoint. At least for me.

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That would be awesome if you could link such data.

Since I don’t have access to that data, let me put up some numbers. I don’t know all these numbers. Some of them are memory, some are merely plausible. Let me know if you know if any of my numbers are incorrect.

This is the most speculative number. Lets say Legion had 5 million subscribers.

Lets say that was almost the same number as WoD subscribers (the “almost” I will justify below). I think the real numbers are that it went up at the very start of Legion, but then went below peak WoD numbers soon after. Regardless, I will assume they were the ~same for this calculation.

Let me also assume that my SV numbers were correct, except I will use the lower and upper bounds of my numbers. In other words, I will say only 3% of the population was SV before, and 1% was SV after. I think those numbers are actually quite a bit off (closer to 4% and 0.5% respectively), but I am trying to get a lower limit calculation here.

Lets say that 75% of those SV rerolled. That would mean 0.5% of the population left just because of the change to SV.

0.5% of 5,000,000 = 25,000 people
Multiply that by 15/mo * 12 mo/yr = $4.5 million dollars/yr.

I don’t care what your bottom line is, no loss of 4.5 million dollars a year is a sound financial decision. That isn’t moneys they will recoup at some future date. It’s not an investment. I doubt very seriously they are picking up many new subs or retaining many old subs because now hunter has a melee spec. That’s just lost revenue based on a whimsical decision that hurt many players and their bottom line.

Even if I am off by an order of magnitude on the number of SV that rerolled, it shows that even a small percent of the population has a very large impact on the bottom line.

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229

wow that was way out of left field. I honestly think its a lil crazy to think that SV being removed caused anywhere near what you are saying when it wasn’t even the most popular spec for its class. if any of that would be true why wouldn’t blizz just revert the changes? they are a bottom line company just like anyone else and they have way better archived and live data on this type of stuff. what do you think they are just being stubborn? honestly if all what you are sayin is true then what is holding blizz back from simply re-hashing SV? or do you think your proclamation is a lil wild and wow probably lost around 200 players specifically due to the SV change and the rest left and came back for varying reasons. Wow has always had mass exoduses and entrances during the moonlight period of expacs. I don’t think the data you are referring to (besides the specific SV hunter numbers) has anything to do with the hunter change.

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It’s obvious Blizz either lost some old devs or just ran out of ideas and passion for an archer class. That’s why MM and BM are completely boring and SV was just erased for yet another melee spec. I don’t even blame people for playing melee SV now because the other options are so garbage and gutted.

If you really want to enjoy an archer class then play FFXIV bard or BDO archer, both games are free to try out. That’s what I’ve been doing while I wait for this waste of time xpac to end. FFXIV’s bard is probably the best archer in a tab-target mmo I’ve ever played.

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I don’t find either boring and I absolutely love the gameplay of BM hunter. The dps is the worst of any dps class/spec, the pet AI is an absolute mess, certain abilities have no business being on a GCD, but I do love the gameplay of BM.

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While I don’t play BM, I have heard of this issue but haven’t really seen it. What I think would be more interesting for them to do for hunters across the boards is implement pets more. (Not for BM obviously, but also possibly?) While for BM you have a good amount of spells that interact and even rely on your pets, the other two specs don’t. SV has kill command I guess, but it feels weird, as it’s a focus regen for us and that’s it. Other than that the entire rotation is pretty much without pet, it would be cool if they added in more pet abilities/mechanics. Flanking strike was interesting, but that got talented and is far worse in terms of DPS than Mongoose bite is, and that’s mostly all your pet does aside from melee attack. MM at least gave the option to increase damage when alone, but literally the only thing you bring a pet to raid with for MM is niche abilities like rez or removal and such, IF your group even needs it which usually is a no. I understand that BM is the go-to pet spec, but it would be nice if they cleaned up AI issues for pets and gave (pets personally, not asking for some abilities for myself necessarily) them something that makes them more than just a limited amount of tmog-esque feel. Most special abilities of pets don’t really do anything except for in PvP or specific situations that you might not have a class for some reason to take care of it.

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I do realise it. I just think it’s not enough merit to replace a ranged spec with a melee one, especially so late after the game released.

A whole lot of loaded assumptions here.

I don’t think you understand playstyle preferences. Some people are perfectly fine switching between ranged and melee. Others have a specific preference for either. I don’t like melee DPS. The versatility of being ranged is critical for my enjoyment in the game. I’ve been playing since the start and I’ve tried out many classes and specs. I think it is safe to say that I’m not going to suddenly start liking melee more than ranged. I’m not obligated to try to get into Survival. Plus, not only is it now melee, it’s a totally different playstyle to what it was before and, in my opinion, a worse one.

This “just try it” attitude is patronising and naive.

It would be even more unique if it were a healer spec.

Hopefully that example helps you understand that “more unique” isn’t automatically a good thing.

Unless they axed ranged Survival within the last 4 months before announcing Legion (unlikely), it actually was the most popular Hunter spec at the time they decided to kill it.

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So… my estimate of 25,000 lost SV players was almost certainly on the low side. That’s from known data and a number probably in the ballpark (5M total subscribers). You honestly believe only 200 people quit for that reason? As I said, I know 3 personally. That’s all the non BM hunter mains I had as close(ish) friends. None of them re-rolled (myself included), they all quit. It was just too much to bear. I am the only one that has come back for BfA, so the losses to the bottom line continue.

But you are suggesting that of those 25k+ people, 24.8k rerolled. You are delusional. That’s not how these things work. Not in all of the games history. Most people quit when things they love get fubar, it is rare to reroll. It is more likely they will come back at some future time (>6 mo) than an immediate reroll. Even if they resub eventually that’s a pure loss of profit.

I think that 75% retention was being generous. But as I said, even if it was an order of magnitude less (97.5% retention) that is still a loss of half a million dollars per year of pure profit with no future increase. I guarantee it was more than that, but I can’t prove it, so I will leave it at that. At the same time Blizzard has said that “most” of their profits come from the store, so at least double that half a million (or 5 million in the above post) to a million a year loss (or 10M/yr loss).

These are calculated numbers based on mostly known data with some reasonable suppositions. You countered with:

suggesting that you think they are purely a for profit machine without any egos getting in the way of anything like profits, or good classes, or good gear system, etc.

We know that almost half the specs are in the dumpster, and azerite is among the worst gearing systems in the history of WoW. We also know that the person in charge of game development is the most overtly egotistical person to ever hold the position. You assuming that the profit section somehow escapes those things is illogical.

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235

It’s fine for convenience. Quests easily, great for prog, never have to change talents.

I just don’t find telling my pet to attack while I throw green snotballs very engaging gameplay. But like I said the other games I’ve tried have kind of ruined wow hunter for me. Glad you’re having fun though.

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As far as the pets go. People asked for baseline pet abilities constantly. We kept trying to say “no no no” it’s not a good idea. And then bam. Blizzard did it.

Fine tuning is not their strong point. If you ask for something enough…they hit you with all you asked for. Even if you just wanted a little

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Now to so e of the arguments in here.

They axed surivival because people were:

  1. Begging for melee abilities back. We used to mongoose, raptor strike, wing clip. That was it. You got a damage reduction buff from raptor strike if an enemy was on you. Big crits from mongoose bite to discourage you from getting into melee range of the hunter. And the wing clip was a slow so that we could get away from melee better. Blizzard took those arguments and built a spec.

  2. They stopped tuning survival at the time so it fell to lowest dps by far. Representation of the spec dropped so blizzard targeted the lowest represented spec. (Which could have been easily bumped back to top hunter dps by adding crit scaling or haste scaling to our dots, serpent sting, black arrow, explosive shot,)

So with that said now we have this horrible , and even more poorly represented by blizzards own numbers, survival spec that is drawing very few people to the class. When the old spec was the top dps, decent on PvP, and highest represented for several years AND could probably bring people flocking back to hunters lol

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238

I don’t know why blizzard has a hard time fixing MM. it’s pretty obvious that half of our damage comes from casting a 2.5 sec cast with no way to create space to get that damage consistently off.

On top of that we lack tankiness, so we are just damage sponges in arena. You can’t have a class be a damage sponge with no real tradeoff. In legion we were similarly immobile but had strong CC chains and cleave damage to make up for being squishy and immobile.

MM either needs it’s control back, getting entrapment for tar trap back as a core talent would be great (coupled with posthaste becoming baseline).
Pulling scatter off trap DR so we can self set up traps or even giving us frozen arrow back that’s interruptable.
We just need something. I don’t want MM to be the same as BM where it’s hyper mobile but does Garbo damage and everyone thinks it’s a meme.

I’ve never played an expac where hunter ranged specs across the board were complete unviable in arena and frustrating to play on top of that.

Blizzard needs to fix this ASAP.

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no im not. you thinking that 25k people just left the game when those hunters were probably not even their main characters. everything you are saying is based purely on instinct and emotion and no fact. what the fact is if the change had caused anywhere near what you are saying then blizz would have taken the time to simply change it back or add a 4th spec. they have added time to SV development already. so they are watching hunters. MM got changes SV got a nerf. for people who think that they aren’t paying attention to hunters you are just wrong. they are. they might not be doing what YOU or I want but they are spending time on them and that is evident. so with them already putting money into the spec if they saw that they were hemorrhaging subs because of the change they would’ve just reverted it. Why haven’t they done that?

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I’ll start with what I like, but it is all overshadowed by the broken nonviable damage, as I main BM, forced to switch to MM, and it is still mediocre.

I don’t mind survival being a melee spec, I like having that option, have played it a few times, and honestly it’s cool to have both options, although I would prefer to have it as a 4th option.

Marksmen is ok, I like having the option to not use a pet (because broken pet AI is aggravating AF). The rotation is engaging enough to not be boring. The AOE being capped at 5 targets is a mind-mindbogglingly dumb decision. Why on earth would that be there??? Because if it wasn’t then they might do as much aoe on large packs at Ret, Warlocks, Mages, Demon Hunters, etc? Is that the reason? Why is this spec is discount, trash version of warlock, worse in every way?

I LOVE how BM plays. I love that every global is a decision that I have to make: “Do I have enough time to fit this KC in before my frenzy stacks fall off?”, “Do I have enough focus to fit this cobra in considering it’s only going to give me a 0.5s reduction in my KC, or should I save the focus.” etc. I don’t even mind having to micro-manage my frenzy stacks to maintain max uptime by refreshing it 0.5s before it falls off and managing all my GCD’s to make sure that happens. – don’t cast anything when frenzy is within 1.8s of expiring. I find all these things make it a very fun and engaging rotation, and I love being able to move around without penalty (although on other classes, or MM spec, being able to figure out how to move and maximize dps is also fun and engaging). The pet AI is the worst, pets getting stuck as often as they do is really inexcusable this late into the lifespan of WoW.

All these things don’t mean crap though, because BM is unplayable and MM should be replaced by warlocks. The useless damage is a worse kind of inexcusable than the pet AI.

I could deal with dumb pet travel time when switching targets, I could deal with not having burst AOE, I could deal with not having a DPS cooldown which nukes stuff like other classes have. I could even deal with pets getting stuck (although it’s a real stretch). The PVP overnerf is really hard to deal with, but I was hanging in there.

What I can’t deal with is that BM damage is unplayable in mythic raiding.

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There are several reputable sites that report percent of population playing some particular spec. I do not know how they gather their data but presumably, since they all are in general agreement, there is some metric by which their numbers are meaningful. It is from those numbers that I made my calculation. I don’t get why you don’t get that. That was a data calculation. I have no “emotional investment” in creating those numbers. I have no emotional investment in SV whatsoever. I always disliked SV. Too many dots, not enough burst. I have been exclusively an MM player since WotLK. I am only reporting the facts with some reasonable assumptions to prove a point.

I just don’t know what to say to this. This is so out of touch with reality its difficult to have a conversation. What you are suggesting is not how things work. When a developer makes changes they absolutely let those changes take their course. They don’t backpedal at the first sign of trouble, especially when ego is involved. It took a lot of work/man hours/salary/emotional investment to create SV as a melee spec. The fact that it failed miserably by all counts was just what it was.

As a developer you think, “I can make it better!” So you double down on your creation. That was why they put so much effort into redesigning SV in BfA. It got more BfA love (work/man hours/etc.) than any other spec, in case you didn’t notice. It got that because the Legion version was an utter failure. No one played it. By no one of course I don’t mean zero people, I mean less than 1% of the population (I remember it being reported as low as 0.3% and never higher than 0.7%). That’s not raid representation, its not arena representation, its the number of total people playing the spec.

Because as a developer, especially in an “innovative” company you iterate, you never completely roll back. They are creators, more importantly, they are people with egos who take pride in their work, even when that work is a steaming pile of dog crap. As a developer you have the mentality that, “we can make it work”. It is never a mentality of “we should just go back to where we were, all our work was a mistake”. It doesn’t matter if a bad choice cost millions of dollars, you simply soldier on ahead because that’s your job as an innovator.

How do I know these things? I was a developer for 8 years and am now an engineer. It’s just how its done.

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One more comment on this.

Look at how they are handling the Azerite situation. They know its terribad. They know they have lost a lot of subs over it (way more than the SV fiasco to be sure). They are actively working on fixing the situation. But rather than just create regular gear and fix the classes, they are doubling down on their mistake. They will let this horrible system exist as it is until 8.2 at which point it will likely be a fair amount better. But that’s an entire year of bad gameplay and lost subs. They don’t “revert”, they only “iterate”. That is how it has always been.

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we would blow them out of the water honestly. I keep on par or just below higher ilvl DH in the few mythics ive done as MM. these are DH that I know and are higher ilvl then me. on a mob pull with 10 plus we become a major oulier. we contend when it only spreads to 5. could it be 7? yes. anything above that and the damage starts to go a lil nuts.

No honestly I think you are delusional to think that people just up and left the game instead of just simply playing another character. you are bringing up factual data yes. but you then use emotion to make wild assumptions based on that data. there is no real way for either one of us to tell why people left the game. you take the data from the expac and correlated a large % of the lost subs to hunter changes.

you are taking spec representation loss and automatically concluding lost subs. I for one left for legion but my decision in no way had anything to do with the SV change. at the time SV was my most played spec so by every metric (you are using) I fall into your category of left because of the change.

conjecture. I cant take this as fact cuz I have no way of quantifying data. not to mention even if true I have no way of tallying whether your situation was an outlier to normal data or status quo.

blizz reverts changes all the time. you are out of touch here if you think that a company that was losing subs in the way you thought would have just sat there and let a developer guide there bottom line. not gonna happen. at the very least they would have added the range spec back.

its been years at this point. so either what you said happened and they rebounded back the lost subs ( so no issue). or what you said didn’t happen and there was no trouble besides an overly complicated melee spec at inception. which caused low population and the addition of a hero melee class pushing melee players to try that class first before SV making for even less representation.

except he has a boss. and when you fail as bad as you say they did then that developer would no longer be there in that capacity. this is how the world works. you fall flat on your face (your words) with a new design idea, you are replaced. that simple. everything you say points to a mass exodus and major loss revenues due to a change in a very low population area of the game

once again taken your experience and saying it auto correlates to the rest of the world. business don’t run the way you are saying besides a select few. big business is pass / fail with stuff like this.

wow and you were a developer? you do realize all the code written on this expac having to do with azerite right? they would have to scrap the expac to scrap azerite in any way. changing all the traits to the neck is their way of streamlining the process to make it similar to artifact while maintaining the integrity of the expac. im sorry man you have a hard time differentiating your own emotion when critically thinking. you got to take yourself out of the situation so your emotions don’t play a roll.

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You haven’t even cleared normal content. You are just not in a position to know what you’re talking about. You haven’t seen rets, shamans, warlocks, rogues who do 100k aoe damage while MM is pulling 40k.

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