Sorry bro, you were the 1 guy playing survival. Change my statement from no one played survival in BC…to unicorns played survival in BC.
Also EW was only off ranged attacks. So you were playing survival as ranged then correct?
1 Like
I played a SV hybrid in TBC, 5/21/35. It was a fun spec for PvP. Granted I didn’t really get into my hunter passionately until WotLK so I am no expert on what was best for raiding in a pre wrath hunter. Prior to wrath it was just an interesting alt, fun for PvP and solo PvE.
Nevertheless, when I played hunter it was primarily SV in both Vanilla and TBC. I liked the extra utility and minimal but effective melee that SV brought. Never was there any doubt that it was primarily a ranged spec though.
3 Likes
Yea that was my point. Think it is going a little off topic but original response was to a guy saying he loved playing survival in vanilla because he could melee. I think survival was highly played in the situation your talking about as a hybrid sort of built, but like you said was a primarily ranged spec, and you never took any of the melee talents other than imp wingclip.
1 Like
Not true. I also took Savage Strikes (20%increased crit for melee), Deflection (increased parry chance), and Counterattack. They were all very useful because melee happened in PvP, and it happened a lot. Those were excellent tools for giving a nice melee wallop when I was in melee, taking less damage while there, and getting the hell out of melee.
There was a melee aspect to hunters prior to the removal of our minimum range, at least in PvP. To state otherwise suggests a lack of engaging the depths of our toolkit.
4 Likes
I would have to agree with Bepples on this as Survival was planned to be melee, but they had few melee abilities and did sub-par damage. Hunters were primarily a ranged class, but some Hunter players focus on melee combat for its novelty or simply for a challenge, it was never considered a actual play-style. However, Hunters still made post asking if a melee spec would work, these post though were rare and would be laughed off quickly.
3 Likes
When Ogdenir and I agree with Bepples on something, then people should pay attention. And if you want to know how little I agree with Bepples, look at the various posts done by my level 8 Goblin Warrior on the previous Hunter Forum.
Link to where I agree with said B: Current state of hunters - #27 by Whim-emerald-dream
I don’t hate Survival I just believe that killing off a spec was the wrong way to give Hunters more diversity. Survival could have stayed range and had a uniquely diffrent play-style. BM would of been focus on pet damage, while MM is the sniper, and SV would be about DoT and burning down the target. It could also had more trap options, like snake trap. Adding in a melee spec this later into a class history just caused a separation between Hunters.
Bepples does make good argumentation for range Survival, but the way he presents his arguments I can not back-up.
Had they made BM Melee it would not have been as bad. The problem that SV had, and BM currently has, it that developmentally it’s stagnated. There has been little change at a mechanical level. The problem with MM is that it is being developed without the end user in mind. Blizzard was tone deaf when it came to Legion’s version of Hunters, and they haven’t paid enough attention to their customers for everything else.
1 Like
You don’t win arguments just by declaring that you’ve won.
I know it would cause disruption. But I don’t agree with the notion that a spec can suddenly be hijacked and afterwards we just throw our hands in the air and say “Oh well, nothing we can do about it now 🤷”. Even ignoring how lopsided and unfair that treatment is, it sets a terrible precedent. Doing what they did to Survival proves that no spec is safe from such a shift. Nothing about Survival stood out; there were specs in the game that were less-established, less-distinct, and less-played. If it can happen to ranged Survival, it can happen to any spec. Including melee Survival. The chances of a melee Hunter spec happening in 2014/early 2015 looked to be nil yet given a change of staff and mindset. There’s no inherent reason it can’t happen in the opposite direction at some point in the future, ESPECIALLY given the changes in 8.0 (it wouldn’t take a whole lot of changes to make it ranged from what it is right now).
If we absolutely need a melee-only Hunter spec in the class, we can work out a better solution that’s fair to everyone like a Gladiator-style “subspec” of BM. But stealing away a whole Hunter spec so abruptly and claiming that changing it back would be the unfair thing is absurd.
Blizzard has proven both implicitly and explicitly that they do not base their decisions on popular demand. All you’re telling me is that the minority melee opinion carries more weight for both you and Blizzard than the rest of the class.
People request niche/outlandish stuff for classes all the time. What puts melee Hunters above them?
Uh, no. Why? Your post was going so well. This is pretty much exactly what Rogues do. If you want a Rogue, go play a Rogue. People have historically picked Hunters for unique ranged gameplay. Why are we constantly forcing anything less on at least one spec?
Best. DPS. Does. Not. Equal. Best. Spec. Design.
The rest is more melee revisionism. No surprise it’s coming from yet another melee class poster. Your class has 3 melee specs that do the same thing at a fundamental level. Why don’t you stick to that? Why are Hunters at fault here when they had 3 ranged specs? Outrageous melee favouritism and selfishness.
Honestly it would have been worse, despite the lore justification. BM has always had a pretty sizable player base just for the pet diversity. Locking that diversity behind melee would cause riots. That’s why at most it should be a level 100 talent like Gladiator that swaps out Cobra Shot/Barbed shot with melee versions that do more damage with a few extra passive bonuses (and work around Chimera Shot/Barrage somehow). Swap Barbed Shot for Lacerate and Cobra Shot for Mongoose Bite and it would look like a decent representation of melee Hunters similar to Survival now, and that could conceivably fit within a talent option.
Very little change in a spec is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes they don’t change much because they don’t need to: they are in a good state already. Nevertheless SV had a lot of opportunity and player input and they even had big changes prepared for WoD which mysteriously got thrown out halfway through WoD beta (likely because the melee remake was decided before WoD launch).
6 Likes
Possible, but most of those people pay more attention to the pet than the way they do their damage. If they make it fun and relatively simple, it with grow in popularity. Heck just making it fun to play can save it. What drove the current divide was you and several others treating players like betrayers for liking Melee SV while people like myself making our own stand, and then both parties were making it easy for trolls to get in and make hay. One expansion later, it’s died down.
Given their history with LW, it’s more likely that they’d buff one option to the point of it being mandatory. They would also put extremely little attention to it. It is something to chew on for sure.
It shows a lack of innovation which can kill a game. It also shows a lack of attention to detail. They put this class into a point where the three specs seemed different reading the spells and tooltips, but were similar to an extreme when you played it. Now MM plays very different in many ways, LnL as it is now is just too close MoP version of MM’s insta-Aimed Shot to my mind. I don’t mind rehashing old mechanics, but there needs to be innovation to bring in both new players, and new investors. The Corroborator still is a viable and functioning fuel delivery system for an internal combustion engine, but the Fuel Injector is a better choice.
They have been ignoring us for over a decade. They started to openly do it in Wrath. I’m surprised that they are still in business with as little attention they are paying to their customers. We’re now in the decline of WoW where it might just be a little too late to save it.
Now that sounds like a good idea for a melee hunter spec. If only they had gone that route all of our lives would have likely been very different post Legion; I dare say for the better.
2 Likes
Too much change and players start rioting and asking “what have you done to my class”; however, too little and players think the developers have forgotten that they exist. What a developer needs to find is a happy medium. Look at the core concepts of each spec and focus on them, but only change those abilities in a way that make the play-style more fluid and engaging. If something breaks up the flow it means that it is not nessary to the spec.
2 Likes
Take a look at what’s happening with MM. Blizzard can easily fix the issues there. The problem is that they refuse to pay any attention to the feedback given. I admit that there is a fine line, but when the largest difference from how I play a class in Wrath vs WoD is getting a gaming mouse in Cataclysm, and a left handed keyboard in WoD and not how the class is played mechanically, then there needs to be innovation.
Is this true though? I mean, it’s certainly true when a class does not have a large consensus “like”, but what about when they do? Take MoP MM, largely considered to be the pinnacle of MM (and many other classes). What if they changed not a single thing from MoP to now? Would more people be playing MM the entire time?
On the other side of that argument, certain changes from MoP to WoD were great. Freeing up a glyph by making Aimed Shot mobile without it was fantastic. The addition of Lone Wolf was imo one of the greatest things to happen to MM ever. Of course it could have been more neutral even then, but lets not go there. Instead let me use it as an argument of a small positive change. WoD mastery was also imo superior. It required skill to use to best effect; a skill that I found to be fun, incentivising standing still without feeling overly punishing you if you had to move.
What if instead of changes to specs for the sake of change, they simply tried to make specs perfect through iteration, starting from a solid base. They don’t need to add or subtract all the time. Starting with a core as strong as MoP they could test out potential changes to specs through things like set bonuses. For those that proved massively popular they could swap out a talent here or there, or even make it baseline, all in an effort to chase perfection.
Making just one or two changes in the baseline or talent tree every expansion would be enough for most people I think, if it was a change that had proven to be popular as a set bonus. Of course even that is not sustainable indefinitely as was stated as justification for “the prune”, but it could last more than a decade if you started with a base as strong as MoP. That’s a long, long time in the game world. Their premise for the prune was flawed. They need to let it go.
1 Like
They don’t want to make the game totally balanced or perfect. People switching to alts and rerolling all the time just adds more playtime without adding more content (i.e. more money). Hence the constant cycle of nerfs and buffs.
While I realize this is not your main point, I would like to comment on it since I didn’t in the post you are responding to. Both “perfect” and “balanced” are impossible. It is a design mentality to work towards that that I was suggesting, not an actual accomplishment of the feat.
I don’t think so. During both Cata and Legion I played very little because I didn’t like the choices they made with the game. In the first case they destroyed my world and I didn’t like what they did to MM (it was the former that really did it for me). In the second case they destroyed all feeling of agency in PvP and they utterly destroyed my favorite spec (MM). If they had instead “iterated towards perfection” with small changes as I am suggesting, instead of “changing for the sake of change” they would have gotten hundreds of dollars more money from me in both cases. Of course that is just one example and hardly representative, but I offer it to make a point.
The game has gotten more money from me when the classes were fun to play and I doubt I am alone. During all the other expansions I never considered unsubbing because I was having too much fun. Making bad classes to encourage making an alt to suck more playtime isn’t economically viable. If you are a long term player you likely already have at least one of every class. If not, making an alt takes a few days to level, and a couple weeks to gear. It extends subscriptions by at most a month. While I have very little faith in Blizzard atm, no one would design a game with that as an intentional long term motivation.
3 Likes
Like a gunslinger. Instead of going the bow and arrow route you could go with a rifle or dual pistols and a shotgun. But that would require blizzard to come up with new spells and get reallly in dept with class design. Which we know wont happen
1 Like
BFA surv is pretty good. BM was ok but it’s impossible to get a decent weapon. MM is just set up stupid and needs work. Sure - surv could use some work - I don’t think the shrapnel bombs do enough damage and compaired to my rogue or frost dk (both of which have equal or slightly better than my hunter gear) the dk and rogue put out much better damage.
Actually spear hunting was common. So survival with a pole arm is quite fitting.
2 Likes
Someone got mad just because I said I liked survival… lol
2 Likes