I’m not convinced that this is true. Back in April or so, in response to the version of hunter they had made for BfA, I posted a rather lengthy exposition on exactly how this could be accomplished. I have it on a word document somewhere. I will have to dust it off, revise it, and repost it. It is worthy of discussion.
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I stated I switched over from a mage to Surv a few months ago. I played the hell out of it in beta but didn’t pull the trigger on it then. Glad I have now and it’s the most fun I have had in many years. Surv is here to stay, hunters have 2 other range specs so deal with it. Surv is amazingly fun.
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That’s odd isn’t it. But one could still tell who I was responding to at least.
If you are talking about the other thread where you get things outright wrong, then you are still wrong there. You have been open about never playing SV, which means that you have been using every SV’s players posts, here and elsewhere for your information. If you actually Play SV and I’m wrong I’ll admit it and concede that point. That is something you seem to lack.
I’m not either. I am how ever convinced that it’s the best chance we have to getting Ranged SV back.
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Cool story; you still have minimal investment in the class v.s. most people here and I think that plays a big part in why you treat former ranged SV players are expendable. It’s selfish.
You still haven’t made any argument as to how SV being fun (it isn’t for everyone, but OK) is directly related to it being melee. Wouldn’t it still be just as fun if they replaced the remaining couple of melee-only mechanics with ranged ones? At least in that scenario the people who are put off by melee won’t be turned away. After all, in all the weekly #ShillingForSurvival specs that pop up here (and I see you went ahead and posted your own confidence-booster thread, which I found amusing), very few people seem to specifically like the spec because it’s melee. All the things they do like, e.g. rotational flow, are independent of the spec being melee. So why keep it melee?
Ranged SV taught us that NO spec is safe EVER, so don’t act like melee SV is safe. It just went through another major remake in this expansion. It’s still in flux.
I’m sure you can come up with a compromise, but it will never be close to as good as having them separate and it will weaken both identities. You would be limiting talent options for both options, obviously, since the talent choices are already taken up by the parts that define which “spec” you’re playing. You also have to have minimal interaction between abilities since that’s the standard for talents: you can’t make talent choices in one row dependent on talent choices in another. You’re basically forcing the talent system to handle something it was never meant to handle. Even if you pulled it off, it would be an ever-present challenge and hindrance for Marksmanship. I understand you might settle for a non-ideal solution but I don’t even think there is any good solution.
zzz you still can’t grasp the part where you have to explain what I’m wrong about on top of why I might have come to a wrong conclusion. Tall order considering I’m never wrong, but it’s not enough to say that someone is not informed on a topic and therefore they are wrong by default. That’s a reverse argument to authority.
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Then make yourself clear. Then again, you just lost credibility again. You should stop with the false accusations. It’s getting pretty bad.
I started to really play hunter during MoP and range survival spec has always been my favorite.
I was disappointed when survival became melee. However, I do like legion and current BfA melee survival. I think its fun.
It’s fine to not like melee. It’s fine to feel betrayed. Fun is subjective. I don’t need to prove or come up any evidence why it’s fun. I don’t need to justify why melee survival is fun as I don’t need anyone to justify why they don’t like melee survival.
To each its own. It’s not selfish to enjoy a spec. It’s not selfish why I am ok with melee survival even though I do miss range survival.
I was a hunter from March 2005 until middle of ToT and played no alts in which I switched to Boomkin. Played Elemental from WoD until the beginning of BfA but kept up with hunter. So if I say its fun then I’m automatically wrong? Why should I have to make an arguement of it being fun when “fun” is subjective. You have took this way to deep and personal. So let me ask this, no where at all in history have “hunters” ever used a spear or traps? I mean the fantasy is there.
It really is one of the most useful melee specs. Plenty of tools and utility, mobility and yes even damage. If a raid has a lot of range players, there is nothing wrong with having a survival hunter who can do anything a range hunter can. If we want to talk about useless melee then Feral druids shouldnt get invites at all. Nor should Demon Hunters except for the debuff they give.
You should really stop taking this as a personal attack Blizzard as done to you. A ton of people enjoy the spec and who are you to tell people they are basically wrong for liking and enjoying it? As for a “major remake” of course it is, it’s still basically new, it will go through changes which is normal for anything. I was so enthralled with Elemental I knew every small detail, even ones people didn’t realize. I didnt like the changes going into BfA, but I didnt cry and complain on the forums or at all. I tried it out and wasnt for me and I felt like I should try something new. I find it hilarious that me saying I love Surv is me shilling…OMEGALUL kid, OMEGALUL
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@Masoschism Your ideas probably would work, but you assume that Blizzard would adopt them when they’ve made it pretty clear they have no intention of ever following up on the promise they would merge them.
The current iteration of MM demonstrates they want the spec to move further away from the mobile spec. old survival used to be.
I would also argue that opportunity costs within the talent structure to make it work would have to be finely tuned/balanced which they have a bad track record of keeping up with. 4-5 talents you would take to be able to play survival is 4-5 talents and MM hunter would be one up from their base skills package.
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The way that classes with spam-able AOE make what you said about DH wrong. Survival hunter does okay cleave with certain talents, but it will never beat classes that dominate AOE.
Survival hunter doesn’t bring anything that makes it unique. It doesn’t bring a debuff, you can’t spam* purge, you don’t have a group stun, and although it does do damage (and has bloodlust) it will never dominate M+ or raid based content like a rogue or mage.
Doesn’t mean you can’t play it, but its a shell of where hunters used to be when one of the three ranged specs always did competitive damage with other pure dps classes.
People are upset because of what you stated; a purely* melee hunter arguably does more single target damage and can almost do everything a ranged hunter can. Some people will argue it shouldn’t be I thing, but I’m okay with it existing although I dislike the BFA version. Whats not okay is how poorly tuned the two ranged specs are in comparison and the lack of distinction.
If you PvP at all its even more evident where MM is non-existent and they refuse to fix it while continuously nerfing BM. It sends the message they don’t want want ranged hunters anymore which is where the animosity comes from.
People that want properly built ranged hunter spec are likely at this point to have to wait a year or more from BFA launch, maybe even 9.0, before it will be fixed. Some people, (myself included), get tired of bouncing around to different classes spending more time because they decided to completely redesign something that isn’t broken.
I played DK in Cata-Wod, and Ele Mop-Wod, if you liked Ele in legion it was the same situation. They utterly trashed Ele in the transition from Mop to Wod. It was non-existent because they wanted to push the idea of multi-strike/turret lord. They scrapped the idea and then fixed Ele for Legion.
I’m not subbing to sit through two more years of having specs in my class still in beta test. I got tired of it on shaman prior to switching to hunter.
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You have a habit of posting things that don’t make any sense in the context of what you’ve quoted.
Better, but doubtful.
Read more carefully. I asked if you can show that people’s enjoyment derived from SV is dependent upon SV being melee. It’s a very relevant question to ask because very often when people praise SV they are citing parts other than the spec being melee. For example, playstyle flow. It’s a very valid point and SV is actually pretty good there. But it’s not something that depends on it being melee. Ranged specs can flow well too. Ranged SV did.
Basically my view is if SV were changed back to ranged you could still satisfy many of the players of melee SV, where if it were to remain melee it’s much more excluside towards the people who played ranged SV.
Sure they have, but in WoW’s history the Hunter class has always been ranged.
Uh, no. It’s actually critically lacking in unique utility and is one of the least-useful melee specs. All its utility is shared by the ranged Hunter specs, and other melee bring potent utilities including both of the specs you mentioned (less so Feral but even that has Stampeding Roar). Demon Hunters are actually one of the most valuable melee. They have the Darkness raid cooldown, for example, along with incredible burst in both single target and AoE with unparallelled mobility.
See this thread:
https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/2456007-With-survival-getting-almost-nothing-changed-in-patch-why-is-no-tuning-been-done?p=50655841&viewfull=1#post50655841
Except we already know it isn’t played by “a ton” of people. If you want to see what a “ton” of people enjoying a spec looks like, go look at SV during the Cata-WoD (1st tier) days. What I’m saying is that we should never be removing and replacing specs, especially when its from a very widely enjoyed spec to a very niche spec.
SV is going through an unusually high degree of flux even for a new spec. It’s rivalling the Paladin specs from Vanilla to Cata, but even those revamps where somewhat evolutionary and iterative. What’s even more prominent is the way it suddenly changed direction; it went from being purely ranged in WoD to being purely melee in Legion, and then whiplashed back towards ranged (but not completely) in BFA. That’s an indicator that they saw no future in the Legion approach and given that they can suddenly change their minds on a whim like that there are no guarantees that can be made about the future of SV. For the record, I think SV in 9.0 will at least have the same model (i.e. melee with a hint of ranged) in 9.0, although I do think they might change up the toolkit e.g. replacing Kill Command. But no guess is safe.
What is your Elemental anecdote meant to prove? That if major changes are made you should just jump ship immediately and give no feedback? That’s a terrible attitude. If everyone did that no spec would ever improve. If that happened with Legion SV, as all the pro-SV people demanded at the time, we would still have Legion SV.
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If only there was a way to make everyone happy… Dark Ranger
So Rexxar is ranged? You said in WoW’s history and technology Rexxar has been there and is now. He is basically survival. Has been since his introduction in WC 3 when he was melee. See, melee survival WAS first.
Actually Rexxar is a melee Beastmaster. Has been since Warcraft 3. He wasn’t “changed” to survival until just before Legion.
What Bepples was saying is that people have a misconception that survival in classic was melee. It wasn’t. It had a few extra melee tools to help it out when people got in the dead zone, but they were always meant to get back out to range and utilize their bow. At no point did survival play as a full on melee before Legion. If someone did use it that way they were using it wrong.
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Rexxar has always been bm. His abilities in wc3 were summon beast, summon beast, and summon beast with his ultimate being stampede, i wonder which spec uses that. Also in wc3 his class was BEASTMASTER, check that out. If there is a npc modern survival is based on its huln highmountain, that random tauren who was brought in to make a sale on survival going from our mobile magic ranged spec that uses fancy traps turning into the thing it became in legion.
I will never understand why they thought survival was the right pick for making a melee hunter. We are currently at the best point of melee survival the magic time where hunters in pvp are bad if they use ranged weapons because melee hunter is better. The magic time where survival is our highest simming spec in pve, and represents many of our highest parses in uldir. And even in this point of peak melee survival it is a shunned spec because many people picked hunter as their class long ago, because they wanted to shoot things. and also because survival is one of 13 choices for a melee slot, and it doesn’t have anything unique to give a raid beyond above average damage.
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Exactly this
If a mythic raid has say 6 spots for melee they have to bring a warrior for shout unless they have a prot warrior, they also have to bring a havoc for his buff. That leaves survival competing with 4 to 5 free melee slots if that.
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I agree with pretty much everything you said but I wanted to point out that it’s actually 19 melee specs now with Survival. If you remove the tank specs it’s 15. That means that 53% of all the specs are melee and 42% of all the specs are melee dps. This leaves the ranged archer, please realize that there are different flavors of ranged (i don’t care for casters but love archers) just as there are different flavors of melee/caster/tank/healer, at a whole 5% of the total spec choices. Yes I know people have different tastes but when you want to play an archer and you only have a 5% (2 out of 36) option vs 53% for melee or 28% choice for caster(not including healers) it really is mind boggling that a company would remove one choice just to add it to a group that was already 50% of all the options.
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Like many others have said, Rexxar was retconned to Survival to coincide with the Legion melee SV introduction. He was described as a Beast Master before then.
Funnily enough, Heroes of the Storm turned Rexxar into a ranged class to better match WoW Hunters. Which is as it should be. Established WoW specs should not be so beholden to particular WoW lore characters. None of them have a skillset that perfectly matches the playable class (which, by the way, is what I was referring to in my post; not some more vague notion of what a Hunter is in the Warcraft universe).
Funnily enough, he wasn’t Survival either. Not only that; he was never actually described as a Hunter before Legion. The pet Eche’ro was written in at the same time as Legion to retroactively make him a Hunter. Before that, he had very minimal representation in lore and NOTHING to indicate any connection to the Hunter class.
Here’s his wowpedia page from before the Legion announcement. He had a spear and that’s about it. Funnily enough, his page still had him listed as a Warrior until Legion alpha opened.
https://wow.gamepedia.com/index.php?title=Huln_Highmountain&oldid=3508422
There are 13 melee DPS specs and 11 ranged DPS specs.
You are right about archers being critically underrepresented, though. I don’t think there should be more than 3 ranged weapon specs… but I don’t think there should be less, either.
This is actually a really good argument to use against the “dehomogenisation” angle for melee Survival. Sure, it makes the class diverse, whether or not that makes it a good thing over all. But it makes the game as a whole LESS diverse because you are taking a spec that is unique v.s. the rest of the game and making it something far closer to many other specs.
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Has Booples not realized how much of a meme he is known to be?
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Not a meme when what he says makes sense. You just seem indisposed to the idea that he’s putting forward which many of us agree with.
No matter what you say they deleted a spec most of us enjoyed in order to implement us spec that a portion of the hunters dislike while trashing the two ranged specs.
MM is never going to be old survival short of a complete revamp making that the 3rd revamp and highly unlikely mid expac.
If I read your posts correctly too you switched to hunter because you like survival which is fare enough but also makes you a FOTM re roller. I never saw these types of posts in Legion to the extent they exist now, and its because they made this survival brain-dead by removing the complex rotation and significantly buffed dps to attract FOTM.
Its obviously a ploy to attract non-hunters to the class. Every time you type something disparaging about his posts a dev. by chance might read it and look to it as affirmation that they’re okay with leaving the two ranged specs as trash because their new brain child makes the FOTM happy.
It wouldn’t be hard for them to make a truly ranged or hybrid survival the way it is now. There are rows of talents throughout all three specs where multiple choices are ignored which could be used to fix this. Instead, its just to sides arguing pointlessly while nothing gets fixed.
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