It doesn’t, though.
You seem to have difficulty separating the concept of an argument to a person’s identity.
To you, if a person is of bad character, their arguments are automatically wrong. That isn’t how things work.
For example, Preach says he wishes Survival were still ranged. You can dismiss his take as bad because he exploited at some point, but what about when Liquid Max comes out and says the same thing? Or Izen Hart? or Bellular? Yes all of them have come out and criticised the concept of a melee Hunter. Are they all just bad people for some reason or another?
I don’t think many would disagree that a healthy spec would be one that has a sizeable regular following and a consistent and coherent design, neither of which are true for Survival.
Like I said, this would be ideal. Not even trying to be insulting. BM and MM are specs that build on the core foundation of a WoW Hunter, which features ranged weapons as the core part. Ranged SV once did as well. If you didn’t like any of those 3 specs that means you didn’t like the class and the reason you like SV so much is because it isn’t built as a Hunter spec. We should not be designing Hunter specs for people who don’t like Hunters.
Well it’s not like very many people from other classes even showed up to main Survival given that not many people showed up period, so it really wouldn’t affect a lot of people in any case.
We don’t have any surveys for this so I’m just highlighting what I’ve seen around forums. While there are die-hards like you who say melee is a critical part of their enjoyment, there are also Hunters who tolerate Survival and play it despite being melee. Since rerolling is a lot more commitment than respeccing it’s safe to assume at least a sizeable part of SV’s current playerbase fits into that camp.
I’m not saying they don’t matter: I’m saying they don’t matter more than ranged SV mains, so the class should not be designed as if they do matter more.
It’s been in a state of flux since then. They evidently aren’t very happy with how it’s turning out if they keep having to reinvent it including various compromises towards the ranged side of Hunters. Did you know Legion SV had no ranged attacks beyond a couple talents (grenades and throwing axes)? Now it literally has access to more ranged weapon abilities than melee weapon abilities. Even as they try to keep it melee they can’t avoid the influence of the baseline ranged foundation of Hunters.
They’ve already compromised. It’s just not good enough, and if they don’t want to take it to the next level they can be content with wasting even more time and effort reinventing an unpopular concept every couple of years.
Thought experiment: let’s say the take the current SV and they replace the melee abilities with ranged equivalents. Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, Carve, Butchery, Muzzle, and Fury of the Eagle are replaced with ranged equivalents and Coordinated Assault and Spearhead lose their charge component. Let’s just say it keeps Harpoon for utility purposes and it loses Aspect of the Eagle because it no longer needs it. It uses a ranged weapon instead of a melee weapon. Otherwise every other choice and interaction stays the same.
It’s the same gameplay from a rotation perspective. It’s literally the same gameplay if you’re up in front of the enemy. It just uses a ranged weapon instead and you can now do full damage up to 40 yards away.
Is it a better or worse spec? Does it become more or less popular? How much of SV’s current playerbase stays around and how much of them quit?
I know you would quit but I’m interested to see how you think the spec would fare after that.
It’s not just Wrath Classic. It was popular for most of the WotLK-WoD stretch.
Huh, so both sides of the argument would have to accept shortcomings but otherwise keep most of what they want? Almost sounds like a compromise or something.
Yes it wouldn’t be ideal for someone like me. If I had absolute power there would not be any melee Hunter at all because I see it as unnecessary. MoP is commonly cited as Hunter’s best expansion and that was one where we had no melee weapon dependence whatsoever. However, I understand a small niche of people like melee Hunters so I see compromise as acceptable. If part of the BM tree were a melee path I would be fine with that so long as most of BM as it is remains preserved. I would never take the melee talents but I would be fine with them being there. What I’m not fine with is an entire 3rd of the class, one that was already occupied, be dedicated to such a niche concept.
The lead developer literally called it a niche spec.
… the option they took is the one that screwed the maximum number of people over. You just don’t see it that way because you’re part of the niche that got preferential treatment.
No, it is overdone. That specific way of approaching melee combat is already covered by at least 5 specs. Ranged weapon usage is very unique; only Hunters do it, and one of those specs (BM) already has little focus on the ranged weaponry. It makes zero sense to take away from that limited pool of ranged weapon specs to add to an already crowded pool of physical melee.
What’s that got to do with anything? Traps come with the Hunter baseline.
Butchery is just a generic physical melee option. Nothing about it speaks “Hunter”.
That’s one of the problems with melee SV. For all this talk about the melee aspect being so critical, the melee parts of the spec are the most generic and boring parts. It’s just two abilities: your single target spender (Raptor Strike/Mongoose Bite) and your AoE CDR/filler (Carve/Butchery). Most of the aesthetic flair and uniqueness comes from things like Wildfire Bomb and the pets, which notably aren’t reliant (or worse: outright conflicting) with being melee.
I think even you understand at some level what a ridiculous stretch this is.
You didn’t do it personally, but you do appreciate that it happened.
As for Blizzard: it’s utter nonsense to cry “live and let live” and say we get worked up over nothing when we lost our favourite spec.
Man there must be some weird bug then where I have all these achievements from 2008 including some that you can’t get any more after WotLK.
Doesn’t make a difference. It’s a unique BM thing. It should not belong to all specs.
And let’s be honest: it’s usually not MM Hunters asking for this.
Do you see big arguments like these popping up for other specs?
Not arguments over tuning: arguments over the core design and existence of the spec.
Special status? All I’m saying is that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. You’re the one saying the opposite; that the few should be prioritised.
Did you know Myspace is still running and has users?
It’s the slimmest of fractions of a percentage of what it once was, but some people honestly still use it.
Are we forbidden to use the word “abandoned” to describe MySpace?
We’ve already been over this. No one is seriously saying that there are 0 Survival Hunters. That’s a strawman. What we are saying is that Survival is very unpopular.
What is the time range for that data? As in, what dates are we talking about?
I know the answer already. I just want to see what you think it is.
But most of the time ranged SV wasn’t “poor performance” and therefore its representation was fine, as opposed to melee SV which is lacking in representation even in good performance.
Most specs do not need best-in-the-game damage to achieve middle-of-the-pack representation. Ranged SV didn’t. Even during ICC back then it saw decent representation. I think it will be less so in WotLK Classic because people are a lot more performance-minded now than they were back then, but it also won’t be at abandonment status like melee SV is on the regular.
In Siege of Orgrimmar BM did more damage than SV yet SV had higher representation ¯\(ツ)/¯
Not to say that SV was more liked than BM, but there was a time where it could stand up to BM even if you try to rewrite history and say it wasn’t so.
Nope, this is just the revisionism I was talking about. This is only true if you count Legion SV and beyond.
On the eve of Legion, looking back to the 12 years prior before that point, SV was more often than not a popular spec.
Even if you count Vanilla and BC before the specs had any real definition (4 years) + the 1 year of HFC where they gutted it right as Legion was being announced, that’s 5 years out of 12.
Otherwise for most of WotLK to WoD it saw healthy representation.
Again you only try to deny this out of a scheme to make melee SV look better. You’re not delusional enough to argue that melee SV is popular so you go for the angle that ranged SV was just as unpopular and they didn’t make anything worse.
Sokyra is that delusional, BTW. They think melee SV is actually popular. Maybe you two should sort that out.
You haven’t debunked anything. I won’t entertain attempts to divert the discussion.