Curious, am I the only one who read this in the voice of Sheldon Cooper?
It always sounds like someones girlfriend broke up with them whenever I come to read these threads. Some of you need to eat a steak.
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It gets redone as melee every couple of expansions, lmao. Do you really need people to point out the common denominator in its growing list of failed iterations?
The longest lasting and most successful iteration of SV was the ranged version with Explosive Shot.
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The problem with SV is all of it’s mechanics and interactions are pretty dull outside of PvP but in PvP the way you deal pressure is interesting
Ofc PvP is just a minority of the playerbase, but the spec really is very interesting to play in that aspect for min maxing
But then as I said the way it plays in PvE isn’t very interesting; unfortunately it’s like the opposite for the other hunter specs in PvP as well, BM and MM are just not interesting in that part of the game
But it’s a minority I suppose so it sucks
I haven’t really enjoyed any ranged hunter spec since MoP (but I have still really liked the game) so I’m biased I guess
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You are correct, the Devs should listen to the Wendys window worker on core gameplay and class designs.
We can literally do that now. So guess were back baby!
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This is how I feel too. Survival is super interesting to play in pvp. I also think it’s more interesting in pve as well. BM is painful to pve with managing barbed shot stacks and that’s all you stare at. Marks is just aimed shot spam. Survival is the most engaging spec by far in all content.
The only interesting thing about marks was resonating arrow usage in SL. Other than that, it’s just boring.
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It hasn’t failed, it was fun In legion and its been tweaked (ups and dons just like all specs) since, it’s legitimately fun now as well. I enjoy all the movement the class has. It’s a melee spec with ranged bits, instead of ranged with melee bits. You kinda need to move on.
People enjoy melee Survival.
Also this. I like our pistol. I also like lunging from from 50yards away and turning people into pincushions.
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The fact that it’s perpetually extremely unpopular tells us it has failed. The only way they can get anyone to ever play it is by buffing its damage to the point where it’s the best in the game by far; if not, it’s just unpopular and avoided. Most people don’t enjoy melee SV even if Warrior mains show up to the Hunter forums and insist people do.
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You have nothing to back up your claim that it’s “perpetually extremely unpopular”, the same circle of people being salty on the hunter forums over and over does not equal everyone or even the majority.
I see plenty of Survival hunters in game, in Dungeons and Raids and PVP, so your claim that they’re not popular doesn’t really hold up to actual experience.
You kinda chopped your own argument out from under ya, “People only play it cause it’s good!”… m’kay? That applies to a lot of people and a lot of specs honestly. Regardless, it also directly contradicts “it’s unpopular” claim if people are indeed playing.
I don’t care about being the best at damage, I just care that it’s fun, and DF Survival is very fun right now.
More personal bias with nothing to back it up.
Monk actually.
I don’t know what to tell you, I see plenty of people in game playing Survival. I enjoy playing Survival. shrugs
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Lol?? Have you ever looked at any representation data from raiding? Take a trip through warcraftlogs some time. Survival is in the pits since and including Legion. It’s either last place or close to it. The only exception was last season where they buffed the ever-loving hell out of it and even then it was still relatively unpopular with most Hunters sticking to BM.
Your anecdotal experience is meaningless because that depends on you a) remembering correctly and b) telling the truth: two areas where SV fans often come up short. Actual data has SV Hunters as very unpopular and most people will tell you they hardly ever see them. Head into BGs some time and it’s routine to see 15+ Hunters, none of which are Survival. Maybe 1 or 2 if they’re tuned well in that patch.
Blizzard themselves talked about SV being unpopular. They didn’t turn around and say “actually it’s really popular and well-liked”. They said “most Hunters prefer to be ranged so we don’t expect them to swtich”.
No, most specs do not need best-in-the-game damage to achieve middle-of-the-pack representation. Right now SV is the highest damage Hunter spec yet a grand total of 2% of raiding parses are SV. There are more MM players than SV… and MM is horrifically bad right now; worst in the game, in fact.
Before Legion SV when it was a real ranged Hunter spec was routinely very widely played and enjoyed, and was in fact the most popular in the game at a few points. Right now in WotLK Classic 85% of raiding Hunters are playing it, and that’s with just a 3% damage lead over MM. Melee brains can deny it all they want but these are stone cold facts.
Do you have fun alternating between Mongoose Bite and Kill Command all day? Because that’s SV in a nutshell. To quote Azortharion: “the closest thing to a genuine 2-button rotation you will ever likely see.”. The OP of this thread is a huge melee SV fanboy and he’s here dooming about it. Even SV fanboy CEO MarcelianOnline is on Youtube rating it as one of the worst specs to play. The SV tree is infamously bad: one of the worst in the game, in fact. And no amount of fanboy denial will change it. Again there’s a reason only 2% of raiding Hunters are playing it, and that reason literally cannot be tuning in 10.0.
/yawn
You’re clearly very uninformed.
Melee main is a melee main. Same thing.
Melee players a) struggle to imagine a spec being interesting without being melee, and b) have a high sense of entitlement since Blizzard took away a spec from ranged players just for them. That’s why they’ve spent the last few years trying to explain to Hunters why it was a good thing to replace one of the most popular specs in the game with one of the least popular.
I do know what to tell you: you evidently live under a rock. Even most SV mains don’t pretend it’s a popular spec. It’s very evidently not.
P.S. If your “experience” is mostly from the last 2 seasons, let me fill you in on details you obviously missed. With Sepulcher’s release they handed SV one of the most spectacularly overpowered borrowed powers the game has ever seen, buffing their uncapped AoE, which was already very high damage, to be so powerful that it eclipsed every other DPS in the game with the sole exception of Destruction Warlock; that pair of specs was literally +30% damage over the second place in M+. This caused a ton of players from other classes to flock to SV since it was literally a required pick to clear keys above 20. Once SV dropped back down to “normal” damage (still the best in the class by a comfortable margin, BTW), all those FotM rerollers fled back to their mains/the next FotM and it’s back to near last place representation again. So, yeah: there was a time when you may have seen many SV Hunters in game because they bribed everyone to play it. That time isn’t now, nor was it any time before Sepulcher.
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Which data are we talking about, x amount overall, world first, mythic? What specific data are YOU claiming as evidence.
Just a reminder that by going by a numbered tiering there will always be a spec in “last” no matter what.
So just straight up demonizing and mudslinging to prove your own moral superiority, gotcha.
I do see them, your experiences are different than mine.
That interview is from Legion, when the change to melee first occurred. Here’s Ion’s response to the “new” Survival being the least represented in patch 7.2
Ion: Overall I think we are satisfied with balance. There is always people who perceive themselves on the lower end, and no matter how good the balance is, no matter how tight the difference gap between the specs, probably lower is always going to feel frustrating about that, and people are going to be vocal about it. We understand that, but I think it is an ongoing process. We are never just sitting back and saying: “Alright, we are done. It’s ok if some specs fall behind.”
Representation doesn’t necessarily matter as much, I think. We knew with Survival Hunter that we were making a niche spec. It is a melee spec for a class that has traditionally being range. I think that a lot of existing hunters, they are all hunters because they want to be a range class, and so we don’t necessarily expect them or want them to feel like they should be changing; but for new players picking up that class, it is an intriguing option; and we have seen a lot of Survival Hunters doing extremely well at very high levels of play. So the fact that they are not playing as often, I don’t think reflects upon their potential so much as it just does where the audience is at right now. That’s not much of a problem.
You’ll forgive me for not believing you. And even then, so what if there’s more people playing MM over Survival? There’s more people playing X class than Hunter. You’re moving the goalposts around to justify your original statement that no one likes Survival Hunter and lying and demonizing people who disagree with you.
lol
More insults, kay.
That’s a lot of classes in a nutshell, builder abilities and spender abilities.
I don’t know any of those people and I don’t care about them, unless they’re at Blizzard actually working on the class.
There’s plenty of buttons in the rotation since the DF overhaul.
Numbers without context, kay. When are these from?
It shows Survival being lower than most, but that’s not the same claim as them bein unpopular.
That malice is eating you alive.
More insults and mudslinging, kay.
I’ve never claimed ranged is uninteresting so you’re making stuff up there right off the bat. I enjoy the other hunter specs, I enjoy certain casters. i just enjoy melee more.
Again, more of you making stuff up since you know what all Survival players are thinking/doing apparently.
Since Legion, so quite a few seasons.
As they do with every nerf and buff wave.
I’ve seen plenty of Survival in game before and after Sepulchre so keep on making up things to justify your rage.
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I skipped everything past the first paragraph because it’s apparent that you opted to take almost 30 minutes to write an essay of a response instead of 1 minute to check for yourself. I specifically name-dropped Warcraftlogs and linked a screenshot from there. Look for yourself.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/29#difficulty=4
The image I linked was for mythic. That link is for heroic. You can use the website to navigate by patch and raid literally all the way back to WoD. See for yourself the kind of particiaption SV routinely gets.
Parse = log of a boss kill including the spec. Less parses = less people playing the spec. It’s not a perfect 1:1 correlation but it’s a strong correlation.
Most people don’t write lengthy responses when they’re not informed at all.
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You have done nothing but throw insults and demand people do your research for you. “Check warcraftlogs” is equivalent to “just Google it”. You’re making the claims, back them up with actual evidence.
The screenshot didnt have any context, you could have not cropped out the top with the pertinent info. It’s also raid participation over the last 2 weeks for mythic Sepulchre, kinda curious why people would bother at this point but regardless, different data from current content but data nonetheless. It’s “beating” 4 other specs in heroics, and more in Normal, and 2 in Mythic, so again, not the most played but definitely not “universally unpopular”.
“Well in Mythic Raid they’re doing” isn’t really much an argument due to the super niche set of players and different mindsets for it.
Or you could have just backed up your argument to begin with and not dragged this out.
They also don’t throw insults out of the blue.
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It is beyond bad. So many talent choices are just a waste of space, not to mention the actual gameplay mechanic loop of the class contradicts itself.
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Warcraftlogs is the standard everyone uses when talking about representation. Trying to claim people are dishonest or stalling for not linking Warcraftlogs is the sort of empty argument you’d expect from someone too uninformed to come up with anything else. It might be making you feel better to keep posting that particular line of thought but you can probably imagine how silly it looks to everyone else here, especially as you’re barking “show the evidence” after I literally linked directly to it.
“Survival at least isn’t last place” is quite a leap from “I see them all the time in game”. The point is that Survival is usually among last place. No other spec has such a stark gap between its potential performance and its representation. Other specs don’t need to be buffed to be 30% better than everything else just to see an average level of participation.
You can convince yourself that this is just a raiding thing and there are plentiful Survival Hunters happily frolicking through the meadows outside of raiding, but Survival Hunters look to be scarce everywhere. Generally it’s a lot harder to track anything outside of raiding but one site that did a really good job was wowranks. It was active for a few months in early Shadowlands and it got its data by looking at M+ completion leaderboards then scanning the entire guild lists of everyone on the leaderboard. As you can imagine this was a lot of data flow, and the site can no longer operate because Blizzard abruptly and silently applied heavy rate limiting restrictions to the APIs the website used. Could be a server performance thing, or it could be the fact that this website was primarily used to expose the utter failure of Blizzard’s SL covenant design philosophy and Blizzard has a history of avoiding accountability by hiding data (hence why they don’t report subscription counts anymore). Who knows. Here is an archive:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210305022330/https://wowranks.io/stats
That’s as close as you get to real data including casuals outside of raiding, and Survival was…4% of the Hunter playerbase. What a surprise! Maybe it’s suddenly a lot higher now but only in casual content and not raiding, but that’s a stretch. There was just never a big audience for melee Hunter. Look at you here: it’s not even your main class, you’re a Monk main posting from a max-level Warrior alt. That’s what it’s like with SV: most of the people who defend it are melee mains who play it as an alt at best, or worse hardly any at all.
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Well said. These people are casuals who have no clue. I wouldn’t even waste energy trying to disprove what they think.
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Is there any factual evidence to back up this statement? And what is considered a high level of play? And when was this?
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I hate to say to this and I know I always lead heated debate with bepples on forums because he hates SV hunter , but he is right. Last night I checked pre patch popularity in DF and SV is literally on the bottom.
The guy that makes guides on icy veins I’m sorry to say this but has literally zero knowledge about SV hunter.
I prefer melee version of SV hunter over ranged because it used to be fun , but right now this version of SV hunter is not so great.
Our best M+ AOE option was removed, they gave us Furry of the eagle that hits like wet noddle and has long CD. They say that it has good single target damage, but even that it’s not worth considering because no one will pick melee hunter over range, unless it deals absurd amount of damage. SV doesn’t bring anything to the table that other two spec can’t provide, except that is melee which is a big monies in competitive play.
And as long Blizzard devs are taking this approach we won’t have a good spec. It was same issue SV had in WoD and MoP. They made it good in PvP and because of that it suffered in PVe for the majority of expansion.
Wouldn’t be easier to add that little tooltip addition that says reduced by X% or to X% in BG, arenas and warmode. I guess it’s harder than we think. I swear I wish I had a chance to ask ovo designer and hunter class devs what’s going on when they work on hunters. Hangover? On drugs? Sick?
I was looking for this to post it, it’s just terrible what they did to SV again. I know you would love ranged back but at least we agree that DEVs have no idea how to design this class. I still prefer it to stay melee but unless it deals again absurd amount of damage it will never see competitive play.
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It’s just a trademark Hazzikostas brain dump. That’s how he responds to difficult question. He brain-dumps excuses: just putting anything on the page or out in speech to have a longer response. Sort of like a Gish gallop. It’s what leads to such nonsense mockable arguments like “we don’t want PvP vendors because players might have trouble finding them”. If you look at Ion’s responses over the years you’ll see this is how he routinely answers questions; he takes an incoherent list of exscuses and glues them together to make them seem coherent.
In this case he’s talking about SV performing well; probably alluding to the SV Hunter included on an early Gul’dan kill earlier that year (this interview was in mid 2017). Which, of course, doesn’t make sense with the rest of the post. Tuning is irrelevant. It’s easy to tune any spec high or low. That’s a hotifx-level chage; a record in a database. A spec having high performance doesn’t make it a well-designed spec. In fact, if a spec is so unpopular while also being tuned well enough for people to “do extremely well” that means they seriously screwed up with the design because otherwise people would be fine playing it.
He’s talked about SV one other time since then, and in that time he basically argued that SV was originally very different and over time became more similar to MM (the opposite is true; it started off similar and then diverged), He also seems to think SV was like Vanilla in that it was all passive PvP utility until MoP and that the removal of talent trees took away everything unique about the spec necessitating it copying a bunch of abilities from MM. In reality a) 5.0 didn’t significantly change the spec, b) SV had its own unique new damaging abilities since WotLK, and c) all those passive utilities that were in the talent tree became spellbook passives you just automatically got while levelling up as SV.
Interviewers need to seriously challenge Ion when he starts braindumping nonsense excuses instead of just accepting them at face value. But there’s a broader problem in gaming journalism… even broader beyond that… where journalists act more as PR mouthpieces for interviewees instead of challenging the BS as it comes. One time someone actually did do it was Preach Gaming when Hazzikostas was making spectacularly nonsense claims about how covenants were going to play out in SL. I wish Preach did an interview with Hazzikostas about Hunters some time because I think he wouldn’t have allowed an answer like the one Hazzikostas gave about SV. Preach used to be a ranged SV main and greatly misses the spec.
Azortharion wrote that and he is VERY knowledgable. He drives most of the Hunter theorycrafting efforts, he runs the Hunter discord, and he has extensively played all specs at the highest levels. He 100% knows what he is talking about when it comes to SV.
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That’s the kid from discord? I mean regards rotation there is not much to miss there, he is let’s say right.
Regards his view of hunter how it feels he is way off there. His claim is that SV hunter has consonantes good AOE or ST damage. Looks like he ate cereal with bad milk and got it confused. SV hunter is almost at the bottom of dps