I see people still ask for old Survival back. But I believe they don’t exactly need the actual old Survival with Explosive Shot, etc… What they’re asking for is at least a ranged Survival.
So, my idea is:
What about giving current Survival the alternative to use bows/guns? Don’t know if this is technically possible, but basically only Raptor would have to change when a ranged weapon is used. We could maybe get Aspect of Eagle always active while using bow/gun…
Of course some other minor things would need to change, such as Carve.
The main thing here is that they don’t need to create a 4th spec to please the ranged Survival lovers.
What basically describing is the old way hunter was played during Classic. Why do all these range and melee tweaks all it will accomplish is half the player will like the range part and hate the melee part while the other half will like to melee part and hate the range part.
What Blizzard need to do is stick with one choice either survival will be 100% melee or 100% range and accept that fact that there will be critic regardless what the decided to choose.
You can never make players happy even with your 4th spec idea. There will always be people who will complain.
Some people will ask for a melee/range hybrid hunter spec.
Some people will ask for a three pets hunter spec.
Some people will ask for a tanking hunter spec.
some people will ask for a dual wielding pistol hunter spec.
Like I said Blizzard can never make everyone happy and adding a 4th, 5th, 6th , 7th hunter spec will only create more problems than solutions.
What do people consider to be the role of “ranged Survival”? To me it seems like everything about the old SV specs could be accomplished with MM talents and PVP talents (and in some respects it already is), other than the label of “Survival”. I wouldn’t say that it’s 100% successful at this today, just that talents are the right place for that to happen rather than trying to add another spec.
Yes some variants of the old SV had fun rotations, but the reality was everyone just used whichever of MM, BM, or SV was most viable at the time. For MM and SV especially, you could have had the abilities swapped at the time (like MM was the spec with black arrow and explosive shot) and we’d probably still be having the same conversation today.
Everyone would just be obliged to be ranged all the time, then, and there would be no reason to ever go melee. Might as well make it purely ranged at that point.
Also, while I would play current Survival if it were ranged, it still needs big changes. Kill Command needs to go, and the spec needs to look to its past to see what mechanics worked and made the spec unique (Explosive Shot + DoTs). I don’t think just making Raptor Strike and Carve ranged is enough.
You’re right that they need to pick one or the other, but let’s be honest: it’s not half-and-half. A minority of Hunters specifically prefer melee mechanics.
What do people consider to be the role of Affliction when Destruction exists?
Same deal. One does upfront, hardcasted, bursty damage and the other is about sustained DoT damage.
No it can’t, no it isn’t.
MM has baseline mechanics that are incompatible with the style and archetype of ranged Survival. Rapid Fire, Steady Shot, and Trick Shots are bad fits, Aimed Shot is completely antithetical. Those are the main spec mechanics right there. SV also had its own mechanics and interactions which can’t adequately be replicated in talents. Remember, talents cannot depend on other talents. Even if you did try to do it, now people who went “ranged Survival” would have zero talent choice because all the talents they picked went to defining the spec they were playing, while every other spec in the game has a set of talents that build on the core spec. You could also never expand the spec. This has always been a terrible idea…
As for whether its adequately represented today: not even close. You’re missing several core mechanics of the spec and the ones that are there are inadequate variants of the original. Look at Explosive Shot now: almost an entirely different ability that just happens to share a name with the old one. Lock and Load went from being a powerful core mechanic that gave critical interaction between your signature abilities (Explosive Shot and Black Arrow) to an anaemic talent based off auto-attack. Black Arrow doesn’t even exist anymore, Serpent Sting is a weaker form of the original, and key passives are missing like Trap Mastery and Serpent Spread. Oh, and there’s the fact that all the mechanics that are represented are talents and not baseline. Screw that. We want specs that are complete in the baseline, like they used to be.
You’re just flat-out dead wrong about talents being the right place to do this. They are exactly the wrong place to do this. It seems you don’t have enough investment in the class to understand.
You could say this about any class with multiple DPS specs, especially the other pure classes which are either all-ranged or all-melee. Stop holding a double standard just for Hunters. Plus, there were plenty of tiers where more than 1 Hunter spec was viable, and even tiers where all of them were viable. Of course you generally saw most people in the highest-damaging spec but you still had healthy populations in the others, too. This is not a good argument for denying exploration and fleshing out of RPG archetypes via specs of a class.
No, you couldn’t, because the identities of the specs are tied to the labels. They aren’t just meaningless and they’re not disconnected. Again, it seems you are too disconnected from the class to understand this.
Marksmanship conveys exactly that: skill in the use of ranged weapons. Yes, all Hunters used ranged weapons. Marksmanship was just the spec that represented mastery in that, just like how all the Hunter specs use pets while BM is the spec that masters that aspect. That is why they are called specialisations. They are not meant to be their own separate classes. There is meant to be a core identity of the Hunter class that includes all 3 to some extent, with each spec enhancing one of them.
Survival was the spec that focused on resourcefulness and opportunism, and that was conveyed through its toolkit which was all spells that were augmented projectiles. That’s not the same thing as sniping/sharpshooting which is what Marksman is doing. If you think Survival was not a good label for such a spec, by all means talk about how it should be named something else. Survival is not even the original name for the spec, neither is Marksmanship the original name for that one. That’s a hell of a lot easier and more reasonable than redoing an entire spec into something hardly anyone in the class wants to play.
No, you can’t, because sniping is a core part of MM’s identity and that entails things such as Aimed Shot. Those things are also not conducive to Survival’s identity. They are different styles and purposes, just like Affliction and Destruction or Fire and Arcane, or Arms and Fury. Survival was meant to be faster-paced, more mobile, and more utilitarian at the expense of raw damage output. That made sense because when it comes to archer classes in RPGs some people like the more frantic mobile approach while some people like the careful, methodical, “mage-like” approach.
This is a really good way of putting it.
People (including Blizzard since Legion) are abusing the meaning and purpose of specs. They were never meant to be different classes. If they were, why even have the 12 classes to begin with? While they shouldn’t all be the mostly the same thing like they were in Classic/BC, they also shouldn’t be unrecognisably different entities. Most of the post-Legion class design woes and blunders originate from this “spec fantasy” obsession and even Blizzard admits to that now.
Now if only there were some system in this game that allowed you to customize how your character played by selecting amongst a set of choices that grant you new passive or active effects. Call them “talents”, if you will.
Not even close. Marks at that time, and now, had nothing on the survival spec from cata and mop.
Marks then was all burst and escape.
Survival then was sustained dmg with better actual kitting. Improved traps made us move faster through them, increased our crit chance, sustained off of dots, good cleave dmg, in pve it was a great spec. Little lack luster in PvP
Mm was just trying to kite and nuke people with aimed shots, rapid fire, and chimera shot.
This is completely wrong. I’d go as far as say that 99% of people who play survival do it BECAUSE it can shift so naturally from melee to ranged and wouldn’t have the spec be flattened out to one or the other aspect.
There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a boss mechanic then going Disengage > Aspect of the Eagle > dps like hell > Harpoon when danger is gone. Leave SV alone, it’s fantastic atm.
With pretty much all MMOPRG game there is no such thing as a choice in picking your “talents” point. There will be certain type of players that don’t bother with how they perform and thus may goes a different path. Even if a game give you 10 or 100 choices there will always be one set of talents that will be the best optimize path for you to go if you want to min/max.
A good games creator will give it players the illusion of making them think that they have choices but in actuality there will be cookie cutter set of talents that will give the best result at endgame.
Mathematically, there will always be a “best” option. That’s not the point. If the talents are balanced well enough, close enough together, and differ sufficiently in which situations they are good for, then there is a choice. Havoc has (ish) such a thing right now, actually. The dominant build is, of course, the Blind Fury/Demonic build, but there’s a Demon Blades based build that’s a percentage point or two ahead on a straight single-target nuke, and a number of top-end DHs choose to use it in specific situations. There are also at least a handful of talent tiers across the various classes that have similar balance, where there’s actual choice involved because they are all fairly close and each has different pluses and minuses.
The problem is, BfA is massively behind Legion in terms of talent balance. Most tiers for most specs have one and only one option for nearly all PvE content (a number of specs have one and only one build for PvE), and Blizzard does not appear to care even 10% as much as they did in Legion to fix that issue.
So, will there always be a mathematically “best” option? Yes. But if the difference between the “best” and the “worst” is, say, half a percent (for example, the permissible delta is almost certainly several multiples of that), then you actually can viably choose the “worst” option, or the one in between, based on the fight mechanics or your preferred playstyle.
Just because there’s always a “best” doesn’t mean that the “non-best” options can’t be tuned to the point of being valid choices. That’s the part we’re lacking right now.