Hunter is just the name of WoW’s “ranger class”. Every fantasy game has them, and most if not all of them include the ability to use a melee based playstyle.
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Don’t get my hopes up. A double dagger mage assassin using mirrors and teleports to confuse enemies sounds dope LOL.
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That’s true. One of the things I enjoyed most about GW2 was busting out a longsword and flying around like a maniac as a Ranger. That, and playing DW axe/torch. Ironically, that played much the way I think MSV should work - fire and poisons.
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See, this is the kind of discussion I find useful about whether or not to try Survival.
Correct, because Warrior and Rogues are very well designed and don’t get reworked as much as Survival.
Except Combat, which was reworked to Outlaw, received a mid-expansion/end of Legion mini rework to not be entirely based around RtB. Or Sub, which has gotten a rework almost every expansion since Legion.
But lets ignore those, Warriors are perfect.
Except the Arms rework in 8.0 to remove the old mastery and playstyle of “hit Colossal Smash, unload, and then pray for a CS reset”. And then a 10.0 rework to that mastery again with the reworked trees so it’d have a purpose.
But even though those specs received the same amount, or more, changes as Survival, those don’t count as reworks because that’d ruin the narrative.
There is no “in and out”, there’s only in. The narrative that Survival is a “hybrid DPS” also needs to die, because it isn’t. Can you still DPS outside of melee? Yes, just like most other melee. Is it a good idea to? No, not really. Only if you’re forced to due to a mechanic.
Sure, it might be nice for PvP, but that doesn’t make Survival a hybrid spec or give sit an “in and out” playstyle when your entire kit wants you in to actually do damage.
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One where Hunters were established as a primarily melee class with a spec or two having to spec into ranged weapons, plus melee not already being thoroughly covered by several other classes.
I would still call it an immensely stupid idea but I wouldn’t care as much because when it would inevitably bomb it wouldn’t take a spec with it.
It’s not magic. Those classes have a framework and foundation that supports being melee. Hunters don’t. This is why Survival has to have the sidearm crossbow and why it has no representation in the class tree; it’s designed from the ground up as an afterthought to an otherwise ranged class.
You believe at a fundamental level that because there was a lore character that lent elements to the Hunter class and also used melee weapons that necessitates a Hunter spec being melee despite it being at odds with the core Hunter design within WoW. Also never mind the fact that we already have a spec representing that character (Beast Mastery) and we don’t need another one. You’ll claim strawman just because I pre-empted the argument you refuse to arrive at from any direction other than post after post of leading questions.
The WoW design does matter more, though. You can’t get around the fact that it doesn’t make sense to whiplash around to a totally different direction 12 years after the fact just because of a lore character; especially when it’s not even imitating that lore character particularly well and, as I mentioned, we already have a spec dedicated to representing other aspects of that character.
Do you genuinely believe Rexxar and the Beastmaster hero type were the primary and major inspiration for the Hunter class? Because they weren’t. We might actually have a mainly melee Hunter class if it were the case, but we don’t because it was primarily based on the Ranger and the Huntress. We get aspects from Beastmaster in the form of the pets (you know, the actual iconic and central part of the beastmaster) but otherwise any melee was situational only. It didn’t make sense to chase melee combat in classic when they made the WoW Hunter class hence why they made it a ranged class, and it certainly didn’t make sense to abruptly 180 to that direction 12 years later.
I would call it an incredibly stupid idea because that’s what it is, but I wouldn’t care as much because a) it’s not my class and b) no one would lose a ranged spec to get it.
If it’s so ranged as it stands then what’s the problem of letting it used a ranged weapon and be 100% ranged like the rest of the class?
It seems to me that whenever melee Survival fans try to explain what’s good about the spec they end up talking about how it can be sort-of-ranged. Just look at this post:
Yeah, I know a type of spec that can determine the range and position of the fight: a ranged spec.
Revising Rexxar to be a Survival Hunter after the fact doesn’t magically justify it.
Survival is still a poorer fit for Rexxar than Beast Mastery even as it stands as a melee spec. If you look at how the Beastmaster from WC3 worked since you’re apparently fixated and obsessed with it, the Beastmaster actually follows the more “command multiple pets” approach they’re trying to force onto Beast Mastery. It certainly didn’t use the utilitarian gadgetry that’s still part of SV and has nothing to do with its pet aspects.
They can steal away BM’s pet aspects to SV all they want. It won’t change the fact the Beast Mastery, as hinted by its name, is the originally intended representation of the Beastmaster of WC3. Rewriting history doesn’t work.
Yeah I just maintain a separate account with different level 70s on different servers (US servers at that, despite playing from Australia), with a different achievement history and pet collection, different gaming preferences including rated PvP (something I never do) over PvE and Alliance instead of Horde, and an actual Survival loadout 
This right here. Ranged SV was the “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” spec. This is difficult for melee brains and Blizzard devs (really the same thing) to understand when they say SV was the same as MM because all they see is the ranged spec. In reality SV was all about the mobility, opportunism, versatility, and control and it won by attrition and resourcefulness rather than long range and casted hard-hitters.
The weird thing is after a brief stint of being a half-assed Warrior clone in Legion, it feels like since then they have tried to recreate that feeling only while keeping the couple of generic remaining melee abilities as a tokenistic distinction.
Yes, actually. The examples you gave still fall far short of how much reworking Survival needed and those specs have fared much better than Survival. A better example would be Demonology but even that at least remained a ranged spec and didn’t arbitrarily cut out core parts of the class.
Actually a rare W take from Ornskal. All the hybrid talk is PvP only, and even then only for fighting other melee. Otherwise most Survival gameplay is melee as intended. People struggle to understand this when making nonsense comparisons between modern Survival and how Hunters worked in Classic.
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It was fantastic. We can both agree on that. However we will have to just agree to disagree as to the current iteration of SV. I think both iterations are great. Just great in different ways. Personal opinion though.
I think they made survival to be a PvP spec. Melee versus range… Meh. My guess is the real issue is that its desired playstyle isn’t necessary in PvE. Half of its kit or more is useless in PvE encounters.
I think a PvP spec is fine. Others might disagree.
Spitball, but…
It kinda makes me wish Mending Bandages was the default and both Mend Pet and an improved version of Spirit Bond (pet and you each heal from your healing done and healing buffs given to the one are spread to the other) the talent options.
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This. A Shadowlands Venthyr SV Hunter could get quite a fair bit done from range and have its damage fall less during that out-of-melee period than any other melee, but still only to a very short ceiling of consecutive uptime. It’s a melee with a situational, largely luck-dependent tolerance for leaving melee range.
I think Leokitas has taken others’ use of the word “hybrid” (to mean that it mitigates the vulnerabilities of being melee [extreme damage falloff even in losses of just a couple GCDs] and avoids the vulnerabilities common to being ranged [cast time]), and taken it far too literally.
Heresy, I know, but I honestly thought WoD RSV felt like the results of an exercise in reductive additions.
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Managing Explosive Shot? And potentially having reason to use up procs on Arcane Shot or risk overcapping ES charges?! Nah, get rid of that. Borrow some of what Mages have got going on with Ignite and let it be no more!
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DoT management that’d actually require some tracking instead of just hitting your priority skills in the same static priority order regardless? No, no; just make it automatic. If it takes more than two GSE macros (mousewheel up for AoE, mousewheel down for ST) to play the spec optimally, that’s just too damn much!
It had a ton of potential, and thematically it fully had my interest, but in terms of its available actual gameplay/depth it seemed to keep shooting its own foot.
- In terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, what it promised seemed better provided even in, say even Venthyr MM with Serpentstalker’s Trickery (especially paired with the bug to allow for 12 out of 14 shots of DT-RF before also applying DT to a LnL AiS, and other little opportunities to exploit).
For the gobbie
Agreed. Don’t see why it’s mattered outside of precisely 2004 or 2016, but fair 'nuff.
Agreed, at least for the present, but…
Let’s take a look at, say, Shaman, which supports both melee and ranged specs. Or, perusing other MMOs, we can quickly see that GW2’s (ranged) Deadeye coming out of the (melee) Thief class, or Mirage (melee) coming out of the Mesmer (predominantly ranged) class, etc.
That the class wasn’t originally future-proofed for melee doesn’t it mean it can’t support melee any more than a class that wasn’t originally future-proofed for range can’t support range. It doesn’t take much work.
:: Note also, original WoW Hunter wasn’t even proofed to allow for Aimed Shot to be worth casting on high-Armor targets, especially if you hadn’t just released your Auto-Shot, did have a melee capstone, and didn’t have a good third or more of the things we think of today as iconic to Hunter.
Except, traditionally, most ranged actually can’t do that much, if any, more than melee in a mechanics-baring fight, because most ranged —in compensation for that added range— spend significant portions of their time with their mobility constrained (either by cast-times or by suffering significant damage loss from falling back on their mobile options, just as melee do when pushed out of melee range).
Constraints to one’s ability to (re)position from being melee and constraints to one’s ability to (re)position from being ranged are just two sides of the same puzzle that BM and formerly RSV, in probably the largest factors generating their ease of play, yeeted out a window before, apparently, calling anyone partaking in those challenges fundamentally irredeemable. (Unless, of course, they support mobility constraints, which is quite straightforward anyways but somehow impossible to do unless the classes started off that way, except in all the other games where they didn’t and yet things were completely fine.)
Sees two positions he dislikes.
Ignores their massive differences.
“Partially same conclusions??! Same poster!!”
Seriously, man?
- I could show you what posting on multiple characters in the same thread looks like from when the phone version would keep bugging out on me when swapping between my Warrior and this guy. Jaggles-Bepples ain’t that. You’d see, for starters, identical or near-identical (if only one is an Allied Race) achievement scores right there, by the name. Pretty hard to miss.
I mean, its kinda sus when they type and talk exactly like how he does and will agree with every talking point he has even when its contradicting to what he said a month ago. Just sayin
clark kent is superman btw lul
you have accused me of this a couple of times when someone agreed with me js
I remember back in cata when this guy had another account and would talk to himself on both accounts to keep the thread going back on Maive. We only knew this because he was a faction spy and let it slip in vent
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Haha, yep. Also
…
Mightiest hunter and a poster boy of Hunters, is… melee, lol.
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*Half-ogre, dual-wielding Beastmaster.
If there was an option to do that, I would. I mean, really, there’s no reason Blizzard couldn’t add DW to SV since (if memory serves) damage is calculated off of attack power. Small indie developer and all that.
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I think I’d opt for dw as well. Spears are cool, but wow does not have spears.
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Maybe imbalance due to 1 enchant vs 2
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I don’t like survival in its current state and I’ve played it this expansion. The issue, probably the only issue I have with the spec, is the fact that you can’t go melee to do your dps or you die. Enhancement shamans and Frost DKs, both weak specs for pvp right now, also have this issue. Except they both have a time when they excel: enh shamans can heal until rng decides to grace them with damage, and Frost DKs simply pop abol, PoF and ERW and they’re scary as hell. One of the worst feelings, and I took some time to realize this, was when I activated Coordinated assault and thought “I wish this didn’t make me charge” because I felt like I had to disengage sometimes and activate Aspect of the Eagle to avoid dying…during my own burst cd…as a melee class.
Honestly, I have to agree with Bepples, 12 years of ranged hunter was way too much. The transition was way harder than they could’ve imagined. At this point another rework its needed, except going back to the same 40 yds range would be boring. Imagine a ranged resource builder that transitions with a spell like Spearhead into melee to burst, with some 20% damage reduction to make it worth it and then has to go back to range. Or a thougher, shorter range (20-25yds) dual wield axe thrower like the famous guy from the picture of the spec tree. After all, at this point, you could give SV hunters autoshoot back, make mongoose bite ranged, balance the damage around range, and it would be less confusing than what it is now.
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Yeah, that’s something I wrestle with. As I said, it’s not that it isn’t fun; I just find it very counterintuitive. You are melee, but you don’t want to be in melee, unless you’re unloading your biggest burst. However, you or your teammate need to also CC the target at the same time to grant you that window, otherwise you get destroyed. It’s just weird to me as a Hunter of many, many years.
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“A youtube video title supports my argument”
Let’s not pretend Rexxar is the primary foundational hero for Hunters. We do derive pets from the Beastmaster hero but the main inspirations of the class, as Blizzard detailed, were the Headhunter, Ranger, and Huntress.
Lorewise Rexxar isn’t even particularly powerful or important. People massively exaggerate his place in the story specifically to prop up melee Survival.
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It’s just a more finesse spec. You can’t zug in a very zug meta. The design is not flawed in a vacuum, but it does take getting used to. You need to be always moving and ideally never in melee range of your opponent (taking advantage of the 3yd extra range).
I do agree that the charge on CA makes things awkward, especially considering that CA buffs ranged attacks (and the subsequent talents also further buff ranged attacks). Maybe if CA reset your disengage or gave you a free disengage within 3 seconds of use… Or something. I dunno. It’s a bit clunky.
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Why was rexxar chosen for the hunter avatar in hearthstone? I’m not very familiar with wow lore… Were there just not many big names to choose from? Obvs most hearthstone weapons for hunter are bows, with bow flavor, as is the hero power… Always thought that was odd.