Which brings the discussion back to the original quote:
“It is unfortunate that the 2009-2015 era imprinted itself so strongly upon you, much like the Vanilla/TBC-era did for me, only to have the rug pulled from under you in Legion. It comes with the territory.”
You began SV during it’s ranged-centric era and Blizzard took it away from you. I’m sorry about that, but the original SV didnt pigeon-hole players into a useless debate about ranged or melee damage.
The basic Hunter class toolkit itself had an assortment of damaging skills, both ranged and melee, to be used situationally. A Marksman without Raptor Strike and Aspect of the Monkey up in melee range was unskilled (although the pre-resilience burst potential of MM usually negated the need).
The spec-centric theme of SV was actually short-term avoidance tanking (30%+ parry & dodge with Aspect of the Monkey/Tier 1 BM talents & Deflection), which then fed into dodge proc Mongoose Bite (an inverse of the Warrior’s overpower ability) for additional damage, and an array of conditional root mechanics such as Counter-Attack that procc’d on parry; Entrapment, or Improved Wing Clip to mitigate incoming damage from melee classes by setting up kite conditions.
Nowhere in the tree, until the TBC talents came about, did SV have ranged-centric abilities. And although MT (Master Tactician) would proc on ranged attacks, you were free to carry it over into the next Raptor Strike. EW (Expose Weakness) procc’d on ranged crits and boosted AP against the debuffed target temporarily, and Thrill of the Hunt returned mana on ranged crits.
TBC SV tier 1-2 still had its vanilla roots intact, but the development did begin going more towards your direction.
That’s a whole lot of words to avoid the fact that SV still had, and primarily used, a ranged weapon. If you could spend 100% of your time at range as SV, you would. Yes, there were talents that were melee centric, but they were entirely situational in that they existed for situations where you were stuck in melee. After all, it was the tree for PvP utility and PvP is where that sort of thing would happen. The goal was to stick to range as much as possible where you were safer and did more damage. For that reason it’s utterly incomparable to modern SV, a melee spec that sticks to melee unless it can’t (i.e. the opposite), and any attempt at comparison is either a product of misinformation or just plain bad faith.
I asked you what Agility did for the Hunter class. The answer is that per point of agility you got 2 ranged attack power, 1 melee attack power, and some dodge chance. That means your ranged damage was tuned to scale more steeply than your melee damage right from the start, no matter the build. On top of that Survival also had Lighting Reflexes +15% agility, so its ranged damage actually scaled very steeply to the point that by Naxxramas it was almost competitive with MM for PvE DPS if not for Trueshot Aura buffing the whole group.
“The original SV didnt pigeon-hole players into a useless debate about ranged or melee damage.” because there was no debate that it was a ranged spec. Don’t pretend to be more informed on this.
The RAP & MAP scaling of Agility is a fair point, but a substantially weak argument against intrinsic design considerations. What you’ve missed is that the class had 2 other ranged specializations competing for our gear and main stat, so a melee-oriented Survival playstyle utilizing MAP would get the shaft due in whole to design constraints and balancing concerns with MM.
In fact, that begs the question: Why did Hunter MAP scale with Agility at all if it wasn’t intentional?
I still don’t understand why it matters what SV was…
Can someone help me understand why that matters? They used to use mana. They don’t anymore. They used to place traps at their feet, out of combat. They don’t anymore. They used to have a melee and ranged weapon. They don’t anymore. They used to use aspects as toggles, based on situation. They don’t anymore. They used to carry ammo. They don’t anymore. They used to have eyes of the beast, then they didn’t, now they do.
I remember you saying you played it in vanilla, so already you mixing up your stories again
you did the exact same thing to him as you are now currently complaining about. Hypocrite.
It doesnt. Its like saying you hate life now because you reached your thirties and everyone else is wrong because you were a teenager once. Time to move on and grow up lol
There isnt a debate, just alot of pathetic crying about Bepples crying about a spec he didnt play
Wake me up inside (save me)
Call my name and save me from the dark (wake me up)
Bid my blood to run (I can’t wake up)
Before I come undone (save me)
Save me from the nothing I’ve become
Every time they talked about Hunters in classic WoW they described its intent as a ranged class. It seems from both design and tuning that it’s unlikely that they ever seriously intended Survival to stick to melee; even before the 1.7 preview.
Agility was also an important stat for melee classes.
Also Hunters still had the melee toolkit. It would be pretty bad if it didn’t scale at all with their main stat. Raptor Strike existed so you still had some damage when stuck in melee.
It’s pretty easy, actually. Everything* you mentioned there is a constraint that wasn’t important nor particularly good for the class. Removing them either didn’t make a big difference or helped the class out. Whereas taking the ranged weapon away from Survival was a much larger and more destructive change.
This just reads as “the Hunter class has had changes before so I don’t understand why people don’t like this change!”. Newsflash: some changes are good while some are bad.
* The only exceptiosn are the aspect toggle thing and Eyes of the Beast. The aspect one is just a different way of handling aspects. Being able to have a flat +30% runspeed for much of a fight was better in some areas and worse in others. Eyes of the Beast disappearing from 10 years was just an implementation decision as it didn’t work with Cataclysm’s engine changes and it wasn’t worth remaking until WoW classic.
They’re mostly tools Hunters have.
Survival being in the Hunter class means it will inevitably have to stand up to other Hunter specs.
And there we have it. You’ve managed to substantiate what you’ve instead rallied against for many years. I will admit that if a Hunter employed only his melee toolkit without consideration for his ranged abilities, then he wasn’t operating at 100% class capacity. The same is true for strictly ranged players that wouldn’t dare take full advantage of every facet of class design to win.
My goodness. By the end of our talk, I will have inspired you to dual wield the Mongoose Enchant and use a Weapon Chain off-hand like you were meant to, should you bare the name Survival Hunter. XD
I think you missed the point. You’re saying that the intended thematic design of SV was to further gameplay that was only relevant in a niche scenario, in what is arguably a type of content that most players don’t/didn’t engage in.
(I’m not sure what the tier 1 BM talents in vanilla, that you mentioned, have to do with your argument of SV being a avoidance tank-theme. IAoH was a talent focusing on ranged, and Endurance Training increased the stamina of your pet.)
Not to mention how you decided to include BM talents in your argument for the design theme of SV.
You also said this. It’s the usual “SV was a melee spec in Vanilla”-argument.
This, combined with what you said before, you’re either ignorant, or you misunderstand the very fundamentals of [hunter] class design in Vanilla.
There were no core specializations in Vanilla. There wasn’t any intent towards providing players with dedicated playstyles through individual talent categories. There was only the core class toolkit, and the overarching purpose of that toolkit, as per your main role(hunter = damage dealer, most effective at range), and the various talent categories only served to enhance parts of our core toolkit, in ways that were/would be relevant in all parts of the game.
Beast Mastery: This category, its talent focused on improving everything that had to do with our pets, and other bestial aspects. It focused on increasing the survivability of our pets, the damage of our pets, certain pet-specific utility(Intimidation, IRP, etc.), and again, it provided options to improve our bestial aspects(Monkey/Hawk/Cheetah/Pack).
Marksmanship: Its talents focused on improving all aspects of the use of ranged weapons. Better damage, improvements to specific ranged utility(ImprCS, Scatter Shot), along with improved efficiency in terms of mana consumption, CDR, attack range, etc.
Survival: Its talents focused on improving all aspects of our survivability, allowing for better adaptation to specific situations(content). It improved our tracking capabilities(damage), our defensive options(for both melee and ranged), increased our stamina, bonuses to general class-wide utility such as Feign Death, and more-so, our Traps. It also provided enhancements to our melee-capabilities, talking both utility and damage*.
*Was the purpose of the melee-oriented talents to make you want to intentionally go toe-to-toe with your enemies? Not at all, the purpose was to make us more efficient at dealing with situations where we would find ourselves forced to enter melee range. Why? Because we had hard restrictions put on our ranged weapons, where we could not use them at all when we were closer than 8 yards to an enemy. And in certain types of content(mainly PvP), you were naturally forced to spend more time in melee range of your enemies.
This is side-stepping the actual point of his argument…
Especially since, again, the melee toolkit of the class wasn’t really of much use in most parts of the game back then. At the very least, it wasn’t something you wanted to intentionally seek out, if such could be avoided.
Actually due to tight mana generation and lack of cooldowns most hunters including survival used melee quite significantly utilizing melee weaving to take advantage of both melee and range auto attack windows. This provided a quite significant DPS increase. (I also enjoyed seal weaving)
Weaving was my favorite on survival spec which I also thinks represents this higher skill playstyle best out of all modern (cata and forward) iterations of hunters. I’m very sad that it was removed in later iterations including classic wow. I’m very glad that survival is now an interesting melee ranged hybrid like it could be played in vanilla. Survival the main reason I keep coming back to wow sure to it’s unique and addictive playstyle.
I found melee weaving fun and challenging and would love for more of this hybrid playstyle to be explored and rewarded for survival.
As for the topic at hand, the recent buffs to wildfire make me a happy hunter and if love more buffs to this now iconic skill!
“I personally don’t like the change, so I’ll spend the rest of my life quoting the original game manual to ‘prove’ that hunters MUST always be a primarily range-based class… But really I’ll just be trapping folks in an endless, useless debate about irrelevant information.”
I never said that Hunters in Classic had no melee so this entire post comes across as presumptive and immature. I said that it’s not comparable to melee Survival today. It’s not the precedent melee fanatics think it is. If you could spend 100% of your time at range, you would. The class had a built-in weakness of not being able to shoot in melee range and SV had some talents to help with that. That’s still not a melee spec.
You can drop the fake friendly tone with me because we both know we aren’t friends.
This had nothing to do with mana. Raptor Strike still cost mana. In fact melee weaving was an additional mana burden because you would be including an additional mana-costing attack in your rotation
It had to do with having a gap in the rotation which could potentially be filled with another attack
It wasn’t often a clear DPS increase in Vanilla because you had to cross the 3 yard deadzone reducing the time efficieny of coming in and out of melee. In fact for most top logs across Classic raids Hunters ignored it. It was more of a BC thing.
It wasn’t an intended part of the design but rather a side effect; back in actual Vanilla and BC it was practically never done at all and it’s largely a product of modern theorycrafting
It applied to all 3 specs, not just Survival
In BC it was more of a SV thing than a BM thing because BM got +20% ranged haste, leading to fewer gaps in the rotation that could be filled with Raptor Strike. This was especially true with Thori’dal which was a little faster than other weapons.
Finally, and most importantly: it’s utterly unlike any post-Legion iteration of Survival so pretending it’s precedent for melee Survival is intellectually dishonest.
Don’t act like you’re informing me here. I know more than you.
To be blunt: melee weaving was terrible. It wasn’t even an intended part of the design. It was largely a result of poor planning of the ranged toolkit leading to static 2-button rotations (itself a terrible design outcome) with gaps that could be filled with Raptor Strike at some points. It’s far more preferable to have a fun, dynamic, and complete ranged toolkit that’s not just statically rotating between a couple abilities at ratios depending on weapon speeds.
It wasn’t particularly challenging (it was only “challenging” relative to the braindead nature of BC Hunter rotations) and it certainly wasn’t fun. Luckily it wasn’t necessary to perform well. It was a bonus for parse pushing on farm content. I’ve seen 99th percentile SV parses in BC in Black Temple and Sunwell that don’t melee weave.
Speaking of which, it seems you like to incorrectly pretend that melee weaving is precedent for/similar to current melee Survival. Do you see Survival parses today at 99th percentile that stay at range? What a ridiculous thing to say. Get that dishonesty out of here. I know dishonesty habit for SV fans at this point but you have to at least try. A Hunter spec lacking a ranged weapon entirely and preferring to stick to melee as much as possible is utterly unlike anything that came before it; even Classic and BC Hunter.
We’re doing this again? Stop pretending that it’s just me who doesn’t like the change. If it were just me, we wouldn’t see SV routinely at <5% of Hunter representation in PvE. Right now it’s 1% in raids, actually.
Hunters broadly don’t like SV. Maybe not enough to post online about it, but perhaps you should exit your bubble and talk to some Hunter players in game about it. I do. I think you’ll be surprised how many Hunters are at least indifferent and dismissive of melee Hunters, if not at least outright resentful.
Tanais It’s funny how you pretend to be the arbiter of reasonable discussion but you still drop likes for ridiculous posts like these.
“I will admit that if a Hunter employed only his melee toolkit without consideration for his ranged abilities, then he wasn’t operating at 100% class capacity. The same is true for strictly ranged players that wouldn’t dare take full advantage of every facet of class design to win.”
Why aren’t we friends, though? I think you could prove to be a powerful ally in the collective sense, if only you’d drop these silly talking points and focus more on the new direction the developers are taking.
It was definitely not intended gameplay, but rather emergent gameplay. It was certainly a DPS increase with auto attacks using slow weapons, the way I used it. Good in pvp as weaving raptor strikes did burn mana, but give you insanely high burst damage with around 80percent more autos and some additional skill inputs. Certainly as you stated it was not intended, but I found it fun and am glad that modern survival evokes some of that feeling of gameplay that I enjoyed.