We are currently in a melee-friendly tier, SV has very good single target, not every melee brings a crucial raid buff. Yet uniquely SV needs exceptional performance for unexceptional representation.
“Designed primarily for PvP” is a design flaw, BTW.
This bit where you pretend I’ve never talked about SV’s mechanics is a reach and you and I both know it.
The main criticism I’ve always levied against the spec is that the toolkit comes across as a poorly planned mess from a thematic standpoint. Things like Wildfire Bomb have nothing to do with things like Kill Command. It’s evident of a team of designers who don’t have a grand vision for SV but rather several competing smaller visions so they try to represent them all at once.
There’s also the fact that the spec is designed as a deviation rather than a specialisation. It’s a jarring and abrupt change at level 10 when you pick the spec because suddenly you’re throwing away the ranged weapon and having to use melee attacks.
As for mechanical specifics:
SV is not represented at all in the Hunter Tree. Worse: it thematically clashes with everything in the Hunter tree. In fact I’m not sure if there’s any other spec in the game which outright can’t use something that’s on the class tree (Barrage). It goes back to the spec being designed as a deviation rather than a specialisation.
Half the tree is generic damage increase talents, with many double-ups (e.g. there are multiple Wildfire Bomb buffing talents spread around the tree with no apparent reason or order).
An unreasonable amount of the spec revolves around Kill Command resets
Kill Command is a BM ripoff, and not the only part of the spec that’s a BM ripoff
Spirit Bond, the other BM ripoff, is one of worst designed masteries in the game
Most of the damage profile is made up by Mongoose Bite spam
Every melee ability aside from Mongoose Bite is bland and generic to the point that they come across as tacked on entirely for tokenistic purposes, and it’s not like Mongoose Bite itself is a particularly palatable mechanic
Fury of the Eagle is an uninspired ripoff of a Monk ability with a crap animation and a mechanic that doesn’t fit the class well. The talents after it are also taking the piss.
Butchery fits the class so poorly that it could be a Warrior ability and no one would bat an eye. Carve is similarly uninspired. Both nonsensically share a choice node even though Butchery is a strictly better version of Carve to the point where before DF Butchery was a talented replacement to Carve
They made Harpoon involved in the damage rotation. Involving mobility abilities in damage rotations is always toxic. This one is especially stupid. It has a minimum range so you have to run out and Harpoon back in
Making Viper’s Venom a 2 point talent in the first place and then gating Wildfire Infusion behind it is one of the greatest piss takes of all time
This is just unorganised thoughts from the top of my head based of what I’ve read in the past. The overarching story is that the spec is directionless and has a “kitchen sink” feel of random crap thrown together, and the melee part especially comes across as a needless inclusion purely to serve as a tokenistic distinction. This is no way to make a spec that’s approachable, intuitive, or particularly likeable and all this talk about SV being “wonderfully designed” comes across as an Emperor’s new clothes moment.
To be fair to SV: not all of these specific mechanical issues (besides the elephant in the room that is the melee, of course) are unique. BM and MM have a lot of the same issues. They’re just a lot worse with SV.
I like the part where he’s primarily fighting at range and only fighting in melee when he can’t get back to ranged.
Mad respect for him actually showing his deaths, though (mostly due to being stuck in melee range ). Most of these classic PvP montages leave those out to pretend whatever whack playstyle they come up with was actually good.
What exactly do you think these videos are meant to showcase?
He’s still extensively depending on ranged attacks. He seems to decide at random to stick to melee; in fact it seems like he’s deciding to fight melee classes in melee, which is just a bizarre choice. In every one of those situations he struggles and mostly depends on the opponent being a keyboard turner that literally can’t keep up with him jumping around them, and even then he often just loses anyway.
This is not “play melee to play Survival to the fullest”. This is “play melee to deliberately handicap yourself as a challenge”.
show cases how the spec was designed. Rogues could still shoot, warriors could shoot. Doesnt really matter. You once said nobody could do this, and here is proof people could do it. Of course he died, its pvp. Nobody is immortal. Everyone was a keyboard turner back then, so whats the arguement again? Just making more excuses? This is someone playing the spec to its fullest for what it was. Anyways
The videos are fun and entertaining. These videos showcase the fundaments of SV PvP: avoidance tanking, melee dps, ranged dps, trap usage, kiting, etc nearly 100% class capacity, and the overall hybrid style of combat that we favor. It’s use was valid in all but hardcore raiding, myself peaking @ 1850 arena rating with a vastly under tuned and underrated spec.
That’s the point. We are a complete class with several options in terms of engagement.
They’re not showing the “fundamentals of SV PvP”. They’re showing a trick challenge way of approaching SV PvP that’s deliberately handicapped just for a challenge. He’s literally losing to terrible melee players in those videos that he could have certainly overcome if he properly kited and relied on ranged more than melee. If your build requires people to be abjectly terrible at the game to have a chance at beating them its use isn’t valid for competitive content.
I don’t buy any talk from melee SV fanatics about the spec being “underrated” because SV fans are notorious for being naive and breathtakingly optimistic; upselling the spec to high heaven at every opportunity. It’s like listening to crypto bros or alternative MMO fans. In my experience the type of person who’s attracted to SV just isn’t the type of person to give an honest and realistic take on the spec.
This is the spin-doctoring I’m talking about. Pretending having a minimum range within which you have to use a vastly underequipped and undertuned melee toolkit at immense penalty is apparently “a complete class with several options”.
5.0 took the melee weapon away from Hunters and allowed us to use ranged weapons up close. We were not worse-off for it because we could now use our primary toolkit from anywhere, not just from beyond 5 yards. Survival actually went on to have its most successful expansion ever in MoP (as much as people like Toxiktraktor like to flagrantly lie about it) so I don’t care for any talk about Survival depending on melee combat to be a successful spec. In fact history seems to show the opposite.
didnt you say earlier everyone was garbage back then? So now hes extra garbage because you got proven wrong? Am I understanding this super mental gymnastic right?
It was bc. you said everyone was bad. now your mad because people were bad. You make no sense dude
grrrr how dare these players enjoy their spec! grrrrrr how dare they!
you come across as a wife beater ya know. Never happy, very aggressive, cant ever be wrong once etc.
range had a range handicap aswell genius. Your supposed to remove the wrapper before eating the candy bar ya know
I bet you cried tears of joy about this too. Imagine little 12 year old bepples sweating so hard over finally being able to kite
idk, i remember a load of hunters upset about the change and of course focus coming in.
I lie about what? People played it, but it was never the 3rd coming of christ you make it out to be.
you dont care, or you dont want to care. I also seem to recall you saying nobody ever plays the spec and yet you constantly get ratioed to the earth daily here by a swarm of sv players so?
for a whole patch in wod you cant stop drooling over. and you werent even that good of a player back then too lmfao
P.S. You seem new to the Hunter forum so I’ll fill you in: Toxiktraktor used to say the same thing I do; that Survival Hunter was a widely-enjoyed, unique ranged approach to Hunter and that talk about it being melee in Classic was mistaken because the melee toolkit of classic was strictly situational. He even uploaded several videos talking about it, namely this one:
Then he started retail again and started playing modern Survival, decided he liked melee Survival more, and has flipped all his positions, doubling down on arguing that Survival was always meant to be melee, was purely melee in classic, was never popular as a ranged spec, etc. no doubt because he views it as necessary to defend the merit of melee Survival.
When confronted with these earlier videos of him saying the opposite, he claims they’re satire… despite them being accurate and correct takes on what Survival was and lacking any form of punchline or mocked absurdity. I can see from the ignored replies that he’s posting here, so if you’re wondering why I don’t reply to him this is why: I don’t engage in conversation with people who evidently don’t hold sincere beliefs and will happily lie if they viewed it as useful to their cause.
I do see when other people quote his replies, though, and they’re as low quality as I expect. From what I gather, he claims Survival’s only unpopular now because the game’s unpopular (even though representation statistics are always proportional so total population doesn’t matter), and he thinks Ghorak and I are the same person. Apparently I maintain a European account as well as a separate US account to maintain a fake persona of an EU Hunter posting on the US forums with an alt account
make sure to also state these were joking videos that the channel description also states. Nothing I did was meant to be taken seriously. its proven by watching what I do. I never actually show a thing on how to do anything other than talk about it, because i knew it was bs. you know it too so cope?
I stopped playing retail? I started playing modern survival? I been playing it since bc? wtf are you going on about this time? lol?
see you are saying this because you know im going to call you for lying about that but wont see the response so it might as well not exist. You are a coward my guy lol
thats because they are. anyone who plays a hunter can tell im going on about nonsense. Dont forget I also said spell hunter was viable!
No
But I do. I memed on you for like a month almost 2 years ago because I couldnt believe how dumb you were. Than I quit and just mocked you for being stupid for the remainder of the time. You think you hold some kind of authority here which you dont btw. I brought up your discord and you decided to run away. Be honest
its common sense your not going to see massive ammounts of players playing the spec or any of the specs compaired to when wrath had 12 million or wod had around 10. This is what you go off of.
def not the only one who does since other people are noticing a trend here
You wouldnt be the first. I use to play on EU for a little bit so has many other people. Its not an impossible thing ya know?
Long story short, keep crying, keep lying and keep being stupid. Its incredibly entertaining to see a grown man act like this online with zero shame. At this point its one of the only reasons I continue to read the forums. And I know you think you are doing gods work here or whatever, but you just say biased, dumb, irrational, and little to no thought contradicting things here. I know it, everyone else knows it, and you know it scooter. Make sure to say something dumb, I cant wait to read about it tomorrow
I saw you deleted your first reply. “Bepples’ alt”, really? …
Anyway, since you deleted it, I’ll leave it at that.
If you feel that it worked for you in PvP, that’s fine for you. But again, what I argued was against your statement regarding the primary design theme of SV, how you said that it was about being an avoidance tank. The category had 1 primary thematic approach to its design, which was about increasing survivability throughout the game, and all types of content.
Sure, some might enjoy watching them. But either way, the logic here is the same as if I was going to say:
If I went deep into the BM category, taking all pet boosting talents, and then proceeded to fight solely by controlling my pet through Eyes of the Beast. That then meant that the theme of the BM category was how you wanted to be a pet-based tank and/or dps, similarly to how feral druids fought in combat, as their shapeshift forms.
“It was valid in all but high-end raiding/PvP.”
Now you also bring up more elements of hunter gameplay from the era, and including those in the “fundaments of SV gameplay”. One would expect you to also include them when you talk about the primary design theme of SV, because they are a part of it.
No, I didn’t. I’ve brought up your statement about the design theme of vanilla-BC SV.
I did. The next post containing roughly the same information and contextual sequence was scaled down to reflect the more lighthearted and educational tone I’m known for. I would like to steer the discussion away from flaming.
Deterrence is the one and only cooldown within the SV tree in classic. From an intra-spec perspective, what other conclusion would you draw from that?
In addition, be sure to fully quote the message. I said: “short-term avoidance tanking”, plus I highlighted an array of tools including ranged dps that constitute complete Hunter potential.
Like I said earlier, that the primary, encompassing theme of the SV category, and the design of its talents, was to focus on survivability, on that side of the class. Deterrence, as a short-duration CD perfectly reflects/adheres to that overarching design theme.
Deterrence being a part of that category merely confirms that part of the thematic design included areas where such could be useful, areas where having a talent such as that one would in fact increase your survivability.
The ‘Axe Rogue’ series was published during the TBC-era which was notorious for low Hunter PvP representation across the board. There was no Master’s Call, nor Disengage, nor a 4 second duration disarmpet ability, etc. In those days, you only had a PvP trinket to affect snares.
So with the higher HP pools in addition to the Resilience stat, glass-cannon ranged play became a thing of the past.
There wasn’t a true kite meta in TBC, especially when constraining ourselves to the arena, which also introduced line of sight problems across the board.
Once snared by melee, you were done. Top Warriors could weapon switch into a shield and spell block our Freezing Trap, leaving MM with a trinketable Scatter Shot. Shadow Step instantly negated distanced play, and with the new CoS follow-up ability (Cloak of Shadows) negating all magic effects, the Rogue could merely walk right over the trap and not bother to disarm it manually.
). Most of these classic PvP montages leave those out to pretend whatever whack playstyle they come up with was actually good.
