lol so now you are attacking my hats? Is this what desperation is or? Next you are gonna say your dad can beat up my dad 
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Just take the L kiddo
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I committed to SV in PvP to see if I could figure it out. It’s fun, and I enjoy both the control and burst potential, and even the ranged/melee weaving.
The pet feels like an afterthought for something that’s supposed to be my bro, though. I wish they could flesh out some design where we rely on the pet for interesting effects. Like a spirit link-like CD (better than RoS), or maybe some kind of short charm effect called Corner where the pet corners the target and gives em the stink eye, broken by damage. Heck, even just a couple of dots. Ooo maybe something where you get a mutually exclusive side tree called Collars where, depending on the collar chosen, your pet has like poisoned claws, or bleed damage, or a portion of damage as arcane or something like that.
I honestly don’t feel particularly squishy. I do find it ironic that everyone was crabbing so hard about Craven, but it was the thing keeping all this dot-based mania in check. Think about how strong those classes are now, with Hunter being the only reliable counter to any of them in SL. I think FD should have magic dispell baseline, and Craven should be the PvP talent, but @30 seconds instead of the old 20.
Damage output feels good overall. Like, REALLY good. I understand why Bombs don’t hit harder - there would be no reason to go in otherwise. Maybe it’s a flawed design, but it IS satisfying harpoon/trapping heals and then flying across the map like a maniac and clapping a Warrior with gigantic Mongoose crits. I have been wondering what a full Mastery build would look like on Mongoose dumps, but theory crafting in WoW is prohibitively expensive.
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That’s basically the idiotic “jump in and out” gameplay FFXIV gave red mages, and I absolutely hate that design because not only is it untenable in the long run but also looks absolutely ridiculous in practice.
Okay, so I’ve got to ask this: What makes you so sure that the low population is the result of SV being changed from ranged to melee? First thing that usually comes to mind to explain why a class is unpopular is the gameplay and/or mechanics of the class. Maybe people find the way Mongoose Fury works to not be “fun”. Maybe they don’t like the role Wildfire Bomb plays in the rotation. Maybe it’s the reliance on Kill Command resets. Maybe it’s the class’ over-reliance on Haste. There’s other possible explanations for why the spec isn’t popular right now.
Because the only constant here is being melee.
Other specs have problems too, but only SV is enough to apparently keep most of the class away from it.
Also Blizzard was asked about why SV was unpopular and they said it was because Hunters don’t want to play melee.
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The population drop makes sense only when looking at Legion’s launch, since that’s when it was changed from ranged to melee. People would understandably move on to other classes/specs as a result of that.
After Legion it makes less sense because by then you can’t chalk it up to it being a melee hunter spec. If the problem persisted through BFA and Shadowlands, that tells me it could be something related to the spec’s design and gameplay (especially when you consider how lackluster SV was in BFA). I might even believe there’s an issue with the spec’s presentation before trying to claim that people are staying away from SV because they’re still mad it was changed for Legion.
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It still makes sense as the reason. It’s not about people holding a grudge. Hunters are still designed and marketed as a ranged class so Survival comes off as a handicap. The failures in its design certainly contribute but the biggest factor is being melee. To most Hunters it’s a very poor trade-off.
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LOL
2/3 specs have been yes. Survival has now spent more time melee than ranged so
not confirmed because you and like 6 others here are annoyed with it. But I know you love thinking you speak for everyone
doubt
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Ranged DPS is just easier in PvE. Boss mechanics are generally easier, fighting trash is easier, leveling is easier… Everything is easier. Any expansion, you could Google “most chill class” and 80% of answers or more would be hunters (with BM getting called out specially).
So when you take one of the specs of the easiest classes to play and make it not only inherently harder by just making it melee… But also making it one of the more difficult melee specs… OF COURSE it won’t be popular.
Anyone knows that when they want to get their girlfriend into wow, they make her a hunter lol
But from blizzard perspective… Do we really need THREE easy ranged specs?
And after having sampled BM for the first time ever… I gotta say, their spec is way worse designed and randomly slopped together than SV. Poor guys.
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That’s more in line with my opinion, as it stands. With the 4pc set bonus, Mongoose Bite/Spearhead feels utterly stifling and repetitive as opposed to the Coordinated Assault style which incorperates bombs and KS, with Mongoose Bite thrown in for flavor. I dont think 1 button should ever account for roughly 40% of a damage profile for any class, to be frank.
Mongoose Fury to me is a worse version of the old Blood of the Dragon mechanic from FFXIV’s first expansion. For context, dragoons had a buff called Blood of the Dragon that they had to activate separately like a cooldown but the effect could be extended via certain attacks. The catch was that the attacks were gated behind combos and couldn’t perpetuate the effect forever.
The buff itself was not a direct damage buff per se, but it enhanced other abilities (Jumps), gave access to new abilities while the effect was active (a fourth step in the standard 3-step weaponskill combo) and had a payoff skill that consumed the effect to deal high damage. So the gameplay involved keeping BotD active for as long as you could, and once the effect was about to wear off you’d use Geirskogul to consume it. By then BotD was off cooldown so you would do it all over again.
SV was leaning in this direction during Legion because of how stacks of Mongoose Fury interacted with Fury of the Eagle, along with how Aspect of the Eagle interacted with Mongoose Fury. Iterating upon such interactions would probably alleviate the 1-button issue you describe. It would also not offend me on a spiritual level like Terms of Engagement does. The sticking point in all of this is that it would force SV hunters to pick specific talents in DF’s version of talent trees, unless we want to make Mongoose Bite/Fury baseline for SV.
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Well put.
It appears the current iteration of MB was an experiment with the ‘ramp up & consume’ topology you mentioned earlier, but was instead compressed into a single linear ability for ease of use.
What if Raptor Strike consumed Mongoose Fury stacks and became a finishing move? Upon consumption, Raptor Strike can have conditional effects based on the amount of Mongoose Fury stacks consumed. 1-2 stacks consumed: Raptor Strike does enhanced damage and increases movement speed. 3-4 stacks consumed: Raptor Strike becomes an amplified Carve to assist with our ST to AoE transition issues. At 5 stacks consumed, Raptor Strike becomes a guaranteed critical strike with a massive boost to critical damage.
There’s much more room for growth.
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Since we’re entering the realm of suggestions and ideas, I’ll build on what you just mentioned.
- Keep Raptor Strike as the starter melee skill in the SV tree, but it scales with and consumes Mongoose Fury stacks.
- Move Mongoose Bite a little bit up the tree so it can be picked earlier (have it swap spots with Aspect of the Eagle at the least).
- Make Mongoose Fury closer to the aforementioned Blood of the Dragon by having subsequent uses of Mongoose Bite extend Mongoose Fury’s duration with diminishing returns. Nerf the base duration to 10s from 14s, but each additional use extends it by half. So on the second use it’s extended by 5s, on the third it’s extended by 2s, then by 1s, then by 0s, giving the effect a net duration of 18s but requiring player input to reach that length.
- Change Flanking Strike into a talent that replaces Kill Command when picked. Keep the 6s cooldown, keep the KC focus generation, keep the reset procs, adjust the initial damage dealt (maybe slightly nerf it?), remove the “leap to the target” thing and change the effect of the skill to enhance your next attack:
- Mongoose Bite: Slight damage increase and a chance the next Mongoose Bite grants two stacks of Mongoose Fury instead of one.
- Wildfire Bomb: Increase damage and/or add one more explosion for reduced damage.
- Kill Shot: Bleed damage for 25% of the initial damage dealt.
- Change Coordinated Assault’s secondary effect to increase either a) focus regen rate for master and pet or b) crit rating for master and pet.
- Move Harpoon, Terms of Engagement and Aspect of the Eagle to one of the sides of the talent tree, becoming a sort of dead end (like Piercing/Enduring Chill is for Frost DKs). Have the talent line be Harpoon => Terms of Engagement => Aspect of the Eagle.
There’s more I feel needs to be done, such as doing something about Carve and Butchery being too similar, what to do with the class’ baseline ranged skills (Arcane Shot comes to mind) and how to make other skills fit in (such as Serpent Sting and Explosive Shot), but I think this is a good start.
I forgot to reply to this. My point is that unpopular classes tend to be unpopular because of some mechanical failing or a massive misunderstanding. I’ve yet to see evidence of a massive misunderstanding involving SV (story time: FFXI’s Beastmaster class was ostracized from parties because a Prima guide mistakenly said that having one in your party decreased the party’s exp gain if they had their pet out; this was false and it took many years before anyone bothered to check), so I have to lean towards a mechanical/gameplay failing of the spec.
Also, I don’t think you can make the trade-off argument because that would involve prior knowledge. Someone rolling a hunter today with no knowledge of WoW is not going to know that SV back in vanilla had a bunch of +damage to specific types of mobs in addition to buffs to Wing Clip and Raptor Strike, or that SV spammed Explosive Shot during Wrath. To that person starting out today, all they’ll see and know is that hunters have two ranged specs and one melee spec, so the questions to answer is whether a) they’re getting compelled to try out SV, and b) if they have and didn’t like it, what about it that drove them away.
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At least on blizz’s end I don’t think melee SV is a failure in class design. I have to imagine that if melee SV failed it would have been reverted back at some point to range. And I know some people are going to say something like “oh blizzard is to invested in melee SV, blizz doesn’t want to admit they where wrong etc…”- to me this sounds too conspiracy theorish. If melee SV is not working blizz would have changed back, so the fact that melee SV is still a thing tells me that someone on the class design team sees melee SV as a success.
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Being ranged doesn’t necessarily mean being easy. It would have been far easier and far more effective to make SV a moderately challenging ranged spec.
Plus I can flip the question: Do we really need yet another melee spec in a game that already has plenty of melee specs? Evidently most Hunters feel like they don’t need Survival.
SV is a special case because its design is largely at odds with the outwardly iconic Hunter foundation as a ranged weapon class. The closest comparisons I can think of are a Rogue without Stealth (not as extreme) or a Mage without spells (much more extreme).
The trade-off argument is independent of what SV used to be.
Imagine the journey of a new player creating a Hunter. The character selection screen has Hunters using ranged weapons, and the icon is a bow. You start at level 1 and level to 10 using exclusively a ranged weapon which can be used at any range within 40 yards (a key point that it seems many SV fans forget). Then at level 10 you pick a specialisation. Two of them continue using a ranged weapon. One of them suddenly requires you to use a melee weapon. You literally have to buy one off the vendor on the way out the door after handing in the specialisation introduction quest. If you pick that last one, which has a pretty vague and broad description compared to the others (basically the spec description in the menu: “it uses bombs, and poisons, and pets, and also melee!”… why so unfocused?), and suddenly you’re given a melee attack and you’re told you throw away the weapon you’ve used until that point; the one it seems the class is built around. Yet you still have ranged attacks in your spellbook; they’re just very weak, and they use an animation-only crossbow instead of your own real weapon.
Not only does it come across as bandaided and shoehorned, but it also feels like a deviation rather than a specialisation. It doesn’t feel like it’s continuing to build on the class; rather than running off to do its own thing. It certainly doesn’t imitate classic well, since we had both a melee and a ranged weapon back then. It also comes across as a handicap. If you’re a new player and you have no concept of tuning, you would be asking yourself: what ever is the point of a spec that uses melee weapons when the ranged specs can also fight at 100% effectiveness in melee range?
So to a new player approaching Hunters and Survival: it’s got a confusing and ill-defined identity, it comes across as a handicap, and it doesn’t feel like it’s building on top of the foundation of the class but rather creating a tacked-on extension.
I’ve talked to many Hunters in game who started since Legion. They mostly avoid SV or are mostly indifferent to it. It really does come down to feeling that picking SV is picking a handicap even if the tuning is strong.
Well of course Blizzard considers it a success. That doesn’t mean it is one.
Being a “success” in the first place is subjective. But there are objective measures of how widely enjoyed a spec is and Survival fails hard there. The thing is: it’s very easy to just change the definition of what counts as “success”. That, plus doubling down on decisions out of pride, is characteristic of Blizzard these days so I’m not sure why it sounds “conspiracy theorish” to you. They do this all the time.
Remember when they stopped reporting subscriber counts (right as they lost 50% of their subscribers in just 9 months) because all of a sudden they considered subscriptions, the primary revenue stream for the game and a number correlated to how people feel about it, were no longer a measure of the game’s success?
Blizzard routinely considers bad and destructive design decisions to be a success. Sometimes they get reverted but it basically requires pressure from the entire playerbase at once, so that will only come from issues that affect everyone.
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If anything, this sounds like an argument for allowing hunters to equip a melee weapon and a ranged weapon at the same time to delineate how the class can specialize. It’d bring back the headache that was picking up stat sticks in either case (MM and BM having to grab melee stat sticks, SV having to grab ranged stat sticks) but I think it would address the issue you’re bringing up.
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It is not worth reworking the class at significant expense to BM and MM just to accommodate melee SV.
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Once again a whole bunch of opinionated fluff in a thread that has nothing to do with said opinion. Still derailing, /sigh
1: You have no idea of a new players perspective.
2: Baseless opinion on what constitutes a handicap
3: the SV tree literally has a picture of Rexxar as the backdrop. That is one of many clear indicators of the idea of the spec, its identity, and, as mentioned earlier, adds to & builds upon the class (just in a way you don’t agree with, but hey - you aren’t any kind of authority on the matter, are you Bepples).
Are you actually going to offer any considerations to the actual thread topic, or are you just going to go in these pointless circles with whoever gets sucked into your garbage?
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You can pretend it’s fine with new players all you want, but evidently there is an underlying reason why even new players who never had any experience with ranged SV shy away from melee SV and it’s worth discussing.
The basic calculus for anyone considering SV is that you’re giving up the ability to be fully capable at any range to only being fully capable in melee range. It’s a huge shift in both identity and capability. It’s not an irrelevant side factor and even inexperienced players see that SV is asking a lot of the player right on arrival.
As for the Rexxar identity: it really starts and ends at “being melee”. It has elements that don’t match Rexxar (Wildfire Bomb), it uses pet aspects borrowed from the spec that was actually originally meant to be inspired by Rexxar (Beast Mastery), and it doesn’t even utilise melee in the same way Rexxar does (2-handed v.s. dual wield). Shrieking “REXXAR” all the time doesn’t magically make SV’s identity coherent; even less so, as a matter of fact, to new players who probably don’t know who Rexxar is in the first place.
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…
I’ll take that dodge as a no. It seems you are content to keep dribbling garbage and derailing everything.
Get a life mate
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