There’s the “yes” answer to your question in the very first line: Death Knights were mostly based on one character. Bad reading comprehension strikes again.
You’re asking leading questions and it’s obvious where you intend to go with them so I’ll pre-empt them. Evidently you think that because Death Knights more specifically emulate a WC3 character that means the same applies to Hunters, which is silly because Death Knight is a much more specific concept than Hunters. If that’s not where you intended to go, feel free to actually detail your argument instead of wasting time expressing it through a series of leading questions.
Setting aside that your many strawmen and assumptive deflections aren’t actually confirmation that you agree with the statements, let’s move on. Trust me, the line of reasoning with these questions is essential for getting the point across.
Great! To reiterate those questions, just so we’re both on the exact same page: We both completely agree that the overarching classes in WoW can be broadly inspired by the fantasies of pre-existing character(s) such as ones from Warcraft 3?
We also completely agree that those same character inspirations and their broader established fantasies can be further concentrated and used as inspiration for individual specializations that offer different fantasy-focus and styles of play within those broader classes?
This just brings us right back to the fact that Hunters had derived inspiration from Rexxar in the form of pets which is why we have a specialisation called Beast Mastery which focuses on pets like Rexxar.
There was never any disagreement that WoW classes get inspiration from WC3 heroes. The disagreement lies in the argument that Rexxar’s existence automatically gives sanction to the specific action of making Survival a melee spec in Legion; something you won’t get specific about because it’s indefensible.
Nothing there tells me whether or not you agree with the above statements, and trust me, these are the last ones I plan on asking you. Do you agree with both of the above statements?
TBH even after the PTR fixes released today, Survival still will seem weak.
In addition Blizzard is way too punishing for melee. There’s a huge imbalance, and a lot of mechanics where you have to spread even in melee. Blizzard likes to have mechanics that devatstate melee on boss fights versus range.
This is simply not true. Most bosses in the current raid are way more punishing to ranged. Melee is being stacked and favoured heavily so far this expansion and is doing more damage then most comparable ranged specs. They also can damage well moving. This is why in the past melee was punished more because of uptime. This expansion has heavy melee bias.
I just hope they eventually give FotE a focus cost so it can better keep up with Coordinate Kill when saddled with some Mastery… if they decide eventually to let Mastery at least compete with Crit and Haste.
(Given that it provides no new duration-capitalizing breakpoints nor has any talent synergies, Mastery should at least scale better per point for ST than Haste or Crit [at least in less crit-proc- or crit-damage-bonus-heavy builds].)
I really miss Venthyr Survival. If only it better competed against Kyrian/Fae in PvE (e.g., if Razor Fragments had been a bit higher tuned or had a higher target cap), I could have excused more of that gameplay goodness.
It’s still not bad – definitely up there with MM and head and shoulders above even my favorite build of BM-- but with the missing Serpent Sting per 12 and Mongoose Bite being obligatory and such a long window of encroachment on all else, it is missing a… something, at least.
Chakrams and Explosive Shot does do a surprising amount for a bit of extra flare, though. Would be neat to extract more synergies from it and other capstone talents. (And for our own less interesting near-capstone passives to, well, do more. I’d prefer that over [just] simple aura patch-ups.)
It’s just disheartening knowing that my hunter will be useless in high keys because of the bad survivability, makes me want to reroll AGAIN this season. Originally had a HPali, had a horrible time so I went MM. Found out about the removal of double tap so I forced myself to re-learn survival again. While it is fun, it does have it’s moments of frustration. We definitely need some sort of tuning or talent rework. Maybe allow us to cast mongoose bite during Fury of the Eagle? or Have fury of the eagle proc a dot that does the damage for us?
Something needs to change for hunter to be fun again, because at this rate, it’s just becoming annoying having to pug Mythic +'s and getting kicked because I chose survival over FoTM or BM.
Tbh the only change I want is coordinated strikes to be reverted to its old form
Then to make spear head or the kill shot/wildfire bomb an upgrade to it.
No idea why they green lit that change and left survival as like one of the only classes with out a damage cool-down and turned them into weird cool-downs
That’s on me, my question wasn’t refined enough. What I was trying to ask him was if he believed WoW’s interpretation of the class was primarily inspired by Arthas, considering WOTLK was when they were released and Arthas was front and center with their debut. WC2’s Death Knights and Teron Gorefiend also being inspirations bolster the point I was trying to make though, so thank you for bringing it up.
Not like it matters though, Brave Sir Bepples will fight tooth and nail to answer questions that objectively pin down how he feels about WoW’s design philosophies.
While this is true, the Death Knights of the old horde, created by Gul’dan with the second war, they were vastly different to what we’re seeing now. They were more akin to necromancers, in the sense that they did not rely on armor and weapons, but rather on reanimating the corpses of fallen enemies(primarily). The goal when they were created was to replace what was lost with the fallen Warlock clans, who had been killed on orders of Orgrim Doomhammer.
Having said that, you can definitely see aspects of their original powers reflected in the currently playable class in WoW. Primarily, necromantic powers.
While I have no interest in joining the discussion that you and Bepples are having, equating the inspirations of/for the Death Knight class to those of/for the Hunter class, is ultimately a flawed argument.
Death Knights, as we see them today(WoW, as creations of the Lich King), derive from a focused skillset, and place in history. Even with the original Death Knights of the old horde, this is true. This is not the case for Hunters. Hunters, the playable class as realised for WoW, drew inspiration from a wide array of units/characters, throughout history.
This. They were robed, resurrected orcs on skeletal horses that Orgrim could better control after his purge of the Shadow Council’s figurehead, Blackhand, and said Council itself.
No obvious plate armor, just a staff and robe. So… a warlock mounted to slightly offset their fragility.
They were considered the analog to the Alliance Mages, still fairly slow and highly vulnerable while acting as utility and anti-armor (via magical auto-attacks), atop slightly greater burst damage and burst self-healing, grantable brief invincibility, and summons that overall made them slightly more defensively specialized (at least, outside of its extra, uncontrollable AoE spell, Whirlwind), as compared to Mage’s pure nuke, offensive Flame Shield, Slow, and Invisibility, etc. Both had a single controllable denial spells (Death and Decay or Blizzard).
Do they? Can you point to any one-thing from specifically established Death Knights prior to WOTLK to explain the inspiration for the Blood spec? WC2&3 DKs have nothing associated with Blood, it’s all Death/Unholy.
On that note, they also don’t have any skills related to Frost, but at the very least Frost has the tangential relation to Frozen Throne and "Frost"mourne.