Most specs don’t need to be the very best in the game just to see moderate play. You can look to the other Hunter specs for that, or even Survival before Legion.
There’s evidently a factor unique to Survival that makes it particularly unpopular. Hazzikostas was once asked about this and he said that it was because most Hunters prefer to be ranged. That is, most Hunters don’t find melee fun, or at least not as fun as ranged.
“Conceptually” is doing a lot of work here.
Pragmatically, melee Hunter is a dreadful idea. Blizzard designed (and really still does design) Hunter as a ranged weapon user and it did this because WoW already has a lot of representation of melee archetypes. A melee Hunter would just come off as a handicapped and undesirable Hunter that’s also not particularly interesting against other melee specs; it was added in the same expansion as a melee spec with double-jump and laser eyes after all. And of course that’s exactly how SV turned out; unless you have an extremely specific set of interests SV is a flop. Completely inappropriate as a replacement to an existing ranged spec.
Good reworks/reboots balance preserving the source material while introducing new positive innovations. Bad reworks/reboots haphazardly throw out everything that works and don’t vet new ideas beyond “it’s new and different therefore good”. Melee SV is the latter.
“Mods please ban people I disagree with”.
PS if you want to report someone on the WoW forums maybe don’t throw out insults at the same time. Don’t worry about me, though: I don’t report people on the forums because I’m not a sissy.
I think survival feels great in pvp at the moment. The only downside is there is not a good way to recover after a fight.
Survival at it’s core though is fast and mobile melee ranged hybrid! This allows you to always play in a range your opponent is uncomfortable fighting you in. It’s a lot of fun determining your positioning to apply pressure to enemies.
The best build utilizes coordinated assault to get you to kill shot burst windows. In shuffles and bgs the aoe kill shot allows you to put large split pressure damage on healers, doing about 300k or more aoe damage on 4 kill shots. Explosive shot gives you big burst set ups and can deal massive aoe as well.
Depending on the fight going to camo will heal you up, if your able to slip away before someone else see’s you in a BG. That can get you back to health at a decent rate.
I genuinely wonder if there’s any world where blizzard makes an iteration of MSV that you might like, and if so i’d wonder what that looks like. Also sorry if you’ve answered this before but how would you feel if MSV was it’s own thing? like a 4th spec. Would you be fine with it since survival was how it was or still be on a crusade against it because it doesn’t fit “Hunter”
For him? No. Classes like Rogue and Warrior can magically be well-designed while melee, because they’re named Rogue and Warrior. Bepples believes on a fundamental level that a melee hunter is intrinsically “bad designed” because he believes his narrow-minded view of ‘hunter=range’ is somehow objective or lore consistent. (It’s not.)
That or he’s just a troll, which I’d argue is more likely considering he’ll never answer any good-faith questions or approach anything in good faith, really. It’s all strawmen that he needs to attack in order to pretend he has any semblance of a point.
The Hunter was, as defined by the fantasy BLIZZARD CREATED, a ranged CLASS. It had SOME melee and short range abilities, but it was a RANGED CLASS. Folks posting on this forum are either turbo ignorant or incredibly obtuse if they think otherwise. There are plenty of melee classes and specs with ranged abilities, but that doesn’t make them ranged, so please PLEASE don’t use that tired and COMPLETELY INCORRECT argument. ALSO, the lore argument is hogwash. Give me DW melee BM and I’ll agree. Until then - can it.
I love seeing this argument, it’s always hilarious. ‘It doesn’t matter what established hunters did in previous lore-canonical games, you can never use them for inspiration! When they made the class, it was primarily ranged, and what Blizzard says is law!!.. Except a decade ago in Legion.’
Them making 3 ranged specs doesn’t mean the class must be ranged. If Blizzard released a fouth battle-mage spec that used a melee weapon, would you throw a similar tantrum about how all mages must use staves and wands?
Who’s gonna tell him that like 60% of survival is ranged by default, and depending on how you spec you can bump that up to like 90%? Lmao
Hey, go open the talent tree for SV on retail, and tell me who’s standing there on the right side. I wonder who they used as inspiration for the spec
Oh, I just noticed that this guy throwing delusional tantrum about a decade old change and spouting off Bepples’ classic insanity is named Jaggles. Bepples liked his post seconds after they post too, really makes ya’ think.
It is possible for more than one person to refuse to accept that survival is a melee spec.
This constant tin foil conspiracy that Bepples is posting from a burner toon everytime someone agrees with him is quickly reaching the same levels of infantilism we accuse them of when refusing to accept survival isn’t ranged.
Take off the tin foil hat. It isn’t a good look for those of us who enjoy the current iteration of survival hunter.
Right!? Just cause some randos named Canine, Dog, Mutt, and Mongrel come and like all my posts instantly and type exactly like I do doesn’t mean anything. It’s just proof that I’m such a smart and relatable guy!
I don’t even mind MSV, it’s kinda fun. I just get sick of the weird revisionist history. Make a reasonable argument for the spec - neither of those is lore or class design history.
I have made the argument before that Blizz should fully commit to melee for SV, no pet for MM, and full-on pet summoning mania for BM. That way they can build actual survivability into (ironically) Survival. Literally every melee spec has some combination of strong heals, avoidance that can be used when bursting, a shield, a disarm, etc. SV has the weakest version of a couple of those - I suspect that’s because (as I have said) the mitigation is based on kiting. For a melee spec.
So again, MSV is fun, if lacking any kind of cohesion. I haven’t been playing a whole lot of Hunter this xpack, but I have been farting around with SV before and after the last patch, and it SEEMS stronger, even with my crap gear, to answer the original question.
Hard disagree on this. The in and out of survival is what sets it apart from typical zug zug melee and is the reason it is so engaging and rewarding.
I will admit we need a little love in the survival department but we fair much better than MM hunter in my opinion. When I’m getting trained by a wild unga bunga I disengage and trap and if those fail I can harpoon to one of there team mates as another disengage.
If you look at it from a more ebb and flow kind of perspective it does start to look more cohesive. I am not saying this is you, but many people tend to think they should just be in melee and only leave when they get low on health. Dancing around the arena with harpoons and disengage really helps seeing why SV plays the way it does. We dont have an absurd amount of damage from range but our sustained damage is decent enough when you are constantly disrupting the enemy healer.
I can also see why PVE heroes tend to hate melee survival. Because the enjoyable in and out playstyle is in no way encourage by the spec. That encouragement lies in external sources which bodes well for it in pvp.
Same could be said for RSV. Just because it was ranged in the past does not mean the spec is garbage now that it isn’t. To be fair though, both side just have their opinion and neither side listens to any justification of the former it seems. That is why these deep dives into history are cherry picked because its such a hard divide in the hunter community both sides seem to just plug their ears and shout.
It sucks ranged survival players lost a spec they enjoyed at the expense of players such as myself who gained one they enjoyed even more. But we play with the cards we are dealt, that’s just life.
To be fair I enjoyed RSV a lot back in the day. It was my main hunter spec cause it was fun to kite 3 melees at a time and know they were probably raging behind the keyboard.
But I am happy with Blizzards decision to make SV a melee spec.
In an effort to stay on topic. Survival feels great after the buffs. From a PvP perspective at least. I don’t particularly enjoy hunter PVE.
I will say I miss RSV from one aspect. Kiting a melee ad infinitum until they realized they f%#@!ed up and try to waddle away and fall over from the dots. I really do miss that. Haha
This is pretty key word here. They were ranged with some melee. Now they are melee with a lot of ranged. Lore doesn’t matter. Old guides and videos don’t matter. What matters is that RIGHT NOW sv is a melee-weapon using hybrid spec … that BLIZZARD CREATED.
I don’t disagree. It IS fun. It just doesn’t make any sense as a Hunter. The counter to the ranged argument is always “HUNTERS USED SPEARS, CHECKMATE RSV.” It’s true, they did. Spears, NOT polearms, though. I would honestly prefer a different kinda spec where you’re more like a Pantheon-esque (from LoL), javelin and shield setup. Leap stuns, brief damage immunity to escape, ranged spear throwing. I don’t think that has anything to do with being a Hunter, per se, but it would be a pretty awesome playstyle. I guess it would be more like a Gladiator class?
