Hey cool! So does Hunter. I’m glad we can agree on that.
Hunter is based on having a pet. Maybe that means LW should be obliterated.
You’re ignoring what I’m saying. Melee DPS is brought because it generally has unique utility. Battle Shout, Rallying Cry, Mystic Touch, Chaos Brand, Atrophic Poison, Windfury Totem, etc.
Yes, DPS doing strong DPS is a solution if they dont want to give utility. What are you trying to say here?
Yes, not having utility when other classes do is silly.
I’ve seen plenty of people on plenty of different online discussion forums saying things from both ends of the spectrum. It’s meaningless. There are people in Discord that are RSV diehards, MSV diehards, and people who don’t care. Just like the same spectrum exists on other online forums.
You’re not understanding what I’m saying. Clearly ranged DPS having extreme amounts of mobility is not something they want in the game, so they aren’t going to have two fully ranged fully mobile specs in the game moving forward.
Could be!
Who said it would be entirely based around bleeds? Bleeds are DoTs.
Or just adding DoT options to MM.
This is quite literally you lol. Your compromise is to combine BM and melee, just like my “compromise” is to add RSV to MM.
Reworking gameplay is reworking gameplay. Reworking class themes is just as valid as “role”. It goes from psychic vampire to old god cultist to both to either back and forth. Along with extreme gameplay changes too.
It’s tricky to have these types of dicussions without repeating the exact same talking points. Time has proven such methods ineffective.
As a result, I might be willing to concede a few points in favor of Ranged DPS, but only if you do the same for Melee DPS. From here, we can have a more balanced discussion on the topic.
I will begin by conceding to the fact that the Hunter Class possessed both a sustained and a burst rDPS profile. This admission is made without regard to any gameplay limitations or personal bias.
Now what I need in return is an admission that the Hunter Class also possessed a sustained and burst mDPS profile without regard to any gameplay limitation or bias.
If we cannot strike an accord on these facts immutable, then no further discussion should be had between us.
If Hunter did, SV would be a hell of a lot more successful less controversial than it is now.
The class is still designed with ranged weapons as the basic assumption and Survival shoehorned in as the awkward exception.
Ranged weapons were and still are more important to the class identity than pets. The pet-first angle has always been roleplay headcanon. Making a petless Hunter involved adding one talent. Making a melee Hunter involved removing and replacing an entire spec.
But yes, Lone Wolf is also problematic. My opinion is that Lone Wolf in WoD gave precedent and normalisation to carving up basic parts of the Hunter identity between the specs rather than keeping them shared. Unlike melee, however, Lone Wolf is sometimes inherently a positive rather than a handicap. LW still has place in the class but it should be something far more optional than it is now.
This hasn’t always been the case and not every melee has something totally exclusive and essential even today.
Bribing people with utility isn’t the answer, anyway. If Hunters don’t want to play melee, they don’t want to play melee. It was a bad idea to replace one of their ranged specs with a melee one, it’s a bad idea to continue to prop it up, and it’s not going to be fixed by x and y bandaid solution regardless of how much people insist it will.
It’s our highest damaging spec right now and it’s still extremely unpopular. So it needs colossal damage leads for Hunters to seriously consider playing it, like we saw in late Shadowlands. I realise a lot of SV Hunters salivate at the thought but in fact it’s unhealthy for the class to bribe everyone to play the unwanted spec with such overtuned damage.
TSL is far more weighted towards tuning-centric discussion. The people there are a lot more competitive than the average WoW player.
In all their excuse braindumping about why they made SV melee, “we don’t want two fully-mobile specs” was never one of them.
Even if it were, ranged SV having less mobility than SV wouldn’t be so much of a deal breaker. It would probably mean it wouldn’t hold up as well against BM as it used to, but anything is better than melee SV’s track record. Using “ranged SV won’t hold up against the other specs” in defence of melee SV is delusional given how melee SV always turns out.
That would be “statistically unlikely” to put it mildly.
Moonfire is a DoT too so I guess ranged SV fans are asking for arcane DoTs as well?
We’re not asking for bleeds and we never did, so pretending that we are because we want a DoT-focused spec is facetious.
No because that just means 2 watered down specs in one. Ranged weaponry deserves far better than that in WoW.
That is a compromise. It’s not ideal for ranged Hunters either because then a lot of design and balancing effort has to go into BM to support the melee mode as well as the default ranged state. The ideal “keep 100% of what we want” situation for ranged Hunters is 3 ranged specs and no melee whatsoever, as it was in MoP and WoD.
It’s a compromise that favours the ranged players, yes, but it ought to be given that most Hunters prefer ranged. It doesn’t make sense to have a melee-preferring compromise when so few of the class’s playerbase wants melee.
This is still not the same as chasing niche ideas like melee Hunter, melee Mage, and tank Shaman.
You seem to think that factual true-or-false matters are something that can and should be compromised over. It’s like if someone says the sky is blue and another says it’s red; you seem like the kind of person to say “can’t we find a middle ground”. No, on some things we can’t. Sometimes one side is just factually incorrect. In this case I’m correct when I say SV was a ranged spec in Classic and you’re incorrect when you say it was melee or melee-preferring. The spec was simply vastly more proficient when played as ranged.
Let’s not forget what the actual melee toolkit was:
Raptor Strike
Mongoose Bite
Wing Clip
Counterattack
Deterrence
The first 3 were classwide. The last 2 were SV-specific. Deterrence is a bit different to the others because it wasn’t a “strike” but it gave dodge and parry chance which are melee concepts.
SV gave buffs to the first 3 in two talents. It had Savage Strikes which gave extra crit change to Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite and Improved Wing Clip which added a chance to snare on Wing Clip… It also had Deflection which was parry chance. Everything else in the tree either didn’t buff damage or buffed both ranged and melee damage (e.g. crit chance from Killer Instinct, agility from Lightning Reflexes).
The fact that there was only one offensive melee talent in the entire tree (and really only one capable offensive ability in the kit, Raptor Strike, given Mongoose Bite was weaker and required a dodge) should tell you it was probably not a spec that was meant to be fighting in melee. Everything else was defensive or even outright helped you to escape back to range. Any understanding of the Hunter class fundamentals tells us that SV was a ranged spec that was just equipped with tools to help it survive when opponents closed the gap.
So whether SV was a melee spec or not is a closed issue. It wasn’t, and therefore modern SV is a bad representation/derivation of what SV originally was. Pragmatically and effectively SV was ranged in Classic. This is not something I’ll compromise on because that’s the factual state of things.
Now we can argue about whether the intent was to have a melee spec, especially given before the Hunter review of 1.7 it had more melee talents including Lacerate, but I would argue that the fact that they designed the class to be so ranged-dependent at a baseline level regardless of spec and they in no uncertain terms described Hunters as ranged weapon users tells me that wasn’t the case. Specs did not decide most of your identity, playstyle, and toolkit back then. Most of that was written into the baseline.
Sure, they didn’t know what they were doing half the time, but if they wanted Hunters to have a spec that treated ranged weapons as a secondary last resort and preferred to fight in melee, there were many easy ways to do that yet they didn’t take any of those paths. And every time they came to work on SV it exclusively enhanced its ranged capabilities. That 1.7 rework was less than a year in, after all.
TL:DR of a section that ended up being way longer than I expected:
Whether or not SV was ranged in classic is an entirely settled issue. It was ranged. That can’t be disputed or compromised over.
Whether or not they intended SV to be melee or melee-preferring is debatable. Before 1.7 it’s a maybe, but unlikely. After 1.7, definitely not.
I’m not interested in this line of discussion. This isn’t meant to be offensive or dismissive. It’s only that this has been done before, and more thoroughly, in this thread:
I was actually more interested in an evolution of the subject. I find that not only you, but myself, have grown accustomed to our comfort zone which has resulted in stagnation.
I challenge you to address the accord as outlined below.
I will begin by conceding to the fact that the Hunter Class possessed both a sustained and a burst rDPS profile. This admission is made without regard to any gameplay limitations or personal bias.
Now what I need in return is an admission that the Hunter Class also possessed a sustained and burst mDPS profile without regard to any gameplay limitation or bias.
How so? All 3 specs can equip both ranged and melee weapons. It seems like the class is being designed around with pets being the basic assumption.
According to whom? You?
It’s been the case for years and years and years and years.
Yes it is with the way fights are designed. Why else would every other melee have mandatory utility?
You’re being daft on purpose. Giving Hunters mandatory utility would fix a lot of viability concerns all 3 specs have. Why do you try to be so dismissive about the importance of unique utility? You say a DPS spec can’t be propped up by the DPS it does (ridiculous assertion) and you say a DPS spec can’t be propped up by utility it brings. You just want to stick your head in the sand and complain?
Again, ridiculous assertion. DPS without utility needs to bring damage. Why else would you bring DPS?
Why do you think every new DPS spec added to the game has not been 40 yd? Do you think your RSV will magically be the exception and also full mobility contrasted with every other RDPS in the game?
So it wouldn’t be brought for mechanics assistance because BM would have better mobility and it wouldn’t be brought over MM because MM would have better damage and as you said, (R)SV can’t be be propped up by having the strongest damage so…
Despite your opinion of yourself, you don’t speak for every single person wanting RSV and it’s cartoonish to even think that your opinions are the baseline. Plenty of people like “shrapnel” effects on their “exotic munitions”.
Subjective opinion you have. It wouldn’t be watered down, because RSV hardly has any weight to it besides “fancy munitions” and “Dot procs”.
So you saying “add melee to BM” is a compromise and me saying “add DoT procs to MM” is not a compromise. That’s silly.
It’s just as heavy handed and should seemingly be worse to your POV as it is much more frequent. SV was changed almost 9 years ago at this point, while Shadow changes identities and gameplay every quarter.
Don’t pretend I’m the one evading here. My stance on this is clear. SV was a ranged spec in classic, end of story. There’s nothing to concede on there. I just wrote a lot about how that’s the fact. Waving it off as “we’ve already discussed this” is just more evasion and deflection on your part. If we’ve already discussed it and you still believe the incorrect things you do, that just means you’re being stubborn in addition to being wrong. You should work on that.
I think you knew this was a reach when you typed it.
You start with a ranged weapon only at level 1, imagery and iconography surrounding the class is ranged weapon centric, and baseline elements + core class tree mostly assume use of ranged weapons (in fact specific exceptions need to be made just for SV to work).
According to Blizzard until Legion. And even after Legion most of their Hunter class design decisions assume ranged weapons as a baseline. The fact that they had to add that stupid sidearm crossbow to SV proves it.
Barring ground-up classwide reworks, SV will ALWAYS be the alien tacked-on spec that feels out of place. This is the primary reason it remains unpopular. Not utility or other cutting-edge content concerns.
Once again, adding a petless Hunter required adding a talent. Adding a melee Hunter required removing an existing ranged spec and making a melee spec from scratch. This settles the fact that ranged weapons are more central to the class than pets. It’s not a matter of opinion and if you disagree that just makes you wrong.
Feral Druid is a spec that also doesn’t have anything immediately crucial to a raid group; at least not anything exclusive to Feral. It has a ranged spec in the same class that usually eclipses it, pun intended. It’s even had a lot of the same troubles as SV over the years… except there are still more of those around than Survival Hunters.
In pure classes these utilities usually come shared. I’m not interested in specific utility bribes just for SV; especially not things like previously shared utilities (namely Aspect of the Fox) coming back exclusively for SV as requested by some fanatics on TSL. If Hunters lack utility, give something to all Hunters. That still puts SV in a bad position, but that’s a natural product of the terrible decision to make it melee in the first place. They made their bed, they can lie in it.
Hunters still get brought to raids. Maybe you haven’t noticed since you’re exclusively infatuated with melee Survival, but Hunters have pretty good representation even in this tier where their damage isn’t the best. It’s only Survival that has bad representation. And it’s not like there’s a huge amount of Survival players out there gatekept out of raiding and M+. There just aren’t that many people playing it. Utility isn’t going to change that because it’s a matter of competitive content and only a small section of the playerbase engages in that.
If they want to add utility to the class, sure: go ahead. But they must not add utility exclusively for Survival just as a compensation for being melee. That would just be Hunters once again paying a price for SV being melee, i.e. compounding losses from a terrific mistake to begin with.
Are you saying that SV being ~20% ahead of the other specs, as was the case in late Shadowlands, would be a healthy state for the Hunter class?
I wouldn’t put it past an SV main to believe something like this. They are generally self-centred.
Because their designers struggle to conceptualise an interesting spec without it being melee? That just means the designers suck and they should get new ones. We’ve known that since WoD. The fact that they haven’t made a 40 yard ranged spec means they shouldn’t be converting ranged specs to melee specs. It’s not Blizzard trying to correct some early wrongs with class design or trying to be innovative. It’s Blizzard retreating to their comfort zone.
But it would be ranged so it would not have any of the baggage associated with being melee. This is the biggest factor.
If it had a damage mode like spread/funnel cleave, something BM and MM don’t have, it would see relevance in PvE situations. It would certainly be a hell of a lot more beneficial to the class than a melee spec.
“Yay I can sacrifice the greatest strength of the class” - average SV Hunter
Yet SV was never associated with those but rather explosives and poisons. In fact bleeds have usually been an MM thing. I think it’s fine to move them to a more classwide direction like they’ve been doing but they’ve never been the focus of ranged SV, so this remains a strawman.
There’s a lot of potential in exotic munitions. SV still engages with it with Serpent Sting and Wildfire Bomb. If SV were ranged with mostly the same toolkit, only with ranged equivalents, would Serpent Sting and Wildfire Bomb suddenly become expendable derivative elements that could just be crammed into MM?
And yes, my opinion is that ranged weaponry deserves more than 1 spec in the game for archetypical exploration. There are some that think otherwise and can’t conceptualise anything being interesting without being melee, but we call them self-centred and mistaken people.
What do melee SV players compromise on with DoTs being added to MM?
So SV is identical to how it was when it first became melee 7 years ago?
This false equivalency hasn’t been working from the start.
I think you also tend to get more abilities as you level up?
I wonder what Rogues start with at level 1…surely they don’t start with poisons? Or two swords? I wonder what Druids start with at level 1…all 3 Druid forms? Surely that’s not indicative of anything.
So nearly a decade ago? There’s a lot of bad things in the game pre 2016, does that mean we should carry everything forward?
It’s much more than just adding a talent, because that means half the Hunter tree will always be inaccessible or made in consideration with MM. If SV adds an “inexcusable constraint” to the Hunter tree in your mind, then surely so does MM and Lone Wolf.
Many MM players like MM because of Lone Wolf and they don’t want a pet. Removing this would make them probably just as eternally upset as you are.
Oh, but it is a matter of opinion, simply because you disagree doesn’t mean otherwise. Especially because SV has been Melee since 2016.
Few people are suggesting otherwise. Giving Hunters utility would objectively only help SV and I’m glad you’re starting to come around to it instead of digging your heels in the ground bud.
Did I say this or are you just making a wild claim and saying “wow can’t believe u said this lol what a goober.”
Get real. DPS specs are brought for DPS. To suggest otherwise is ridiculous.
Devastation, Preservation, and Augmentation are all interesting. None are melee. None are 40yd.
You seem to be forgetting the most recent class is entirely ranged…and also not 40 yard…and also not 100% full mobility.
In the words of Bepples “So it would need to be by far ahead the other two specs in X instance to be brought? Sounds unhealthy.”
You’re just making things up for your point now.
I don’t think you know what a strawman means, and using debate terms doesn’t automatically make you right.
If you only limit your hypothetical RSV to things prior to 2016 and after 2006 it’s going to be quite a dull and limited spec.
Except anything bleed or magic based, of course.
Surely we wouldn’t call you the same thing? I didn’t know your opinion had more weight than every other WoW player. How’d you manage that?
]
Beast Mastery, Marksmanship. There should probably be a Warrior or Rogue spec that can use Bows/Guns/Xbows because an entire class having access to a weapon is not such good design.
Same thing you compromise with by adding Mongoose Fury mechanics, Wildfire Bomb / Frenzied Strikes, SS to BM.
My aim with the accord (that I assume you’ve dismissed) was simply to highlight that regardless of personal opinion or performance, mDPS was one of several original features of the Class. In this thread, I don’t hold the conditional use, performance, or intended purpose of the Hunter mDPS profile in contention, I only seek to acknowledge it’s presence.
Hunters are based around ranged weapons. They are the most central element.
There were good things that got screwed up, too.
Remember, if the Legion devs kept it their way we wouldn’t have Kill Shot, only Survival would have traps, BM would be 30% downtime, etc. Hunters were the most reworked class in that expansion and also the most botched. That’s why it required heavy reworking in BFA as well.
Yes, Lone Wolf is also problematic, like I said 5 posts or so ago. It should be far more optional than it actually is.
Nevertheless, at least there aren’t any talents in the base tree that MM outright can’t use
They don’t need to remove Lone Wolf. There are situations where independence of a pet is beneficial. They just need to make it more optional than it currently is. Mainly they need to make it buff only single target damage.
No, it is fact. They have to make hasty workarounds for SV to make it fit in an otherwise ranged weapon user class, hence the sidearm crossbow.
Remember, their first vision for melee SV had no ranged whatsoever. However the ranged weapon influence in the class was too strong; lack of a ranged weapon made SV feel like a different class. Now it has more ranged abilities than melee abilities, with only the shoehorned in Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite keeping it melee. A pointless endeavour. They’ve made it as ranged as possible without ripping off the bandaid and actually making it a ranged spec because they don’t want to damage their pride.
In contrast, MM has had Lone Wolf since WoD and it doesn’t have nearly the same stigma in the Hunter class as SV. Evidently Hunters can tolerate losing the pet much more than losing the ranged weapon. This is because, objectively and factually, the ranged weapon is more central.
Yes SV Hunters tend to think otherwise but they tend to have a very head-in-the-clouds mentality about the Hunter class. They also contort themselves into believing that using a melee weapon somehow makes the spec more versatile, not less. There are no good takes to be had in that crowd.
SV would still be as avoided in favour of the other Hunter specs as it is now. Because, as we can see from tier after tier, if Hunters can get away with avoiding SV they mostly avoid it. The only time SV representation caught up and exceeded the other specs is when it had a damage lead that couldn’t be avoided i.e. to the order of 20% or more. Which, of course, is unhealthy for the class.
You’re responding to a part where I’m talking about late Shadowlands so it sure seems that you’re defending the late Shadowlands state of tuning.
Yes, another mistake of class design. They probably wanted to make it a melee class but realised that yet another melee spec would have been a little too absurd. In interviews explaining their Evoker decision they said it was just more interesting to be up close, i.e. their class designers are infatuated with melee combat and have trouble conceptualising anything else. That means they need new class designers.
No, that wouldn’t be unhealthy because I didn’t ask for SV to be 20% ahead in order to bribe Hunters to play a spec they otherwise don’t want to play. A ranged spec would actually be palatable to the average Hunter so they wouldn’t mind having another ranged spec that focused on a damage profile that was different to the other two. I say this with confidence because this was the state of the class for years and it worked out fine.
Your response to people asking for a DoT-focused SV based around special munitions like we used to have (explosives and venom) was that bleed-focused attacks fit that description and therefore some bleed talent in MM is matching the theme they’re asking for.
Kill Shot buffs and shrapnel-themed shots have typically in WoW’s history been the domain of MM, not SV. So pretending that’s what we’re asking for does in fact come across as a strawman.
I’d be happy for SV to broaden its scope of munitions to other unique things like electric-themed attacks, but like I said Kill Shot buffs and bleeds are more MM’s thing, aside from baseline basics in our DF talent tree.
Besides; it’s not like it would be limited to 1 attack from each type of munition. There could be more than one explosive-themed attacks, for example.
Are you saying that believing specs can’t be interesting without being melee is not self-centred or mistaken?
BM’s focus on ranged weapons is more or less incidental by virtue of being a Hunter. That leaves MM to have a ranged weapon focus. So no, that’s not sufficient.
Why should ranged weapon focus be offloaded to other classes? They already have 3 specs, and ranged weapons are the unique characteristics of Hunters. Besides, that would just mean more reworking to tread on eggshells around melee SV. At some point it’s just not a spec worth keeping.
No, trying to cram ranged SV into MM just means melee don’t have to have anything changed and they keep 100% of what they want, which is already a lot more than what’s deserved given they’re a very small fraction of the Hunter playerbase. It’s not a real compromise.
You’re contrasting it with a spec that has seen heavy changes since Legion as if SV hasn’t.
The contention isn’t whether Hunters had melee components in classic. Everyone knows that.
The contention is whether SV was a melee or melee-preferring spec in Classic, and on top of that whether modern SV is a good representation of SV’s roots. The answer to those is no, by the way.
This is certainly walking back your statements on classic SV in this forum quite a lot, isn’t it?
Do you believe SV primarily fought in melee in Classic?
I was referring to pre-legion designs that would be pretty darn bad if brought forward.
I don’t think anyone on god’s green earth is losing any sleep over not being able to use barrage as SV, especially because you can weapon swap to use it if you really really wanted to use it. Not to mention it competes against Explosive Shot which like…isn’t really a competition.
Sure, but a lot of MM players don’t want a pet no matter what. Not to mention, without any pet talents / interactions in the MM tree at all a pet would just be a 100% passive and mindless side feature of the spec just an animate DoT. Unlike BM and SV, which have pet abilities and interactions.
According to you. If it was objectively and factually SV would be ranged, which it isn’t, so it’s not objective. Try to be less dramatic.
Why do you focus so much on this side-arm? Do you freak out about Rogue’s? Do you freak out about hunter’s pulling traps out of hammerspace? Do you freak out about Hunter’s throwing a Chakram?
And their first vision for SV in classic had melee talents and abilities. What’s your point? Specs evolve and change.
Woah, so does Enhancement. I wonder if you lose sleep about this spec too.
You don’t know this, because you’re just speculating from your very biased PoV.
Please show me exactly where I said a 20% difference is healthy design.
25y is not up close. It was never intended to be a melee spec and you’re making things up to get mad at and insult people you’ve never met because your pride is hurt people don’t agree with you.
Literally pulling this out of thin air just so you can continue to get angry. Remember when you quit the game because you didn’t like how you were acting about it?
They do not ranged DPS to be as fully mobile as BM and be 40y away. If RSV were to be added it wouldn’t be mobile (RSV nostalgic gamers would hate it) or it wouldnt be 40y (same point).
Wow I wonder why people get confused on conflating identity between MM and RSV. One spec uses special munitions and another one does too but uses sharp munitions, but they are different?
But you’re just getting mad at me for implying they could add bleed-themed attacks and that wouldn’t work cause it’s “never” been in the wheelbarrow. Now you’re saying it should have new electric attacks, even though that’s been “traditionally” (one expansion) of BM’s identity.
How’s that make sense?
No? Where’d you get that from?
Why? What are you trying to say here?
But cramming MSV into BM is a real compromise? Okay champ.
Well, placing my first talent point in SV at level 10 for Hawk Eye I know that there’s jack-all to do in melee. I think the dead zone might have something to do with it mechanically, and nobody back then was so dumb to make melee work.
Hawk Eye: increases range of ranged weapons by up to 6 yds. In the SV TREE. Not to mention SNIPER TRAINING and EXPOSE WEAKNESS further down the tree.
I’m excited to enjoy the Hunter class and RSV for the first time before I picked it up in Retail WoD.
I believe these changes were introduced during The Burning Crusade pre-patch, or perhaps slightly earlier. It was during this time that rDPS-exclusive power creep first intruded into the Survival archetype.
Ah, Classic Vanilla? Indeed, I’m doing the Wrath SV tree presently.
All the same, I really don’t see much in the way of enhancing melee skills. Deflection, Counterattack, and Savage Strike. And there’s still a dead zone. So if you go full SV in Wrath Classic, then yes, being at range is key.
I think you knew this was a reach when you typed it.
