This means very little when the overwhelming majority of Hunters don’t care about the melee toolkit and would rather play ranged instead of melee. This is reflected both when they actually made a melee Hunter spec in Legion and when they added support for it in SoD. It’s always played by a pathetically small amount of people; a usual number is 2% of the class’s population.
It reflects the disconnect between what the developers see as fun and interesting Hunter options and what the players expect. For most players all that work put into supporting a melee style is work wasted for the simple fact that a melee Hunter is just a Hunter with the interesting, iconic, central part of it (ranged weaponry) sidelined.
As evidenced by the overwhelming amount of melee Hunter logs
It’s all the way up to 1/50th of the class representation in the raid. Such momentum!
It doesn’t come out of nowhere. The basis for the complaints were there even before SoD released. People weren’t happy about the state of the Hunter runes. They were mostly unimaginative with a couple runes carrying the whole thing.
Oh, really? Because I rerolled to Mage and I find a bunch of fun and interesting new mechanics that make it far more fun to play. I don’t get that on a Hunter. On that class I instead get era Hunter with more passive damage.
