Don’t know. 2/3 of the class is getting asked for attention, so the class doesn’t seem “ignored” to me. Seems like the pet specs are getting attention though.
Maybe in 11.0 MM will get some cool new toys and it will further enhance the ranged weapons expert or sharpshooter fantasy. Personally, I’d like to see some new animation work and perhaps a mechanic to play around with the spec
Sounds like blizzard deems it a core and the most important part of class identity if those are the specs getting all the attention.
There are some people that want SV to be a healer spec. They have no way of expressing that fantasy right now. SV being melee deprives them of that.
Why don’t they make SV a healer?
Crazy how SV outperforms BM yet has the same representation as MM, one of hte worst DPS specs in the game.
Lower representation soon, at this rate.
Skill issue.
SV as a healing spec would be even more thematically distinct. Why don’t you push for that? It makes me doubt you care about thematic distinction 
Back then it made sense and was balanced. Nowadays it would be very bad for the class so it’s worth missing out on its thematic value.
This reminds me of how I talked about class icons and you acted like I was arguing the entire class identity came from the class icon.
You do that a lot, you know.
Yes even dual-wielding. Does the class support dual-wielding too?
Evasion 
They’re afterthoughts to the newer devs that don’t care about ranged weapons.
It does have a workable foundation. It never gets the maintenance it needs. It’s clear they try to get away with as minimal work in MM as possible every time.
What happened was they were so uninterested in ranged weapons that they couldn’t comne up with changes for SV that satisfied their class design philosophy in Legion, and they were too hostile to player suggestions about anything to go with any of those, so they made a Hunter spec that was melee so they could actually be bothered to work on it.
MM they put in effort before reverting to a simpler iteration and then leaving it largely on maintenance mode for patch after patch and most of the time they can’t be bothered to go that far.
BM has been mostly in a good state, but has also been relatively low maintenance since Legion. It’s hard to go wrong with it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they at least have a developer that plays this spec. But not a chance they have one that plays MM.
Yeah and people are flocking to the spec as a result, right?
Also didn’t you assure to me in other threads that SV didn’t get a lot of changes?
That’s weird because most of their focus seems to have gone to the spec that the community likes the least.
They also said they don’t care about subscription numbers even though that’s the primary way the game generates income.
This is company PR 101. When the metrics look bad, discrediting the metrics.
In reality representation does matter. If they keep funnelling effort to a spec that hardly anyone plays no matter what, that’s wasted effort. It could have gone into other specs. Admitting that it matters, though, means admitting that they made a mistake with SV. And we all know Blizzard’s track record for owning up to mistakes.
If representation doesn’t matter, and class foundation doesn’t matter, then there’s no reason SV shouldn’t be a healer spec.
Why don’t you ask for MM to be a tank? Why do you love irrelevant questions?
It also had more cast times and mana then. Maybe those shoudl be brought forward too? It sounds like a lot of what made historical hunter, hunter, were bad and probably shouldn’t be brought forward (such as 3 bow using same feeling DPS specs)
You mean how you brought up something that’s complete nonsense and matters to nobody but you?
I mean, if the ranged identity was all encompassing and the “core” class concept, you’d think it would only be allowed to use ranged weapons. As you said, SV is some sort of “deviant” for using melee weapons, despite melee weapons being usable 1-10.
“Hey guys what if something that doesn’t happen, happen?”
“You can’t call me out on talking nonsense though or it’s deflection!” 
So you went from saying nobody on the dev team cares about SV and it’s an afterthought to saying the current dev team doesn’t care about ranged weapon? Weird argument.
Neglected spec for sure. How you think they can make two fun, thematically different ranged DPS specs both revolving around ranged weapon continues to confuse me if they can’t even do one to your standards.
Nobody cares about this but you
You go back and forth between saying SV is “high maintenance” like it’s a bad thing and then complain that MM isn’t high maintenance. Which is the problem here?
The community being your cherry-picked echo chamber? I see plenty of communities happy about the changes BM and SV get. Kind of funny to me that the specs you dislike get a lot of fun and requested changes and the spec you like isn’t in the game and hasn’t been in the game for years.
According to whom? You don’t think it’s the mTX shop? I didn’t know you were intimately familiar with the income of the game.
I love when you talk like you have some sort of intimate knowledge with the goings on of the dev team, the work load, and how effort is divvied up.
By your logic right here reverting SV to RSV would be a “waste of time” as Hunter players by and large prefer BM and will always prefer BM.
A man of culture. I agree with everything you’ve said.
The only change I want for SV is to give a cool side rotation that incorporates ranged. I don’t want it to be full ranged, I like it being melee. But I would love to have a bit of range in the rotation as an option, that isn’t just wildfire bombs! Bepples can’t wrap his head around people enjoying the melee aspect though. You won’t get through to him, just block him, and 67% of SV hate posts vanish.
And you’re complicating the wrong damn part. Skills will receive a portion of casts and portion of damage, with the spec itself having an expected portion of effective-uptime. That’s all you have to look at.
It is not worth trying to finagle ‘deserved ability power’ out of context, because you wouldn’t even then have its cast-frequency from which to estimate its contribution. You literally cannot balance it that way.
It’s an example based on a misinterpretation and/or a failure to read. For the third time now:
Being limited to melee range is a contextual constraint to your % effective-uptime. But you can absolutely have constraints of similar value on the ranged equivalents as long as you do not try to copy every skill and mechanic affecting it directly / one-to-one.
That still doesn’t require individual ranged nodes, nor even choice nodes for the difference.
A conditional talent is not a choice node, nor does it necessitate a choice node. It’s literally “If this <spec, talent taken, weapon equipped>, do that.” If Prot, increases Shield Slam damage. If Arms, increases Slam damage. If sword equipped… Etc., etc.
Never said it was. I literally just said that you do not need separate ranged nodes nor do you need to lose or change any of the existing effects there for melee (while, say, playing with a melee weapon). You can just use conditional effects, as are already used among other classes’ talents.
It’s appending. Adding on does not require take removing the existing effect. Because they are conditional effects. You can have both. Simultaneously.
Adding these conditionals would be the same as replacing, as there’d be no reason to fight in melee. If you give any mDPS the ability to do their rotation from 40y away there would never be a reason to be up close in melee.
Why don’t you? I’m the one who supports a focused foundational class identity. You don’t.
Mana was arguably a bad decision from the start, but the cast time thing was also a matter of balancing.
Is it that hard to understand that there are things worth bringing back and things worth abandoning? Is the concept of judging ideas on merit foreign to you?
Arguing that having 3 ranged specs was bad is a take and a half. Hunters had 3 ranged specs in all the most widely beloved and successful eras of WoW and in those eras it was consistently one of the most popular class; often first place.
So you still think Blizzard just picked them at random and they mean absolutely nothing?
But the toolkit doesn’t support them.
We can equip all the weapon types that we could before MoP. That doesn’t mean it’s supported by the class. It means it’s vestigial.
It’s a hypothetical because you seem to think it’s impossible for a spec to deviate from its class foundation.
If that’s not true, I’d like to see what your standard is for what counts as a spec doing that.
If you think a spec by definition can’t… well that’s a nonsense view point, isn’t it? At that point you’re basically arguing that having a foundational class at all is an outdated concept and each spec should be a separate class, like jobs in FF14.
I said they don’t care about Hunters. They had to make SV something alien to the class just to bring it into their comfort zone and relinquish the responsibility of having to come up with creative concepts for 3 ranged weapon users.
They need to get new devs.
I’ll remember this next time I see yet another WoW reddit post begging people to try the spec.
MM doesn’t need that many changes. The problem with it is we go entire seasons with no changes at all; or changs that make no sense.
Why did we spend an entire season with the WRG talent making it an RNG mess? Why did it just get a PvP only buff when it’s already good in PvP while its damage is abysmal in PvE?
If a lot of people liked SV a lot of people would play it.
Are you really going to back them up on arguing that subscription count doesn’t matter
Did you know it takes subscribers to buy the micro transactions? What a crazy complex economic system we live in!
Actually that’s just how… work and effort work. Everywhere. Time spent on one thing could have been spent on another thing.
Ranged SV had no problem being just as relevant as BM.
Nice, they should do this for SV.
The class has a focused foundation. It’s just not the one you like, so you get upset on the internet.
Well, you ask for rSV because that’s “how it was” but then upon any actual scrutiny doing things “how it was done” back in the day seems to not be a good idea. You say “back then the devs were good” but then say almost everything back then was bad. Just makes me think you actually don’t know what you’re talking about.
Irrelevant. Bosses had 0 mechanics and there was nothing to do but raid in the most widely beloved eras of WoW. Should we go back to that?
Yes more or less. Why is the Evoker one a claw? Why is the Druid one a claw? Do you think Druids whole thing is shapeshifting so it just removes two specs out of the 4 from the “foundational class identity”?
Yes it does? I have MB, I have Butchery, FotE, etc.
This whole paragraph is meaningless. You need to reword it.
It’s not alien at all lol. It’s worked for 8 years and it will work for more years. They clearly care about hunters which is why BM and SV get changes.
Go for it, I don’t care whatever weird vendetta you have with niche internet communities.
So you want a spec to get attention or you don’t? you seem to get really bent out of shape when something is “high maintenance”.
Look at MM player count. People clearly don’t like ranged weapon specs.
You didn’t answer my question. Post your information, please.
Yeah do it to all DPS as well as remove cast times, too. No reason not to.
Again, no, it doesn’t.
The individual skills do not need to have the exact same impact. They do not need to be one-to-one just to avoid bloating the talent tree or spell book.
Skills… are not… balanced individually.
They do not need… to be… balanced individually.
All that is necessary is that multiple builds have nearly the same output in a given fight (yes, in practice, not on paper), and that each is fun to play to those to whom its parts would appeal.
Which is fine for the odd specifically ranged build (one that has skill expressions that cannot well be met/optimized while also dipping in and out of melee range).
The rest would still be closing in, with the less they have to think about A (the optimizations involved in going in and prepping to maintain effective-uptime) taking on more of anything else (some other cognitive load in its place), because there’d still be commensurate reward —however tailored to their contexts— for going in, so anything but the wackiest-yet-still-competitive build wouldn’t just leave that lying there without due cause (whatever makes it harder and more redundant to dip in and out).
Having that actual choice in tactics, in what to be resourceful in, is not a problem for a spec themed around tactical resourcefulness.
You need only then give that specifically ranged build, for whom it’s not worth going in, commensurate challenge on par with being melee (to the extent that competitive MSV builds would be) so that they still see most of the fight-to-fight variance* that other specs see (especially as relative to their competing DPS specs).
Don’t get me wrong. I love highly mobile melee. Havoc, Arms, Sub, you name it. But I also like Black Mage in XIV, which is an outright turret (but with tools like teleporting back to one’s Rune or to one’s ally that make it nonetheless wholly competitive), because it’s likewise about foresight and management of effective-uptime. I enjoy nuanced gambles that create branching plans of attack, but don’t much care for procs than become ‘whack-a-mole’, especially if constant (instead of being limited to a bursty, focused short phase). Others love that stuff. So I’d have to say, give them the choice.
Insofar as is possible, let players pick the skill expressions through which they want to play the given theme. And I suspect a lot more is possible than Star’s been suggesting.
You can support multiple playstyles in a single spec, rather than just mere tweaks here and there. Frankly, more specs SHOULD do that.
Which is incredibly unrealistic. In what world is a melee DPS balanced against a ranged DPS set on the same spec that does comparable numbers? If they don’t do comparable numbers, you play the strongest. If they do the same, you play the range, because there’s no reason not to.
If a ranged dealt as much a melee on paper, they’d do more in practice. But they don’t, and thereby their actual performance therefore ends up pretty damn equal whenever the game is balanced.
The short of that is whoever is more burdened by the challenges their form of gameplay interacts with gets the slightly lesser performance in-practice, while performance is still subject to player skill more than simply which spec to take.
That’s what balance looks like, and if that doesn’t seem a worthwhile goal to you, then either side may as well be removed from the game in the first place.
Melee isn’t in that foundation; it’s only there if you spec Survival.
Do you think saying I want ranged SV just because that’s how it was in older times is a fair and accurate representation of my position?
I want SV to be ranged because it worked better for the class. Instead of having the overwhelming majority of the class stick to BM and MM with SV being the niche odd-one-out largely made for people who aren’t Hunter mains, all three specs were designed as meaningful extensions of the baseline class and Hunters were open to playing all of them.
Believe it or not I don’t just want to import everying Classic did into retail. I actually prefer playing Dragonflight to Classic and BC. My favourite of all the expansions was MoP, which was much closer to Dragonflight in its design than to Classic.
The devs made a lot of mistakes back then in classic. Some understandable, some not. But back then you could count on them improving the game, and the Hunter class, every patch. I don’t ever remember dreading a patch release until Legion and beyond. These days they have much more experience and resources, so it’s inexcusable when you get major misteps. Hazzikostas botches system after system with the entire playerbase warning him in advance every time. They should know better by now.
You know there are 5 expansions between the launch of the game and Legion.
Like I said: MoP was closer to modern WoW design than classic.
Who knew that saying the class icons were picked as broad representations of their classes was an unreasonable statement
The evoker one is a claw because they’re dragons, and the druid one is a paw because it represents shapeshifting (which is important to all 4 specs).
The Hunter one is a ranged weapon because it’s the most iconic and recognisable part of the class. Simple as that.
This is Survival only. None of this is baseline.
Skill issue on your part.
And yet like 95% of Hunters don’t ever play it.
MM is the most neglected spec at all and even that spec gets more play than SV.
Consider how much you think MM is bad and needs a “floor to ceiling rework”. What does that say about SV when the “broken mess” that is MM is more broadly appealing?
I want it to get the bare minimum, which it’s not getting.
People were fine with it back when it was competitive, which was not too long ago.
It’s the basic economic mechanism for all online games. You need a paying and engaged playerbase. More people playing means more group content and engagement, and more potential microtransaction sales. Subscriptions are customers and every business needs customers. You’re asking me to prove that businesses need customers.
Nah just Hunters; and have MM keep its cast times for the people who like that (evidently more than melee SV lol)
Yes
Its on par currently no?
You need to define bare minimum vs high maintenance as you seem to just jump around on your definitions
People hated how it played in 10.1 but played it because it did significantly more damage than bm isn’t this the same issue you have with people playing sv in 9.2?
I think you are forgetting that whales exist and bring in far more money than subs
agree buff survival
You can equip melee weapons and use melee weapons. Seems foundational to me. Otherwise it wouldn’t work.
Yes actually I do.
To you lol
MM has .1% more players than SV so clearly this isn’t even accurate.
Restoration uses shapeshifting?
This reminds me, SV even uses ranged weapons in its rotation so your whole point is wrong.
The only “baseline” things are Steady Shot, Arcane Shot, Wing Clip (lol), and tame beast, no? Sounds like no animal poison or exotic munitions are baseline either. so RSV wouldnt fit at all. or sharpshooting MM.
95% of Hunters dont play MM either. I guess ranged weapons aren’t what the playerbase wants.
MM has .1% more players.
Sucks for you then I guess? I want MM to get attention too.
According to you, people will play MM even when it’s not competitive because that’s what the class is meant to be.
Not to mention, MM IS competitive right now and deals great damage. So you’re wrong on both counts.
MM has barely more players than SV.
Tangent, but
It absolutely does, yes. Not that often if there’s no utility value to be had from it, but certainly often enough.
And current survival does use ranged weaponry sparingly (Kill Shot, etc) so his point is moot…no?
Ahh, sorry. Had to scroll up for more of the context.
Is dual-wielding founational?
If that’s the case you haven’t ever understood my positions at all.
Have a read of that if you’re under the impression I’m just unconditionally preferring what’s older.
To a lot of people. SV used to be one of the most widely played specs in the game. Modern SV fans can’t even comprehend that being a reality so they make up ridiculous lies to pretend it’s always been a niche spec.
MM has proven to be capable of being widely played.
Yes, it does. Just because it isn’t permanently in shapeshift form doesn’t mean shapeshifting is irrelevant to the spec.
So the cosmetic design decision of not always being in shapeshift form is the equivalent of not being able to be a ranged attacker with a ranged weapon?
Yeah they should make ranged weapons the primary mode of dealing damage.
Poisons and special munitions are a natural extension of the ranged weapon fantasy.
MM has proven to be capable of being widely played.
Actually, I don’t think you do. I think you enjoy the deflection.
No, I don’t think that about MM, If it’s not competitive people will play BM instead. It used to be people will play BM or SV, but people largely avoid SV even when it is competitive.
There are still far too many downsides to picking MM over BM.
MM has proven to be capable of being widely played.