Yes they do need to find class developers who are actually interested in ranged specs.
The preferential treatment is from Blizzard towards melee players.
The pariah status is from the playerbase.
Good thing I was explicit in not claiming this.
The baseline of the Hunter class is ranged combat with ranged weaponry.
It’s fine for MM to be generally less played than SV.
If it’s one of the least played specs every single season after a rework away from a previously very widely enjoyed iteration, then there’s a problem.
And yet it’s still a fully capable ranged DPS so it gets more attention from Hunters.
It’s crazy how people would take so many downsides over playing SV…
It’s poorly designed in a sense that it works against its baseline class instead of with it.
The game once had ranged SV and it worked very well. It’s never had a pure DPS class with 4 specs. So, in fact, 4th spec for Hunters is a lot less likely than ranged Survival.
One of us is arguing in favour of a vastly more popular iteration for the spec. The other has vehemently argued for years that all the players of that iteration were expendable and less important.
And yet not a single Mage sees it the same way as Hunters see Survival. Why is that?
Each of the specs can use a melee weapon too if our standard for “use” starts and ends with equipping one.
It doesn’t need to see higher representation than BM.
Survival is more consistently unpopular than those specs.
It’s from just before Shadowlands and it’s an answer full of such absurd fallacies that it exposes Hazzikostas for being as clueless about Hunters as we already assumed.
For one, he claims that Survival started off different and got more similar to MM as time went on. Objectively false: the opposite true. It started off the same and got more different. It never “duplicated” MM abilities. It got its own new unique ranged abilities.
Secondly, he claims SV’s uniqueness depended on its talent tree and when they changed over to talent tiers its uniqueness was lost. Absurd lie. Almost every active ability and passive from the talent tree that made SV unique became SV baseline in MoP. Funnily enough, the notable one that didn’t was the one everyone pointed out was a poor fit for the spec from the start: Sniper Training. SV in MoP was mostly the same core spec as SV from Cataclysm, with a number of iterative improvements.
The biggest tell that someone has no idea what they’re talking about is the incessant equating of MM and ranged SV. In fact, in WoD SV had a very different feel to MM. It played a lot more similarly to BM. The reason you see people focus on the MM - SV link is because they didn’t know the class well enough to tell that BM and SV were more similar in playstyle. So they focus on the more outwardly obvious thematic differences. It’s easy to tell without even playing a Hunter that BM relies on the pet while before Legion MM and SV were both largely independent of the pet.
So the obsessive focus on MM and SV being too similar is the talk of people utterly unfamiliar with the specs. That goes for the developers put in charge of the class back then as well as every melee phony Hunter that parrots it.
This describes a ton of Hazzikostas’s decision making in his tenure as game lead, and as it turns out it’s really bad for the game once player engagement and retention are no longer considered relevant metrics for success.
