They didn’t even need to. They could have left Survival as it was with all the changes they made to Legion MM. Though I’d have never played a hunter again as I hated Legion MM.
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Reading over a lot of the posts in the alpha thread about survival in Shadowlands, one of the testers put it best: Melee survival was the poster child of spec fantasy, now that we’re going back to class fantasy, it’s making less and less sense. I just don’t understand the reasoning to change survival in the first place, the justification for keeping it this way despite the blow back, and the reluctance to change or address any of the issues that testers have brought up about it’s fit in the class (+baseline abilities) or its weapon requirements.
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That is damn true. I mean melee is still a part of the hunter fantasy but it was never supposed to be our main source of damage! Melee was only a thing in the situations where we can’t be ranged. To be a Hunter is to prefer being ranged.
It’s pretty obvious Blizzard is going to eventually cave in and realize this themselves. “Melee” SV is almost completely ranged now anyways…
Didn’t you say that already?
Because since the start of ever, ranged were easier to manage than melee?
You said this before too…
right right. Sky and water is the same cause they are both blue.
…
Pot meet kettle.
Regardless. Your defense of him is terrible because it doesn’t address what he actually said, but hey keep trying to deflect from that part. (P.S. It’s not going to work, but you can keep trying.)
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I mean melee is still a part of the hunter fantasy but it was never supposed to be our main source of damage! Melee is literally only a thing in the situations where we can’t be ranged.
This is something that annoys me a lot about MSV as well. Our overall hunter kit was trimmed and I find my self missing my other abilities that used to be baseline that are now shoe-horned as ‘core’ survival abilities (Serpent sting for instance). Melee was a piece of our ranged kit and I actually enjoyed having some melee abilities that I could bust out on a warrior that got inside my dead zone. Wing clip was a helpful extra slow. I enjoyed experimenting with MM-survival pvp builds in the old talent trees. That was fine. Melee had fringe uses, like killing a warrior in pvp with raptor strike just because. But as a spec, it makes no sense thematically.
I’d rather just have a more coherent class, which we currently do not… it’s a mess.
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This is what i was trying to tell people, and now its literally coming from the mouth of Ion. You guys can disagree with it all you want, but you were just presented with a FACT from the game director on why they felt compelled to change the spec.
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I will agree the fantasy does overlap quite a bit in the pre-WoD era of Hunter specs… but they really didn’t overlap in WoD and especially wouldn’t have overlapped in Legion if RSV still existed.
Anyhow I can’t change the mind of Blizzard.
I will also say the things Ion says aren’t always facts… I really like Ion since he seems like a genuinely nice person, but he is also another human just like us with questionable opinions who makes questionable choices and mistakes.
That’s how we ended up with BfA. The dev team refused to listen to any feedback because they believed the player’s opinions were wrong. Ion himself admitted to ignoring feedback in BfA because they believed players just didn’t get the full picture.
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but you were just presented with a FACT from the game director on why they felt compelled to change the spec.
It may be factual that this was blizzards reasoning on why they made thw decision, but their judgement that the specs were too similar is a subjective position. And that’s a position that I think a lot of hunters would disagree with. What exactly did the specs have in similar outside of range abilities… Thats what I want to hear from blizzard.
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Ion is just repeating the same answer that Travis M. Day gave in his interview with gameaxis
Travis: It was another one that was missing its niche. It’s kind of like Marksman except more traps? Or different arrows? So it was kind of missing that “what is the core fantasy?”
Having it move into the melee space and actually return to its roots that was the vanilla Survival experience. You got your Raptor Strike and all that and having those come back and play a role, moving into melee, giving mobility like the Harpoon to draw you in – it’s like it finally gave them a unique identity. If this is the beast companion guy that you’ve always wanted to play then you’re going to have that role.
Ion: That’s a good question. I think part of what led Survival to a melee space to begin with was trying to differentiate Survival from Marksmanship. The rotations over the years had become very very similar — OK you might have a couple more magical-seeming shots in the Survival space. Beast Mastery was very clearly its own thing with its clear niche as the pet-based spec. But then you had these two ranged specs that basically did a lot of ranged shots in their rotation.
Then later on in GamesCom 2017 World of Warcraft: Legion Patch 7.3 Interview with Ion they mentioned that Survival Hunters are the least represented spec right now, and are there any concerns about some classes or specs?
Ion: Representation doesn’t necessarily matter as much, I think. We knew with Survival Hunter that we were making a niche spec. It is a melee spec for a class that has traditionally being range. I think that a lot of existing hunters, they are all hunters because they want to be a range class, and so we don’t necessarily expect them or want them to feel like they should be changing; but for new players picking up that class, it is an intriguing option; and we have seen a lot of Survival Hunters doing extremely well at very high levels of play. So the fact that they are not playing as often, I don’t think reflects upon their potential so much as it just does where the audience is at right now. That’s not much of a problem.
This interview comes back around to what Ion said in the end “We want to keep melee as part of the unique identity of Survival but in Shadowlands and beyond, as we start to think about what classes should look like in future expansions, it’s important that there will be this sort of universal base of what defines a Hunter. All Hunters should have access to ranged attacks and Survival Hunters can be ones that specialize in melee but not necessarily at the expense of the universal skillset that everyone had as a level 5 or level 10 Hunter because that’s what being the class means
I’m okay with that”
Ion has been made aware of Survival representation with only a 16,265 parse in M+ Dungeons it is still on the bottom after two expansion. Bringing more range abilities in just cover some of the issues that MSV has.
For one, almost all of their AoE capability depends on talents. Without Wildfire Infusion and Butchery(/Hydra’s Bite) you’re left with Carve which deals literally no damage (it’s there just to reduce WB CD), and Wildfire Bomb itself is one of the worst AoEs in game. I mean, it’s okay putting a cone AoE on a ranged class. Putting one on a melee class means you miss the majority of the mob that is not in front of you.
In addition, a lot of talents feel like a must-have choice to even complete the spec (like Alpha Predator being mandatory until you reach uncanny amounts of haste or you end up with no focus and unable to get any for couple of seconds every once in a while).
Then there’s the 4th talent row which has the superb Bloodseeker, while the Steel Trap and A Murder of Crows do not even approach Bloodseeker’s value in single target combat, let alone for AoE. It’s just all around bad talent design. Same with Chakram - it’s a DPS loss compared to the other two talents in that row no matter the situation, and it doesn’t even look good.
Survival hunter has no damage mitigation outside of turtle, which doesn’t work on all mechanics, low armor compared to most melee, extremely poor health gain compared to specs such as warriors, dks, paladins, and dh’s, and most importantly 0 defensive that affect raid members/allies.
Then there is the lack of mechanics in Hunter’s playstyle…
I mean, really. As a hunter, you have grand total of 5 abilities and you use only 4 of them regularly. Kill Command is only for focus generation and doesn’t interact with anything. Serpent Sting as a DoT and it doesn’t interact with anything, Raptor Strike as a focus spender that doesn’t interact with anything. Literally the only things that interact in BASE survival spec are Carve reducing CD of Wildfire Bomb. That’s it. SV needs, desperately, about half their talents as baseline just to fill the eternal boredom of it’s base. You have no procs, no changes… just one static rotation all over again.
Adding more range abilities may be a start to bring up MSV in the ranks, but that will only show how much utility it lacks to other melee specs. Overall, I feel like Blizzard just missed the mark on this idea. It’s like they forgot they’ve made several other mobile and capable melee classes before this rework. I think that Blizzard missed a huge opportunity here, and I hope they rectify it soon. The spec is honestly not that far off from being fun and cool to play, but its issues trump any other spec.
If Blizzard just gives it some love in the defensive capabilities and the mobility area, then Survival Hunter will feel more complete and comparable to the other melees that currently outclass them. The potential is there, but at the moment, it’s completely squandered on a spec that feels absolutely dreadful to play.
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i dont necessarily hate melee sv but they really need to reevaluate the spec. id like to see traps have a bigger focus for them. of course id like it more if it was ranged too, but traps would be a start. the unpruning of shadowlands would be a perfect opprutunity to bring more back. also redesign their talent tree because without latent poison, birds of prey traits, and less focus regen, theres definitely gonna be a lot of imbalance (alpha pred, guerilla tactics,MB,wildfire infusion, bloodseeker)
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For an expansion thats unpruning classes and fixing them for the better they have done nothing for hunter lol
Hopefully this will change though, if it doesn’t hunter will be the only class that didn’t receive any changes since the blizzcon announcement.
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but they really need to reevaluate the spec.
I can agree with this: If they are really just going to bury their heads in the sand and refuse to listen to complaints about MSV, then they need to fix the spec at the bare minimum.
The talents are currently unintersting, the weapon reqs in shadowlands are bizzarre, and it’s very unclear how the spec fits into the class overall. If you want to give us a melee spec, then make it as feature complete and coherent as other, normal melee classes.
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A well written post. I can agree with just about everything you said.
I don’t hate MSV but it does make me sad to see a spec as complex (maybe not gameplay-wise, but mechanically complex) as RSV be replaced by a spec with no abilities that interact with each other.
MSV without talents might as well be the simplest spec in the game bar Havoc, and the interesting talents it offers are overshadowed by objectively stronger talents that are needed to compete in DPS meters.
I don’t expect RSV to return, but they need need to work on MSV more. It needs more mechanics, and it needs nearly every single passive, Butchery, and Mongoose Bite baselined.
It’s their game. Your opinion is irrelevant.
I’ll be honest, I do hate MSV because I dont enjoy the rotation or the talents. I think LnL, explosive shot, and black arrow was a much more fun rotation. I enjoyed weaving ES during LnL procs. I thought it was a more fun rotation with more satisfying buttons to press. I thought the talents made more sense and it fit with the class identity better.
Regardless of opinions on MSV v RSV, any one can see that survival is bizarre in it’s current iteration and will feel that way even more so with Shadowlands moving towards class fantasy. I expect blizzard to do the bare minimum and take a pass over survival to iron out the talents, weapon reqs, and integrations with baseline hunter abilities. So far they’ve just slapped it on and moved on.
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t’s their game. Your opinion is irrelevant.
Cool take.
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So… if you go to a restaurant regularly and order the same thing over and over for years. Something that is popular on their menu. Then one day you go and find they removed that item and replaced it with something completely different, you just going to sit their and take it? I hope you do, because you know, in that case it’s their food, your opinion is irrelevant right?
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No, because I’m an adult. If I didn’t like anything else I simply wouldn’t go back. What you lot are doing is equivalent to going back to the restaurant for the last four years after said item was removed and just yelling at the manager/cook to add the item back to the menu.
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5 Star analogy sir
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