In BFA when Survival was far and away the best Hunter spec in PvP most Hunters playing rated PvP were playing it (to be far most Hunters just opted to not do rated PvP). Yet now, when according to you when Survival is “the best 2v2 spec by far”, it has middle of the pack representation and is behind 12 other specs including BM? What gives? Seasoned PvP players are good at the game and don’t avoid SV just because it has a higher skill cap.
I’m sure Survival is great in 2v2. I don’t think it’s “the best 2v2 spec in the game by far”.
There’s a sub rogue with a higher rating and win rate, actually. In fact there are BM Hunters with higher win rates; they are just lower because they have far fewer games played. It looks like you’re pinning your entire judgement on SV’s relative power in PvP on one power user (Bicmex).
I think Covlol might have something to say about this:
If it’s so ranged in PvP, what’s the contention? Why would it be so much a problem to replace that one melee damage spell with a ranged spell and have it as a ranged spec again?
This is the problem when you go on a marketing spree about how great melee SV is on account of its ranged capability; it raises the obvious question of “why can’t it just be ranged, then?”
So now it’s a widely popular spec? Just before you said most Hunters stick to BM. Yet apparently Survival is both the most fun and performant spec with a lot of fans? How does that work out?
The whole reason for this thread and many like it even existing is that Survival doesn’t have a lot of fans.
It’s just a matter of replacing Explosive Shot and Lock and Load in MM with something else. BM didn’t get anything from ranged Survival and MM got a couple of heavily modified talents. It would be trivial to work around that.
What’s hard to understand? We had a popular ranged spec and it was replaced with a niche melee spec aimed mainly at people that don’t even play the class.
So you were so distraught with Hunters losing melee weapons in MoP that you quit the class, yet apparently losing the vastly more important and central ranged weapon is just fine?
Your priorities for Hunter class design are upside down. Stick to your melee classes, please.
This is reaching and you know it. They had all the resources and knowledge they needed to make a working melee Survival and, if the melee fanatics of this thread and others are to be believed, they produced something that flows well and has good performance throughout the game. We don’t need to try another 5 years and 2 reworks to know that this concept is a dud.
It’s actually wild that you see this class design direction as a bad thing TBH.
BM has had its entire worth and capability tied to pets since forever as part of the basic foundation of the spec. I don’t want to hear SV fans whining about how it’s holding them back. You’re simultaneously asking for SV to have Exotic Pets BTW so if SV is going to steal away all the unique capabilities of BM it can fully expect to inherit the weaknesses too.
No, because that class design philosophy was an unmitigated disaster.
What exactly do you think “specialisation” means?
You do this a lot: whenever you’re faced with opposition you just shut down and double down on what you already said with no actual rebuttal. I just explained why giving exotic pets to SV is unacceptable and you just mindlessly repeated that they should do it. Where do you expect the discussion to go from there?
I ignored your list of remarks because 100% of your Hunter class design takes are awful and would make the class worse. You really need to stick to melee classes. The Hunter class would be better off without meddling from people like you.
This is some concentrated copium.
To put 5 years in perspective: 5 years after WoW launched we were in Icecrown Citadel. Think of all the class evolution and iteration that occurred in that time. Incidentally, Survival went from being an overlooked and directionless PvP utility tree to the most popular Hunter spec with a fun, dynamic, unique gameplay approach and great performance across the board. In the same time frame, despite a major rework along the way, melee Survival has remained an object of ridicule and remains the most avoided and abandoned spec in the game. It’s going nowhere fast.
Because neither of those are remotely good fits for the Hunter class.
There would be zero point to using melee weapons in this scenario. The only good option for a melee Hunter is a talented melee stance within BM. Anything else is overstepping.
No, this is all a terrible idea. You run into one of these problems:
- The Hunter is doing most of the tanking, which is utterly alien to the identity of the class. Hunters are never about deliberately pulling attention and soaking damage in melee range. We kite and avoid.
- The pet is doing most of the tanking. Have fun with positioning bosses with pet controls…
There’s also the tiny problem that most of the class doesn’t want to tank, but I know what the Hunter playerbase wants is largely not a concern to melee SV fans.
Hunter tanking is a nonstarter. Its an unwelcome, unwanted idea that would only fail harder and more spectacularly than melee Survival.
The only reason we see these sorts of suggestions all the time is because melee Survival was the bat signal for every forum warrior and his dog to dump their putrid suggestions on the Hunter class. In reality Survival is the cautionary tale as to why those people should never be listened to.
IDK maybe it’s because it replaced a vastly more popular ranged spec ¯\(ツ)/¯
OK Death Knight
It’s objective that melee SV has been much more controversial and unpopular than ranged SV. It’s also been higher maintenance; it’s arguably required more reworking and tweaking in just Legion and BFA alone than all of Survival before Legion combined. So it’s taken much more work and attention for a much less satisfactory result.
Look to Terranox demanding exotic pets for SV. This sort of thing is very common.
What’s with melee SV stans believing that the spec’s performance is a justification for remaining SV? Is performance tied to being melee in your mind? There were plenty of tiers where ranged SV was “strong AF”, and it didn’t need a ludicrously tuned tier set that was also bugged to give +280% bomb damage instead of +80% (yes, it really is bugged like that; look it up). Not to mention the upcoming tier set is buffing Wildfire Bomb, a ranged ability that hardly fits the “primal beast companion” melee Survival anyway.
SV Hunters demand all sorts of special attention from Blizzard all the time. They solicit favourable damage tuning as well as unique utilities for BM and MM in order to bribe their way into raids. I even see SV Hunters ask for traps to be unique to SV again. Handing them someone else’s spec on a platter created an entitlement complex like no other.
It could do with being ranged. Anything else is a waste of time, and lord knows they wasted more than enough time on this crap in Legion and BFA.
This. It was clear in Legion and BFA that most of the developer attention was wasted on Survival. ESPECIALLY in BFA. BM released with one of the worst, most poorly tuned and unimaginative set of talents in the game, and MM wasn’t even a remotely functional spec on launch. They spent most of the beta reworking and tweaking Survival, which got an entirely new set of talents. They even made new talents for SV only to throw them away and replace them with entirely new talents on top of that (e.g. they made Arctic Bola and then removed it in favour of Wildfire Infusion). And for what? So the 2-5% of Hunters that played it in that expansion could have more fun while BM and MM faceplanted?
Shadowlands was a step in the right direction in that they didn’t waste any more time on SV than absolutely necessary. And that’s ideal for the class: either spend the time to make SV ranged again or don’t waste time on it at all. It’s drained too much time and too many resources and it hasn’t earned its keep. Here’s a reminder that ranged SV did not need constant stream of reworking and tweaking to be a valuable and widely-enjoyed Hunter spec.