Blizz giveth and taketh awayeth.
I wish this would come back more than the Blessed Battlegear of Undead Slaying (Green Judgement set).
I mean enhance and feral have always existed and been relatively fine despite usually not top tier picks for cutting edge, people just tend to pick a role and stay in the confines of it partially because before they went to fluid stats on gear it was a pain in the butt to gear for entirely different roles.
If survival had always been melee it would have suffered in the same way in that people likely would say I want to play melee or I want to play range, albeit they probably would gave been a lot better off than shaman or druid because they would likely just be looking at weapon swapping as opposed to total gear revamp like they had to contend with.
Edit: also not really sure why you think melee is inherently worse off than their ranged counterparts. Warriors and rogues were the DPS kings of Classic for various reasons. The popularity of ranged over melee for flexibility is more of a retail phenomenon since the game now tries to be far more balanced across all specs on paper.
Whether or not this was true, complexity isnât an inherent result of being melee or ranged. They could and should have just added more mechanics to SV to increase its complexity, such as funnel cleave/multidot mechanics.
Usually when a change is made to a product that makes it go from being very popular to very unpopular we call it a bad move. The only reason you donât think so is because, by your own admission in other threads, you primarily play melee specs such as the one youâre posting from. Youâre just defending a bad change because you benefitted personally.
What content have you done as Survival?
Out of your guildâs 40 Hunters, only 3 of them are Survival (lol) and none of them are level 60, so Iâll give you the benefit of the doubt and say your SV Hunter is not in the same guild.
When you declared that ranged SV was the worst implementation and that melee SV was a good move it sure didnât seem like you were stating it as a matter of opinion.
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just go play classic. melee hunter automatically removed.
So complexity aside, youâre saying that implementation of RSV lacked mechanics and needed reworking, which is what happened in the end no? Why was RSV such a wonderful spec if it lacked mechanics and complexity? That doesnât sound like an inspired design worth saving.
Popularity has been more recently related to whatâs performing well or what the most âmetaâ spec. With all of the hunter specs performing relatively equivalent to one another, players are gonna flock to BM as itâs generally been the easier spec to play, while MM (being a bit clunky imo) is more difficult to perform well. Itâs sort of why there are a million boomy parses, feral does great damage in single target, but everyone plays boomy cuz âmetaâ even though feral is incredibly strong in single target. This generally has far less to do with the spec being fun in regards to raiding, m+ and PvP.
Seeing as you spent time looking at my guilds roster, Iâm sure youâve already looked at my hunter so kind of funny youâd ask. Aotc and cleared heroic a few times (havenât spent any time trying to pug mythic really). Iâve done up to 21s in m+ and normally finish between 11-13k overall, havenât done any arena but Iâll run around BGs occasionally. Majority of the time has been spent in M+ when Iâm not on my DK. Either way itâs significantly more time spent than complaining about a spec I donât want to play, havenât played, and doesnât have any current experience with the spec and just pulls out âitâs badâ from thin air.
This entire thread is opinion, which is why itâs more likely RSV wonât be coming back; this includes your weird hate-on for MSV simply because itâs melee and you want to whine and cry about it in a million threads because you and others canât move on in a game and enjoy another class or spec because youâre so inflexible.
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Fair enough, I donât main hunter and just remember WotLK survival being fun in less-than-cutting-edge play.
I donât have any interest in melee survival personally though, so as far as Iâm concerned hunters only have two specs (and I donât particularly like BM either). Whatever it ends up being Iâd like to see hunters get a fourth true ranged spec.
Do you also feel the same way about rogues? If not, why? All of their specs are essentially the same and do the same things, should one of them be drastically changed?
No one cares. How the spec performs or how well you personally do with it has zero to do with how people feel about it or why it is disliked and the reasons behind it. It could be the top dps spec out of all the classes and specs and I can still call it bad because Iâm not talking about it from a numbers standpoint.
So are most every other thread, what is your point?
What do you think youâre doing right now?
yes, bring old sub back
I mean he directly asked what my experience was, so I answered.
Point being only blizz can make changes to the specs and the collective opinion on RSV vs MSV has zero impact so far.
Iâm responding to questions he asked or arguments he posed, not whining because I loathe melee specs or conversely ranged specs.
Shouldnât be too difficult to understand that.
No, thatâs not what Iâm saying. People can read this thread and see past replies so think twice before trying to put words in my mouth. What I said was that even if it were true that ranged SV lacked complexity the obvious solution is to add unique mechanics to grant it complexity. RSV was not a complex spec (most specs arenât) but it had plenty of baseline interaction and was fast paced with good flow. Imporantly, its gameplay style suited its identity and both of those aspects sensibly built on the core Hunter foundation. It wasnât a âdesign worth savingâ because it wasnât a design that NEEDED saving. It worked very well and as a result appealed to many players. Itâs outrageous and hypocritical for a fan of the most perpetually unpopular spec in the game to be making judgements on spec designs âworth savingâ to the point where it comes across as deflection.
I do wish ranged SV got more baseline mechanics just as I wish the current BM did. There were plenty of sensible design candidates for that; some of which briefly saw implementation. The most nonsensical decision was to make it melee. As I said, complexity is not dependent on being melee or range. Youâve created this false dilemma of ranged + simple or melee + complex. You can have ranged + complex or melee + simple. As a matter of fact, the current SV isnât even very complex if at all. It has almost zero baseline interaction (ask yourself what Serpent Sting does other than single target ticking damage, for example). All of the specâs interaction and complexity depends on the talent Wildfire Infusion; an augmentation of a ranged ability that would seriously fit ranged Survival better than melee Survival. Why couldnât we just have ranged Survival with Wildfire Infusion?
We are so far beyond blaming SVâs unpopularity on performance, especially when SV fans spend thread after thread falling over themselves to talk about how great Survivalâs performance is. Itâs unpopular because itâs melee and most Hunters donât want to play melee; simple as that. I skipped the rest of this paragraph.
So, yes, you play a Hunter to a casual capacity and most of your time is spent on your DK main. Thatâs kind of the point. You arenât a Hunter main. You main a melee class and you have a Survival Hunter (or at least a Hunter you sometimes play as Survival because evidently youâre currently not specced into it) as your alt. You then demand that Hunter class design continue to adhere to your melee preferences even though itâs clear most of the class doesnât want that. Thatâs self-centred and entitled, and making Survival melee has enabled and rewarded that entitled behaviour from melee mains. No other spec in the game has been reworked to explicitly appeal towards people other than those playing its own class yet somehow itâs a good thing to do for Survival according to some in the community.
As for the talk about experience with Survival: believe it or not, most of us have tried out melee specs before, including Survival. Most of the Hunter playerbase expects and wants ranged combat. They donât need to invest significant time in melee Survival to know that itâs not for them because they donât prefer melee combat. Survival isnât owed attention from Hunters. Hazzikostas made it clear that Survival wasnât made melee with Hunters in mind.
Why should ranged SV mains have to âbe flexibleâ and either accept being melee or move on to a less preferable spec? No other spec in the game was ever totally reworked to appeal to a completely different audience. Melee fans have 12 other specs to enjoy, including every DPS spec added to the game post-launch and the one youâre posting from. They should get lost in one of those instead of having Hunter specs handed to them on a platter.
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Explain the complete rework Survival got coming in to BFA.
Thatâs why I play hunter as my DPS toon. Canât wrap my tank brain around the other classes. Too many knees to the head from bosses.
Hmm, that gives me an idea. Sub is the shadow magic spec and people keep asking for dark rangers. Rework sub as dark rangers. Bow user, shadow magic. Boom, done!
Again, you can apply this logic to any topic posted on this forum. Only blizzard can make any changes to any of the game and our collective opinions about any of it may or may not have any impact.
We donât loathe melee specs, we loathe what was done to a spec many of us enjoyed. Telling us to get over it or play another spec is fine, just remember that attitude when / if the shoe ever happens to be on the other foot. Donât expect a shoulder to lean on when something you enjoyed isnât around one day.
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Speak for yourself, anytime I make a comment about MSV being fun and enjoying it grumpy bepples throws stones at me calling me a âmelee mainâ while I play and have played every spec and class in the game at some point since wotlk. The select and loud few like to diss any response coming from someone posting on a melee forum profile character.
Also, Iâve stopped playing warrior and lock multiple times when things were gutted and changed over various expacs since wotlk. I stoped playing brewmaster this expac because I didnât like the overhaul to tanking. In the end itâs a game and by no means should blizzard cater to the 25 whiners that losing RSV is the absolute end of the world.
Iâve also played every class, but this hunter is, was, and will always be my main. Iâve had it since the start and stuck with it through all the ups and downs so of course Iâm going to be loud about changes to it I donât like.
I donât begrudge people who enjoy the current survival, but I will push back against people who say dumb things like, âIt was a melee spec in vanilla.â (it wasnât) âIt wasnât unique and was just like MM.â (The current iteration has more in common with BM than the old version had in common with MM but they all gloss over that) âThe old version wasnât popular, the new one is.â (the opposite is true and backed up by actual numbers)
No one is saying it was the end of the world, someone made a topic and asked if was going to be removed, we said not likely, then everyone started throwing in their two cents about the spec and here we are now.
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Oh look! Mages have 3 specs, all focusing on casting spells with slightly different names. HowâŠcreativeâŠ
Oh look! Rogues have 3 specs, all focusing on swinging 2 small sticks while popping in and out of stealth. HowâŠcreativeâŠ
Etc. Etc.
This. 
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âŠas opposed to the 5 MSV loyalists who claim itâs the best thing to happen, ever?
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i agree. also let arms warriors equip wrenches and bobâs yer uncle youâve got tinkers
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The OP seems to have difficulty with understanding this concept, just saying.
Iâm not worried as well and youâre right about it in PVP.
I wouldnât mind the option to tank in Survival. I think that would be pretty neat.
I do like the options of bouncing between melee and range depending on what I feel like playing. I know giving this option to Hunters has made the class more interesting for me and its why Iâve stayed playing this character. Most of the time when I am playing its in melee survival mode.
I just absolutely love the spec and have been playing it since Legion. I even got the mage tower artifact look for him. 