I think it will actually end up being the opposite of what Nadirah said; new players might be picking Survival and not realise it’s intended to be played with a melee weapon in melee range.
I had this conversation in the Hunter discord. Basically the counter-argument was that the spec has “Recommended weapons: Polearm, Staves” on its page and that there’s a vendor at the end of the Shadowlands starting area that sells a melee weapon. I just don’t think that will have a 100% success rate and new players might find themselves disappointed when they find out how the spec they wanted to pick in a class so heavily themed and advertised around ranged weapons can’t actually use them.
To be honest, I delight in the confused mess it’s creating. It further erodes the validity of melee Survival. While it’s still unlikely we’ll ever get a purely ranged Survival back it won’t take that much of a philosophy shift at Blizzard to make it a possibility. Look at where the spec is now in Shadowlands v.s. where it started in Legion.
I expect people will either pick Survival, notice it’s melee, then pick Marksmanship or Beast Mastery; or they will pick Survival, notice it’s melee, then buy the weapon on the way out of the building where they picked the spec. Alternately they pick it in Exile’s Reach, before Darkmaul Citadel (you hit level 10 from the quest right before it), and they get the spear from Tunk, but this seems more like something an experienced player would do.
This is for the people who pick Survival in the first place. I expect that will be a very small percentage of Hunters, as it has been since the switch to melee in the first place.
Wildfire Bomb has an effect radius, and if you want to pull independent targets that’s not gonna help. As for Serpent Sting, the idea was to make it cost less focus than Serpent Sting and deal less damage, to underline that you can get some use out of it to pull a mob to you but should not consider it a serious part of your rotation. I just think that would be preferable over the ability being useless and having the spellbook highlight it to remind you it’s not on your bars.
The devs explicitly said that not every ability they were unpruning baseline would be used by every spec.
No matter how many times I’ve seen this mentioned, it still sounds like a terrible approach. If we want to do a focus on class, the best way to go about it is to have a set of baseline abilities then (where applicable) have the spec modify how those abilities work and their effect.
How often would you say a Frost Mage casts Fireball as part of their moment to moment gameplay? Would you think it appropriate for Fireball to be a Fire-only spell, or is it so core to being a Mage that all Mages should have it?
Aye. You take the bad with the good. See? We’re not dumb, MSV fans. And I always said that MSV was a bad melee spec since the very beginning. The devs and the community who sided with them got what they wanted. Obviously less people playing Hunters overall is the true endgame of that.
“But SV is really good. It’s one of the best!” they’ll say, as if that’s going to get MORE people playing it when right now LESS people across the board are bothering with Hunter.
I would liken it to a unique school cafeteria lunch entree that almost every student doesn’t line up to get, while the cooks are saying, “This is the best thing we’ve served ever!”. The few students that do pick it up get made fun of when all the others are enjoying better stuff(i.e. pizza), and all that food eventually gets trashed per policy. This bit was inspired by a true story.
It might have very well been the best entree but nobody believed the cooks and the few students, and it was never served again. I forgot what it was, something of the Mexican cuisine.
Can’t change the focus cost mid-cast, since that could cause it to straight fail to cast entirely. Decreasing damage could work, but personally I’d just prefer WoD’s mastery return as a fixed magnitude passive for MM, without the range increase component (that can stay tied to our actual mastery). ie:
When you stand still for 3.0s, you gain Sniper’s Focus, increasing your damage by 10% and critical strike damage by 20%. Lasts for 9.0s after you begin moving.
Now Aimed Shot can have innate cast-while-moving, at no penalty, because we have a baseline penalty for moving. Also has the practical upshot of weighting our stat priority back towards crit instead of haste or mastery (I’ve always felt MM should be a crit spec, tbh).
Fireball should be a spell specific to fire. If we need to give a non-specced mage a baseline fire school spell, I think it should be Fire Blast. As for how that would work with Arcane and Frost:
Fire Blast (Frost): Blasts the enemy for xxx fire damage. Castable while casting other spells. If used on a target that is not frozen or has not been shattered in the last 6 seconds, increases damage taken from the next Frostbolt by x%. 20 sec cooldown.
Fire Blast (Arcane): Blasts the enemy for xxx fire damage. Castable while casting other spells. Makes target unstable for 9 seconds, causing them to explode for xxx arcane damage when hit by the next 2 Arcane Missiles or Arcane Barrage projectiles.
The idea here is that Fire Blast would affect the three mage specs differently. Fire would obviously have most of the perks since their version would have a shorter cooldown (12 seconds, affected by haste), has 2 charges, always crits and procs Hot Streak along with Ignite. For Arcane and Frost it’d be a supplemental skill that can be used once in a while to make your main rotation abilities a little stronger (1 charge, 20 second cooldown).
I feel this is how Blizzard should be going about focusing on class.
That starts to make the rotations really similar. If they apply that same logic to a Frost and Arcane spell, now suddenly you have the same 3 spells that are part of all 3 specs’ rotation. Ya, they may have different purposes, but like half the rotation is the same spells between the specs.
When Sniper Shot got vastly improved in 8.1, it was a godsend for sure. I used it in 8.0. Having extra range for longer meant nothing if you were doing tiddly-wink damage. I mained MM that far back two years ago when everyone else was BM before the BM nerfs. So the tune-up MM did get, I greatly appreciated. It’s not like Blizzard isn’t capable.
As Bepples was saying, MSV is a mess. We’re given PROPAGANDA that it’s among the best, but no serious PvPer has rerolled for it legitimately. The numbers don’t lie: when you have a 4.4%(I think it was) drop in max-level representation, that’s not congruent with SV being the best. Common sense dictates Hunters should have gotten a substantial bump, but as a zero-sum game, the other classes would be upset. Has any other melee class complained about the migration to SV, and how strong SV is?
It’s a war of attrition that involves deleting the entire class. People who are trolling us are not going to be happy until every current Hunter has RR or QQ, and that’s antithetical to the MMO concept in general for either option. Would you want to RR and still play a MMO with people of a Tigolan-Furoran EQ toxicity? And if we QQ, that would degrade WoW to the point where it doesn’t make enough money to remain Retail.
Blizzard has had the same philosophy for classes now since Legion, leave the spec with the bare bones of its abilities then just let its artifacts, Azerite talents, or Covenant abilities fill out the rest.
They are all about getting a game out fast then letting us tell them all the issues. We get to pay for early-access while they polish their turd.