I have to say that yes, I agree that melee survival hunters have had some growing pains since they introduced them, but I am loving them in Dragonflight. I level A LOT and right now survival is really the only hunter spec that I’m enjoying, and I usually love the ranged specs better. The ranged specs feel extremely underwhelming to me during the leveling process, but survival is loads of fun. Just my two cents.
I think survival is fun as is, though could probably use talent tweaks and tuning like a lot of classes. To satisfy both, could just make Aspect of the Eagle into something like “all abilities no longer usable in melee but available using a ranged weapon”, basically a ranged toggle instead of a cooldown.
Probably since he isn’t a second rate side character, as:
In WC3, the game WoW heavily draws many things from (Arthas and the Lich King from the human campaign, Illidan/Malfurion/Tyrande/Thrall/Cairne/list goes on, and on, and on), Rexxar had his own entire campaign, where he was the main protagonist, along side Rokhan, Chen, and Cairne.
This campaign that is referenced in vanilla wow (https://www.wowhead.com/classic/quest=819/chens-empty-keg), and this campaign which is the literal founding of Orgrimmar, and a few other major big events, such as the invasion of Kalimdor by Jaina’s father, his occupying of Theramore, and the death of said father (the whole BFA Jaina Warbringer bit, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo7XPvwRgG8 and the entire Kul Tiran isles Jaina storyline that happens because of what happens in the Rexxar campaign).
He has also been present in every expansion except mists and offworld ones (warlords & shadowlands), and has been represented as the quintessential multi pet using melee hunter.
Its the least played spec because people who want to play melee are playing a melee class. Survival hunter is like a moped - it’s kinda fun once in a while but most people don’t seriously consider it if you’re playing a hunter as your main.
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Personally, I don’t really care where they take SV. I tried it for a year in Legion. It was painful. I’m kinda over my hunter. He’s here because my forum post history is associated with him.
Frankly if I’m going to be in melee I’d rather be there as an Unholy DK or an Arms Warrior. Both bring more to the table than a melee SV. Plus both have access to a real tank spec. Plus Arms isn’t dealing with a pet that gets in the way every time you try to loot something.
I agree about the Arcane Shot/Steady Shot thing. I saw those in the talent tree when DL dropped. It was like… Ok time to close the door and walk away… (I was only logged onto this guy to start cleaning out his bank, and it kept nagging me about my talent tree…)
Just because something was prominent in WC3 doesn’t mean it is prominent in WoW.
There are a lot of players that were not even born when WC3 came out.
It came out over twenty years ago.
Present and prominent are not the same thing. Present is a stretch too.
Where was he in Legion?
Where was he in WOTLK?
Where is he now?
The most relevant Rexxar has ever been in WoW is BFA, and even then it was for a small quest chain for Horde. He is a side character.
“All but one” works.
“All but three” does not.
Rexxar is more relevant in HS than he has ever been in WoW.
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How about they spend resources fixing the other Hunter specs and making them viable instead of the one that is played by <2% of Hunters and <0.2% of the playerbase overall. BM is only viable (in quotation marks) in raids when equipped with a rare drop bow that only drops off the last boss and literally increases their DPS by 15% (the LFR bow is a 6% DPS increase over the 418 crafted bow!) and their AoE rotation is one of the worst (arguably the worst) in the game. I can’t speak for MM, but I’m sure they would love more attention to making their spec feel smoother after swapping their talents and forcing them to take 1 path that a lot of them hate and gutting their burst for good measure.
SV can stay a forgotten spec for all I care, spend the time/resources on the specs Hunters actually play. SV was an immediate and inarguable failure when they changed it to melee. It’s been a failure 95% of the time since, with the only exception being when they are grossly over-tuned to the point of people feeling forced to play it or get denied invites.
To summarize - Either change it back to ranged or delete it, but don’t waste time/resources on the melee iteration that no one wants to play.
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I might actually play one of my old huntards again if they made this change.
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or put it back to ranged, you know the UNIQUE nothing even close to resembling any other class or spec, the way it was in 5.4 or even 6.0 with exotic munitions, serpent spread and all that good stuff.
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I loved old SV with Black Arrow and Explosive Shot. I would def play it if they changed it back.
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Very little of what made ranged SV fun was moved to MM.
Black Arrow and Serpent Spread are gone entirely. Lock and Load and Explosive Shot exist in tokenistic, heavily modified forms to the point that they’re just abilities that happen to use the same icon and name.
On top of this, MM has things like Aimed Shot that clash with the identity and gameplay style of old SV.
I know it’s hard for melee players to grasp, but there was more to either spec than “use a bow”. Ranged SV had a gameplay style and identity that was separate to that of MM and modern MM does not represent that style at all.
Evidently that uniqueness is wasted because very few people like melee SV enough to engage in it.
So… a worse Hunter?
Why would the average player be excited by this?
You have a cool down that lets you do your melee attacks at range when it’s necessary to shift phases
Are you arguing that no other class has defensives like SV Hunter? Are you aware SV Hunter is one of the most comparatively vulnerable and squishy specs in the game?
Yeah, you’re right. All other specs see a lot more play and attention than SV…
Yeah you and like 12 other people. Totally worth screwing over the thousands that played and enjoyed ranged SV, apparently…
For most people it’s the opposite so why should your preference be more highly regarded?
No Hunter spec should be melee. At most there should be an optional melee style within BM.
To be fair most of the FOTM rerollers when talking about this were clear that they were there for the damage and not the gameplay.
The people who liked SV for its gameplay were largely against the degenerate tier set gameplay of Sepulcher. Same goes for MM.
Do you seriously believe like 3 people on a forum is a meaningful statistic?
Go check the spec’s representation on raiderIO some time.
This just “differentiates it” by being a worse Hunter, though. The other Hunter specs can fight in melee range as well as anyware from 5-40 yards without penalty. Differentiation by handicap is a horrific design standard for specs and this is why most Hunters avoid SV.
This is delusional. It has some of the worst talent tree and gameplay flow design in Dragonflight and even people who love Survival like Marcellian have pointed out its Dragonflight design is bad.
There is something very wrong with it when a) Hunters in WoW are heavily based on use of ranged weapons and b) it replaced an existing ranged spec.
It’s actually an extremely bad idea.
Only as an optional stance within the spec, not the baseline state of the spec.
MM plays nothing like old ranged SV. We wouldn’t be here advocating for ranged SV if MM were sufficient. It’s a different fantasy.
The thing is most specs don’t need best-in-the-game damage just to achieve middle-of-the-pack representation.
SV is always unpopular unless its damage is so overpowered it can’t be ignored. That suggests that the problem is deeper than just damage tuning, unless you believe that propping up SV with game-breaking damage tier after tier is a healthy long-term solution for the game.
Bad decisions don’t become good decisions with time.
Melee SV was a mistake and it’s always worth rectifying that.
You’re posting from a class with 3 ranged specs. How do they make those unique?
As it turns out, there’s more to a Hunter spec than the weapon type it used.
Ranged SV was a different approach to ranged combat than the other two. BM mostly depended on close cooperation with its pets. MM mostly depended on hardcasted physical damage burst. SV mostly depended on special munitions and rot damage. It was actually a very solid ranged class design, closely mirroring how Warlocks work.
This is my attitude towards it, too, and I’ve talked to a lot of Hunters in game that feel the same way. It’s tiring to see more and more resources being sunk into melee Survival for no discernable improvement while the WoW community gaslights itself into believing it was a sensible decision all along. It’s an emperor’s new clothes situation.
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Survival was so much fun in MOP. Man I miss those days. Screw class fantasy. I felt like a damn survival hunter.
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TBH from a class fantasy standpoint it was superior in MoP. It was always meant to be the resourceful opportunist that made use of every tool to gain an advantage. MoP SV fit that very well. Legion SV is completely antithetical to it. They still try to advertise it as resourceful, but what could be less resourceful than arbitrarily ignoring the most iconic and powerful resource the class has?
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I can go for more ability interaction (make Kill Command extend Mongoose Fury by 1 second when used), but I absolutely abhor Wildfire Infusion and would rather see Blizz rework how hunter traps and grenades work than deal with that “let’s combine 3 abilities into one and make it totally random” talent.
There is no need to make it ranged again. At least as melee it has uniqueness and some flaw. As ranged explosive, shadow damage, “trap” class it didn’t felt special. Unless it outperforms other specs like in 9.2.5
They started amazing in Legion but for some reason they decided that suddenly it has to revolve more around pet then BM hunter. They should change SV so it draws more towards legion version of SV hunter.
But you shouldn’t start any conversation about SV hunter. It will turn into heated debate between Beppe, Ghorak and two other hunters against whole forum hunter community, how SV was the most popular hunter spec and it was always most played spec.
there was never any need to make it full melee. the spec had more people playing it than you can imagine. you may say it didn’t feel special or it wasn’t unique. but it was special and it was more unique and had more identity than both mm and bm combined. you were a survivalist.
you had poisoned shots in the way of serpent sting and cleave and aoe with serpent spread. you have explosives with your explosive shot. you had your black arrow (of death) which could of been interpreted as some black mamba venom. you had your traps and trap launchers. you have your makeshift exotic munitions with incendiary ammo for additional aoe and cleave. you had poisoned ammo for your single target. you had frozen ammo for your slowing of adds and or pvp.
coming here and talking about “it didn’t feel special” you sir are a fake hunter and delusional. as for 10s of thousands of hunters that over represented the ranged survival spec during mop and wod and even earlier, you sir are wrong.
survival hunters are pissed because the spec was removed entirely for an inferior spec and playstyle that does not correlate with the hunter class. there were many hunters that just jumped right into bm or mm. there are some that changed classes. hell there are some that were so die hard into survival that when it went melee they quit the game. but when the deal was done they did not move into melee survival. a fraction under 1% may have and some melee players might of gave it a swirl, but all in all it was doa. hell it was still doa at the end of shadowlands when it was meta spec. so there’s that.
now that it has been a few years since the change we can all sit back, admire the carnage and devastation moving it to melee has done and fully realize that it was a huge mistake.
the only real fix for it is to bring it back to the way it was so it can be fun, unique and start repairing the fantasy it once was all over again.
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I’d rather talk about the entire class than just its most polarizing spec. When none of its specs are even A-tier for either raids or M+ and two of those specs gain a massive damage boost from a weapon that only drops off the final boss of the current raid, they all clearly need a lot of tuning.
I wish people would accept this, but a lot of them want to insist that this single game that they likely never played when it was new should dictate what WoW should always be, despite the devs clearly wanting the game to be distinct from the RTS era outside of storylines where the Legion or Scourge were involved.
If they made a spec that spammed 1 button for all its damage and it had to do a 360 spin-jump before casting it every time, that would be unique. It would also be awful.
Uniqueness is not automatically a good thing. They can make something uniquely bad. In Survival’s case, it’s unique in a way that makes most people categorically avoid it. That’s not a positive just because a handful of people now like it more. I’m sure some people would love that hypothetical spin-jump class. With a playerbase of hundreds of thousands of people you’ll find an audience for any out-of-left-field craziness. That doesn’t make it good.
Ranged SV evidently felt special to a lot of people because it was very widely played and enjoyed in its day, and 6 years after its removal people still talk about it.
Let’s not rewrite history. Legion SV was the worst-received iteration of melee Hunter, and that really is saying a lot. It got a lot of coverage and people tried to help it but it released in a deplorable state and didn’t improve much over the expansion. It was a total mess from them to design and tuning, and it remained the very least played spec for the entire expansion.
So you’re going to pretend the “whole Hunter community” supports melee SV, just like how you pretended you did good DPS on your SV Hunter because you didn’t know Warcraftlogs existd?
Melee SV is extremely unpopular while ranged SV was routinely very popular. These are provable facts. You can pretend those facts don’t matter; that’s a separate discussion and you’d be wrong there too, but at least don’t pretend that it wasn’t the case and rewrite history. WotLK classic is out right now and SV is a widely played spec. We’re far beyond the point of revisionism when it comes to this.
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Honestly, a lot of the classes need reworks. I’m surprised anyone likes the current trees/playstyles.
- Priest is still awkward.
- Paladin is a hodgepodge of bad design decisions.
- Rogue has extra high-DPS/utility buttons in its kit and for what? More random hard to balance damage?
- Monk has extra buttons to push on top of a kit already providing excellent DPS.
- Warriors are alright I guess. Fury is basic and boring but folks seem to not care.
It just feels like there’s so much fluff now. No real synergy outside of babysitting a bunch of procs/awkward utility abilities.
I just don’t like it. My hand feels like they’re constantly playing twister. I don’t even mind all the buttons really, just how many I’m pressing as often as I am. And all for what feels like a rushed design.
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I said on forums. There is only a fistful of you guys pretending to be ranged SV crusaders. It’s gone. Cry as much as you want. Post as many links as you want from few times in history of wow when it was considered meta.
You still will never be able to digest the fact that ranged SV is history , it’s gone , and you can’t do anything. And since you’re to balloon to understand , like every spec in history of wow. It’s popular when it’s meta.
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