Hey look, another hunter holding onto the hope that they will change something that they never will.
They went all in for players like me who wanted it to the point where certain content would be locked out if they reverted it. They aren’t changing it dude. You want the old play style? Good news, they baked it into the other two specs that are still ranged! Play those, I’ll keep playing my Survival Hunter and loving it.
Two physical ranged specs… versus how many melee specs that were in the game before Srv was crucified…?
The last thing WoW needed was another melee DPS spec and the fact it has to this date been rocking near absolute bottom representation percentages despite Blizzards previous efforts to bloat its numbers says it all. The idea is clearly a failed experiment but pig-headed developer pride when it comes to admitting mistakes is a force of nature in Blizzard. Take a look at how 25 yard “medium range” Evokers are working out.
We’re pretty much only suggesting the current survival spec be renamed to beast mastery and a new ranged spec be developed, and you’re bent out of shape at the idea 
It’s somewhat of a consensus that current BM is “boring”.
My survival hunter actually has a macro that when I click a button he swaps from his axe to his bow and click it again to swap back, it changes his ability bar too and swaps Raptor strike and Carve for steady shot and arcane shot. lets him shoot at people who are running while I wait on Harpoon cooldown etc. It’s pretty fun honestly.
So making survival into more of a toggle spec that can swap between weapons, or specialise to either ranged/melee through tallents would be a really novil way of making the spec unique. while still keeping the melee only playstyle intact for those that want to keep that.
Because, to be blunt, it’s not equally as bad because ranged SV was the broadly appealing one while melee SV was niche.
4th spec is the least realistic option. There is no circumstance where they’re going to create a 4th DPS spec for a pure DPS class.
That’s why the compromise I’ve been in favour of is having a talented melee stance within BM. It addresses most of the problems with creating a melee Hunter. Yes it’s not a favourable compromise to melee players, but the niche newcomers shoudn’t get a favourable compromise over the rest of the class’s playerbase.
If SV were a healer it would be even more variety.
Hopefully one day you’ll learn that variety doesn’t make something automatically better.
Besides, the game still has more melee specs than ranged specs. Ranged weapon users are especially underrepresented. So from the perspective of the game as a whole it’s actually more variety to have SV as a ranged weapon user.
It’s also worth noting that you’ll not spec into it most of the time in PvE.
Usually I copy the post quotes to a Visual Studio Code document and write the responses there, and I’ll not write the entire thing all at once.
Plenty of people still played SV in ICC, you know.
Yes, MM will overtake it. But WotLK SV didn’t become abandoned like melee SV.
People played SV unless they couldn’t. You’re trying desperately to draw an equivalence with ranged SV and melee SV on popularity but history proves you wrong.
Can you point to a single patch outside of 6.2 (when they already decided to can it) where ranged SV was as unpopular as melee SV? Make sure to actually link proof.
What’s with this revisionist push to try to act like Legion SV was all sunshine and roses? It was even more unpopular than all subsequent iterations and was widely panned for being an unapproachable mess. The only thing it had going for it was that exponential AoE Hellcarver/Butchery nonsense. Otherwise the spec was an unmitigated dumpster fire with a nonsense playstyle, a half-finished talent selection, a hodgepodge toolkit, and no coherent overarching theme to speak of.
Believing it would turn out better if it lost its only niche that sets it apart from other melee is a delusional statement. Can you even begin to detail how that would work?
I doubt you’ve played a Hunter since WotLK.
They baked in almost nothing at all from ranged SV into the other specs. All we have is Explosive Shot and it’s hardly even the same ability; only the icon and name remain.
You don’t seem to know much about the Hunter class. Maybe you’ll be playing your DH instead.
Making BM melee is also a really bad idea.
isn’t rexxar ranged? lol
I’m not against keeping melee survival. By all means, keep maintaining your hotpot of mechanics that don’t blend together at any level that you call a spec. But I want ranged survival LIKE WE WERE PROMISED IN SHADOWLANDS!
Ranged survival didn’t make a lot of sense either (poisons, explosives, black magic, etc) but at least it was fun to play unlike the garbage pile we have now.
Also, if you’re going to have melee hunters remain a thing. Then for the love of god let them dual wield. Why is the spec pointlessly locked to 2 handers?
You’re jumping to conclusions instead of asking for clarification, as I never said it was a perfect and complete spec. I’ve repeatedly said that Legion SV needed iteration and refinement instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, which is what post-Legion SV has been.
My guess is that it’s a combination of aesthetic, the fact that spears don’t see much use (even before Legion spears were weapons you’d see once in a blue moon), and that Blizzard probably wanted to avoid adding another class that would get into fights with rogues and enh shamans for weapon drops.
Well people want to be able to dual wield for aesthetic reasons too. I’d actually try survival more than once or twice an expansion if I could.
So if that is their reason, it’s a dumb reason. People already complain about every facet of loot anyways, one more dual wield spec won’t break anything. Nothing changed when we got our 5th leather class before we even got our 3rd mail class.
Only people who can’t play survival are those lacking in an above average IQ.
I can understand that. As long as I can still wield a spear, why not.
Isn’t that kind of the point, though? Evokers could have just as easily been a plate class (to fight over gear with paladins) or yet another leather class. Chances are it was made a mail class because it wouldn’t crowd the field.
were JUST out of a season were survival was S tier for the whole season.
relax theres no hurry. that wasnt fun.
No there isn’t.
its funny because the talent tree is artwork of rexxar dual wielding axes lol
Personally I feel having them being able to tame Exotic beasts (However obviously still have them only be able to tame 1 pet at a time) would make more sense than BM: since they fight literally side by side their pet, instead of throwing them orders from afar like a slavedriver.
I also think Survival need more, well ironically - Survivability. Since they feel squishy as hell compared to the other two who can kite & mitigate with manoeuvres. That and buff their execute more. People would play them far more for sure then.
i understand why evoker is a mail class. if it was made with lore in mind, it’d likely be either plate or armorless and have some passive that increased stat gains from non-armor gear. doesn’t change the fact that their own actions have gone against this idea already.
I shake my head… My poor Survival Brother and Sisters have been done dirty for so long.
Survival is a fun change of pace when I want to mix up my play-style. It feels fine to me, the only real complaint/change desired is for abilities that require a two-handed weapon to be changed so you can either use two-handers, or dual-wield one-handers.
I’m guessing imposing the two-hand weapon limit is to try to not overlap with other dual-wielding classes, but, eh, Rexxar? Dual axes. Come on, man!
It made a hell of a lot more sense than melee SV because it was the resourceful munitions expert. Only Black Arrow felt out of place, and it was just there because a) it was a different kind of augmented shot; it’s just augmented with magic instead of explosives/poisons, and b) historical reasons from WC3.
Survival is meant to be resourceful and opportunist, not “I’m going to abandon the most important resource of the Hunter class just for funsies”.
No, they really did need to throw it out entirely. Legion SV was a rancid mess, from concept to design and implementation. It’s talent tiers were like something from a different era, like Classic WoW. It’s core gameplay had no synergy whatsoever; just a handful of mechanics and concepts that had nothing to do with one another blended together. Only a select few individual mechanics were remotely worth keeping.
This isn’t even speculation or bias. This is the type of critique people why liked melee SV and were trying to help it gave, and the spec was ultimately even less played than the iterations that came after it. It wasn’t just a few tweaks away from greatness.
Least snobbish SV player.
To be fair, that was very much an exception to the norm. This will be melee SV’s 7th year, and in that time Sepulcher was really the only instance where it was broadly useful and appealing, and it was entirely due to overtuned borrowed power rather than any design triumph of the spec. In contrast, it had 12 prior years as a ranged spec in which it was quite often useful and widely engaged. Melee SV has had an exceptionally poor track record.
So it’s no wonder that people want some sort of change. The difference in perspective is some people call for a better melee Survival, while others call for a new look into what worked into the past with ranged Survival.
There is a problem if you see threads like this pop up all the time, and SV routinely getting D/F tier ratings.
An entire third of the Hunter class is basically designed as a rarely-useful, widely-avoided experiment ground with no real design philosophy or goal. A ton of developer effort has been poured into the spec for the better part of a decade with no real positive result. That’s a problem.
It might be fine for Warriors messing around on their alt Hunters, but it’s utterly insufficient as a Hunter spec.
It shouldn’t be treated as a novelty “for the lols” side experiment, though. It should be a spec worthy of occupying a third of the Hunter class, and right now it certainly isn’t. It’s far from fine. It has some of the worst spec design in the game and it has no coherent theme to speak of.
Except in season 4 of SL where it was considered S tier. And currently where survival hunter is currently a really good melee pick in PVP because of mending bandage counteracting a lot of the bleed-based going on right now. If anything survival is only hybrid melee. Most of the time surv does not stick in melee, it uses its ranged dots and pet to deal damage from range and jumps in for the kill when necessary.
None of that, though, has anything to do with the fantasy of a melee hunter spec. Which was the original point being made. If it is underperforming, then it makes sense to buff it. In the past, Blizzard was incredibly slow to make class adjustments. Now they’re making them just about every week. So in the past survival being low meant it was going to be low for a long time, whereas now they are adjusting dials constantly and that means survival can be tuned properly.