Kill Command is a key part of what makes BM stand out as the pet specialist. If other specs have Kill Command it takes away all meaning and distinction from BM. Kill Command was actually a baseline ability in the past and this was changed precisely because of this. Same for why Aimed Shot is no longer available to other specs. When you have something that definitive of the spec to which it belongs they should absolutely be exclusive to one particular spec.
Look at how they’ve handled Survival in the past. Survival was always the one with a focus on traps but they aren’t what made up the core identity of the spec, and that’s why Survival simply had better traps than the other specs (something that’s no longer the case outside of a fringe talent, mind you). However, Survival was the one that was meant to have the special ammo and that’s why it was the only one with Explosive Shot and later Serpent Sting.
All Hunter specs have pets but BM is the one that focuses on the pets. It makes 0 sense to have two specs focus on pets and that’s what we have right now. Remember, the entire reason they said they made SV melee in the first place was that there was too much overlap between SV and MM. They were either full of it or spectacularly incompetent (likely a mixture of both) because now Survival is overlapping with another Hunter spec more than any time since perhaps BC, only it’s BM now instead of MM.
Blurting out “deal with it” is the most lazy and immature response ever in these sorts of discussions.
No, I don’t, because Hunters in Classic had a minimum range on their ranged abilities and therefore they had to have melee filler. They still had a ranged weapon and primarily used that; something that is not true for current Survival. You’re the one trying to argue that the current Survival is representative of the classic Survival (without having even spent a single point in the Survival tree, mind you) when it isn’t.
Yes you did, though, and that’s why people are calling you out on it. You have repeatedly insinuated that max level Survival hunters don’t know what they’re doing and only say Survival is behind because they didn’t think to take Butchery and they are trying to force Survival to be a ranged spec.
Think I’m putting words in your mouth? Here’s you in the other thread:
You keep putting forward this critique on max-level Survival Hunters and whenever anyone counters you on it you duck back into “I’m just saying it works for me at low level!”.
Given that you are actually talking about Butchery in end game content despite your insistence that you aren’t, here’s some SV Hunters that have actually run Butchery on a fight where it does well:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/24#boss=2333&class=Hunter&spec=Survival
There are only 41 parses right now for Survival because, again, hardly anyone plays it. The top parse is 107k DPS with Alpha Predator, Butchery, Mongoose Bite, Bloodseeker, Mongoose Bite, and Birds of Prey. That’s as melee as it gets. There are 6.6k parses for BM (literally over 100 times more) and the highest DPS is 188k, i.e. not far from double the top SV. Hell, my own best parse for Hivemind is here (https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/dGfyBtN71QqApgbj#fight=25&type=damage-done). I was 88th percentile (i.e. 12% of BM Hunters on that fight did better than me) and I was at 126k DPS. My best parse, which was’t even in the 90s, on that fight is better than the very best Survival Hunter and that’s with Butchery.
This is what people mean when they say SV is not as good as BM in PvE. It’s behind in both single target and AoE situations and it’s even worse in situations involving both. This isn’t just a matter of “top Hunters not picking Butchery”.
Hmm, nope. His argument is that SV was not designed to focus on melee. Which it wasn’t. Deliberately going into melee range was not something SV Hunters were meant to be doing. Their melee talents were situational just like the entire melee side of Hunters back then.
I have noticed there are two sides of the homogenisation argument. One is in terms of playstyle and one is utility.
Utility definitely is more homogenised, although not as badly as many people think. For example, while Bloodlust is something that’s shared among multiple classes, things like Shroud and Darkness are not. There are still utilities that are specific to individual classes; it just isn’t as all-encompassing as Classic.
As for the gameplay side of things; again, the playstyles vary quite a lot between classes, not just specs. I would actually argue it’s much moreso than Vanilla because Vanilla moment-to-moment gameplay was for the most part extremely simplistic. I mean, what made a damage dealing Paladin different to a damage dealing Warrior back then? The fact that the Warrior actually had a toolkit to use whereas the Paladin was mostly just refreshing buffs to its auto-attack? There’s a lot of handwringing about everything being “builder spender” nowadays but to me it’s kind of like arguing that everything is the same because they all have action bars with abilities on them to use. “Builder spender” is a term that encompasses a lot of different playstyles even if you can abstract and generalise them to the same basic model.
Making things like Bloodlust shared between classes is a matter of practicality more than everything. It really sucks when something so crucial to a group is limited to 1 class, and it restricts freedom of composition significantly. It especially hurts in smaller group sizes. If Bloodlust were Shaman-only it would have an extreme negative effect on the M+ scene, for example.
I also vehemently disagree with the Classic class design model where many classes are flat-out non-competitive (often because they are flat out unfinished in terms of their core design) and the only reason they are brought to any content is because they are holding some key utility hostage. It strikes me as lazy and extremely slapdash.