but but but…raptor strike does horrific damage to my enemy and its melee range. How on earth would anyone play the spec as ranged and even remotely get decent DPS?
I literally HAVE to be in melee range to get maximum damage with the spec thanks to Raptor Strike.
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Which isn’t a problem, because any competent surv hunter knows which defensive traits to run, and its very easy to stay alive in even a MASSIVE pull by simply using a Leech pet and the feign death absorb trait.
Stick to discussing specs you actually play
The ability to stay at range 100% of the time is not at all necessary, as you seem to suggest. You just ave to be competent enough to watch your CDs and know when to kite and when to go in for melee burst. If you have 10x latent poison on MANY targets, you’re healing yourself for big chunks of HP when you come in to consume them.
The reason you hate surv, Bepples, is because you’re not a competent melee player, full stop. Don’t project your inability to judge situational safety onto others.
I’d suggest you refrain from discussing your private server exploits on the official forums, btw.
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I don’t know what abilities you have access to at your level but at max level your single target abilities are:
- Raptor Strike (or Mongoose Bite, the talented replacement)
- Kill Command
- Serpent Sting
- Wildfire Bomb
3/4 of those can be used at ranged. Furthermore, you have azerite traits that will buff things like Serpent Sting and Wildfire Bomb (there’s a Kill Command one as well but I’m pretty sure it sucks). So you can potentially have a big proportion of your damage being ranged.
You also have the cooldown Aspect of the Eagle which makes Raptor Strike ranged for 15 seconds.
Of course Auto-Attack and Raptor Strike do constitute a plurality of your damage so you won’t see any Survival Hunters going around in raids sticking to ranged. It just means the spec holds up at ranged much better than other melee specs and this helps it in PvE (think about mechanics that require you to run out of melee) and PvP in the case of countering other melee.
Ok. So what you are saying here is that melee Survival does indeed have this major shortcoming v.s. ranged Survival as has to put in gear and effort to overcome it just to be a bit less worse than ranged Survival.
Was this meant to be a rebuttal to my point?
Are you actually trying to argue that melee SV was just as good if not better than ranged SV at this particular combat feat? Melee Survival has better burst AoE. Ranged Survival had better pulling, kiting, and ranged AoE capability. I even gave you an example where ranged Survival excels whereas melee Survival wouldn’t even be able to pull it off at all; granted, due to the particular design of those mobs and their stacking debuff, but it still matters because it’s a clear demonstration of an area where Survival has lost effectiveness.
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It’s not bad at all, actually. It’s become a fairly common choice in pvp if running alpha predator + bloodseeker (these are also the optimal choices in big pulls for fairly obvious reasons)
Surv’s Kill Command does very decent damage, let alone when pheromone bomb is up.
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heh…yeah…I use leeching kitties and pet taunt to get the crap offa me quite a bit, as well as having used feign death about 1000 times already. Mostly due to overpulling tanks, though.
Had a few runs where I was literally last man left standing and was able to finish off a pretty good sized mob using taunt, Feign death and just Raptor Strike/Butchery until everything hit the floor.
but I am playing at level 60, so probably not the same later on, I suppose.
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LOL this thread is amazing. This dude baited bepples so hard; imagine being that jaded.
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heh…yeah…I had no idea praising the spec would cause all this 
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Bepples has a history of arguing with literally rank 1 survival hunters about why their belief that BFA survival is one of the best designed itterations of the spec is wrong.
He is an incredibly toxic and self-absorbed individual, and will react this way any time the spec gets brought up.
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I have played every spec in the game from level 1 to level 60…most to BFA content as well.
Looking at the spectrum of classes/ specs in the game, up to level 60, I dont see Survival being seriously shorted anywhere.
I half expected to be dying a lot more than I have been.
Ive literally had tanks actually THANKING me after the run for using taunt and keeping the team alive…which also keeps me alive when I need it.
Im not a hunter pro by any means, but I am having trouble understanding how it might be being dismissed as a bad spec or whatever.
Ive done better with it DPS and surviving-wise than I did with MM or BM.
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Reminder that the original point was that melee Survival couldn’t pull large amounts of mobs and kite them to death to the same effectiveness as ranged Survival. Everything you posted afterwards didn’t argue this point but instead argued that it didn’t matter. I don’t actually disagree with that and I don’t doubt Survival excels at solo content. All Hunter specs do. I’m just arguing that it’s worse at that than ranged Survival was, and particularly worse at that than current BM too.
If you’re not disagreeing with that point this whole discussion is a pointless waste of time.
Trrruuueeeee
Yes I was totally baited by the guy angry enough to lash out repeatedly saying I’m a mediocre player, a “clueless manbaby”, a “lost cause” and “on the spectrum”.
It can be. At level 120 with decent gear you should be able to solo mythic dungeons and I’ve saved groups on trash even in 15+ mythic dungeons sometimes.
The quality of a spec’s design is extremely subjective. Plus, “rank 1 survival hunters” also talk about why Survival’s design actively makes it an unappealing option for most PvE content, so I don’t see how people square that with “melee SV is the best thing ever” no matter how well they do with the spec.
An important thing to ask is “is Survival good because of melee or in spite of it”. Most of your posts on this topic seem to heavily imply the latter even if you don’t like to admit it.
The problem is pretty much everything you’re describing here can be done better and more reliably as BM. The PvE utility difference between the two is very small yet BM is fully ranged. There aren’t many avenues for SV to shine in the shadow of BM. I know Scabber will flip out again when reading this but I’m really not sure why this suddenly becomes a point of debate when SV Hunters themselves admit this stuff when soliciting buffs from Blizzard.
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You’re right, it’s more effective, because it kills them faster. It’s irrelevant that you take slightly more damage to do so right up until the moment it kills you (which is user error)
This is not a zero-sum, one-hit-one-kill game, especially in regards to the kind of mobs you might be aoeing down in the first place.
Whether you kite at 40 yards the entire time, or kite at 10 yards the entire time while running in, carving, and running out is literally irrelevant unless you’re actually dying to them.
You said yourself that modern surv has more burst aoe. Couple that burst aoe with the right playstyle and there is a near-zero chance you will die unless you lag out or have a swimming pool’s worth of corruption on your gear.
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meh…I probably agree, but BM is so brain dead easy to play that it bores the pants off me. Same with Demon Hunter…both specs.
I think thats why I like healing so much. Keeping a team topped off while trying to get good DPS is just the perfect balance of enough to do.
Survival seems to make me think about it just a bit more than banging buttons with BM…probably just a personal preference thing, id think
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It’s good because of it. Some of the tools that make survival such an excellently designed spec for pvp exist exclusively because we are melee. Ranged survival would never be given access to harpoon, net, or a shorter kick cooldown.
In an expansion full of specs that require very little thought and have little in the way of punishing mechanics, surv is a spec that is still very strong while also being very punishing to you if you haven’t put in your time in learning to play it.
You weren’t expecting this answer (despite having been given it by Dilly before), so I don’t except you to accept it though.
Being melee-into-casters and ranged-into-melee is actually an extremely advantageous position from a control aspect.
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Scabber:
Also Scabber:
Sorry the thread went this way, OP.
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Cool. That’s literally all that needed to be said 
I mean, we’ve been over the fact that the last time Survival was ranged it had much, much higher representation in 1800+ pvp than the current SV despite not having net, Harpoon, or a shorter interrupt CD. You may have had a lame excuse for it but that’s the fact.
You seem to consistently ignore the fact that PvE exists, let alone that it’s the bigger part of the game than rated PvP. And there is no denying that SV is more than held back in PvE due to being melee.
P.S. Dilly himself has told me that being melee is, if anything, a balancing factor and that if the current spec were ranged it would be uncontrollably overpowered.
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Good luck gaslighting OP into thinking me being rude to someone that’s aggressive to anyone that plays surv is somehow worse than the same individual trying to talk down to OP in the very first response.
Sorry y’all are too socially inexperienced to realize the saccharine charade doesn’t work.
Yes…that’s…literally what I meant when I said ranged survival would never be given tools like harpoon, net, or short CD kick.
Feel like you’re trying to argue “2+2=4 is not the same as 4=2+2” right here.
I’m guessing you didn’t realize “it” in that sentence was melee surv.
In what world do you live in where surv hunters are even asking for buffs? I’ve literally never seen a surv hunter ask for buffs, not even once, in BFA.
We’re a pretty damn contented bunch.
BFA pvp has been incredibly low participation with the exception of season 1 (where we were actually very well represented) , so you can’t really learn much at all from comparing it to previous eras.
Surv’s lack of representation in S2 and S3 had nothing to do with the spec itself or being melee and everything to do with the proliferation of pve gear in pvp and tank trinkets leading to obscenely long games. Surv is a spec that shines in short duration matches, and it will fall behind in long, drawn-out deep-dampening games. This is true for all hunters, not just survival.
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SV is garbage. Why take a weak melee class when every other melee spec is better? Hell even enhancement is better.
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I rarely even use serpent sting at all, let alone macro it.
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t. garbage raider
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As far as ranged vs melee…why on earth would I WANT survival to be ranged?
I have two ranged hunter specs that do just fine.
Seems to me if survival didnt have Butchery and Raptor Strike they could have left hunter at two ranged specs and been done with it.
Survival is cool because out in the solo world I dont even need to close distance and can Kill command, etc the enemy to death from a distance.
But in dungeons where I need that extra DPS to impress the ladies, the melee damage with Butchery and Raptor Strike is quite clearly, at level 60 anyway, overly devastating, especially when Im fighting a good sized mob.
I guess Im just not seeing the down side to survival…and Im having a blast with it.
I play enhance. It isnt any better on DPS from what Im seeing so far.
Leveling up enhance is ok, but it aint topping the DPS charts by any stretch of the imagination.
Im actually getting noticeably more DPS from survival than I do when Im running enhance.
I tried SS a couple different ways…even took the one talent to make it hit multiple targets. It wasnt horrible, but not worth writing home about.
Wildfire Bomb does good, but with that cone and not being able to line up targets every time, seems a bit unpredicatable…so even two shots with it was…‘ok’
I decided to try to macro the two which leaves me with one key instead of two for the both. Again losing that 5 second window on SS because of the CD on wildfire bomb. But Id challenge anyone really to prove to me that not doing that way will give me buttloads more damage on mobs (since thats kinda what the multi target SS was for to begin with) than just doing what I did and using the Butchery talent instead for clearing out mobs.
The down side is my armor repair bills have gone up a bit,but my DPS is more than fine in 5 mans.
Without SS being on the macro, Id have put it on some side button to fire off as needed, but certainly not have had it on my main rotation.
Again, at least in classic level content. It may be different at end game
I dont think that at all. Just seems that some are attacking the spec in ways that seem to be more from bias than from actual data and facts.
Ok by me, Im going to play what I like, how I like, just as I always do.
And Im quite sure that no one in the 5 mans Im running the last week or so minds that Im getting upwards of double the DPS goodness of the next player down and helping clear the dungeon faster than we would otherwise.
This has been typical of the spec in level 60 dungeons the last 4 days regardless of what classes are in the group.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=15JyBcr6S2CYo6Q5HcFCrYoYNVxLJAh9V
Mine is at the top.
Im not at all unhappy with Survival
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