It was more clearly melee, but I don’t personally think it was better.
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To each his own. Fir me it was perfect. Apart from way of the moknathal. That talent can burn in the fires of hell for all eternity for all I care.
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Really? IMO the Legion-era “Spinning Plates” SV hunter was the most fun. It was one of the last time you could really consider any hunter spec “hard”.
Idunno mate without moknathal it felt smooth as butter
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Moknathal definitely cluttered up the rotation more than what was necessary. I know when I was doing the mage tower I was running it, hated every moment of it though and ended up swapping from it for that particular fight.
Funny thing was how much people praised moknathal (within sv discord etc) where you would be looked upon like mentally deficient for not taking it, meanwhile 1 or 2 mistakes meant that Animal Instincts was actually the better choice 
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It’s because people always want to think of themselves as being good. And you very well could be. But to make that talent work properly depended heavily on uptime and whether you were not just good but exceptional.
I think a lot of players mix up the idea of being good with being exceptional in that they don’t make any or rarely make mistakes. The truth is, nearly everyone does including some of the best players in the world time to time.
That talent was just awful due to how impractical it was, it forced you to try and fit too many things in a small window of time between maintaining the buff, dots, etc.
Sure.
The BfA changes, while certainly influenced by people petitioning for more ranged capabilities, were made primarily because then-current MSV players(many of…) weren’t happy with the design and the gameplay. It wasn’t just the “RSV crowd” but also many SV players themselves who were unhappy with the design.
The fact that the devs decided to do yet another big rework instead of working more towards fixing the parts of that previous iteration that weren’t necessarily working as well…yeah. Devs…
But either way, clearly the things they accused RSV of were just excuses made up so that they, in their own minds, could justify removing it in favor of MSV.
Anyway, I’m not here to petition for the removal of current SV, as you know already.
Give me RSV back as a 4th spec and I’m all good: [Updated for Dragonflight] Munitions - If RSV was to return
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Gotta love how in late Legion you heard endless preaching about how BFA’s Survival rework was going to save the spec and bring it into the mainstream and then when that didn’t work out suddenly we hear everything was fine and dandy in Legion and BFA ruined the spec for no reason (despite the fact that BFA and SL Survival achieve higher representation).
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It was MoP, actually.
Cata still had the minimum range. I remember because that was when I started playing, and I learned to kite because of it. I remember noticing most hunters who started in MoP generally didn’t know how to kite.
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Feels like a difference of alpha-level to me: Is it figuratively “BM” when any and all resource generation, barring borrowed powers, comes from Kill Command? Is it “BM” when losing your pet neuters you almost as much as a BM?
I’d still say no, but I could imagine certain criteria whereby an equivalence would be figuratively valid, if in a very rough manner.
Personally, I’d at least like Kill Command replaced with, say, a baseline variant Flanking Strike for which the pet being alive is merely a bonus. Heck, I’d even take a Lone Wolf trait, though I think the bonus ought only to affect single-target damage, if that’s all the pet would amount to (given the KC->FS rework).
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While personally I may not agree with all, I completely agree that ideally kill command should be replaced.
Basically what I’d like to see is the dual attack. It be a melee attack and pet attack as well. The focus regen tied to the melee attack and in the event the player is out of melee range the pet still completes the attack (mind you it would only do a fraction of the damage in comparison to being in melee range and completing the melee attack as well).
I think it would be pretty unique, still give us a ranged pet attack BUT most importantly not gimp Sv in PvP when the pet gets 1 shot and we can no longer generate focus.
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They took things too far from legion to BFA with the changes. The biggest being the mongoose bite window rework into a talent and the introduction of coodinated assault as a CD instead of aspect of the eagle and the flat out removal of fury of the eagle.
The mongoose bite charge system, flanking strike, aspect of the eagle, and fury of the eagle all worked really well and made for an interesting base for a melee rotation.
The change from lacerate to serpent sting was fine and the change from explosive trap to Wilfdfire bombs was also fine, but the other changes and the outright removal of all the talents that allowed for in depth traps and extra control removed a lot of legions SV’s niche and the other Changes removed legion’s sv’s burst dps.
That… would actually be a much better name for what I am looking for, haha. Actually… could have sworn this was up in a larger list already… Ahh, there we go. I for whatever reason called it by an even worse name…
Oh I’m definitely not creating the wheel. Was just being very simple in verbiage since my thought to how it functions is a little different.
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Here’s the thing. Outside of the name/animation of 1 single skill, how is it like BM? Is it the dependency on your pet? I feel like that’s not a good argument. Up until recently (2017? Ye I know that was 4 years ago but by comparison is quite a bit younger than the hunter itself) ALL hunter specs depended on their pets. The pet is an icon of the class and always has been. Saying, ‘well they feel the same because they need a pet to function’, is like saying that both SV and MM have felt like BM for the majority of their existence.
I agree that KC should have been renamed, with a different animation, for SV. But, as I have said before, they function in completely different capacities. 1 is a spender to do dmg and 1 is a generator. BM is about boosting your pets effectiveness while SV is about working in tandem with your pet. I see nothing wrong with a master of the wild beasts (which is part of hunters baseline fantasy) needing a pet to function in any spec.
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My thoughts; but mongoose bite stack window is terrible gameplay.
Having to spam the ability 5 times in order to do damage before it falls off feels awful, and having to do any movement or mechanics etc completely erases progress and makes your damage trash.
Edit: hey spam this one sole ability 5 times, then spam it a bunch more times in this window.
Exhilarating gameplay
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Well, not quite, Lone Wolf was already a thing in WoD… so, 2014?
Kill Command, the iconic BM skill, plays a far more pivotal role in SV than in BM. That’s as different from simply that “they both require pets to (fully) function” as Destro’s use of pets is from that of Demonology. When a BM pet dies, it uniquely loses a more slightly efficient Focus spender and significant passive damage. When a SV pet dies, the Hunter loses half its ability to even cast its own attacks, due to Kill Command being its sole Focus generator and dependent on said pet (unlike the Kindred Spirits trait on BM which does not care if your Kin is dead).
Again, I’m not saying I think SV is basically just BM. I said I found them quite distinct in what you’ve just quoted. But I can easily see why people might think their bounds or themes excessively overlap (especially, BM’s onto SV’s).
To be fair it was different when it was free, and had charges that were reduced by haste.
I liked the idea of mongoose bite the best in legion, moving into BFA it felt very tiresome.
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Correct me if I am wrong, my memory isn’t as good as it used to be and I didn’t raid in WoD, but I remember people never going LW in the beginning. It wasn’t a worthwhile talent and might have well not existed other than ‘new shiny’ flavor.
The ‘significant passive dmg’ isn’t a small thing. Depending on the situation, your pet can do as much, if not more, dmg than you. Often the loss of your pet will neuter BM dmg quite a bit more than SV. If I loose my pet in SV I loose the ability to raptor/carve … that’s about it … Not ‘half of it’s ability to cast it’s own attacks’. Passive regen is more than enough to keep up SS as well as still throw out the occasional raptor. All of the other abilities still function just fine. I can through out all dots and res pet and not miss to much of a beat mid-fight. BM just stops dmg all together (outside of measly Barbed dot). It ‘feels bad’ to not raptor. But pet death is not NEARLY as impactful to your bottom line, on SV as it is on BM.
Again, they moved the Theme of SV to be “work together with your pet”. That is extremely different than BMs “Make your pet a bad-butt killer”.
I completely get the whole KC debacle. I have no clue why they wouldn’t have reskinned, and reanimated, the skill to be different. I feel like that was a lazy move. And, likely, would have stifled some of the cross-over feeling so many people get. Obviously some of those feelings would still be there to some extent. But going back to the mage analogy, they SHOULD feel similar. It’s a class design. Classes should ahve some crossover between specs. Otherwise why don’t we just make every class 1 spec? And each spec now gets its own class?
Based on hunters being the iconic pet class, I can’t see how pet reliance is looked down upon. If I had my way LW would never have made it into the game. I don’t think it added anything to the class, and in fact, drew away from it’s theme as a whole. I think all hunters should be pet reliant.
And, I feel like, that’s kinda what this whole debate comes down to. Personal preference on whether or not a hunter should need a pet in the first place.