I think if they could tweak it some and make it so you can play either way effectively that both crowds could easily be appeased.
Except it’s not just about it being ranged. It’s about getting back a version of SV that was removed in Legion (or something relatively similar). We do need more ranged physical damage dealers in the game though. MSV was a perfect idea for a new range/melee hybrid class like we used to have in Nethack.
They could have created a class that had huge portions of Outlaw Rogue and MSV Hunter ideas, and left the existing specs alone.
In the end, I think it’s a bad idea to add different play-styles into individual specs. That’s one of the reasons Hunters are a mess right now.
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That wasn’t the reason for why they changed it.
Nope.
This:
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Good luck with that. lol. I think we’re seeing on the PTR what we’re getting. Better to run it my way than you all not getting anything you want at all. But whatever.
I’m not saying that current SV should be turned into what it was prior to Legion.
Nor do I have any hope of further changes/additions to be made for SL as it stands now.
I wanted to refrain from bumping this thread after 3 months but I couldn’t resist because you’re basically just Rapid Firing out misinformation here and declaring it as fact.
Firstly, BM shined in BRF due to the set bonus. Survival shined in Highmaul after the early January 2015 hotfixes and was in fact the most represented spec in the game by a huge margin until a few weeks into BRF (in fact, at its peak Survival had 50% more parses than the 2nd place, Frost Mage).
In Cataclysm the preferred Hunter spec depended on the tier, but it basically went:
- SV, sometimes BM for T11
- MM for T12
- SV for T13
Claiming that BM and MM were substantially better is flatly wrong. While I don’t know of any source of representation data before 4.3 (a patch where SV was entirely dominant over the other specs, mind you), you can talk to people who raided at the time as well as look at things like boss kill videos. For example, here is Paragon’s kill of Al’Akair in which the Hunter is Survival:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGeY1Hxv-u8&ab_channel=paragonWOW
They were also playing Survival for Cho’Gall and Sinestra, while they played BM for Nefarian.
Obviously this isn’t perfect; you can have a situation where a spec was good at the start of the tier during progression while a different spec became better later on. This happens in WoD; all the world first progression in Highmaul was done as MM even though for most of the tier Survival was the spec of choice (they buffed Survival quite a bit in a hotfix a couple weeks after Highmaul launched). If you go to Blackrock Foundry the world firsts were done as SV (fun fact: the last time Survival was ever included on a world first kill) even though BM was better once you got the 4-set, which typically took more than a couple weeks. But for tiers before 4.3 it’s hard to come by representation data; I’ve seen data for Ulduar which, surprise surprise, has SV as the most played Hunter spec (turns out this was a typical thing before it went melee) but other than that I don’t know of any hard data source for representation before 4.3.
It could be true that BM is in total the most represented, but it has not always been the Hunter spec of choice and there have absolutely been times where SV was the most represented spec in the whole game (not just out of the Hunter specs). We know for sure that it was the most popular in the game during Dragon Soul and Highmaul, and in addition to that we know it was the spec of choice for Hunters in all of WotLK until ICC, the first tier of Cataclysm, and all of MoP outside of Throne of Thunder. That’s actually quite a lot of the time of its career as a ranged spec from the addition of Explosive Shot in 3.0 until the removal of ranged SV in 7.0
We can argue about representation details to the end of time, but these facts are clear:
- Ranged Survival was routinely a popular spec
- Melee Survival is always an unpopular spec
PvE speaking, of course, since there have been times melee SV was effectively required for PvP Hunters.
The fact of the matter is you really don’t have any standing to declare that ranged SV was an oddball, a red-headed stepchild, or a bad spec by any means. It was very widely enjoyed during its tenure and saw a lot of play at all levels of content unlike melee Survival. We did not get daily threads across the WoW forums begging Blizzard to save ranged Survival or to revert to some older concept, like you do now for melee Survival. It’s impossible to declare melee Survival to be the better spec from any objective standpoint. You can personally prefer melee Survival, for sure, but that’s not a platform to declare that the spec is in a better place now for the general playerbase. It’s clearly not, and melee Survival is clearly not going well. We wouldn’t have threads like this all the time if it were.
This is true for the second tier of WoD, 6.2. The reason it was true was because MM synergised really well with the tier set and legendary ring, making it so far ahead of the other Hunter specs they just weren’t valid choices for PvE content in the slightest. The playstyle was enjoyable… once you got the 4 set (WoD MM was actually not received favourably before that), but it was very basic and there were clearly more things they could have done with the spec. I didn’t like the direction they took it in for Legion but WoD MM always came across as half-finished.
Survival in Cataclysm was based on what it was in WotLK, in which it finally gained unique abilities that meaningfully distinguished it from the other two. The ideas that Survival became more similar to the other two over time and that it had no identity, are flatly nonsense.
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No. Melee survival is fun and interesting. Just needs a few buffs.
Ohhhh beast master melee sound like it could really be badass.
It clearly isn’t fun or interesting to many people since it is perpetually underplayed even in non-competitive content.
Survival is not just flawed in a way that can be buffed away. It’s flawed at a fundamental level. Every spec in the game except for Survival takes part of the base class and improves it. Survival works off taking away part of the base class; the most important and iconic part. No amount of dressing will change that. People come to Hunters and see the only two specs in the game that use a ranged weapon v.s. just another melee weapon user; you would have to really like melee combat to pick the melee option over the ranged one. It’s just not an idea worth entertaining or continuing. It makes no sense to devote a third of the Hunter class to melee combat or even whatever melee/ranged hybrid people come up with.
The better approach would be to have a melee stance via a talent in Beast Mastery. Survival leans way too much on Beast Mastery’s identity as it is. A melee style would make way more sense there; it wouldn’t have to exist alongside thematic elements that make no sense in melee (namely Wildfire Bomb and Explosive Shot), it wouldn’t take away a third of the class to make “BM but melee”, and Survival can once again focus on being a fun and unique ranged spec that gives much-needed exploration into the ranged weapon archetype. Exotic munitions as a thematic element and multidotting/rot damage as a gameplay style match the class really well yet we lost that to get a melee spec instead. Madness.
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No. 
You have 2 other specs that are ranged.
Survival is a fun new spec for melee combat. If you don’t like it… don’t play it.
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Make Survival a tank spec*
Surv is in no way the same identity as “BM but Melee”. Suv IS a fun and unique spec. It’s one of only two melee with a pet specs in the game (the other being Unholy DK). I get that some people don’t like it, but I do, and I know I’m not the only one. The only thing holding it back is things like Mongoose Bite and Butchery not being baseline. I love pet classes, and there are few enough of those in WoW as it is. Why take away one of only two melee pet specs when all it needs is some small buffs to fix required talent choices?
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no
I agree
Buff it’s damage tho
And you have 12 other melee specs in this game, including every single DPS spec added post game launch and the one you’re posting from.
Hunters are the sole representatives of ranged representation in this game. It never make sense to take such a large part of WoW’s representation away in favour of yet another melee spec. A melee spec that, let’s be honest, most melee players don’t give a damn about anyway let alone long time Hunter players.
This isn’t a simple “don’t like it, don’t play it” situation. Many Hunters used to be Survival mains. They weren’t allowed to just continue enjoying their spec while melee players went with something else. The spec got handed to melee players. We are far past the point of “live and let live” when it comes to Survival.
This will always be a terrible idea. Even worse than melee.
It’s not entirely “BM but melee”, true, but it takes a LOT from BM. Kill Command is straight from BM, Coordinated Assault is more or less a renamed Bestial Wrath, and Spirit Bond is something that used to be part of BM but is now exclusively SV. The spec is also marketed as one that has heavy companionship with its pet which is BM’s forte. This is a pretty big problem since the entire reason they made SV melee in the first place was ostensibly to make it more distinguished from other Hunter specs.
There are other aspects of the pet but they both don’t fit the pet aspects and don’t fit melee combat either. Why would either a pet spec or a melee spec be using things like Serpent Sting and Wildfire Bomb? They are cool abilities and it would be great to have a spec based around them but Survival has both those and a bunch of other random things that don’t fit, which is indicative of the fact that melee Survival is forever without aesthetic/thematic direction. They would actually fit ranged Survival really well, as a matter of fact.
Because, as I said in my post, Survival is not just a few tweaks away from greatness. It’s been though five years of iteration right now and the only thing constant is the spec’s unpopularity. Building a spec around a weakness over the base class is a fundamentally flawed idea. The starting point of Survival is literally “Hunter but worse” and everything else after that is playing catch up. You would have to really, REALLY like melee and like Hunters’ theme to enjoy melee Survival and that’s simply too niche to justify an entire third of one of the most popular classes in the game being devoted to that. All these melee players showing up posting on their warriors, rogues, death knights, and paladins comes across as extreme selfishness when put into perspective.
This is why they should instead just have a melee stance as a BM talent. It wouldn’t be an entire third of the class devoted to a hyper-niche concept and therefore losing all of that ranged weapon representation and those few people who both like Hunters and are absolutely enamoured with melee combat can still get their melee Hunter fix. It would also mean we don’t have a spec that copies BM’s identity and mechanics. It makes so much more sense than spending literal years bashing our heads against the wall trying to make melee Survival likeable.
You can keep Survival melee; just don’t act surprised when it’s always living in the shadow of BM and MM’s spec.
Here’s a fact for all the melee lovers here: you didn’t have weekly “save Survival” threads when SV was ranged. That’s because it was actually widely played and enjoyed.
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How kind of you to point out that we have a whopping 2 ranged weapon specs in the game. Just out of curiosity - would you be satisfied if there were only 2 melee DPS specs in the game? What two would you want to keep? Would MSV be one of them?
Warriors were one of the original classes that could use ranged weapons. You good with one of the Warrior specs being changed to ranged weapon user?
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Arms and Fury are just the same thing right? I mean, they are both angry physical damage dealers that swing one or more sticks around. I heard that was enough of a justification to just delete one of them and tell all its players to sod off while you replace it with something aimed at rerolls from other classes.
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That’s for one class… You’re being intentionally obtuse here. Not worth replying to honestly if you’re going to troll like that.
Nothing like carving and striking with arrows
no