I never ignored the melee-buffing talents. Like I said in my earlier post, Survival was the PvP tree and you were expected to be caught in the minimum range a lot when in PvP.
What you are ignoring is the fact that the spec still had a ranged weapon and still had ranged abilities like Arcane Shot, Serpent Sting, and Multi-Shot as well as utilities like Distracting Shot and Tranquilising Shot. In fact, everything I just named were available to Survival right up until Legion took the ranged weapon away.
Every single one of your posts on this topic is revisionist weasel-wording around the basic fact that every iteration of Survival before Legion, including the very first iteration, used a ranged weapon. You need to stop trying to be manipulative because you are really bad at it.
They took away the spec we enjoyed first. This is just about getting our spec back.
It sucks if that removes something people like, but they should not have done it in the first place. There are far better compromises for a melee Hunter than what they did. Melee Hunters can’t cry foul about people calling for their spec to be replaced when they started the business of replacing people’s specs in the first place.
Vanilla Survival Hunters had a ranged weapon.
BFA Survival Hunters do not have a ranged weapon.
Lateral downgrade, and not representative of the spec’s roots.
Yes, I typically don’t count tanks because the distinction between DPS and other roles is much larger than the distinction between melee and ranged DPS. People don’t typically go “I choose to be melee, now should I be a DPS or a Tank?”. They pick the role first. It’s the same reason why I don’t count Healers with the ranged DPS.
To some people the melee Hunter fantasy fits exactly what they want, but it is exceptionally niche and fringe. Personally when talking to Survival Hunters I find that the majority of them actually like the spec in spite of the melee and not because of it, e.g. they like it because of the well-flowing rotation and the diversity in talent choices. Those are legitimately good aspects of the spec, but they are not dependent on the spec being melee. It could have those if it were ranged. It did have those when it was ranged.
Yes, Sub rogues are the least played. They had a disaster of a redesign in Legion when they tried to make the spec more distinguished from the other Rogue specs by turning it into something most Rogues weren’t interested in.
Sounds familiar?
Now they have confirmed they are going back on that redesign and looking to the pre-Legion Sub. Kind of makes you think about how they should handle other specs that followed a similar path.
Yes, I know a hypothetical future ranged Survival wouldn’t play exactly like it did before Legion. That’s fine. As long as it would have the core of what made ranged Survival great. In fact, there are plenty of updates they could make to make the spec better and also more distinct, some of which were actually tried out in game before Legion threw it all away. There were some pretty interesting updates to how Survival played before and during WoD, such as the new Lock and Load system and Black Arrow multidotting.
Someone once told me that usually people who tend to use toxic words while trying to prove a point always tends to be the foolish one in the end.
Like I’ve said to about 10 other people in this thread already, melee players already had 12 other specs in the game to enjoy. People who liked ranged weapons only had the Hunter specs. It made zero practical sense, and wasn’t fair at all, to take away one of the only ranged weapon specs to add yet another melee spec.
The same goes for you. We had 3 ranged Hunter specs. There was no reason to take one of them away. There are 12 other specs in the game that focus on melee weapons. We didn’t need a 13th at all, ESPECIALLY not at the expense of one of 3 ranged weapon specs.
You’re wrong about the stuff that survived from ranged Survival, anyway. Hardly anything still exists. You have an ability called Explosive Shot as an MM talent that does something totally different to what the original was. You have a talent called Lock and Load which is also totally different to the original. There’s Serpent Sting, but a nerfed version that has none of the associated passives that Survival had such as Serpent Spread (to get that, you need to spec Survival and pick Hydra’s Bite, a talent which is just a flat-out worse version of the formerly baseline Serpent Spread). There’s no Black Arrow, no Trap Mastery, and certainly none of the sustained damage, mobility, and multidotting that made people love ranged SV.
If you want to fight in melee with your pet so much, spec BM and do just that. It can do full damage in melee range, you know. This class does not need Ranged BM and Melee BM.
Butchering other specs in the game is not the answer. Like I said somewhere else, I didn’t go around demanding that other melee specs get made into ranged. I never did that before Legion and I don’t do it know because I actually respect the choices of melee players… at least until it comes to melee taking away specs from ranged characters. For example: Rogue players like the class because you stealth around and ambush people while duel-wielding with fast-paced melee combat. The class has never had a ranged spec and as a result the people who pick the class are people who know they’re getting an all-melee class and that’s probably what they want. Taking that away from one of the specs would be disruptive and it would absolutely upset many people, even if it pleased others. That class has already been through enough since Legion.
And yes, I’m aware making Survival ranged would also be disruptive to some people. The difference is melee Survival is a new spec, and one that replaced a ranged spec. I think it’s a necessary price to pay; righting what went wrong. There are better compromises for melee combat in the Hunter class than forcing one of our specs to be melee, such as an optional melee subspec for BM.
It means nothing to say “Oh I’d support ranged specs elsewhere” because they didn’t make any new ranged specs and are not going to make any in the near future. They just replaced one of our ranged specs with a melee one and called it a day. Melee got further oversaturated, the paltry representation of ranged weapon archetypes got even worse, and you all cheered it on becuase you couldn’t care less about ranged specs and are infatuated with melee.
You see absolutely no reason Hunters should be ranged because you are woefully misinformed about the historic development and identity of the class. The original outline for the class explicitly stated that the spec was ranged (`https://i.imgur.com/kBVr5Uc.png). Melee was little more than a balancing factor that lost its relevance as the Hunter class evolved. The only real significant representation of a melee-only Hunter in lore was Rexxar, and he a) later became distinctly not melee-only and b) his contribution to the class was the pets since he was, you know, a Beastmaster. The ranged part of our class, i.e. the very central element and what gives us our class icon, was based on far more important and established characters in lore such as Alleria. Hunters should be ranged because that’s the single most unique and iconic part of the class. There are plenty of melee in the game already.
P.S. The best part about your post, aside from how easy it was to get you unhinged, was how Mandriani felt the need to like the post on 3 separate characters.
You posted bad arguments and got called out on it. I wasn’t nice about it? Too bad. Maybe post less bad arguments and I wouldn’t be so harsh.
You stated right from the start that your opinion was uninformed yet you still felt the need to tell us.
And yet there are still a suspiciously low amount of actual melee Survival Hunters around and most of the people here who support the spec, including you, have minimal investment in the class both before and after melee Survival.
Also, using multiple sockpuppet alts to give likes to posts you agree with doesn’t make them any less wrong. If you are going to do that you should make sure you don’t have a common naming scheme among your characters.
It was the most popular spec in the game during Highmaul. Not the Hunter class, but the whole game.
In fact, it still had a healthy population all the way until 6.2 launched which gutted the spec in both direct and indirect ways. And that patch came out just 1.5 months before Legion and melee Survival were announced. Big class changes like Legion Survival have to be planned many months and even years in advance; they are usually working on expansions beyond the upcoming one (e.g. working on Legion before WoD even launches). There are also hints that the developers were considering melee Survival even in MoP when Survival was an extremely-popular spec for pretty much the whole expansion.
Basically, the popularity of the spec wasn’t a concern for them, nor were the general wishes of the class. They were pretty open about that during Legion. Hazzikostas said they knew Survival would be a niche spec and that most Hunters didn’t want ot play melee, so they banked on rerolls and new players to populate the spec. When that didn’t work out they made Survival have a hell of a lot more ranged capability in BFA in hopes of getting other Hunters to play it again. It’s at least had some effect but the spec is still extremely unpopular and generally a pariah within the class.
Sources:
- Hunter WCL parse data for Highmaul (
https://i.imgur.com/yduITaW.png) and Blackrock Foundry (https://i.imgur.com/MrUPlNt.png) - Hazzikostas’ Survival representation comments at 2017 Gamescom (
https://warcraft.blizzplanet.com/blog/comments/gamescom-2017-world-warcraft-legion-patch-7-3-interview/2) - Hazzikostas’ Survival rework comments in the first BFA Q&A in January 2018 (
https://www.wowhead.com/forums&topic=281275)
