Yeah, I’ve always been BM on my Hunter (seems like the one that changes the least.)
I feel for you, it would be VERY ODD to be a regular survival ranged Hunter and then they suddenly say “OH, you are melee now!”
Hmm, come to think of it something similar happened to me on this character! I’ve also seen complaints about how Frost used to be 2 hand. I seem to recall playing Frost when it was, as somewhat of a “tank” spec. I think that is why I’ve been blood since a change? I can’t recall now, it being so long ago. But I’ve even seen recent posts lamenting the Dk Frost change away from 2 hand. However, that is still a FAR cry from a Hunter spec going from Bow to melee.
Counts for about the same as some level 10 hunter on the forums
Perfect so bm was and always has been the most popular! Makes sense cause that’s what real life hunters are like. Hence the theme being the most popular
Yeah people play hunter for the ranged spec. Don’t disagree. Hence they play bm/mm. Sv though was always in a weird place, now it is much more unique from the other specs. Personally still play bm.
Survival played almost exactly like BM before the changes. You had like 2 abilities that differed and you could put them in the same slots on your bar as each spec and change almost nothing about your rotation. Survival was my go-to Hunter spec before too, but honestly the Survival Overhaul was much needed to get some variety in the class.
This is all mechanical; in terms of identity it was the spec that focused on enhanced projectiles i.e. poisons and explosives. That’s a very common motif in fantasy games so it makes sense to have a spec in WoW that represents that.
Also, SV was a sustained damage spec. MM was the one with the great burst.
You made a good chunk of the last couple days of this thread a discussion about me instead of Survival so yes I would say you’re the one derailing the discussion.
I see people do it all the time including in this very thread as well as the one with all the Classic die-hards on the Hunter forum. Are you seriously denying that it’s a popular buzzword in class design discussions?
Listen to yourself for a second, god damn.
Sorry I paraphrased? The exact quote was “The Hunter is a unique class in World of Warcraft because it is primarily a ranged attacker”. How is summarising that to “Ranged is the defining element” not an accurate take?
Pets clearly come secondary to ranged weapons in that manual description. It’s also evident from the nature of the class in game itself that pets are secondary to ranged weapons when it comes to the class identity. The first time you had a petless Hunter option was in WoD; both MM and SV got the Lone Wolf talent. So to make a spec petless they just needed to add 1 talent; the look and feel of the specs were virtually unchanged. Yet when they changed one of the specs to melee it required totally remaking that spec and rewriting the class definition so it could actually fit a melee-only spec.
I’m talking about their Vanilla class intent because many people claim that the class in Vanilla was intended to facilitate a melee-only playstyle i.e. one that eschews the ranged weapon, and therefore they use that as a platform to justify the current melee Survival. That doesn’t work. Somehow the common knowledge now says that Legion and BFA Survival were more similar to the Vanilla iteration to MoP and WoD Survival when that just isn’t true when you actually look at the toolkit of each iteration.
You think those sorts of people always indicate that it’s just their opinion? In just these recent few posts you have multiple people saying that Survival was the same as MM, stated as fact when it isn’t even accurate.
I’ve been saying that the original description stated ranged weapons are what made the class unique, you agreed with this earlier in this post, so evidently I’m not making things up.
Your argument is flimsy as all hell. You are saying that I’m writing posts on the forums in the hopes that no one would read them. What ever would be the point of that? I asked this in my post and you didn’t address it.
It’s maximally dishonest to pretend any of those things are elements that were important to the Hunter identity let alone as important as ranged weapons.
Pet happiness is all but a footnote in that manual description, whereas the opening sentence itself declares the importance of ranged combat.
Again, look at the example I used with Lone Wolf. Ask yourself what actually changed about the look and feel of the Hunter class when you no longer had to use ammo or feed pets. Very little to nothing at all.
You picked like 3 or 4 lines out of my multiple posts here which a) were not hidden and b) were not bad arguments. So actually your examples along with your argument as a whole are terrible.
At this point you’re contributing absolutely nothing to the thread except complaining about your feelings being hurt, so maybe this just isn’t the thread for you? You’re just wasting everyone’s time.
Ranged SV was not a sniper. That’s MM. Ranged SV was a utilitarian approach to ranged weapons that focused on enhanced projectiles rather than raw sharpshooting skill. Those are different approaches to ranged weapons.
It’s like how both Assassination and Subtlety are stealth-based fast-paced dual-wielders that use combo points, but we understand that there is a crucial difference in style between the two specs as one is based on the stealthy aspect while the other is based on poisons and bleed attacks.
Plus, as other people have pointed out, it doesn’t fit a “completely different mold”. Beast Mastery is the spec that’s based on Rexxar because, as it turns out, the defining aspect of Rexxar is not necessarily the melee combat but rather the animal bond (Seriously, go look at his Warcraft 3 toolkit. I feel like not enough people have actually done that). Survival, in fact, borrows excessively from BM making it not nearly as unique as you think it is.
We can’t tell what a spec’s popularity is outside of raids and rated PvP but historical data shows that ranged SV was very popular in those areas at time. You even have tiers like Siege of Orgrimmar where BM does more DPS but more people in the raid are playing SV.
Yes, all Hunters have traps but SV had better traps, just like how all Hunters had pets but BM has the best pets.
It’s laughably misinformed to call ranged SV the lost spec. It had a consistent model of playstyle and identity for 4 expansions. Melee SV has been through 2 major reworks in just as many expansions and is currently an ill-defined mish-mash of unrelated concepts like “melee skirmisher/Arms Warrior 2.0” (Raptor Strike, Carve), “BM Hunter but melee” (Kill Command, Coordinated Assault), and “Resourceful utilitarian” (Serpent Sting, Wildfire Bomb). The current iteration of SV is the most “lost” and directionless iteration out of all of them.
As I said previously, obviously it is not more “unique and cool” than the last one simply by virtue of the last one not having to borrow the signature ability of another Hunter spec like the current one.
Then what is your justification for the statement “BM was always more popular”?
Pets are a BM thing and borrowing BM stuff makes it not unique. Its trap focus is very weak compared to ranged Survival as it no longer has Entrapment (root effect on trap proc) and Trap Mastery (trap buff and cooldown reduction)… two things it had in every ranged iteration from Vanilla to WoD, by the way.
So you have a tacked-on melee weapon that only exists as an excuse to say the spec is different to the other Hunter specs. That’s an incredibly weak justification. Should they remove Stealth from Outlaw rogues just to make it more different to the other Rogue specs? Survival had enough uniqueness before it was melee.
Not every ranged spec is a sniper and people evidently liked what ranged Survival was because it was consistently a very popular spec.
Emoji spam makes you sound like a 10-year-old.
Popularity is a function of performance and playstyle likability. Plus, current Survival is very strong in PvP yet its a rare sight in battlegrounds; it’s only prevalent in high-rated PvP due to its overtuning there.
As someone else pointed out, you have to look at historical data. Specifically from WCL, which started in WoD, you should look at the parse counts over the course of Highmaul (not just the last 2 weeks as the default page shows). I linked a graph of them earlier in this thread.
He is posting from a level 10 because he is from EU and needed a US character to post. Grats on being uninformed.
You’re making less and less sense the more you post. Sounds like you’re becoming unhinged. He literally said BM is more popular now but in the past SV has been more popular as a ranged spec.
I was just in a Throne of Thunder LFR on a MoP server earlier. There were 5 Hunters in the raid, all of them were Survival. In a patch where BM is better. Try finding something like that in current WoW. I regularly do epic battlegrounds and see 10-12 Hunters, none being Survival.
Yes, I’m glad we agree that melee is dragging down the spec into obscurity. Why keep it melee, then? Rogues have 3 stealthy dual-wield specs, Mages and Warlocks have 3 caster specs, Hunters were and will be just fine with 3 ranged weapon specs.
Melee has only made the spec more directionless and unpopular. Just because you are misinformed about Hunters doesn’t mean the rest of us are.
Uh, no. No, it didn’t. BM had Kill Command, Bestial Wrath, and the entire Focus Fire system, SV didn’t. Meanwhile, SV had Explosive Shot, Black Arrow, Lock and Load, and Serpent Sting while BM didn’t. Stop lying about the past.
Plus, how can you even say with a straight face that it was the same as BM before yet now it’s different? It literally has BM’s signature ability now (Kill Command), along with a renamed Bestial Wrath (Coordinated Assault) and a stolen BM passive (Spirit Bond).
No, we did not need the Survival overhaul. We had enough variety already. Making Survival melee was, for most Hunters, removing a choice and not giving one as most Hunters want ranged weapons.
Unbelievable how people feel so confident in posting unfiltered misinformation about Hunters.
Yes, and in actual gameplay, this amounted to swapping out Explosive Shot for Kill Command and Black Arrow for Frenzy on your bars. They didn’t work the same way; they played the same way.
The kind of person who believes principles apply consistently.
Like, don’t take something away from somebody else so you can have it. I think that applies at the horrible extremes and the piddly little stuff you can say doesn’t matter.
“What kind of person uses the horrible theft of ten thousand dollars to prove that theft of a penny is wrong? You monster!”
If that’s the way you roll, fine.
Horrible things that I’m partly responsible for are always on my mind, and I try to use them to sort right from wrong in my (much less significant) life. If you think that’s wrong, tell me why.
played since cata as MM Hunter and now i feeling in love with new meleeSV spec, its so goooood and funny.
anyway there are 4 main damage skill, 3 ranged and 1 melee ( can turns it in ranged with aspect of hawk) and many DoTs…
Maybe for leveling, for me I leveled open world as BM. But as soon as I hit level cap. which was 80, I switched to RSV. I don’t know which was most popular…. Seems like MM was when I started in wotlk.
What does the level of the character I post on matter for here?
Fine, stay ignorant.
Yes, technically it is, at least the intent of it being a melee spec. The actual design beg to differ.
But this is not the argument. We’re arguing that making SV into a melee spec was a change not intended for current hunters(as of the time of said changes).
Read between the lines mate. In this case, it’s the same thing.
They wanted to add a different element for the class to focus on. Something which it hasn’t in the past(as a main focus). That means they wanted to add a unique flavour fitting for players not already invested in the class.
They did not use the exact word. But it was exactly what he meant with that statement.
This claim has already been proven to be incorrect. On multiple occasions.
The fact that he did not know I’m a EU player matters for less, IMO.
I personally couldn’t care less what character someone posts on. Show me that they know what they’re talking about and that’s enough.
Take your own advice mate.
Seems like you’re having trouble moving on as well, from these discussions.
Did you actually play back then?
At least read up on how abilities work/are designed.
I’m confused, in what world does a developer never citing flavor as a choice for the design, and they state it’s to bring melee classes to play it. Mean the design choice was a choice of flavor?
It’s because they did this to a class with a very distinct theme of being about ranged combat. They(devs) felt that it needed something which wasn’t that. Something that stepped out of that area.
For the players that were actually playing the class, changing a spec from ranged to melee, equates to bad design as it’s a design not actually meant for those players.
Does this mean that every single player who at some point prior to Legion played as a Hunter hated the idea of a melee spec? No, ofc not. But the class was designed around ranged weapons. And the vast majority of players who played as hunters, chose this class as it was about ranged weapons/ranged combat.
The devs said that they wanted to give SV a new niche, something of it’s own, unlike anything the other hunter specs had already. This in context, is the very definition of adding a unique flavour to the class. It’s just different words for the same thing.
Flavour in this case, refers to variations in class/spec design.
Hence why I said: “Read between the lines”.
In this case, you’re way to hung up on debating the actual word that is “flavour”. And what can be interpreted as it.
The actual argument here, is not about that, but about how many players tend to use such a word because they think that mentioning it, somehow justifies making changes to a class/classes which aren’t meant for the players playing that class/those classes. When in fact, such changes only results in alienating players from the class. Which is by large, what this change accomplished.
And, speaking of weak arguments, here’s one for you that is mentioned frequently in discussions such as this one.
You already have 2 ranged specs to choose between. BM/MM.
Neither BM nor MM provides the mechanics nor the theme or aesthethics which the old RSV did. BM is about pets and pet-related mechanics for the most part.
MM is about hard casting and about hard-hitting instant-damage attacks.
Both being very different from what RSV did as a playstyle. Despite all of them being about using ranged weapons, to a varying degree.
