Survival wasnt built around being ranged. Since its inception in vanilla it was loaded with melee skills and melee talents. Survivals roots are in melee.
Its pointless to cry about it. It was never a beloved and greatly played spec compared to the people who played marksman or beast master…which is exactly why it was reverted to its original form when the specs of all classes were made to stand out from each other.
Its been melee focused for years and years at this point. It started as a 40/60 melee/ranged spec to begin with when the game first released.
He said it was a trash spec every single patch. So yea great argument I have because 2 years is longer than a patch. So obviously it wasn’t bad every single one. Not sure how SV held up in other patches but we all know it hasn’t been that great ever since they turned it into a scuffed melee class.
The Hunter class was absolutely based around being ranged and Survival was a part of that class. It had a ranged weapon and preferred to fight at ranged, as was the basic design of the class. This is evident in both the design and the tuning. Their vision of the class at the time included a minimum range restriction on the range attacks and therefore a melee toolkit; knowing in PvP other players would exploit this weakness it made sense to make a PvP-focused tree that included melee enhancements. This did not mean SV deliberately went into melee range and it certainly didn’t mean Survival abandoned the ranged weapon. This notion that a Hunter spec without a ranged weapon is an accurate representation of Survival’s roots is revisionist and ignorant.
You’ve already been proven wrong on this multiple times and every time you just sweep it under the rug. Survival was provably a popular spec for a 7 year period between WotLK launch and WoD up to 6.2. There were multiple times where it was the most popular spec in the class and even times where it was the most popular spec in the whole game (e.g. Highmaul during January 2015).
You’re either relying on faulty memory or actively lying and pushing a point you know isn’t true. Which is it?
Oh, please. Are you honestly going to pretend that the specs started off different and got more similar over time? How clueless can you be? Go to Classic and look how the Hunter specs different. It’s mostly passive differences with a few utility actives here and there. Then go look up how they differed by MoP and WoD. And I really mean look it up. Don’t rely on your memory because you’ve already demonstrated yours isn’t accurate. At that point they had distinct toolkits and recognizably different themes and identities.
And there you are again pretending modern Survival is representative of old Classic/BC Survival. Laughable.
And it’s been a languishing failure of a spec for years and years. Look at the thread you’re posting in. As I said, people want Survival to be ranged because we remember when it was ranged and it was far better off, despite your attempts to pretend this wasn’t the case.
And it started with a ranged weapon and a full-fledged ranged toolkit.
That’s 2 more years of success than melee Survival has had. Add to that all of Cataclysm and WotLK and half of WoD, and you’re actually looking at about 7 years out of 17. Then remind yourself that 6 of those 17 years were the melee Survival dark age. By WoD the spec was actually more often successful than it wasn’t. Melee is what doomed the spec to niche obscurity forever.
They might never change course, but that doesn’t mean we should all just give up on telling them exactly what they got wrong and how they can fix it. Their stubbornness and vanity is in the wrong, not our desire to make Survival a better spec.
And you lost all credibility linking the original handbook which was misaligned on numerous classes and has been a running joke for 17 years when people try to prove a misbegotten point.
I’m fairly sure MM will fall out of meta. It was about 7th or so (IIRC) in overall rankings for raids, and was doing really well for itself in M+. However, it ate a pretty big nerf tuesday that ended up decreasing its damage by quite a bit.
Neither BM or SV are in good positions either right now, and even if MM hadn’t been nerfed your suggestion isn’t a very helpful one for someone who wants to play SV.
Nothing wrong with enjoying them. If you like them, play them! Though a lot of the conversation has been about how they implemented the spec was a total mistake. If blizz wanted a melee spec that badly (and melee can work thematically, cool fighting up front and personal with your pet) then it should have been a 4th spec from the start.
I mean, before Legion I absolutely would have agreed. But we got a spec that not many players actually wanted while removing a really popular one in the process. How they implemented it has caused a lot of problems within the hunter community, and SV itself needs some love as well.
**and judging by some of the stats people have posted on it I think it is played less than half than the next lowest Spec\class its almost been ran under the ground…
Did you mean to post an argument? Because there wasn’t any in this post.
It had a ranged weapon, period. There is no precedent before Legion for a Hunter that deliberately sticks to melee combat and abandons the ranged weapon.
That manual matches closely to how the Hunter class worked in game, so however wrong you think it is, it’s aligned for Hunters.
Can we please stop with this lie? The survival tree had one extra melee skill. One. Counterattack, which could only be used after a parry.
It only had one talent that specifically increased the damage of a melee only ability. One.
It was never meant to stand toe to toe and fight. It had one melee ability on a 6 second cooldown and another that could only be used after a dodge.
What other melee classes have only two offensive abilities?
I don’t have much faith they will ever bring ranged survival back and if you enjoy the current melee iteration of it, more power to you, but take it from someone who played quite a bit during that time: melee survival hunters were never a thing in vanilla outside of a couple of people messing around with it outside the gates of orgimmar for fun.
If anything outside of not being able to use exotic beasts SV hunter spec almost has a leg up since it’s the only spec which still has in combat HoT via spirit bond as a passive, I’d honestly play it if we could dual wield polearms and use animal companion and could pick pet specs so I’m not stuck using two cunning pets ala owl and Fel-wolf hound…
You can actually play survival as ranged right now. It’s a bit clunky, but it works. They returned steady shot and arcane shot to survival, but both require a ranged weapon.
The rotation is a bit odd and you might have a dead talent or two, but if you are hell bent on doing it you can. The biggest flaw in using a ranged weapon is muzzle being melee range. Of course, you could always harpoon, muzzle, and disengage.
Cata and pre patch 6.2 Survival hunter would also like to say hello and more people were playing it in the 7 years from Cata to WoD 6.2 then have played it since it was made melee in Legion .