(because I hate when people try to hide behind alts… Eleshakai is my former hunter main - I switched to that character to show her unleveled state.)
People are hostile to the idea because in order for 1 of 3 hunter specs to be melee… one group of hunters had to literally lose their spec.
NOBODY would be hostile to the idea of 1 of 4 hunter specs being melee, because that would’ve just been ‘hey look there’s a new playstyle to play’.
Hunter is WoW’s premier archer class and the only one to use actual bows as weapons. If you want to get your hands dirty and fight side by side with a bow, the only other spec that does that is MM, which is aesthetically and mechanically VERY different. So a archer spec makes sense as one of several options for hunters.
Ironically, many of us want a 4th spec to prevent exactly what happened to RSV from happening to current SV.
And yet many SV players are against even that idea that is meant to be a compromise and satisfy as many players as possible. You’re sitting there judging people who are upset for the very thing you’re defending the current spec against because it already happened once before.
Help argue for a 4th. How Blizz implemented current SV was a huge mistake and leaves a horrible precedent. You have good reason to be worried about blizz up and deleting the current spec at some point because thst already happened to old SV. Let’s work together and help fix that. A 4th spec not only ensures everyone gets what they want, but it would also act as an admission on Blisz’s part. That how they implemented the current SV was a mistake that shouldn’t be repeated. Outright removing specs like they did is a terrible move, regardless of how one feels about current SV or not.
We’ve all seen this before. All it shows is that Ion has a very poor understanding of the Hunter class and its history. For crying out loud, he’s trying to argue that SV and MM became more similar over time. Go look at how they played in Classic v.s. MoP or WoD. It’s such an easily-proven fallacy it’s shameful that anyone buys into it, let alone the lead developer. He’s also arguing that SV’s uniqueness depended on talent trees and that was lost in MoP… even though all important, defining actives and passives were preserved and going from Cata to MoP SV played more or less identically. He’s just doing what he always does: braindumping random thoughts just for the sake of having a response that sounds vaguely reasonable (even though it’s not reasonable at all).
Yes. That’s why we are not basing our arguments off personal dislike. The fact of the matter is Survival used to be a very fun and widely enjoyed spec that fit well within the class identity and the expectations of its playerbase, and it provided some much-needed additional exploration into ranged weapon archetypes not seen in the other specs. A newer group of developers then went nuts with their “specs need to be their own separate micro-classes” philosophy and turned Survival into a melee spec purely for the sake of having a tokenistic uniqueness (even if it’s unique via weakness) and the spec has been a dumpster fire ever since. The clear, objective conclusion here is that it was a bad move and they should have instead iterated upon what they already had. They spent a whole bunch of extra effort to make the spec worse.
This is all true whether or not you personally like Survival, so really this can easily be turned around: your personal love for a spec is not a good argument for preserving it. It’s utterly ridiculous how much they are bending over backwards here to appeal to such a tiny niche of players.
Not only is this response snide but it is a total waste of time. It’s not even remotely the same at any level. The identity and playstyle is totally different. The spells are basically just named after the original ranged Survival versions with few other similarities and zero interaction with anything else in the toolkit, not to mention the baseline elements that never fit within the identity or playstyle of ranged Survival (namely Aimed Shot).
And history has shown that this is a tiny niche of players. It’s absurd to expect an entire third of the most popular class of the game to be handicapped to specifically appeal to this group of people. For the overwhelming majority of the people playing the class, making Survival melee doesn’t add an option but rather removes one.
Besides, we already have a pet spec: Beast Mastery. It doesn’t make sense to effectively have ranged BM and melee BM. If they want a melee pet-focused spec, they should make a talented stance within Beast Mastery. That way the melee fanatics can get their melee Hunter fix without destroying BM while the rest of the Hunter playerbase keeps another ranged weapon option in a game sorely lacking in ranged weapon options.
Ya know, that’s actually a pretty good concept. Kind of like Lone Wolf vs Non-Lone Wolf for a while… make it so BM hunters have a choice at the start of their trees. If they choose melee, a lot of their bow abilities get lost in exchange for similarly purposed melee abilities and then they get a playstyle built off of the idea of fighting right alongside their pet. I always felt like the FANTASY of the BM hunter fit more closely to rexxar than the fantasy of the survival hunter did, so I think putting that as a talent choice in BM would have probably been a reasonable way to do it.
Yep. The ironic part about the rework is supposedly MM and SV were too similar to one another. They then went right back to making BM and SV compete for the same thematic niche.
Ion has been anything but reasonable on the matter.
I remember seeing this complaint occasionally back in the Cata days… and what it essentially amounted to was “I’m an MM hunter, I switched specs and don’t know what I’m doing so I’m just doing the same thing I did as an MM hunter and my dps sucks. This spec has no purpose and is too similar to MM so it has no identity.”
you didn’t need to make a tally yourself, that info is easily surmised by simply looking at the publicly available Warcraft Logs or Raider.io figures that show the breakdown of unique characters and their class/specs that have logs recorded or scores on raider.io
For example this graph showing only dps over the entire Mythic+ Season 1 of Shadowlands:
Survival hunters are so under populated/represented that they are virtually a flatline, barely 0.3% percent of the overall ranged dps.
According to the graph, there’s ~75000 unique Marksman Hunters, 12,000 BM Hunters, and under 1,600 Survival Hunters
Survival are melee… so wouldn’t they be excluded from that chart on principle?
Not saying you’re wrong about how many of them there are… but like… I wouldn’t have thought they’d fit on a ranged dps population chart anyways…
yeah had edited it, i keep thinking of 6.2, the good ol’ days.
Even with the edit, rip, SV is the least populated overall dps spec. literally more arcane mages than sv hunters lol!
Dawn’s post is using raider IO as the source IIRC and using spec / covenant representation which covers about 49 - 60.
That helps represent others who may not be pushing mythics / raiding.
So, same source, slightly different methodology for measuring who is playing what ^^.
except the methods those 3rd party websites get their data is questionable/incomplete, considering blizzard broke the api to take a population census. So the best way to get better data is by looking at the graphs on warcraft logs and raider.io as those the number of record unique players that ever ran a raid, dungeon, or whatever people upload logs for including the people they ran with. Such as this graph from raider.io has a sample size of 529,261 unique dps players as you can see listed on the bottom, so that’s a really good sample size if you ask me, hell, not even professional research surveys/polls ever get sample sizes that large 
(i.e. gallup polls or published harvard/stanford university research papers, etc)
I’m mildly confused since Dawn is using the same source to be honest.
Regardless, as you said
Very few people play it either way xD.
And to go along with the raider.io graph I posted above, here’s the chart compiled from Warcraft Logs:
It’s a mess, but as of 3/8/2021 (bottom right), Survival Hunters only comprised 0.30% of the overall dps spec population that has ever been logged on warcraft logs.
And just to show how accurate these sample sizes and graphs are… literally Warcraft Logs and Raider.io both state that Survival Hunters represent 0.3% of the overall dps population even though they pull their data from their own independent sources/logs.
I Was around for classic in 05 as a hunter. I was a main hunter until BFA. The ONLY TIME you were on melee as ANY HUNTER was the following: The first 10 lvls before you got the pet, and if your pet died/ you pulled off it and did not kill the mob before it got to you.
The few melee moves we had hit like wet noodles and were meant to get you OUT of melee. Ex: WK was a slow. Old school disengage was not the “jump back” move it is today, but rather, a move that lowered your current threat. Counterattack had to be used after you parried a hit.
This was true until WOLK When it was madE into the SV People like. The ONLY reason I And any hunter who wanted to raid had points in SV was for trap mastery Pre-Wolk.
There was never a melee hunter. If you were in melee is was because you did something dumb. No ammo? Hit the boss with your stick as the raid laughs at you. Your weapon is red? Why did you not repair it before the raid?
Oh, let’s not forget about the dead zone. What’s the dead zone? It was a radius around the hunter that if your target wandered into, you could not shoot it. You were not in melee range. You did everything you could do to slow the target to get out of the dead zone to stutter step, at range.
And don’t even claim you could use a thrown weapon. That was the same slot as your bow. It also did trash dps.
Now that that out of the way, let’s talk about Rexxar. He did not train you. He did not train anyone. He walked around a few zones to the annoyance of many players. Is he a badass? Yes. Yes, he is. He is also a loner who only shows up from time to time when the story needs him to- for better or worse. Rexxar is also way more of a beastmaster than an SV Hunter. GRANTED he was a melee boss in visions, but my point still stands that he was not the person you learned FD at level 30.
If SV Was to return to its MOP playstyle and identity when it was among. if not the most played class in the game, you know, as a ranged hunter, I am most hunters who experienced it would swap back to SV In 1/3rd of a heartbeat.
Now let’s talk about the real issue at hand.
The game has not added a range class or spec ever. DKs, Monks, DHs, all melee. The space around the boss has been a can of sardines for a while now. That same space is also sometimes shared with things that want to kill all the melee very dead.
Meleeing during cata wasn’t 1/2 bad. I use to love to intentionally run in to melee range of people to knock em on the noggin with my staff as a beast master huntard (i use to love the hollow skull sound it would make)… did decent damage too.
However unlike earlier expansions, you could still range attack in melee range during cata, so was just fun weaving the melee attack/spells along the ranged/bm spells 
also SV needs to return to what it was during WoD. a dot focused ranged hunter class. i mained SV during 6.2 and i swear it was the most unique and fun hunter spec i ever played. the rotation was actually a legit rotation on par with other classes with real rotations…
It still bothers me that they put Kill Command on SV yet it doesn’t work the same as BM.
The stat stick might have done meh DPS, but you are right about the sounds. I almost forgot about them. Weaving melee moves as a hunter when could go burr at range was still not as good as just going burr.
Then again I still have the old habit of standing as far as I can away from the target and slow it- just in case.
That’s an exaggeration. The first Hunter rework was in classic, and at that point 31 surv 20 mm became an okay spec for dungeons or pvp due to wyvern sting and 15% agility… and 2/31/18 bm/mm/sv became close to the most common dps specs in vanilla.
And then in TBC, ‘expose weakness’ became a pretty standard ‘one Survival Hunter per raid to sit with the rogues’ build… and Survival was AMAZING in heroics in TBC because of the huge CC variety while still doing decent damage.
But… aside from that, you’re not entirely wrong 
What you’re showing and what I am showing is not entirely the same.
Raider.io and Warcraft Logs only show the number of characters doing that content. I mean look at the picture you linked in the bottom right corner.
Sample Size 529,261. That’s less than the total number of of hunters. What I am looking at is every character that has interacted with their covenant. Which is basically every level 60 regardless of type of content they participate in.
Doing this also removes the "This is only high end content people and doesn’t show the “casual players.”
Also that chart is measuring every class against each other. I’m not really interested in a comparison of classes if I can look specifically at hunters alone.
It’s not taking a census though. It’s tracking characters that interact with their covenant.