Meh unholy is for the edgy fotm clowns.
i feel i have to ask, SOOOOOO many people were upset about the chance then why was it sp underrepresented in the final tier where it was ranged?
and i mean the real reason, they gutting Demo lock and we still saw more of those then we did SRV hunters? i mean if everyone loved the spec so much?
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It was far, far, far worse off than Demo was in HFC. Even after the insane nerfs, Demo at least still had an effective niche (burst AoE). Survival was 20% behind MM on Patchwerk DPS. Not only is that AFTER massive hotfix buffs to the spec in July 2015, but Patchwerk DPS was the one area SV was meant to specialise in; it had no cooldowns and no real burst, only solid sustained damage. But its damage was so weak by that point that even in the one area of content that was its speciality MM was massively better. What makes this situation worse is no fight in HFC was actually Patchwerk DPS; they were almost all priority add burst and, due to the legendary ring, all fights valued 2-minute CD cycles. Both of those things are areas MM excelled. So there was no Hunter PvE scene in HFC outside of MM.
Put it this way: there are several fights in that raid that we couldn’t do if we didn’t have Marksmanship Hunters. That’s not an exaggeration. Gorefiend, for example, our guild skipped if I wasn’t there that day. Look at our kill video for that fight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rblpRnIxDAc
Notice how I’m bursting down those ghost adds at specific times, and it takes a lot of attention and management? That was MM’s forte. BM, and certainly SV, couldn’t hope to do that. If I went SV for that fight we would not have killed it, period. Hopefully I’ve adequately explained to you why Hunters didn’t go SV in that tier: we couldn’t.
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P.S. if you think this is just me being a DPS elitist or whatever and only caring about damage, here’s a video of me as Survival on Brackenspore:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hGTt35khac
MM was absolutely better on Brackenspore and most people went with MM for progression on that fight. I went with SV because it was close enough and I found it more fun. You could do that in Highmaul/BRF. You could not do that in HFC.
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but numbers shouldn’t trump fun, and i know that tier well as i played through it, as a holy priest. our numbers were generally 2/3 the other healers and yet we still did our job just fine.
face it, the issues in general with old survival was it was too similar to old MM. we even see the population just flip flopping between the two prior to that tier correct? your other post says the current Survival “infringes on BM’s identity” whenever old Survival infringed on MM identity.
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… are you kidding me? I just wrote a damn essay about how you literally could not progress in that raid if you brought Survival Hunters instead of MM Hunters and you’re still trying to wave it off as “but if its fun they should play it anyway!”.
No amount of fun makes up for dragging down your entire raid.
Survival Hunters could tolerate being behind. Lord knows we had been weak at times before then. We could not tolerate literally being a waste of a raid spot. Some raid leaders were of the opinion that, at least before the July hotfixes, bringing an SV Hunter to a flex raid literally scaled the boss health further than the SV Hunter could possibly make up for, meaning you were literally making bosses harder by bringing SV… and that’s for the lower difficulties. They probably weren’t wrong, either.
It seems like you are utterly failing to grasp how gutted SV was in 6.2. Every other spec in the game was at least “acceptable” at something. Even Holy Priests. They made sure SV was worse than worthless in every single situation.
No, that really wasn’t a problem. They invented this problem after the fact. This relies on the pig-headed, myopic logic of “uses a ranged weapon therefore must be the same”, but somehow this never applies to, say, Arms and Fury or the Rogue specs.
When SV and MM were both ranged, aside from common Hunter utilities they shared:
- A casted focus generator (Steady Shot for MM, Cobra Shot for SV)
- Multi-Shot with an added effect for AoE (Bombardment for MM, Serpent Spread for SV).
Literally everything else was different. MM used Chimera Shot, a 2 target cleave, while SV used the purely single-target Explosive Shot along with the Lock and Load interaction. MM used Aimed Shot as a focus dump which had a focus return on crits, SV used Arcane Shot as a focus dump which would apply Serpent Sting for more damage. MM used Rapid Fire and Kill Shot, SV used Black Arrow. MM would do extra damage to high-health targets (Careful Aim), SV had better traps. They were different specs with different identities. MM was the patient sniper, SV was the opportunistic utilitarian. This sort of variety is great for Hunters; it keeps the core identity of being ranged while also exploring different possible representations of a ranged weapon user.
Meanwhile, SV being melee automatically removes a ranged weapon choice (of which there were only 3 in the game to begin with, compared to 11 melee specs) while also necessarily depending on BM aspects. It isn’t just like SV and MM sharing Multi-Shot, either (something BM still shares, BTW). Kill Command is just BM’s literal signature ability, now in SV. Coordinated Assault is a renamed Bestial Wrath. Spirit Bond is an old BM talent. It’s just stealing from BM at this point. It is so much worse than any sharing of mechanics between ranged SV and MM and demonstrates the hypocrisy of the people who defend it. How can you say your goal was to make the specs different when you produced something that is so, so much worse in that regard?
Speaking of hypocrisy, let’s take a moment to appreciate how you are spending all this time attacking ranged SV’s representation for being low in 1 patch where it was brokenly underpowered, when melee SV’s representation has been low for its entire existence even when it does strong damage.
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If they announce that a spec is getting removed/turned into something else entirely. And if you combine this with what they did to RSV, essentially making it’s performance plummet(yes, this is what they did to it) to levels waaay below pretty much everything else.
If this happens to a spec, what do you think players will do? Do you actually expect players to continue with it?
It does not matter how good the design is or how popular the spec is in general. Do what they did to RSV, and players will abandon it.
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Kinda wild how everyone who wants RSV back are generally pretty weak players.
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Not anymore, because laziness is a virtue 
(also I don’t have the dedication to try to gear up again for rated pvp).
It’d be different if I could mix in a bit of raiding/m+ to fill gearing holes while mostly pvping, like I used to, but the pvp reward system is so screwy that I’d need to grind a bunch before I could really do anything serious (successfully), which is kinda a nauseating prospect.
Survival! ROOAAR!
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Pretty much this.
It was just an excuse to justify making changes that they wanted, no matter what current RSV players preferred. Or just most hunter’s in general.
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It’s honestly frustrating how the hunter class was redesigned from WoD -> Legion, specifically the archetype of the “ranger/archer”. MM was a mess in legion and continues to feel flat in many areas for BfA (arenas, M+). SV was outright removed and replaced. It’s just crazy to me how limited our options are when wanting to play the bow/gun aesthetic, especially compared to before. The class felt so flexible in WoD.
As many have stated, Survival and MM were very different playstyles. MM capitalized on bursting down priority targets and heavy-hitting shots. Their abilities took huge chunks out of their focus bar, but hit harder. Survival used a flurry of abilities for steady damage. It was exciting to get thrill of the hunt and lock n’ load procs. The feel, pacing, and utilization of the two specs were very different in WoD.
I don’t really view melee SV as terribly designed. Rather, I think removing a ranged spec from the hunter class and adding a melee spec was a terrible design decision. This becomes even more problematic when we consider how narrow MM’s application has become in recent expansions.
For Shadowlands, I really want the ranged weapon elements of hunters to be emphasized. It’s felt very much lacking since the Legion revamp.
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Well said.
I honestly think they could keep survival as melee, if they introduced “Dark Ranger” as a 4th spec.
And has most of it’s abilities apply dots, with a permanent crows going whenever they attacked, and spiders applying venom in swarms, and had some cool cloaking effects and the ability to teleport short distances “invisibly”.
Black arrow could make a return and most of their pets could be shadow based. A more modern updated version of the old survival hunter with a new motif and cool aesthetic.
That I could see, and it would fit the expansion, as we are going to the shadowlands… what better time than then to introduce the dark ranger to hunters? (Survival ranged 2.0)
Could even make their traps apply bleeds, fire, poison, shadow damage, etc.
Sounds good to me
Fair enough that this is something you would like.
However, it wouldn’t be RSV.
It also wouldn’t be catering that much to actual Dark Rangers as seen in the game.
Ofc we like different things. That’s only natural.
But if RSV makes a return somehow, I would argue that it should be RSV as it was to it’s core back in the day, both in terms of mechanics but also it’s general theme/aesthetics.
Yes, it should be updated to fit the modern game, but you should still be able to recognize it as RSV. That includes visual effects. Not just mechanical design of abilities or even pets.