How on earth in your mind does what you typed here address what I said? The fact that every baseline element they add is ranged-based doesn’t count because… they are all “skills”? You’re just putting words down in the post and not actually meaning anything.
Survival Hunters themselves admit it’s not in a good spot and it’s undesirable in most forms of content.
That is, of course, until someone starts arguing that it shouldn’t be melee. Then all of a sudden all its issues don’t exist and it’s the most perfect spec ever.
No, what he said is absolutely true. SV does not have anything that meaningfully distinguishes it in terms of utility or damage to the point that you would want to take it over anything else. This is compounded by the fact that melee spots in a raid are generally limited.
I know you are going to harp on about how nothing matters because SV can still queue up for LFR, but it really does actually matter. By this logic they should do no spec balancing at all, ever, and let some specs do 80% more damage than others at their best, just because it doesn’t matter for many players. Being competitive matters in an MMORPG.
People immediately identified Flanking Strike as a discount Kill Command right into the Legion alpha. It helped make it clear when they literally copy-pasted Kill Command’s description onto it in the first Alpha build. Changing Kill Command back to Flanking Strike would not meaningfully change the spec’s identity or how much of a BM rip off this iteration is.
Even if you could play it at ranged it would lack all the things that made ranged SV good and it would still have the completely incoherent BM-infringing identity it does now.
“now-beloved melee spec” lol. It’s incredible that you think the only opinions that matter are the people who currently play the spec. That clearly didn’t matter in the case of ranged SV and there were a hell of a lot more people who played and loved that version.
Did you think people only cared about melee v.s. ranged? There are these things called playstyle and identity, you know, and frankly ranged Survival was better in both departments. Plus, the old ranged SV had high potential for expanding into the realm of multidotting which would ACTUALLY be a highly unique niche among Hunters. The niche being “melee” is tokenistic and useless in any practical sense. It’s also forcing SV’s identity to be as hodgepodge and broken as it is now.
P.S. you know very well that if playing SV as ranged were viable in SL that would effectively end melee SV’s existence right there. No one would choose melee in any form of content.