What’s worrying you about it?
Yes, it remains the beautiful melee spec it is in BFA, as it’s actually quite popular with the people that play it.
Sorry your little wish didn’t come true, but I told you it wasn’t gonna.
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I was really hopeing for ranged survival to come back 
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What does “quite popular with the people who play it” even mean? The whole point is that it does not have many people playing it. You’re making less and less sense by the day.
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The end-point of this logic you’re expressing (niche specs are invalid, even if the people that play it love it) seems like a very shortsighted position that could ultimately be used to make the argument that DKs and DHs are the best designed things in the game due to their popularity.
By the way, if you’d actually experimented any with playing BFA survival as a ranged spec (wildfire traits, etc) and coupled that experience with the knowledge that arcane shot is now available to the spec (and currently requiring a ranged weapon) you’d probably be less pent up about it.
Ranged surv is back, just not the way you wanted, and not as the dominant theme of the spec. They threw you a bone and you didn’t even catch it.
The danger of entrenched and boneheaded positions.
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You can be a ranged survival if you equip bow and use arcane shot as focus spender instead of raptor strike.
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The problem with “niche specs” is that at what point do you decide whether the spec is just a healthy little niche or if it’s a spec with severe core problems with its playstyle and identity that make people avoid it? Saying it’s just a niche spec just sounds like spin-doctoring to avoid saying that it’s a spec most people want to avoid. Then, of course, there’s the fact that this niche spec replaced a spec that was very much NOT niche.
Uh, no, I would not be less opposed to it. It is not a ranged spec, period. It does not have the capability to put up competitive ranged DPS no matter what you do with it. Furthermore, it’s not just about the spec being ranged or not. It’s about the playstyle and identity of ranged Survival that was lost.
Adding Arcane Shot and Kill Shot doesn’t fix it. It still has to fight in melee to be competitive. It’s still missing all those things that made ranged Survival great. When you were trashtalking us behind our backs in the Survival channel of TSL 30 mins ago you mentioned that Survival could even auto-shot. Did you neglect to notice that Auto-Shot has an in-built 50% damage nerf for SV specifically to prevent you from ever using a ranged weapon?
No, they did not throw us a bone. It’s far more likely they are just adding these abilities in because the Hunter has forever been defined around the ranged weapon, there are few options for the return of formerly baseline elements that aren’t ranged, and they know melee is so disliked that no one will want to see baseline melee elements. Throwing us a bone would be making the ranged SV playstyle or at least the important parts of it available through some means like they said they would. You are not going to successfully frame this discussion as Blizzard trying to accommodate us while we reject it because they aren’t even trying.
This will not even be remotely competitive just from a tuning standpoint, not to mention the multiple baseline and talent elements that depend on you having a melee weapon and using Raptor Strike. It also has none of the elements that made ranged SV good. It’s not just about being ranged or not, you know.
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Can we please keep this thread focused on discussing the datamined goods from the Alpha? I don’t want it to get derailed into another RSV vs MSV argument.
Seriously. Please.
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It’s not that hard to gauge whether the few people playing a niche spec are enthusiastic about it or not, especially as a company that obsesses over time played metrics
That’s speculation until we see workable numbers tuning.
There’s room here for you to be positive about this and you choose to be the ever-constant sore loser.
Just because autoshot damage is lower for the hypothetical arcane shot ranged surv build than autoattack is for melee surv doesn’t mean it has no chance of being a viable build, considering we’re getting tuning changes to a lot of “unused” talents.
There’s room to explore, theorycraft, and problem-solve on this topic instead of drinking salty yellow cheerio milk because melee survival didn’t get deleted.
Go armchair-moderate somewhere else, Watermist. Arcane shot being given to survival is topical here.
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I don’t do a ton of mythic plus, i just started this previous season (never been higher than a 5). I’m a filthy Casual 
Anyways, I was wondering if this wasn’t what all the AOE limitations were somehow geared toward, M+? Maybe somehow it’ll add a new depth not previously seen?
That really doesn’t mean anything. I’m sure there is still an enthusiastic core community surrounding Fallout 76. It doesn’t make it not a deeply flawed and unpopular game. If we are going to talk metrics ranged Survival had far more mass appeal. It also had an enthusiastic core playerbase. If it didn’t matter for ranged Survival it doesn’t matter now.
No, it really isn’t. As it stands your Auto Shot does 50% less damage right off the bat as SV. You can’t use Carve at ranged meaning you’re not getting that CDR and your AoE is gimped. Raptor Strike is exceedingly unlikely to not completely dwarf Arcane Shot in terms of damage output; right now on Shadowlands it does 100% of your attack power in damage for the same amount of focus as Arcane Shot which is just 60% (MM gets the -15 focus cost perk, SV does not). When you look over to talents, all the following talents are off limits for a hypothetical ranged SV hunter because they depend on melee:
- Viper’s Vemon
- Butchery
- Bloodseeker
- Tip of the Spear
- Mongoose Bite
- Flanking Strike
- Birds of Prey
That’s at least one per damage row, including the entire 5th tier (unless you do some weirdness with Flanking Strike into melee and then going back out, which is just awful).
So it’s locked out of half the talents, it’s almost certain to do a lot less damage, and it is absolutely certain to have none of the things that people liked about ranged SV (this part you ignored). There is no reasonable way to pretend this is “throwing a bone to ranged Survival players”. Your entire argument here is that they might change all this but you have to know that’s nothing to rely on.
Easy answer. It won’t. It’s an arbitrary limitation on how much you can damage at once. It doesn’t actually make any of the enemies harder, it just makes the players worse. Blizzard themselves even said correctly that it will lead to no difference on 1-5 target pulls. So you’re going to see the exact same mythic + play you see now, only with none of the big fun risky pulls. It’s just going to be worse for everyone, period.
Although they have said that they want to some some classes distinguished by having uncapped AoE capability, so the answer then changes: you may still see big pulls but those few classes that can reliably dish out damage to large amounts of targets become the immovable meta for all high level M+. This, of course, completely and utterly defeats their stated purpose of doing this for balancing reasons.
There is no upside to this change, period. It’s a change championed by people with a limited understanding of mythic + and class balance. Yes, this includes the developers themselves. Even if the issues they stated were real, which is a stretch, this is the absolute laziest and careless way to go about fixing them.
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It’s alpha you over-caffeinated dope, the PRESENCE of the ability is something that bears more attention paid than the tuning of it.
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Since when do they tune things? They usually have their vision and foist it onto us whether it’s working or not.
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They tune things but it’s incredibly wishful thinking to assume they will tune SV to have a viable ranged option, and even then it really isn’t what people are looking for when they ask for ranged SV.
By the way, looking at Rogerbrown’s stream it looks like Kill Shot requires a melee weapon as SV even though it uses the ranged animation. Yep.
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SV wont be viable period. It does not matter how well tuned it is, there is 0 reason to take a melee hunter over any other melee class. Real melee classes have better toolkits for melee. Also look at SV right now… no-one with any actual knowledge of the class plays it because BM craps all over it in every way.
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Because they are all “skills” ? I fail to see your logic there Crusader Bepples, they are merely abilities, the ranged weapon still isn’t the central part of the hunter class identity. That’s like saying if they made all animations of mages being cast from their staff would make said weapon the class identity.
Yes, Survival is already in a good spot, there’s hardly anything that needs to be changed mechanic wise… they only need to adapt the numbers.
Read that their goal is to have melee be king in 4-5 aoe senario and caster shine more on 5-8, uncertain on the scource howver.
SV really viable and good, the problem isnt the class, the problem is you hatin on it cause you’re sad and the community wanting only the top of the top, which careless of xpac/patch or w.e there will always be a class that does better than others.
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That is exactly what would happen. Blizzard could have decided that mages required a staff to channel their powers. They didn’t though so a mage doesn’t need to channel their powers through anything.
However, in order to fire an arrow, you need a bow. Survival somehow has a small crossbow that they carry around with them. Yet for some silly reason, they won’t use it to actually fire an actual shot at the enemy which they certainly could. So even Survival uses a ranged weapon for some of it’s “skills”.
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if you cannot be the top you are failing. Right now there is only 1 viable hunter spec sadly. BM is it, if you are playing hunter and not BM you are hurting anyone and everyone you group with.
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So I don’t know if anyone else has posted this but I feel like this would make the class a lot easier especially for BM hunters. Is there a way to make cobra shot act like steady shot as in not cost focus, a cast-able ability. So that Arcane shot can be our filler spell so we are not fighting with trying to add arcane shot and cobra shot into a rotation. Because if we do that the spec will be focused starved from the get-go. -Friendly Neighborhood Panda
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Does anyone know Precise Shot (MM) is still a thing in Alpha Shadowland?