Yes they did. I am one of those that is glad that the option for 2H is back. There are still some that don’t want 2H back. Also, they haven’t yet put the balancing elements in that would make 2H viable.
Your original statement is that because BM has Concussive Shot it is equivalent to MM. I am pointing out that that example is very poor. BM and MM do share a few abilities but that is because the abilities they share are baseline Hunter abilities. The example that would be equivalent to SV having Kill Command would be if BM had Aimed Shot. Aimed Shot is MMs signature ability. Kill Command was BM’s signature ability. Taking a spec’s signature ability and slapping it into another spec is what the issue is.
shamans, as far as i know, never got a choice in the matter since 2h shaman was nerfed harshly in vanilla and then enhance just became a dual wield spec. they just want the choice back.
dk’s had the choice of 2h or dw for many expansions and blizz just said no more 2h for you. dk’s just want the choice back.
survival was forced into a melee spec and for some stupid reason was limited to only 2h weapons. since we’re forced into this position, we just want to have the choice.
notice something between all three? people don’t want one or the other. they want both to be usable at the same time.
There are people who prefer either/or so most would prefer the ability to use whichever they want, which is what they’re aiming for with DK and so on.
It’s also a pretty ridiculous generalisation to say 2H is always better than dual-wielding. Should all the Rogue specs be using dual-wield too?
Deflecting to other Hunter specs is a common SV apologist argument.
SV is the Hunter spec which is most problematic and most out of line.
And yet there are plenty of SV Hunters out there who hinge the validity of a melee Hunter entirely on the existence of Rexxar. Why don’t you tell this to them?
Uh, this really doesn’t change anything. Coordinated Assault are mechanically similar an aesthetically identical. This takes away from BM’s uniqueness and it’s also stunningly hypocritical given the entire stated reason for making SV melee in the first place is because the incompetent Legion class designers believed they couldn’t have a 3rd ranged spec without it infringing on the identity of the other specs.
The existence of Kill Command, Coordinated Assault, and Spirit Bond in SV and the unwavering defence of this from SV Hunters only proves to me that the “we have to differentiate the Hunter specs!” tripe in Legion was never a genuine concern.
As someone else pointed out, this is a nonsense deflection because Concussive Shot is a baseline Hunter utility. Kill Command is a signature BM ability and has been for several expansions. Sharing signature abilities like this takes away from the uniqueness of the spec that originally had it.
This is a massive point of contention with Warlocks and there are tons of players out there who have angst over that decision to this day. Deflecting to another mistake in class design does not help your argument here.
You’ll notice I’m using the word “deflection” a lot when responding to your arguments. This is because you clearly have a habit of absolving SV of fault by deflecting to other specs/classes. You do this in almost every single point you make. You should work on that.
Oh, really? Because a huge amount of the stated appeal for SV from people who play it is being like Rexxar and fighting alongside your pet.
It really does seem like you’re not looking for a Hunter spec here but rather an extra Warrior/DK DPS spec that happens to be in the Hunter class.
How are they better? BM handles the pet interaction just fine. SV makes watered-down copies of it.
Do you honestly believe what you pointed out here is a significant enough difference?
It evidently is a major issue when one spec borrows from another because Blizzard deleted ranged Survival over it even when Survival wasn’t sharing or even stealing multiple aspects of MM.
Did you even read his full post or what he was responding to? Your response makes 0 sense here.
Again, this is a terrible deflection because Counter Shot is a core Hunter utility. You keep trying to draw an equivalency between these and SV sharing Kill Command but it isn’t working. SV should not be taking signature abilities from BM, period.
As someone else pointed out, this is a lazy, pathetic, and ineffective defense of bad game design.
Not sure what exactly you’re referring to here given the original discussion was about the pet aspects of SV that it steals from BM. In any case this doesn’t make sense. Kill Command at a basic mechanical level works the same way for both SV and BM in that its a command that rushes your pet to the target and makes it deal damage given LoS. The difference is SV’s Kill Command is a generator that deals light damage while BM’s Kill Command (the real one) is a spender that deals heavy damage. This doesn’t make a difference to fluidity or PvP value and in fact BM’s version does more damage.
If you’re talking about the SV spec as a whole: lol. SV notoriously requires a decent haste level to feel remotely fluid and deals significantly less damage than BM to the point where BM is dominant in all PvE and solo content. SV is only ahead in PvP due to a couple overpowered PvP talents.
There’s also the fact that BM does a better job at representing the traditional WoW hunter aesthetic, identity, and playstyle and thus has vastly better appeal with the Hunter playerbase, while SV tries and fails to sell itself to rerolls and new players beyond a fringe niche. I would say that in fact makes BM the objectively better spec.
SV is no longer a real Hunter spec. Back when it was one, though, it shared Concussive Shot and Counter Shot among others. Because those are spells that belong to the Hunter class.
Concussive Shot in particular has been with the class from the literal beginning.
Wow. Usually when people go mining for misleading quotes they take a sentence out of context. You, on the other hand, go the extra few steps and cut half of a sentence out and completely misinterpret it to make a bad argument.
He wasn’t even complaining about melee Hunters. If you want to see someone who thinks there should be no melee Hunter, or at least not an entire spec devoted to it, you should read my posts instead.
You are literally reaffirming what he said. You have a habit of posting cringe nonsense purely for the sake of disagreeing with people even when you’re not actually providing any meaningful disagreement.
DW would be nice, as would having 2H Sword and Axe be an option too. I think they need to go back to the “main stat change” weapons so those weapons can also be in the pool.
With SMF being back, and the changes to monks and such, hopefully SV won’t be left in the dust.
Agree 100%. Outside of cosmetic effects and the ability to enchant another weapon there is little benefit of the dual wield hunter in terms of damage, and our rotation especially since we are becoming more hybrid than ever.
Agree with this yet again. He had a fun offshoot campaign in WC3, but the guy spent half of the game in WoW patrolling Desolace… Big time plot there…
I think it’d be a fun fantasy, but I’d still rather have 2 hander. I do believe BM should have been the Melee spec though.
Problematic with vision of traditional hunter. Otherwise I’d say MM most problematic with it’s design. Glass cannon really blows.
Definitely watered down versions, but KC on surv just really helps the flow of the current build and gives it a better rotation than what BM offers. I know you’re not a fan of current MSV, but I fully enjoy the survival rotation and feel of damage output as it’s currently designed better than BM. I know BM does better damage, and I miss RSV, but I’m talking as it currently stands.
Is it me or has MSV become an actual living thing to old Beeps here? When you start accusing made up things of “stealing” from other made up things, I’m figuring the mental break down has to close…
Sorry for not being bothered to type “The Blizzard class developers lifted aspects from BM to help build some sort of melee Hunter identity for SV”, I guess?
Rexxar was most closely matching BM through and through because that aspect of Hunters was heavily based on Rexxar. The entire toolkit of Rexxar in Warcraft 3 and eventually Heroes of the Storm revolved around close interaction with the pet and BM was the spec that reflected that. The only resemblance Survival currently has to Rexxar is a) being a melee fighter (not even dual-wielding axes, mind you) and b) pet aspects lifted from BM.
If it’s for style, I can’t really argue since that’s subjective. I think dual wielding looks cool too. I prefer my zapper though so my opinion is useless.
But for practical purposes, a two-hander is way better. You only need to loot 1 weapon instead of 2. And being able to equip both single-handed and two-handed weapons in the same spec would be pretty bad. One of the combinations will end up better than the other but you might need to loot all 3 weapons at some point, which sounds horrible.
Normally I don’t really agree with Bepples, but he is right that the current SV takes too many aspects from BM to establish it’s own fantasy.
Blizz wanted to go for a “tag-team” sort of feel with the pet on SV (which if you ask me that’s already what BM is), but by replacing flanking strike with kill command, giving us coordinated assault (which is just bestial wrath), and giving us a mastery with a historically BM-only ability name (Spirit Bond)… suddenly SV is much more BM than SV.
I’d prefer it if it kept going the trapper + melee fantasy from the original 1.0 talent tree instead of this weird BM + melee one that Legion tried making.
I think a big part of the reason people tend to feel this way is that prior to Survival’s rework BM is really the only spec that cared about it’s pet in a significant way.
In practice BM uses their pets to fight, survival fights alongside their pets and honestly I think both specs do a very good job of fulfilling those fantasies. BM can hop about in safety while shooting relatively low damage shots to incite their pets to deal damage. Survival’s ability to sustain damage literally demands that they stay consistently in melee with their pet. Any time spent away causes them to lose out on uptime for CA. Even if you take WFI, you rely on your pet for focus generation; if you go without your pet for more than like 10 seconds you’re basically dead in the water.
KC shares a name with the BM ability, but Kill Command is literally an ability that says “pet attack” which is about as simple as you get. It’s the WoW equivalent of pokemon’s “tackle”. I appreciate why people see it as being BM’s signature move, but it’s far too simplistic conceptually to disallow anyone else from having in a spec whose pets aren’t magical in nature. I don’t think anyone would really care if the name changed, but at that point why even bother? It’s about as fundamental to a class that interacts with their pet as is imaginable.
The real issue continues to be that Hunter is stuck between being the animal companion/naturalist class and the ranged weapon class. Anything they might add that’s targeted at ranged weapons miss out on survival, anything targeted at pets misses out on Marksmanship.
The problem with putting more focus on being a trapper is that everyone hates using traps offensively, they just feel bad to have as part of your rotation. Flanking strike being baseline would be great, or at least MB being baseline to allow you to ever actually take flanking strike.
This is pretty subjective. I love hunter traps! Hell way back when I was little and first hopped into WoW, I actually tried working my way into the SV talent tree just cause I loved hunter traps. Even when you had to place them at your feet, it was so satisfying getting an immolation trap or explosive trap off.
Obviously I eventually found out it was a terrible idea, but point is I love hunter traps. They also work fine now-a-days, you just pick a location and throw it there. Others will certainly hate it, but I prefer it over Wildfire Bomb.
My issue with KC is specifically the name. Mechanically it has nothing to do with BM’s version anyways so it may as well return to being Flanking Strike. It would help the fantasy of the spec, and would make it feel less… ranged?
Current SV only has 1 rotational ability that is always melee (carve) and it feels goofy. Might as well make SV ranged or go all in on melee again.
This is actually an issue with all classes. Back then the fantasy of each spec/talent tree wasn’t so different from the others even if you put every single talent point into a single tree. Back then if you were a marksmanship hunter, you were still a hunter.
Now-a-days, each spec is so different from each other (and azerite traits are so expensive to change) that it is basically the same as choosing your class. Hunter is the biggest example of this since the other specs can’t use melee, MM can’t use BM skills, and SV can’t use ranged skills. Barely anything unites the 3 specs under the title of “Hunter” besides their past.
Yes I guess this is why SV has BM skills, but I’d rather those BM skills were universal hunter skills than shoehorned into SV’s fantasy that historically had no focus on pets.
I think functionally they could make flanking strike behave like KC from range. Something like when your at range, your pet does it’s portion of dmg plus 25-50 of yours. When your both in melee, you’d do your full and pet would just it’s regular portion.
Ex. Say FS does 200 dmg when in melee, 100 from you, 100 from pet. At range, your pet would do 125-150.
This allows SV to still build focus and kite, but incentivises it to be in melee for full damage. Also we get to have differential pet attacks between BM and SV to help define them better.
And more power to ya, I also really like traps. Having them as utility options is cool, but I feel pretty comfortable saying people didn’t enjoy them being part of your actual rotation.
Changing the name doesn’t really change anything though. Even if they do rename it, the nature of what the ability is is still the same “pet attack”. Changing the name to flanking strike wouldn’t be a big deal, but FS is another ability that also interacts with your pet. I get the issue here but I don’t really see it as being significant to more than a handful of people.
MB/RS is a melee ability. Eagle is a utility cooldown to let you deal with mechanics that don’t allow you to be in melee. People aren’t popping it just to run around and be ranged for just to be ranged. SV does have plenty of ranged options though that’s for sure. But seemingly that’s intentional that they mainly want the spec’s melee element to be focused around the tag team you’ve previously mentioned between KC and RS/MB
This is actually an issue with all classes. Back then the fantasy of each spec/talent tree wasn’t so different from the others even if you put every single talent point into a single tree. Back then if you were a marksmanship hunter, you were still a hunter.
Sure but this issue isn’t really shared by other classes. Sure arcane fire and frost mages are different but they all feel like they’re mages at their core. Same for warlocks, they all feel unique but it still feels to me like I’m playing a warlock.
With hunter I don’t think that’s the same. Marksmanship doesn’t really feel like a hunter to me. It just feels like an archer. And I can understand why people who don’t like survival would say the same about it. But As it stands they are both hunters, and apparently what makes you a hunter is aspects and traps which I think we can all agree, are important but not the defining feature of being a hunter.
Historical SV doesn’t exist anymore. What SV is now is a spec that coordinates with it’s pet to fight primarily in melee. If you feel that’s shoehorned then I’m sorry you don’t like the spec more, but that’s just what reality is for hunter now.
Personally I vastly prefer it to what historical survival was, a spec whose image was really just marksmanship with weird arrows.