Yeah, what Dawnspirit said. I’m looking at how SV has played since MoP and how it appears to be playing in SL and it just doesn’t look good. For Blizzard to toss Melee SV in the bin and start fresh with a ranged perspective on what is now a short schedule doesn’t give me a lot of faith in their ability to do it well; decent is pushing our luck.
Just a point of order… I play melee SV and if SV is melee in SL I’ll continue to play Melee SV, but I don’t really have a dog in this fight. If it’s ranged I’ll play that too. Like I said, I just want it to be good. My hunter main has just been Survival since vanilla because neither Beastmaster nor Marksman seemed to be a good fit for the RP of the character.
New Blizzard seems to be slowly realizing that whenever they do whatever old Blizzard did, that they succeed. Classic WoW for example, and now they are making this xpac the ‘unpruning’ xpac. An ‘unpruning’ sounds brilliant, and if they continue to ‘revert’ things going into future xpacs we might see a new golden age if they do it right.
Won’t get my hopes up of course, but perhaps the future looks a little brighter than it has been these last couple xpacs.
As for current SV specifically, that’s not going to happen. I really can’t see how.
They said early on that changes to existing specs, on the level of what was done to SV going into Legion, wasn’t on the table for Shadowlands.
And quite frankly, completely re-designing current SV from melee to ranged would require more work than creating a new 4th spec for the class, in the style of the old RSV. Especially at this point in development.
Well, I’d be on board with a 4th spec. Survival could go back to being ranged, and the melee spec could be called Guerrilla and then everyone can be happy.
Except all the other classes that didnt get their 4th spec. Except the balance team getting even more work to do. Except all future hunter raiders that will have less chance that their spec is the most optimal.
Other classes didn’t have one of their specs deleted. Did you miss that whole part or something?
Blizzard has already established precedent here with Druids. Instead of deleting either the melee DPS or tanking aspect of Feral, they made a new spec to accommodate it. We have that exact situation now, where they are trying to make SV into some sort of melee ranged hybrid.
Heads up bub but Blizzard already added a new fourth spec to Hunter: melee SV. They just also deleted ranged SV in the process. So really they wouldn’t be adding a new spec, just ‘unpruning’ the one they deleted.
This can literally be used to argue against all content. “You want raids in this xpac? Pfft that’s a terrible idea! It would create more work for the balance team!” or “You want a new class? Pfft that’s a terrible idea! It would create more work for the balance team!”
Azagorod supports ceasing all future content patches confirmed.
Why not just remove all but one spec for every class then? This has got to be the dumbest reasoning I’ve ever heard. You think that “future hunter raiders that will have less chance that their spec is the most optimal” is somehow valid reasoning when you are literally arguing that current Hunters players should have no chance of their spec even existing?
Naw man can’t undelete ranged SV so the tens of thousands of Hunter players who loved it can have it back at all, because then the min-maxers may feel obligated to play it and wouldn’t that just be the end of the world?
People asking for RSV back let’s look at a hypothetical for perspective.
Let’s imagine for a moment Survival never went melee and stayed ranged through Legion and BFA. Now look at what Happened to every class and spec in the game. Look at how different almost every one of them plays compared to several expansions ago. Many of you keep saying you want MoP or Cata Survival back but the fact is even if survival stayed ranged it wouldn’t be what you remembered or wanted.
After all the pruning ALL classes went through You’d likely have a ranged spec that plays similar to MM with the old survival inspired talents. I’m not saying it would be exactly the same but it certainly would NOT be what you fondly remembered.
For all those saying you quit hunter or the game or know people who have when it went melee I kind of understand because I largely stopped playing my hunter after survival lost any ability to melee way before MoP. Sure melee was never the focus but when I made my first hunter at the end of Vanilla the ability to both fight at ranged and melee, even if not the most effective at it, appealed to me thematically more than anything.
Needless to say when they announced melee Survival in Legion I was super excited and have been maining it since. It’s different than old survival but I always preferred melee anyway and the classic D&D Ranger archetype that could choose a ranged or melee focused fighting style which WoW hunters clearly drew inspiration heavily from. Beyond that D&D drew inspiration for its Ranger class from Lord of the Rings and characters like Aragorn who fights with a sword.
Of course these are different worlds and settings but those saying melee doesn’t belong in hunter class design need to consider where some of the thematic choices come from beyond pure game mechanics or personal bias. Yes, game mechanics matter but so does theme and class fantasy. I’m sorry if you lost something you loved but a melee, nature themed archetype with a animal companion fills a void that a rogue or other class thematically never could. A game is more than numbers and mechanics.
I’m sure this will get lost in the sea of arguments going on in this thread but I just wanted to add my 2 cents.
I’m also a huge fan of MSV and still think RSV needs to exist. I don’t want MSV gone, I just want RSV BACK.
In addition, the argument of if it HAD been in the game until now it would be different is a non argument. Of course it would be different if it HAD been in the game. That’s why the version most people want is the MoP / WoD version, not a version of what it would have been had it been in the game the whole time.
You can see the same kind of argument going on with Spriests right now with legion changes. “No point in wanting what was, because we’re past that. Get used to what you have and live with it.” Thankfully, that never works.
And they should have made a new class then instead of deleting a spec that already existed. We also don’t have a true spellsword spec, but that doesn’t mean Blizzard should delete Arcane and replace it with a melee DPS spec. If Blizzard wanted a spec that used ranged weapons and not a pet, they should have made a new class/spec instead of saddling it onto Hunters who have always had pets. If Blizzard wanted a spec that fought at melee with a beast, they should have made a new class/spec instead of deleting SV.
Nobody here is saying “That archetype shouldn’t exist in the game”, they are saying “They shouldn’t have deleted a spec that already existed in order to make room for a spec that abandons the most core aspect of the class”.
Blizzard should have just introduced a new class/spec, but they didn’t because they didn’t want to put actual effort in and would rather cannibalize Hunter. So now they should do what they should have done in Legion by bringing back ranged SV as a fourth spec.
As others have already mentioned, those versions wouldn’t fit modern WoW with how much the game itself has changed.
You’re entitled to prefer that iteration but they aren’t going to copy-paste an old spec design into the current game so I miss the point in asking for it back just as it once was.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting something but expectations should be managed realistically vs wishful thinking. It detracts from focusing on making what we have now better rather than trying to turn back the clock.
I’ve seen others mention why it wouldn’t fit modern wow, but I’ve not seen any actual run down of WHY it wouldn’t fit.
*It’s AoE works much like assassin rogues currently in that it spreads DoTs
*It has a DoT which can lead to a powerful proc that has a medium CD, much like ele shaman and lava burst currently
It has filler with arcane shot and steady fire, like how MM currently works.
*It would bring more CC and interrupts than average, much like monks do currently (that was the main reason I liked it, especially in cata. I could prevent a wipe on my own with good CC use)
These are things that already exist in the game. If it honestly wouldn’t fit the current game then we need to find what about it DOESN’T fit exactly and tweak those to better fit. We could argue that shadow priest doesn’t fit the modern game with it’s lack of movement, easy to mess up rotation, ramp up time, lack of useful utility, and lack of good sustained AoE, yet it’s still here to stay.
What wouldn’t fit is that it has zero requirements to plant its feet, to simplify it.
Hunter’s been a mess to balance ever since Cata when they threw Fox in, and further in MoP when they took away melee from it entirely.
It’s a 40 yard melee with all uninterruptible or instant skills. It has all the advantages of melee and ranged but none of the downsides of either and no unique weakness (ie deadzone, in the past) to it. At least, nothing that’s ever been significant enough, anyways.
Look at how badly survival ruined 2s in WoD because it had everything. What everyone wants back would be unarguably mechanically broken.
Truthfully, hunters should have been a caster from the very beginning, just one that did “attacks”.
Interruptible just like regular casters, required to plant feet to do most of their damage, and then given tools like casters had/have.
You can’t do it now, but if nobody ever experienced anything else, it’d wouldn’t be controversial.
Couldn’t the same be said about BM? Their stuff is all instant and without deadzone unless their pet dies / is CCed. But even then, the hunter can rez the pet with good gameplay and that would be a CC / DMG wasted on the pet rather than the hunter.
If you wanted cast times, then we can do cast times. Again, the interaction with black arrow is very much like Ele shamans interaction between LB and FS. Explosive shot has a cast time and can be talented to have an additional charge. Black arrow has a chance to reset ES CD. I"d be fine with that change. Would give me real decisions to make in pve unlike with my BM hunter.
You know this might explain why i rerolled elemental shaman in legion, the similarity in flow. I was wondering what pulled me to shammy. I would like to have rsv tho, and ill be so happy. As much as im “ok” with bm, i rather have rsv back. Mm isnt a allowed option.
Oh wow haha i swear before you mentioned it i had no idea really. I know i love nature themed classes, but druid i just couldnt find love in. Feral is too boring and unforgiving, and balance is…eh. it just seemed like other than rsv, ele is only other spec i can really enjoy.
