Err, yeah? That’s exactly why it’s tuned like garbage in PvP and nobody likes fighting it even now that it has LoS requirements lol
It’s not really just cast times, it’s cast times with a way to stop it and a requirement to plant your feet to do it, that kinda stuff.
But yes, and major changes like that are probably what would have happened to RSV if it stayed around in some form for Legion+.
It’s unlikely for it to have maintained full mobility.
It also would have been an incredibly unpopular change because whether or not anyone’ll admit it, that kind of privilege is a huge part of why people liked RSV :^)
I get that. It has alot of stuff RSV had. You have your proc in lava burst, but LB still has a ok CD so if it doens’t proc, you don’t feel bad. You have tons of abilities to be a support (earth elemental, nova totem, healing surge, hex) and you still have plenty of room to plan and really maximize what you do. But the mastery ceiling is always good.
I mean, you can think that’s why people liked it all you want. We have no data as to WHY people played it.
I def wouldn’t have minded a cast time, just like I don’t mind having one on my ele sham or MM hunter. It was never about the cast times. It was about the themes and how it felt to play.
I liked being a psuedo magical hunter and having tons of utility. I enjoyed knowing what I was doing and never having bad times with it. I would have “OK” times sometimes when I had poor RNG, but it could only go up and I never minded it being just ok. I also liked that I was in the middle between MM and BM. I didn’t need my pet, but having one out didn’t hurt me.
Sure, I can go ahead and just concede that MoP / WoD surv wouldn’t work in today’s game. But I think what people are missing is that what we really want is what we already had. We want to be that super resourceful player that can save the group. We want to be that middle ground of the hunters. We want a rotation that isn’t tedius or brain dead.
We want the flavor that came with the class. For some, that was the super survivalist trapper. For others like me, that was the semi magical shots and ability interactions.
Sorry but I am of the opinion that PvP should absolutely not hold back class design. Classes/specs should be designed and balanced first and foremost for PvE. Tired of Blizzard butchering fun and interesting abilities/talents because of PvP.
Blizzard just needs to figure out what the heck PvP even is in this game first, instead of trying to maintain some sort of balancing act between PvE and PvP that only ever ends up worsening the game in both areas. Just make abilities/talents behave differently in PvP if they are too strong there. Ya it would suck and create inconsistencies, but I’d rather have inconsistent abilities that are fun and engaging at least in PvE rather than have class/spec designs watered down across the board for PvP.
If Hunter’s, with their range, mobility and instants, are too strong in PvP, then cause them to deal less damage there and there only. Balance their base damage around PvP, then give them a passive like “Hunter’s Edge” or something that increases their damage against non-player targets by X%.
It’s not just PvP though, lol.
It translates directly to PvE issues too.
You have no struggles with any ranged mechanics while the rest all do.
You can’t do competitive DPS because of it or else you’re just outright better than a caster at handling every mechanic.
Imagine RSV is the same as it was, and ends up being a top DPS spec. It’s got decent enough burst damage, sustain, strong aoe with serpent spread + the instant tick (when that existed), and has no troubles with being targeted by mechanics.
That’s an incredibly difficult design to work with. It always will be.
“I want to have zero mobility limitations while everyone else does” isn’t “class design” anyways, it’s mechanically broken in a world where nobody else gets that and casters are increasingly stationary.
Without being undertuned, you’d see hunters push out everyone else barring a fight specific requirement.
But isn’t this the same thing as BM right now? Even going into SL? Blizzard doesn’t seem to mind much. Hunters have been more mobile than casters for pretty much their entire existence anyway. Why is it suddenly such a roadblock for SV to still be mobile when it never has been in the past?
Mobility at range is a utility, just like other utilities. It is not a matter of dps balance but rather utility balance. Casters have utilities that Hunters don’t have too.
I do actually agree that SV does a great job of being a master of nothing, but unfortunately the entire purpose and namesake of a specialisation in the first place is to be good at something.
Ah yes, I forgot about the hidden appeal of being a “Hunter but worse”.
SV’s pet interaction is literally exactly what you’re describing here: Kill Command. Which is, of course, a Beast Mastery ability.
SV does not have some hidden extra dimension to their pet interaction that BM doesn’t just because SV fights close-up. I can fight close-up as BM as well; does that mean I’m suddenly a beast “companion” rather than “master”? Hell, one of the primary appeals of SV right now is how much time it doesn’t have to spend in melee alongside its pet.
I could describe SV as a versatile jack-of-all-trades spec, actually… when it was ranged. It’s impossible to give the same description to melee SV, though. Arbitrarily depending on a melee weapon makes it less versatile and less of a “jack of all trades”, both mechanically and thematically. It takes an incredibly warped perspective to try to pretend SV represents versatility through use of a melee weapon.
This has always been an utterly meaningless point. If it were ranged, no matter how different, it would still be closer to what we want and more in a position to improve and evolve than any meaningful melee iteration. Plus, from what I’ve seen around the forums, most people who want ranged Survival back including myself would be fine with something that resembled the Survival of Cata, MoP, and WoD with tweaks and additions where it made sense. I haven’t seen anyone demand MoP or WoD Survival with absolutely no changes.
If you look to Ghorak’s suggestion thread for ranged Survival, what he suggests is enormously different to what ranged SV was in WoD.
The specs got more and more distinct from one another each expansion. There’s no reason to believe it would have suddenly converged. Survival did undergo heavy pruning in WoD and it still kept the most important and unique parts of the spec that made people like it.
Actually, if Survival survived into Legion, it would have likely gained more unique elements as that’s the expansion when they made spec-specific talent tiers.
Yes I’ll be sure to add this to the “List of things that definitely happened for real”.
So we’ve gone from “The ability to both fight at ranged and melee appealed to me” to “Losing the ability to fight at ranged appealed to me”. Ok. Makes sense. Go on.
It’s not so much that melee doesn’t belong in the class but rather that a spec that can’t use a ranged weapon doesn’t belong in the class. The ranged weapon has always been the most central element of the class. It does not make sense to try to make a Hunter that doesn’t use one no matter how many empty appeals to DnD you can crap out into the thread. This is primarily a matter of theme and class fantasy, I agree: and melee Survival majorly fails in those areas.
Neither does BM, yet it still exists. Nonsense point just like 100% of the rest of your posts in this subforum.
Plus, it’s not like “having zero mobility restrictions” is an inherent part of the ranged Survival Hunter identity. That was only a reality for its toolkit for 5.1 onwards. Hell, Black Arrow was almost going to have a 1.5 second immobile cast in MoP. If mobility really were the sticking point it would be trivial to add a restriction.
It really hasn’t been. There’s zero concrete evidence to back statements like these up regardless of how much they get regurgitated onto the forums.
This describes BM right now and it’s one of the lowest-represented specs in PvP. This isn’t the holy grail you think it is. Even in WoD when Survival was really good in rated PvP it wasn’t even the highest-represented spec in the game, and considering the sheer amount of mitigation, self healing, and gap-closing utility dished out to pretty much every single melee class in Legion and BFA it certainly wouldn’t be dominant right now. As soon as Havoc DH is out of the picture then you can talk with sincerety about Hunters “having everything”. Until then, it seems like your concern is less about Hunters becoming overpowered in PvP but rather Hunters becoming viable in PvP which fits in nicely with the rest of your generally anti-Hunter rhetoric on the forums.
Frankly I tend to not do rated PvP at all so you can imagine my animosity to any sort of reasoning about removing my favourite spec from the game because “it breaks arenas”.
RSV’s representation in arenas wavered around 5-6% throughout WoD and that’s pretty good by the standards of most specs. Assassination Rogue and Demon Hunter have both had representations in excess of 8% or more throughout this expansion. Spare me the concern trolling about Hunters being OP in arenas.
The have usually compensated for this by making Hunters a) have less mitigation than everyone else and b) flat out do less damage in Patchwerk situations. Yes, BM is overtuned right now, but that is primarily due to unforeseen scaling craziness brought on by azerite traits. It spent much of the rest of this expansion, and most of the previous expansions, doing less Patchwerk DPS than other specs, as did ranged SV when it still existed. The idea is we become competitive despite our lower on average stationary DPS because in real situations other classes face penalties for moving and we don’t. And this has actually worked quite well.
It’s good to have at least one or two specs in the game focus on mobility over raw damage output. What you’re asking for here is absurd homogenisation of all the damage profiles of ranged specs.
Ultra-difficult solution: retune it so it isn’t the top DPS spec. I shouldn’t need to hold your hand through this.
BM is overtuned right now while being fully mobile and it isn’t pushing everyone else out. If you don’t believe me, go ask a raiding guild which they prefer: a BM Hunter or a Fire Mage. You’re making hypotheticals here when we already have real-world reference points, and the reason you’re sticking to your hypotheticals is because reality doesn’t match up with your anti-Hunter world view at all.
P.S. When Blizzard explained their reasoning for making SV melee, they did not say they did it because SV was too mobile. They said they did it because there was no meaningful difference between SV and MM. As much as their reasoning was complete bull, that’s what their reasoning was. So the entire premise of your argument here starts with assigning a motive for Blizzard removing ranged SV that was never actually stated or even hinted at.
I’m one of the people who likes current surv (I hated legion version), however I still want a ranged survival.
I had this thought while doing a dungeon and needing to fight from range for a bit due to a mechanic. What if we took one of the lvl 15 talents and baked it into the class (or used one of the lvl 60 talents since only one is ever used and the other two are trash) and in it’s place we put a new talent: Eagle talons (based on the spear)
Your raptor strike becomes a 40 yard range attack.
Carve is removed and replaced with chakrams. Works the way current chakrams do (but balance the dmg out to fit) and reduced the CD on bomb by up to 5 secs. Same CD as carve.
I honestly like the way surv plays and works. I do want a ranged version though. I feel that surv has alot of aspects as a psuedo druid with the way some of their abilities work and how some of their lore is. I feel that if I can’t have a psuedo magic archer like old surv, then this version would be a trade off I’d be willing to accept as I feel it would be fairly easy to balance due to nothing but carve and raptor strike needing melee.
Agreed. I think the only issue would be the way wild bomb works now, but tbh wild bomb shouldn’t work in a cone. It should just work the way it originally did. Everything in a 5 yard radius gets hit and gets the DoT. That would make a ranged variant of the current hunter pretty easy to pull off.
Good. Because it did. I got bored with it after hunters lost melee weapons.
I can refute the points you made attempting to refute mine but I see it’s utterly pointless since you already have your mind set that your opinions are facts. However they’re not.
They are just your opinions and you will only read and interpret anything anyone else says as you want through the narrow, biased filter that is your opinion.
Go ahead and have your opinion but don’t deny others theirs and try to invalidate them by saying something didn’t happen when you couldn’t possibly know if it did or not.
I cannot speak for everyone here ofc, but check the link below. That is RSV but with a design suited for the modern game.
That is basically the old RSV, with abilities and other elements taken from all former iterations of that spec, going all the way back to WotLK.
It also has some other additions as well as, like I said, we have new design philosophies and a new approach, in the modern game.
Considering it’s design promoted a playstyle almost completely void of large burst potential, the fact that it was/could still have been fully mobile, is not a stretch at all.
If you give a particular spec a specific strength(like full mobility), that also has to come with an equal-scale weakness.
For BM, it’s the fact that most of it, depends on pets.
For a spec like RSV, again, that would be the fact that it wasn’t/would not be designed with a potential for massive burst/or big hitting abilities like Aimed Shot for MM.
MM has the potential for massive burst and it contains big-hitter abilities. It’s weakness? To achieve that increase in output, you’re required to stand still for parts of the fight.
I recall us having an e.g. oriented system that served as a basis for further customization of our abilities.
The old Glyph-system.
Why not get something like that back, instead of locking certain things in as PvP-talents or similar? Then people can make whatever choice they want, no matter what type of content they want to be doing.
It had some burst potential, but that factor was actually it’s biggest weakness.
It became even more evident in HFC when they removed that instant-damage tick for SrS, along with how most fights were designed, favoring burst-oriented specs. Like for priority targets. OR let’s not forget the Legendary-ring and how it worked.
Yep.
That was the main goal(part of it) with the design.
Because well, RSV certainly had the required potential to serve as a basis for a playstyle with the spec fantasy-focused philosophy in mind.