It’s amusing to me that MSV proponents seem to live in this fantasy land where the spec itself is actually highly popular, but people have just not played it for a cascade of ancillary reasons and happenstance. It’s always because it’s undertuned, or because some influential youtuber trash-talked it, or because it needs to not just be strong but actually broken.
Statistically, we’ve never seen more than 2% representation for MSV since the rework, and the majority of tiers have been at or under 0.5%. Some of those tiers MSV has been objectively the strongest hunter spec available, and people still didn’t play it. That’s the data we have.
Now, if you want to insist that people are just chomping at the bit to play MSV, and only this mystical confluence of hurdles keeps getting in their way, I guess that’s on you, but it fails the smell test, and is also substantially less likely for the data we have than the alternative explanation: the majority of hunters simply do not like MSV, and won’t play it regardless of how strong it is tuned.
If it has to be tuned so strong that it becomes a FOTM, then the people that would only play it in such a case aren’t actually wanting to play MSV. They just want to play whatever is the most powerful spec.
The assertion herein is that:
If that were the case, then the period where it hasn’t been tuned poorly should show massive swings towards it as people that want to play it, but haven’t been able to justify it due to tuning, are finally able to play it.
And yet that’s not what we saw. Heck, even at the expansion boundary between Legion and BfA, which both revamped a fair amount of the MSV kit and represented a reprieve from systems and a free period to simply try whatever peeps wanted (and was also one of the periods MSV was balanced as the best hunter spec), MSV hit it’s highest ever representation since the revamp…
2%. That’s all of 16% of hunters. And a full third of those players quit SV by the time Uldir came out, despite MSV retaining it’s strength through that first raid tier.
So 5 out of 6 hunters weren’t willing to try MSV even when it was tuned strong and when it least mattered (during expansion prepatch), and 1 in 3 of those that did abandoned the spec by the first raid despite the spec remaining strong for that period.
But ya, I’m sure it’s just because of tuning… /s
Erm…which ones? Arms is the king DPS spec for warriors in PvE atm. Frost is now an extremely strong PvE spec for mages. Sub was behind outlaw, but definitively ahead of Assassination until the latter was buffed in 9.0.5.
The concept of “PvP specs” hasn’t been a thing for literally over a decade now.