I understand what you’re saying. That doesn’t mean that there can be a way to find a happy medium. And having more voices behind the hunters isn’t a bad thing, for the long term.
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That sort of blanket term isn’t exactly fair to say, not entirely untrue in some cases, but that could be said for a lot of classes. Do people who decided to roll Hunters back in Legion for Survival have as much investment in the class as you do? No, because clearly you have been a Hunter for a long time.
But speaking for myself MSV is something close to playing a Melee Ranger in DnD and GW2 that previously that wasn’t a thing available, and as a result I have found myself exploring the rest of the class. While I do main Survival, I also enjoy MM (although if Blizz reduced the cast time of Aimed Shot that would be beyond amazing.)
That being said I will never say your frustration is unwarranted, because it definitely isn’t, but I still subscribe to the idea that we can all get what we want.
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The reason some of us don’t care about the Melee players is because there are many melee players in the forums who hostile and condescending to the old Ranged Survival players. Personally, I would like to see those people learn how it feels to lose their character after working on it for years.
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Again, I get the frustration, felt the same way with my DK (albeit to a lesser degree) when it was made DW, but hey don’t lump us MSV players all together lol.
That being said, removing a spec always sucks, losing something you liked always sucks. If they did that you would see forum posts asking for it back. Ideally we should all be pushing for a 4th spec (regardless of the likelihood) so that everyone is happy. As I said earlier, we shouldn’t HAVE to delete something to bring something back.
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I’ve lost many things over the years through various specs. Still miss my 2 hnd shaman in pvp. I get it. I’ve said it before, and I think it would be awesome if blizz could make spells with conditions that change how it works. In this case using a ranged vs melee weapon would change the way the skill works. Or just a 4th spec would work 
I don’t believe there is any way to get the old SV gameplay through spells and talents. They can’t even give people reasonable DPS choices in the talent tree (think Lone Wolf).
Besides, it is too different. The way SV “felt” has always been very different than the way MM “felt,” and it is even worse now that they no longer have a Focus generating filler. I do not want to play that clunky (my opinion) spec any more than I want to play BM or MSV.
In any case, I can’t imagine Blizzard ever creating a fourth spec for Hunters. They would rather continue to lose millions of dollars than fix the mess Ion created. I’m sure they think tweaking some spells is going to work. Their mindset has always been that people quit for reasons unrelated with their design choices, so they approach fixing things with that in mind.
In case somebody from Blizzard reads this (unlikely, but it has happened at least three times), I have two things to say:
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You completely screwed up Hunters in the Pre-Legion patch by making MAJOR changes. The only way to fix it is to make MAJOR changes.
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People quit because of your changes, not because WoW is irrelevant or old.
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Agreed.
Well said.
Have been one of my main arguments since the beginning.
It’s ofc a matter of changing the mindsets of devs which is easier said than done. But all we can do is keep on trying. Hopefully they’ll listen(when taking in consideration the vast amount of feedback related to the topic at hand over the past 4 years).
Not without “hurting” existing specs. Not without changing current talent compilations in a major way.
The most likely result of doing something like this with for example MM, is that MM in itself would now be diluted in terms of it’s own intended fantasy of being a sharpshooter.
The talents added in which would cater towards RSV’s playstyle would most likely not yield a satisfying result either as it would require quite a lot to achieve that old playstyle.
Not to mention being locked into specific talents just to access that partial playstyle. As well as potential issues with balancing/tuning.
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Using simple logic and not involving emotions is a good thing to do. Some of you dont and go full emotional twisting facts. Bepples is well known for that.
I just hope these threads get enough flags to be locked down.
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I personally hope that everyone can get what they want, I just hope that it doesn’t hurt what we already have when it comes to what I enjoy the most which is world pvp.
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I dunno, why does shaman have a ranged and melee option? Could it be that they play in different ways and that different people enjoy different things? Nobody ever said one option was better than the other - an option is merely an option. If ranged were superior over everything, nobody would play melee, and yet here we are.
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This is got to be a joke, right? Bepples always backs up arguments with logic, and supports them with other sources.
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Because that is their original design.
Why does WoW’s only ranged weapon class have a melee option? If the Devs originally intended hunters to have a melee spec, there would have been one in vanilla. 10+ years later is a little late to be drastically changing specs from their original design.
What the Devs did to SV was wrong, and should be undone.
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You mean like… the original SV tree which had lacerate and only melee/trap talents? That original design? The melee spec came first and ranged purists stole it, returning sv to melee in legion was justice.
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Complete nonsense.
The only reason hunter had melee skills at all is because of the dead zone. Ranged attacks had a minimum range. You were literally a sitting duck.
The SV tree was there so you could somewhat defend yourself. Nothing more. Just because you could melee doesn’t mean you were intended to do so.
It wasn’t returned because it never was. And they’ve admitted that they regret some of their class design changes they made in Legion. Specifically making specs within a class feel like a completely different class.
They know they screwed up. Why do you think they’re pushing class over spec fantasy so hard?
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The Enhance tree was there so you could somewhat defend yourself. Nothing more. Just because you could melee doesn’t mean you were intended to do so.
After all, enhance still had access to all the various shaman ranged spells, clearly it was intended to be a caster who could melee a bit.
Each talent tree focused on one aspect of the class; pets, ranged, melee. If marksmanship talents were poorly balanced and MM hunters saw their best damage output from running into melee to fight, that wouldn’t translate to MM being intended to melee. It’d just be another example of blizzard failing at balance.
It’s been 4 years and you’re all still so hilariously, pathetically angry. What happens if in another 4 years, sv is still melee?
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It sure seems like every “happy medium” you people come up with is overwhelmingly favourable to melee players. That includes having an entire Hunter spec being a baseline, dedicated melee attacker, by the way.
And this isn’t a net gain for the class’s playerbase. While some people came to the class, quite a few rerolled or quit. So forgive me for not celebrating the arrival of people who evidently can’t even be bothered to level their Hunter to max level.
I can pretty much count on one hand the amount of people I’ve seen around who are newcomers to the class for SV that went anywhere beyond entry-level content. It’s more like they are tourists from melee classes than anything else. Meanwhile, I know many veterans of the class or people that put thousands of hours into it who gave up on the class over it. Yes, it’s anecdotal, but it fits Hazzikostas’s statement about the spec being aimed at new players and rerolls rather than existing Hunters quite well and I find that unacceptable.
The class was already very popular with plenty of people picking it for their alts. It wasn’t some insular, niche community that needed expanding. Funnily enough, that’s effectively what they created with Survival. I can’t think of any other class that gets subjected to this sort of design philosophy than Hunters.
I appreciate your understanding of ranged SV Hunters but I don’t think there’s any perfect way out of this. Any solution is going to screw over someone except for a 4th spec idea, which is, to be blunt, infeasible. That’s why I think the best approach is a compromise favouring ranged Hunter design; all 3 specs are baseline ranged with ranged SV being based on its pre-Legion direction, with a melee option available via a BM Gladiator-like talent that swaps out ranged abilities for melee ones (e.g. Cobra Shot => Raptor Strike, Barbed Shot => Lacerate, Barrage => Butchery) in exchange for a damage and HP boost. This would also solve the ever-present problem of all valid melee Hunter concepts being inseperable from a pet-based identity.
He is not joking. He’s projecting.
The big difference is that Hunters were based around the ranged weapon, whereas Shamans have a caster spec and a melee weapon user spec. It is much, much easier to envision a true melee/ranged split in a class where you don’t have all 3 specs having access to a ranged weapon.
While we can’t say anything for certain about Blizzard’s intent for Survival from back before 1.7, it’s pretty unlikely they intended for it to be a purely melee-based spec considering these factors:
- Specs didn’t decide your entire playstyle and identity back then, and all hunter specs had a ranged weapon with a fully-fledged ranged toolkit as well as gear and stat weights centred around ranged weapon damage
- The stated class identity for Hunters was centrally based on ranged weapons to the point where melee is all-but-absent from the definition
It’s much more likely to be what Kazenia said: they intended for SV to improve your PvP standing and they imagined Hunters would get caught in the minimum range a lot in PvP, so SV buffed those melee spells, but you weren’t intended to stick exclusively melee.
Who knows. The 2 or 3 people demanding melee Hunters were still demanding them right up until the 10.5 year mark when it was actually announced, so it doesn’t look like there’s a time limit for this sort of thing.
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Despite those talents in the old Outdoorsmanship category, it did not intend for you to be a melee hunter. You still had all your ranged abilities, and you still wanted to use those over melee ones whenever possible.
In short, prior to Legion, the class was not designed to favor melee combat over ranged combat, at any point.
Correct on the first two.
Survival however, did not focus on melee.
It focused on survivability and utility.
It was the same with the prior version that was Outdoorsmanship.
They took that general design away as it wasn’t very useful. Most of the talents weren’t actually good. They weren’t good enough to be considered in most parts of the game(compared to other talents).
Pretty much this.
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I played survival in vanilla and BC and raided with it for the raid buff of expose weakness. It was also great in pvp imho (outside arena of course). It was my favorite spec and still is… but there was only like 1 in 50 hunters doing survival back then. Even if I am off by quite a bit it was a slim miniority. If they did ranged survival with expose weakness again I would go back to it immediately probably, but I don’t want anyone who is currently enjoying playing melee survival to have to give up their spec they like like we had to do. I didn’t think it was cool then and don’t think it’s cool for anyone to have to do now. I would like to see a 4th spec for everyone instead. I think it would be a fun thing to do and put some more diversity in all the classes and probably also be fun for the devs. The trees aren’t as deep so if there are balance issues it should still be less of an ordeal to sort them vs the old style deep trees.
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I don’t have a fully leveled hunter because I’m currently playing him. Outside of 2 mythics on my mage, I have exclusively been playing this guy. He was 40 last week. My intention is to level him and have him be my main, as it fits everything I have wanted (at least in terms of an aesthetic/fantasy).
Blizz isn’t known to admit any kind of mistake so they are gonna double down on MSV. I personally like it and am currently lvling an alt for pvp. Want something a bit more engaging than “Spam necrotic strike”.
That said, i could easily see them bringing in a Dark Ranger with one spec being the spiritual successor to RSV then another spec being your old school shadowmeld Aimed shot type. Kinda like a ranged rogue.