I mean, I can understand liking how it used to be. Like, shaman 2 handed for me was far better than what they have now. But I personally just moved on to other classes. A lot of people like dual wielding shamans, but I prefer 2 handed or sword+shield or magic or bows and arrows. Dual wield just doesn’t do it for me.
As for DK, nah this character I didn’t really play until BFA. I mained warlock affliction in legion since it was the best dps soloing class at the time with how OP self healing was for it. In WoD I actually mained a shaman despite it not having 2 handed, cause at that time they had a ton of self healing abilities compared to now and were one of the best soloing classes for DPS. Then various characters before that, whatever was good at soloing in the other expansions
Kinda weird comment though cause marksman is not really like survival at all even how it used to be. its more an archer than anything else that doesn’t need a pet. There really isn’t a spec like how survival used to be.
But I find the current survival fun I just play BM cause its better at soloing. But for survival, some find it fun that have tried it so I mean make one group happy one group angry, double edged sword even if its not 50/50. I agree though no spec should just be completely changed, and blizzard does that a lot for every class pretty much.
I’d be a grouchy old person too if I spent months complaining about melee survival hunter. I’ve been looking up survival posts to see if I can’t solo better with them and some strategies and what not, and almost every thread I’ve found he is in it complaining how bad melee survival is lol.
Hunter for the most part has been a melee and ranged class… and it came out in Vanilla as such. Legion didnt rewrote it… it brought it back. MOP and WOD, the only two expac with a pure Ranged Survival only.
That edit only made your argument even more flimsy.
No iteration of any Hunter spec lacked a ranged weapon until Legion. You can argue whether or not it fits to have a melee weapon as well as the ranged one for each spec, and if true whether it’s worth trying to re-implement (I would say “no” to both but this is more debatable) but having a melee weapon for close-range combat in older times with the minimum range does not justify a spec now that totally lacks a ranged weapon (beyond a token animation) and must focus on melee attacks to do full damage.
They didn’t “bring back” some long-lost melee Hunter in Legion. They revised history and made something that the class has never seen and for the most part has never wanted.
No, they didn’t. Legion and BFA Survival does not have a ranged weapon. Every single iteration of every Hunter spec outside of Survival in particular in the last 2 expansions has used a ranged weapon. There was no Hunter spec that required you to spend as much time in melee as possible to meet your full damage potential. Every claim otherwise is revisionism.
Right now the spec has abilities that can be used at ranged. That doesn’t mean anything when, again, you must be in melee range to meet your DPS potential. Other melee specs have ranged compensations as well, SV just has more of them.
https://i.imgur.com/kBVr5Uc.png
“The Hunter is a unique class in World of Warcraft because it is primarily a ranged attacker.”
Survival is primarily a melee attacker.
As for the last part being my opinion: it’s also the opinion of lead developer* Ion Hazzikostas who said that most Hunters are Hunters because they want to play a ranged spec.
I wasn’t even looking for their posts cause actually don’t care about them, just feedback on survival…and all the way back into july and then august rofl. Notice anyone familiar? You’ll have to visit the thread to see.
It literally made me laugh so hard my face turned red and couldn’t breathe. Never had such a hilarious moment on the forums
At this point it may be better just to report them for trolling as that is what it actually is if they’ve been posting the same junk all the way from july
If an entire class is going to Hades, I wouldn’t feel sorry for just two people. I was Johnny-come-lately to the class and I know too well that SV was EVERYTHING for all Hunters. I was partial to MM but I couldn’t deny how Legion screwed us over.
I think the sad reality is that none of the newbies remembers what’s the entire class used to be like before Legion, and I was a warlock at the time when I saw Danaik from Warcraftvideos. We need to stop patronizing Legion and understand that expansion borked all of this. If you were to look at Cata-MoP-WoD, you would understand that SV had its own flavor apart from BM and MM, just like all the other classes. For warlock, Affliction had their own style, Destruction had theirs, and Demonology had theirs, even though all three specs did both shadow and fire damage to a point where the specs had exclusivity over a certain school(with Demos sharing both). Ironically, before Demon Hunters came along, Demos were the “Illidans” though that spec was far less potent in actual DPS.
The warlock class is evidence enough that Blizzard could have done hunters the same service by keeping the specs true to their core identities. Reinventing Demonology was an awesome idea on paper despite the metrics were wanting from Legion and BFA(sadly). Survival could have been more of the likes of John J. Rambo, the penultimate Survivalist, and Rambo for all intents and purposes preferred to defeat his enemies with guns. SV should have been the “environmental” expert that doesn’t just use a bow/gun/xbow but can use improvised weapons(the GOOD stuff, not that silly Engy crap) and unconventional tactics to overcome an enemy. MM can likewise be the true actual weapon expert and BM can be the expert on coordinating attacks with the most powerful beasts that can be tamed.
If I could redo Legion, I’d give Titanstrike to MM, give Thas’dorah to SV(because Sylvanas from WC3 did have a Survivalist mindset when she used terrain and structures to slow down the Scourge), and give BM something that might actually be unique as a mainstay: THROWN MELEE WEAPONS. Rexxar from the WC3 bonus campaign actually THREW his axes. We don’t have a class/spec that actually throws its weapon as a ranged component. Some of us might remember the Javazons and Double Throw Barbs from D2 so Blizzard has done it before too. In this vision all three hunter specs are ranged specs and actually might emulate better actual true big-time hunter heroes from WarCraft 3!
TL;DR: Blizzard in times past actually HAS kept the core identity of a class/spec sanctified so it’s not impossible for them to repent from their blunders with Legion. Sometimes we would cry because the resolution to make hunters the class they ought to be is TOO EASY TO FAIL. All Blizz has to do is watch all the First Blood movies, remember how they allowed various viable builds in Diablo 2, and remember how hero units that represented Hunters operated in WC3.
It wasn’t a thing. Ofc you could opt to playing/fighting while only using what melee abilities you had.
But the class was not designed with melee-combat as a core element to focus on over ranged combat.
Nothing you could make use of back then made you want to abandon the ranged weapon in favor of only/mostly melee. At least not by design.
Not even the Outdoorsmanship-spec(prior to 1.7) resulted in this.
I agree though, that there are indeed players who want to focus on fighting in melee as hunters.
But we did not have the ‘‘melee-hunter’’ back then. What we had, was ‘‘regular/ranged hunter with some melee-based abilities’’.
I could spend hours scouring the old Cata forums to look for comments just like this one, from you, when Blizzard invented John J. Keeshan and the new Redridge Mountains questine. I want to see where you commented during Cata. Real talk. Because if you thought it’s funny now, you thought it was funny then. And being a gnome hunter, which was a Legion-era addition, might not help your case unless you did an xrace.
The true Survival Hunter in my book is the one we always knew: Sylvanas before and after death(you can throw in Nathanos as well), and she was not one for melee as the high elves were mostly a ranged army(self-evident belves couldn’t be warriors at the get-go). Nothing spells Survival better than outlasting the Burning Legion and emancipating from the Scourge. That being said, Legion and onward should have explored this way more to stay true to what was already there. But I’m sure you laughed your guts out about it back in 2000-2003.
The early 2000’s were the laughing stock years of Blizzard.
@Ghorak I remember back in the day, someone actually made a thread about Warlock’s MELEE capabilities back in the same timeframe. In Vanilla, you could actually MELEE as a warlock assuming you invested in a deep Demo build. In some scenarios Demo was capable as an off-tank spec. This particular guy had a long list of abilities that escape my memory, but I remember that a lot of warlocks chewed him out for it because the class was more optimal at operating from range. The point is: hunters were not the only ones that could be put in that box.
In D&D 5th Ed there’s the Hexblade Pact which practically equips warlocks for better melee. In BFA before 8.1, Demon Armor used to give our warlocks plate-quality armor rating(now it’s mail). So it makes you wonder if it’s just a matter of time before Blizzard does the exact same thing to the warlock class as they did this class: take one spec(probably Demo) and just make it full melee. <_<
That was sort of an official choice for Demo during MoP with a special glyph.
It was not a proper tank spec with all the tank toolsets, but it was serviceable enough to tank heroic dungeons. Some were skilled enough to manage to use it to tank raid content on farm mode.
And yes, many do wish to have it back, even as a 4th spec.
They already did that - in fact, they surpassed that by creating an entire class based on the concept of ‘melee with demonic form’.
But here’s the thing which makes our community somewhat different.
Despite the hatred we have towards what was done to us, despite the bad blood some of us have towards the new edgelords, despite the complete dumpster fire state of our spec for an entire expansion…
We don’t outright blame those newcomers to the spec for what happened.
We don’t condemn those who love the redesigned spec or yell that they should ‘roll other class’, even when we don’t like how our spec has become.
We don’t spin the discussion on the new spec to become ‘everything was good until you people show up’.
We adapt, even if we don’t like it.
We change, even when it is painful to do so.
We survive.
Hell, we survived not just one redesign, but two - even DK took a pretty good slice off us when they first show up their rotting faces.
Perhaps the irony is how most of your community ex-SV supporters did not manage to live to their spec’s name sake - they failed the test of survival.
I don’t nor have I ever blamed those who like current SV and who currently plays it. The blame, falls on the devs that decided to delete(not change) our spec based on nothing but their desire to add a melee spec to the class. I don’t particularly care for the melee spec, but I’m not against it being a playable option within the class.
I’m against that the devs justified the deletion of RSV with the excuse that ‘‘it was just MM, but with different arrows, or traps’’. Which is a bulls–t excuse.
An excuse that held no merit simply because all specs were overhauled going into Legion anyway. All specs got the spec fantasy/identity treatment, except for RSV.
Some excuse this with ‘‘RSV had nowhere to go. It could not be taken further’’. Much like the above, this is factually wrong.
If they wanted to add a melee-option, fine. But don’t take away one of the few unique ranged options in the process. Do it by adding a 4th spec to the class. Or, fast forward to today, add RSV as a 4th spec instead.
That’s why a warlock background is very advantageous for me. Wrath and Cata were times that I “survived” by “being a warlock” in other “MMO’s” such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Battlefield 3. Funny you mention survival when survival means doing whatever it takes to stay alive. If a tornado is raging through, what do you do to survive? Being somewhere else, far away from it. The smart ones are going to QQ, especially once they properly analyzed the alpha and especially the beta builds for SLs. I was the dumb one for not QQing during Legion and BFA, but I’m starting to get smarter.
I’m retiring after S3 for Hunter PvP. Whether it’s temp or perma QQ, I shrug. I was absent for all of 3.1 and vacationed during Cata as a lock. It wasn’t until my sweetheart expansion, Mists, when I got stoked to enjoy the Golden Age of Warlock. WoW still has one more expansion left before its 20th, so there could be a new golden age for Hunter yet.
In essence, I’ve been down this road before. I got nothing against the new guys as I was new myself in WoD. I remember someone telling me that the only person you hurt playing a broken class that has lost its way–whether you agree or disagree that it is–is yourself, so at the end of the day, I don’t need to put anyone down.
Well, given those of us who liked ranged SV are the ones who lost our favourite specs, we actually are the victims here.
A) It’s been way, way longer than just July 2019
B) If you knew who Kindwolf was and how he posts you would understand that thread better
C) What a ridiculously scummy thing to do: bragging about frivolous reports. I’m not breaking any rules. You don’t get to just report people you don’t like for no real reason.
So now we are back to:
I wonder if we will ever get a mage spec that doesn’t use spells. Because, you know, apparently it’s OK if 2/3 of a class follows the core identity.
Contrary to popular belief, blindly and unconditionally accepting all change and never contending anything is not a virtue. It’s actually defeatist and counter-productive. You might be content with being a doormat but I’m not.
