Why do people insist on keeping with these endless arguments rather than opting for a solution which would benefit everyone?
Why insist on arguing for the removal of MSV?
Arguing for those who liked RSV to just…forget it and move on?
Why say that we should just do to MM what we should absolutely not do to MSV?
…and so on.
Again, the devs caused this with Legion when they went overboard with the whole “changes for the sake of identity”.
Again, by all means, add something new to a class(MSV). But don’t ignore a sizeable part of the hunter community just to push your personal agenda.
And well, they have already done that. Lucky for them it’s still fixable. It just requires them to let go of the mindset that we should remain with the restriction of only having 3 specs, despite how they have now added a 4th playstyle to the class.
I know I speak for a lot of hunters when I say that it’s purely the melee that keeps me from liking it. I’ve said this 1000 times before, RSV was the only hunter spec that felt like a balance between pet and range.
Now you have MM witch is 100% range and no pet and BM which is almost all Pet and no ranged. The sore spot is that they turned the one spec that was in between to melee which a lot of clearly don’t like.
That’s why the conversation keeps going where it does and that’s why it won’t stop anytime soon.
Its not realistic for blizzard to give hunters of all things a 4th spec when they’ve avoided it in most cases. The feral guardian split occured when blizzard wanted to end having specs that could dps and tank, but couldn’t outright delete cat or bear form. That is why we don’t have 6 death knights specs they just made blood the tanky one and took away its dps. And like many of the legion reworks the new survival stomped out a popular and maybe better playstyle so you will have people who are rightfully upset about it.
The same thing has been happening with a lot of the legion rework specs, combat rogues are still mad about roll the bones, demo warlocks were mad about meta not sure now haven’t kept track, shadow priests had a huge campaign until recently about removing voidform to go back to shadow orbs. Survival hunters have a right to still be mad about their spec being thrown in the dumpster in legion to advertise for the exciting new legion class changes. To my knowledge monks in general are pretty mad, except brews.
If anything they should be making changes in the vein they have for most of the other classes where they bring back mechanics from before legion. Bfa hunter has been a travesty, I tried in uldir and I discovered two one button specs and BM. MM quickly lost its steady shot until aimed shot rotation after uldir but survival has been “I hit mongoose bite” for the entire expansion. If they want to fix survival they need to give it back lock and load and convert to proccing wildfire bombs. Survival was a dot spec that was mobile and had trap synergies. Modern survival is mongoose bite until you can’t mongoose bite dots optional. They need to tone down mongoose bite and give survival some room for more abilities and options so it can be an actual interesting spec again. Wildfire bomb should become the replacement explosive shot, because blizzard decided to give mm a different ability with the same name.
suppose i’m in the ‘i enjoy the melee hunter’ vibe, However, the spec needs a few changes to it to clean it up a bit.
also, wanted to edit quick because the entirety of time i’ve spent researching SL main ideas, and looking into SV, it seems every single forum post is about some wanting old SV back and the others who like it but want some changes to it yet.
I think this is a little pathetic at this point that this specific community name calls one another in every SV post and does the same argument time and time again. Would be much more beneficial to give quality feedback to improve the melee version if that’s to be going forward yet. As well, to give feedback on the 2 other ranged specs to choose from. Sheeeeesh, guys.
I wholeheartedly agree with how RSV felt the most in line with the balance between “hunter(ranged) and pet”. That, coupled with the specific theme of RSV as a munitions expert and trapper was the reason for why I played it continuously for the entirety of it’s existence.
I’m not questioning why(what the background is) people debate on this topic. I’m questioning the outcome, what people are actually trying to achieve, and how they intend to achieve the desired outcome.
I’m not saying that only hunters should get a 4th spec. But, what do you mean when you say “avoided it in most cases”?
That was most likely a big part of why they gave druids a 4th spec yes. But the main thing to take away is, rather than deleting a playstyle which a lot of players enjoyed(cat and/or bear), they gave druids a 4th spec option.
In short, more happy players in general. And yes, I know there are those who wanted Feral to keep it’s theme of being about both tanking + dps.
How would they’ve made a separate Frost tank and a Frost dps with enough distinction between them to meet the necessary criteria? Same with Unholy. And with Blood.
The main reason that it worked prior to Cata was because there were no dedicated core specializations that defined the central core of the gameplay. Only the base class served that role. “Specs” prior to then were just different talent categories that contained various talents that suited a partial theme of the class as a whole.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying that turning Blood into the tank spec while making Unholy and Frost the dps ones was the “right” decision. They could just as easily have gone in another direction. But, with the introduction of Core Specializations in Cata, that had to be applied to ALL classes. They delayed the split of Feral into two separate ones until MoP and we saw the outcome where it did not work out that well during Cata. Basically, they should’ve performed the split going into Cata, not leaving it.
Like I said before. I’m not questioning why people are upset. I’m questioning why people insist on opting for changes which would only serve to upset other players in the process. Instead of opting for changes that benefit everyone within the community.
I very much agree.
I just opt for changes on a slightly larger scale when I advocate for the 4th spec option. Because quite frankly, unless they perform major changes/reworks to one of the existing specs we have, it won’t be enough for the outcome to feel like the old RSV. And thus, bringing us right back here again as another spec has now been watered down/partially deleted/etc, in favor of bringing something else into the mix.
Back to my initial point. These endless arguments accomplish nothing. The back-and-forth does not/will never amount to anything that we can all be happy with.
I’m not sure why you consider asking for it to revert to something it used to be pathetic. Most of us spent a very long time playing that spec. If anyone knows what would fix it, why not us?
I’m not trying to stir the pot, but I told you why there are so many people wanting ranged survival back and why this debate is never going to end. I’m glad you enjoy the melee spec, but a whole lot of us don’t.
This discussion won’t end until they do something definitive, and they appear to have ignored hunters completely this expansion so you have two more years of MSV vs RSV.
Thats the thing though, I don’t think its possible to not have arguments because there are mutually exclusive goals in play. You have people who simply want rsurv back, and people who want msurv for whatever reason, and these folks come in with various flavors of this opinions such as “keep msurv but fix it” vs “msurv is fine” and so on. Its hard to have a discussion aimed one way when someone is going to get a undesirable outcome regardless.
I hope that survival will get a shadowpriest style change within this expansion or the next. I’d prefer sooner, but it looks to be the latter. A lot of these debates remind me quite a lot of the #removevoidform threads that were a staple in the priest forums until the rework. Whether that change makes surv go full melee or ranged I don’t mind as long as it becomes a relevant, useful, and interesting spec, as it is now it is not particularly relevant or useful outside of pvp and I don’t like that. And finally theres just the case where they rework a class and suddenly the buttons have the same names but the class itself is a different beast like many of the legion reworks. The point though is that there have been many playstyles but most of them did not receive new specs when they were replaced outside of guardian.
Basically any time blizzard could have made a 4th spec they have instead deferred to removing it or making it the new baseline. For example you have the weapon type ones like dw unholy 2h frost v dw frost which are generally different playstyles that sometimes have talented support. Then some things like that glyph that allowed warlocks to vengeance tank, or gladiator stance which very well could have evolved into another spec. Then there are just playstyles that keep popping up that aren’t always in accord with the intended use of that spec like the shockadin or catweaving which is more of a stretch then other examples but are playstyles that could evolve into a holy casting paladin(glimmerdin is kinda this) or the generic brand druid that is jack of all trades master of none incarnate.
Blood dps was mostly well developed as heavily strike based with having heart strike as a defining benefit for cleave. Its definately hard to separate dps/tank blood or even a hypothetical frost unholy without making abilities and mechanics so I generally agree with how it was handled. If the work was put in though I’d imagine dps blood to specialize in the traditional strike focused damage improved by good disease uptime playstyle. Tank frost would be built around physical mitigation and have slows and significantly more armor also more aoe options to give that lich king winter feel. Tank unholy would be built around magic mitigation, with some self healing, it would probably need a cd to convert physical damage into magic for better mitigation, but of the three its the biggest stretch, far easier to just not.
I think the best we can hope for is something most people are happy with. I don’t think a 4th spec is realistic because class balance is always in flux and a issue. But I do agree that a good solution would be something that is in between. Personally I think survival should have the weapon split that some of the other classes are getting like frost with 2h/dw and monks and fury warriors with dw 1h dw 2h. It wouldn’t be too hard to have some way to convert arcane shot into mongoose shot, and give survival a extra mechanic or two to encourage being close to the target. I’d recommend some kind of “point blank shot” that has low range and extra crit chance/damage in melee maybe even build that into to survival’s variation of kill shot while making killshot usable for melee weapon and ranged weapon.
I think the back and forth is mostly fine since between personal attacks and people rewriting history we occasionally see a good idea or two.
We want to keep melee as part of the unique identity of Survival but in Shadowlands and beyond, as we start to think about what classes should look like in future expansions, it’s important that there will be this sort of universal base of what defines a Hunter. All Hunters should have access to ranged attacks and Survival Hunters can be ones that specialize in melee but not necessarily at the expense of the universal skillset that everyone had as a level 5 or level 10 Hunter because that’s what being the class means.
Doesn’t say never, and it’s not exactly a ringing endorsement that SV is going to stay anything like it currently is.
Question: The Hunter community is still split on the issue of the melee spec even two expansions after its introduction. With your new stance of “class over spec” and more ranged abilities returning to the class, what does it mean for Survival in the long term?
"That’s a good question. I think part of what led Survival to a melee space to begin with was trying to differentiate Survival from Marksmanship. The rotations over the years had become very very similar — OK you might have a couple more magical-seeming shots in the Survival space. Beast Mastery was very clearly its own thing with its clear niche as the pet-based spec. But then you had these two ranged specs that basically did a lot of ranged shots in their rotation.
Some of that is actually fallout from the shift that we did in Cataclysm going into Mists. We moved from the old-school talent trees that could probably better support types of play styles and utility without having to build a whole spec around them. Having a tree like Survival that was about traps and utility and a little bit of melee stuff in there — that worked when it was something that you could put points into as a broader class initiative. But then turning it into its own spec ultimately led us down a path of duplicating a lot of Mark’s abilities.
We want to keep melee as part of the unique identity of Survival but in Shadowlands and beyond, as we start to think about what classes should look like in future expansions, it’s important that there will be this sort of universal base of what defines a Hunter. All Hunters should have access to ranged attacks and Survival Hunters can be ones that specialize in melee but not necessarily at the expense of the universal skillset that everyone had as a level 5 or level 10 Hunter because that’s what being the class means."
There is the FULL statement from Ion. Survival is staying a melee specialist, but is no longer going to be locked out from the basic ranged attacks that all hunters started with before picking a specialization.
If anything I’d think that some sort of hybrid range/melee is implied vs the true full out melee that tigerman keeps dogging me about. I could live with that.