Uh… ok, what about mage then? Three ranged DPS specs. Frost, Arcane and Fire. How about Rogue? Three melee DPS. (Ok, Pirate… I mean Outlaw, has pistols. I dropped Rogue when they changed Outlaw, so maybe it’s some kind of ranged/melee hybrid?)
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Most people in time learn that being unique does not automatically mean being good and that you can make something a lot worse if you chase uniqueness over everything else.
Believe it or not, you can have 3 ranged specs that feel different to play. No one is going around saying all the Mage specs play the same to one another.
Ranged combat was still the central part of the class.
Go read the material from the launch of the game:
https://i.imgur.com/kBVr5Uc.png
Blizzard very much thought of Hunters as a ranged class right from the beginning.
I know from other discussions you’ve seen this before and I have no doubt you’ll just once again quietly drop out of the thread and never reply, only to start up again in another thread.
No, phasing out the melee aspects like they ended up doing was the right idea. Survival was at its best as a purely ranged spec.
What about running into melee and swinging a 2-handed weapon around fits the Goblin engineering theme? Ranged Survival fit this much better. You clearly like the Wildfire Bomb aspect of the spec, yet that aspect hardly fits being melee at all. They could just make ranged Survival with Wildfire Bomb.
To be honest the fantasy and core idea are pretty flawed too.
At it’s core, they took the spec that was always meant to be the resourceful opportunist and made it stick to melee range i.e. totally missing the point of the spec.
As for the spec’s fantasy: it’s a mix of incompatible elements including melee skirmisher attacks more fitting of a Warrior (Raptor Strike, Cleave - I mean, Carve), exotic munitions more fitting of the old ranged Survival (Wildfire Bomb, Serpent Sting), and pet-based attacks more fitting on BM (Kill Command, Coordinated Assault). There’s no underlying theme here. Why is a spec that’s supposedly meant to be a companion of the pet also throwing grenades at point-blank range?
Call me crazy, but I would rather we try to make Survival feel like a Hunter and not a Warrior.
This is very ironic given the perpetually low population of Survival Hunters.
That tends to happen when Blizzard removes specs people enjoy.
That’s not what SV is back to. SV used to be able to deal its full damage potential at ranged. It can no longer do that.
I know the point you’re trying to make and I agree with it: I find it hilarious how after all is touting of how melee Hunters are so great the melee spec has hardly any melee left in it. But it’s important to note current Survival still has to be in melee to deal its full damage potential which is unlike every previous iteration of every Hunter spec.
Hunter specs should not be sacrificed to appeal to people who don’t like Hunters. You should have gone with one of the wealth of melee options in the game already.
At most they should have made a melee option within BM i.e. a talent that replaces ranged abilities like Cobra Shot with melee ones like Raptor Strike. That way the melee roleplayers like you can be satisfied and the real Hunters don’t lose an entire spec.
Comparing Nathanos to Rexxar is bizare, by the way. Nathanos is very much a ranged weapon user and nothing like Rexxar.
Most likely: you had developers who were very unenthusiastic about Hunters to the point where they couldn’t recognise any nuance beyond “they all use a ranged weapon”. Combine this with a misled and reckless class design philosophy of “every spec needs to be as distinct as a different class” and more enthusiasm for designing melee specs and you get a Hunter spec turned melee.
What a weird thing to get attached to. ES weaving was a lazy and uninteresting mechanical “trick”. It was a terrible way to add a skill cap to a spec because it was unintuitive. It’s not obvious to a new player that using Explosive Shot as soon as its available can be a bad thing due to DoT clipping and it really interfered with the flow of the spec. You might have a valid complaint in saying that ranged SV was too easy but thinking that the ES clipping was some great mechanic that made the spec so much better is wild.
“Besides 3-4 core DPS abilities”?? That would be almost the entire core gameplay, so yeah that would actually be pretty substantially different to MM. What kind of useless argument is “if you ignore everything that’s different, they’re the same spec!!”?
This is true, but at least in those classes they were established as melee specs from the very beginning and have a sizeable melee-preferring following built up over years. With SV they shoehorned a melee spec into a class that was previously entirely ranged, so not only are they having to deal with the bitterness of the people that liked the old Survival but they are also trying to sell a melee spec to a class full of people who play it specifically for ranged gameplay.
Why? Hunters were defined around the ranged weapon from the very beginning. It makes sense to have a class focus on that and for that class to have specs that focus on different aspects of ranged weapon gameplay.
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Melee Survival just feels like a strange, bargain bin version of Outlaw Rogue to me. They’re sort of lacking their own identity.
Shame, too - you could totally tap into the Aragorn / lone ranger aesthetic and go to town with that.
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I understand your grievance, I honestly do. I started playing in WoD launch and right away got very attached to Survival, I mained the spec throughout the whole expansion and I wept when the changes were announced.
At first, I decided to stick with Survival entirely out of stubbornness. But I honestly ended up liking our new Melee Survival.
I do have never considered Ranged Survival and Melee Survival to be the same spec, they simply share their names just like Paladin Protection and Warrior Protection do.
My biggest dream is for Ranged Survival to one day come back as a fourth spec, but I see the chances of this happening anytime soon as very small to none at all.
So rather than reminicense about the good ol’ days I will instead advocate for Melee Survival to at least get the sorely needed updates it needs.
If we cannot have Ranged Survival, lets at least fight and bring our voices up so that Blizzard gives us a GREAT Melee Survival!
So yeah. I know how much that ol’ wound still hurts. But please let’s not derail the post.
This post is about reminding blizzard that Survival is currently the ONLY spec that has yet to recieve even ONE mechanical update since the start of alpha and beta!
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Well all be darn, there he is. I was wondering when you would reply to this thread 
Had me worried there for a good minute because you know a Survival Hunter topic isn’t a thread without the Legendary Bepples the Great input. 
SV doesn’t really deserve any attention in beta. It’s a failed experiment that has been the least popular spec in the game for 2 xpacs in a row now. Outside of returning it to the actually fun and useful ranged version I don’t care what happens to it.
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This is VERY reminiscent of the Old Shadow vs Legion/BFA Voidform discussions. We see how that went. They MAY be considering it for Survival in the future.
When you make a bold move like that to change a spec from range to melee, you’d expect the spec to allow a little “time in the sun”. It seems you want to take responsibility for your creation to make sure it succeeds and is competitive.
Its very puzzling as to why so little attention is given to it. So its not surprising to start questioning Blizz as to what was the point then to change to melee?
I hate these statements… they’re so factually incorrect. You have made a post about a spec that you want to change and have a lot of people telling you it’s fine the way it is. Saying “they don’t care about our feedback” is obviously not the case. I’m not saying Blizz is perfect, but if you have people actively disagreeing with you, then your feedback is probably in the minority or close.
Instead of being both entitled and salty about it, why don’t suggest changes to see what people actually think about the spec. Crying about it on the forums doesn’t give anyone a direction or incentivize actual change.
If you spend five minutes reading instead of going directly to raging you would understand that my real issue is how little development time Blizzards is giving to Survival.
Survival is the only spec in the game that has not recieved a SINGLE mechanical change throughout alpha or beta <— This is my issue.
I am neither in team “ranged” or team “Melee” Because I consider myself part of both. I loved and mained Ranged in WoD, and I ended up also liking Melee Survival in legion. Do you people honestly beleive it is imposible to have liked both versions of Survival?
I do not care either if Blizzard decides to return us to Ranged or stick to melee, what i care is that they at least give us the updates we deserve!
I feel I have spend the entirety of this post trying to defend myself from both the Melee lovers and the Ranged Lovers. if one group is not trash-talking me then the other is.
ALL I WANT ARE UPDATES FOR MY SPEC! you guys can keep your gang war out of my post.
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Make Surv an official Tank Spec. Seems like a no brainer. Hunter fights along side pet. Together they use natural survival and through their bond they can tank it up with the best of em.
Hunters get a melee spec and tanks become more plentiful than ever.
I already tank the floor good enough with my face.
On a serious response: I do not see Survival ever changing from a dps to a tank.
I am also really unsure of how I would feel about it if by some insane hiccup of the matrix it ended up happening.
Not saying your idea is bad, I just don’t honestly know how I would feel about it as a current Survival main that has never tanked.
Never seen such in fighting for a class before. Melee survival really hit a nerve with a lot of hunters and it is understandable. However I agree with the op melee survival needs help and instead of trashing it and wanting to bring ranges back they could just add ranged survival back as a fourth spec. But don’t trash the one you don’t like. I like melee survival and And I want all hunter specs to be improved , SV included the clunky ness is weird
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I had consistent 90th-95th percentile parses as SV in both Cata and MoP, i know how the spec worked.
It felt very good to pull off and yes subtle ways to improve your gameplay feel great and is what’s been clearly lacking in the game as of late, specially in pre-borrowed powers/RNG eras of the game where Warcraft Logs was the end game once you had reached BIS gear (because it was reachable). Dragon Soul, for all its numerous flaws was probably the point i had the most fun raiding because of this.
Have you ever stepped outside of a raid? You realize there’s more to a spec than just their damage rotation right? What’s the point of having two IDENTICAL specs outside of their 4 primary damage buttons?
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I’m sure you were desperate for an opportunity to humble-brag about your parses, but unfortunately this statement makes no sense in context given nothing I said questioned your knowledge of the spec.
It is good to have subtle skill caps. It is not good to achieve that through unintuitive game design oddities.
Example of a good skill cap: BM having multiple cooldowns and getting maximum effectiveness when it lines them up. That makes sense and it’s intuitive; combining damage cooldowns multiplis their effects. Then you can think about how to line them up with certain times in the boss fight while also not losing cooldown usages over all. It complements the spec’s playstyle in a way that feels perfectly natural and it adds an element of dynamism to the playstyle.
Example of a bad skill cap: Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting scaling off spell damage instead of attack power in classic. Yeah, it makes some level of sense given those spells actually do damage in the form of a school of magic, but what doesn’t make sense is the rest of the class plays into physical attack power and that’s what our itemisation focused on. The skill cap here is also just a matter of knowing that this is how they work; once you find that out it doesn’t actually make anything more difficult in any dynamic sense.
Explosive Shot clipping itself is an example of an unintuitive skill cap. You get the Lock and Load procs and are encouraged to use them right away, but there’s a hidden caveat that makes you instead wait some time between casts. It’s not immediately obvious that this is how the game works, especially considering we already had some forms of damage-rolling dots in the game while Explosive Shot still worked this way. Once you do find out this is how it works, it changes your gameplay in a very minor, static manner. It doesn’t necessarily make the spec any harder to play and there isn’t any management beyond “wait a bit between casts”… which just interferes with the flow of the spec when it’s otherwise centred around “Always Be Casting”.
I understand wanting there to be skill caps. Survival was an easy spec. It was an easy spec before and after Explosive Shot stopped clipping itself. The point is that this mechanic a) added very little management on top of the core spec and b) it did it in a way that didn’t feel intuitive and generally made the spec feel worse. There were much better options to consider than this. For example, Black Arrow was a DoT that gave you chances at Lock and Load, which was a proc that gave you more single-target damage. They could have added a CDR mechanic to Black Arrow which allowed it to be applied to and maintained on multiple targets. This is a good skill cap because it’s intuitive: more Black Arrow ticks = more Lock and Load procs. There’s a clear reward and it requires management to achieve it. It works with the mechanics of the spec and not against them.
Even without that, though, Survival still felt better in MoP and claiming it was worse or even dead because you no longer had to stop between Explosive Shot casts is just plain weird. It had more focus regeneration making it flow better in its baseline form and it had additional abilities from the new talent systems while keeping all the best elements of its Cataclysm talent tree. There is a good reason why people generally refer to MoP as the peak of the spec.
The primary difference between specs of a pure DPS class is how they deal damage. Utilities are generally things that get shared between specs for the most part. Fun fact: specs are actually meant to share some things from the base class since, as their name suggests, they are specialisations of a class. Crazy, right? It’s actually NOT necessary to make specs feel so completely different to one another that they feel like different classes. In fact, that’s a bad thing; such a bad thing that Blizzard is now actively trying to move away from that design.
This is why Survival right now shares the vast majority of its utility with the other Hunter specs and most of the difference does in fact come in how it deals its damage.
The Hunter specs weren’t identical because they all had traps and aspects, for crying out loud.
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I used to really like the old ranged Survival. I’m not a huge fan of the new one. My only issue now is that MM is forced into not having a pet. And I liked it better when it was an option. Because MM is a glass cannon and could use the pet to tank. Now it’s a question of do you want to be 10% weaker? Or have a pet and have better survivability? I’d rather just have all 3 specs have them like Warlocks. It’s class flavor is all I’m saying.
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The differences between rogue and mage specs are distinct though. Sub has a bigger focus on stealth, Assassination has a bigger focus on bleeds and poisons, outlaw is kindve like a warrior/rogue mix with some ranged attacks. Mage specs speak for themselves, they all play differently and use different magic types.
I couldn’t ever figure out the identity of survival when it was ranged…like black arrow? Whats a black arrow have to do with surviving? It was so strange and felt like a black sheep. Having a melee spear with beast companion spec sounds really cool, and has a distinct identity to it, it makes more sense for the spec name too because its as if theyre down to their melee weapon out there trying to survive. I just wish the spec was designed better.
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BM and MM already fulfill the fantasy of being a ranged hero with a bow or gun. There isnt much more you can do…unlike a class that uses magic like a Mage where you can distinctly notice the difference between specs by the type of magic theyre using.
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The big problem here is called Serpent sting, 9 seconds average duration makes the spec clunky af, it needs to be longer, like rupture, or be applied via pet attacks or raptor / mongoose, or better: make wildfire infusion baseline and let the Green bomb to hit with Serpent sting all the targets.
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My suggestion, bring back the triple axe throw… It felt amazing.
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