Reading the original wow manual the current version does not fit the original designers vision of the hunters archetype either, like reading the menu and it says pizza and all of a sudden the new cooks decide pizza now equals goulash.
*even if there are less people in the game the ratio between the hunter’s spec’s have not been as bad as they have been for MSV vs the other two.
M+ is a major part of end game and the most popular. Plus this is the time period to judge since until now Survival was always mid to bottom Tier.
You know, while in the car earlier I realized how silly the survival spec concept is.
It’s a melee spec… that focuses on throwing bombs into the same melee.
A melee spec, that throws bombs at their own feet…
That is silly beyond belief. 
It’s pretty hybrid, it can spend almost all of it’s time outside of dumping focus at range.
Tbf it’s a conal ability from point of impact (so away from the thrower)…if we’re using logic in a fantasy game then most things don’t make sense, black powder, fan of knives shouldn’t hit multiple in the same direction, bladestorm. Idk, ammunitions/explosive is a fine enough fantasy and i enjoy the melee hunter/companion aspect, that we’ve as a species done in the past.
Well i think it’s cool 
I feel like it’s no less sillier than afflic or assassin rogue
You can take any bad spec design and give it god-tier tuning. That doesn’t suddenly make it a good spec design.
Tuning is independent of being melee or ranged. This is especially evident that SV’s current tuning strengths are entirely the result of Wildfire Bomb, a ranged ability that so poorly fits a melee spec that many SV Hunters have been calling for its removal for years. They could just have a ranged SV spec with Wildfire Bomb exactly as it is, and voila: all the same strengths but without the tacked-on melee.
It was better as a ranged spec.
Unholy Death Knight exists, so this isn’t strictly true, is it?
But let’s say it has to be an animal pet. Even then, this statement doesn’t mean much. BM uses pets and can also fight in melee range in full effectiveness. It makes little sense to then give us another pet-focus spec that uses melee weapons instead. This class doesn’t need “ranged BM” and “melee BM with a grenade”.
There are very few people who genuinely enjoy the concept of a melee Hunter. We can safely say that most SV players are there in spite of the melee and not because of it; particularly in this patch with its brokenly overpowered uncapped AoE. It never made sense to devote an entire 1/3 of the Hunter class for such a small niche of people; particularly since that 1/3 was already occupied by a fun and widely enjoyed spec. Since any melee Hunter necessarily depends on a pet, they should just offer a talented melee stance within BM for that group of melee roleplayers. That way we wouldn’t need melee SV awkwardly copying BM’s unique stuff to try to make it’s own identity. SV could then focus on the explosives and poisons instead i.e. the truly unique and exciting stuff.
Weird because ranged SV didn’t need to be spoonfed some of the best tuning in the game to advance beyond minimal represenation.
Lol? Are you really going to pretend that people aren’t just playing it due to the absurdly overtuned Wildfire Bomb + set bonus? Outside of this patch it was consistently one of the least played specs. Even now there are far more BM Hunters in M+ than Survival despite such an enormous damage difference.
They can bribe people to play melee SV all they want with excessive damage tuning. That won’t make melee SV a good idea.
That’s a weird way of saying ~73% of the Hunter playerbase chooses to take a huge damage loss by avoiding SV even in a tier where SV is spoonfed the best uncapped AoE in the game.
At ranged SV’s height in WoD (Highmaul in late January 2015) it was played by almost 80% of the class. That’s what modern SV’s representation could look like if it were ranged with its current tuning.
Expecting people to be happy with a bin spec that’s a burden in any group content because they can still play in the open world is a bad take.
Let’s not pretend that the melee isn’t the primary and most prominent reason.
“Player perception” really isn’t as big a factor and it doesn’t have that sort of staying power. Look at SV in this patch. It’s representation has gone up a lot especially in M+ because Blizzard gave it the best uncapped AoE in the game in an expansion where most other specs are capped to some extent including BM and MM. Survival’s capability was immediately obvious to everyone despite years of unpopularity. It’s still less played than BM and MM even in M+ despite being a lot worse, though, because again being melee is the primary factor.
SV is in a very different situation to other low-representation specs. Aside from this patch right now, SV has been consistently very unpopular. They achieved the exception in this patch by giving it some of the most spectacular overtuning this class has ever seen, and even then most are still playing BM or MM. While SV Hunters might be content with this as a solution and argue for such egregious overtuning in every patch from now on, that’s obviously not a healthy solution for the class or the game as a whole.
Unlike any other spec in the game, SV changed from ranged to melee. Other specs have undergone significant changes, some even near total reworks (e.g. Demonology), but none have undergone such a significant and abrupt role change. The initial reasons for the remake were dubious at best and it’s evidently had long term, severe, negative impacts for the spec. There are a lot of good reasons to make it ranged while none for melee beyond “it’s been too long to care”. It seems to me that Blizzard and SV fans mostly cling to the spec remaining melee out of pride at this point.
I’d wager that very little of Survival’s playerbase is there specifically for the melee, especially in this patch. People should think about this: how many people avoid Survival because it’s melee and how many people play it specifically because it’s melee?
Then it should be no problem to make it fully ranged 
This is a very poor compromise. Those abilities aren’t great fits for MM. It’s meant to be a physical damage sharpshooter/sniper. Even Arcane Shot’s inclusion is dubious. The only reason it’s still there is for nostalgia; it was actually going to be replaced with a physical damage equivalent in BFA (Quick Shot).
The special munitions stuff is a recognisably separate and distinct ranged weapon identity. Cramming it into MM serves to only gives us a watered-down and incomplete MM and ranged SV in one spec, all so the tiny niche of melee Hunters can enjoy an entire 1/3 of the class to themselves with no compromise whatsoever.
I know SV Hunters are accustomed to being handed all of BM’s unique stuff, but enough is enough.
Nope. nope. Not what I said. You don’t have to Mythic Raid with a dumpster spec. This is why we have more than one spec. Play optimally in the raid. Have fun in the world.
THis is what a lot of us are asking for with the new talent trees. Be it the Surv or MM tree give us a path to make something reminiscent of the old range survival spec.
Yet it has abilities ripped from either current or past iterations of BM, so unique taking BM abilities and renaming them. Along with being yet another melee spec in an overcrowded sea of melee, so unique.
Let’s see, Kill Command, ripped from BM, spirit bond, ripped from BM, with a small modification and made their mastery, but let’s keep saying it’s unique, even though it had to take abilities directly from BM.
Blizzard disagrees. 
Those who played survival back in the day (myself) know that it was a real gimmicky spec even then and had some OP aspects. So the complaints is strictly base on nostalgia.
Current survival needs some fine tuning.
For example I want a bit more melee,
And I wish I could toss my Polearm like a spear as a damaging ability.
I love the melee part of survival, I just think the spec needs to focus on the Aspects more, changing position as combat flows. I also would love the option to replace Wildfire Bomb with something else.
(Finally can we get an option to replace crossbow ranged attack animation with throwing weapons or blowdarts for more variety, and the chain for Harpoon with a rope)
Looking at the SV populations charts after it went melee, seems most players don’t agree with blizzard (not doing what the players what seems to be a trend with blizzard the last few expansions).
i am on board. anything that gets a melee spec out of the hunter class i would drop down cold hard cash to see that happen.
i been saying this from day 1 ----> hunter was and is the most popular and most played class. and at the height of its popularity ranged survival made the other 2 hunter specs look like trash. blizzard had to do something to get people away from the spec and hopefully away from the class… hense survival went melee. and guess what? it worked.
Well it worked I guess lol, got me away from wow entirely, only reason I’ve resubbed was for Classic (mostly LK coming out). *friend tried to pull be back in for a short time in BFA and neither of us lasted 3 months (both had it uninstalled before the sub even was up).
so funny when people praise melee SV like it’s the best invention in the world when it’s literally explosives + dots. literally the same thing as the old spec that people say was nothing unique. only the melee spec has BM skills and is about half as fluid as the old one.
I’ve made my stance on this pain stakingly clear I really dont feel like either of us are gonna budge on the matter so imma leave it here, hope they bring RSV back (not at MSV expense) so you can sleep easy and finally rest from your mission and I can enjoy playing both again