Intentionally missing the point. Bad faith is bad faith.
They could, but Beast Mastery could also be melee.
I guess Rogues are nerfed as well since they have like no damage at range; Blizzard should do something about that too! And Warriors. And Death Knights. And Retribution Paladins. And Enchancement Shamans. And Survival Hunters. And Demon Hunters. And Feral Druids. And Windwalker Monks.
Again, intentionally missing the point. Keep the (bad) faith.
Two and a half years outdated. Moving on.
Exactly like Rexxar does now.
Fixed that for you.
Pure speculation.
Very surface level, but I appreciate the attempt.
More speculation.
Speculation part three.
Hunters had melee capabilities all the way back in Vanilla and even then Survival was mostly played in melee range using melee abilities.
And ranged Survival was one of the best specs for challenge modes.
As it turns out, tuning is independent on whether the spec is ranged or melee. In fact, the main source of SV’s high damage is Wildfire Bomb, a ranged ability that so poorly fits a melee spec that much of the spec’s playerbase has spent the last few years asking for it to be removed. So why is Wildfire Bomb being overtuned a reason to keep SV melee? We could just have ranged SV with Wildfire Bomb.
And this would be a nerf.
Out of all of those only SV used to be ranged. The rest started as melee.
What’s the point? That if it’s not a melee weapon then melee mains like you won’t get attached? Good. I don’t care. The Hunter class should be designed for Hunters. Melee brains have 12 other different varieties of swinging sticks around to get lost in.
I mean for more recent stuff you can look to warcraftlogs and raider.io.
This tier we’re in right now is the only tier SV has seen any significant representation as a melee spec and it’s because they buffed the hell out of Wildfire Bomb while crippling the rest of the class’s AoE with caps. Even then far more people are playing BM and MM despite the competitive disadvantage especially in M+.
Are you genuinely disputing the fact that melee SV is an unpopular spec? Even Blizzard admits to it and it’s exactly what all representation data has shown.
Lol? Rexxar is not a playable class. Rexxar is a lore character. The concept of class design and specs doesn’t apply to Rexxar.
I’m asking how it makes sense for a class that’s thoroughly themed around ranged weaponry and starting with a ranged weapon at level 1 to spec out of using a ranged weapon at level 10. No other spec has such a clear drawback in class power based on spec choice like that. Even for the other examples of ranged and melee DPS in the same class, Feral and Enhancement, at these those classes have melee weapons and not ranged weapons and they each have clear frameworks on how specialisation into separate melee and ranged playstyles makes sense. Meanwhile Hunters have you pick up a melee weapon off a vendor if you pick SV at level 10
Yes it’s my opinion, but generally if a game designer takes something very popular, spends a bunch of time and effort remaking it from the ground up, and produces something very unpopular, we call that a bad idea or at least a bad execution. People just make a mental exception for Survival because many in the WoW playerbase as well as the devs themselves place a lot of pride in the Survival melee rework.
Again with this? Melee SV being unpopular isn’t “speculation”, it’s demonstrable fact.
Hell, look right now when it has its highest popularity ever as a melee spec. It has an enormous advantage in M+ over BM (which is doing terribly right now) yet there are still far more BM Hunters in M+. Meanwhile in Survival’s ranged days even a slight advantage would lead to a huge lead in representation. In Highmaul, just 6 months before Legion’s announcement, SV had the highest representation out of every spec in the game. So yes, melee SV is comparitively very unpopular compared to ranged SV.
So? Why should we spend more time and effort trying to devote 1/3 of the class to melee fanatics especially when a) there aren’t many melee Hunter fans to begin with and b) it causes so many problems with SV such as the total lack of any thematic direction?
Hahaha, no they didn’t. What a ridiculously misinformed comment. SV, like all Hunters, had a ranged weapon and a fully-fledged ranged toolkit that scaled far better than their melee toolkit due to agility giving 2 ranged attack power per point (and SV had a boost to agility as well).
Melee Hunter was entirely a meme back then. SV was a ranged spec. It just had a couple passive melee buffs for situational PvP usage since you couldn’t use ranged abilities within 8 yards back then. Now you can and a ranged Hunter inherently includes “melee capability” so this setup is obsolete… not that modern SV in any way represents this old setup because unlike old SV it lacks a ranged weapon and prefers to stick to melee range.
I’m fine with the current iteration of Survival. Melee Survival makes the spec more unique than when it was a Ranged. Plus WOW didn’t have melee Pet Class so there was a void to fill.
I agree that BM would have been a more suitable option since fighting alongside your Pet fits the flavor of the spec but I can see why Blizz picked Survival. It was the “melee” after all but with BM being one of the most popular specs in the game I’m sure Blizz knew the uproar would have been much louder.
Surv did not get played more then BM or MM, they were 100% more popular then it was, hence the rework.
I tried out Surv hunter in wod when it was ranged, it was soooooooooooo bad, garbage 10/10 questionable spec that I can see why they reworked it. I found way more identity in MM and BM then I ever saw in surv.
What a ridiculous thing to say. There are 12 other melee weapon users in this game yet just 2 other ranged weapon users, and you think melee makes Survival unique? Only a melee main can post something so blissfully tone deaf.
Melee mains had Unholy to get lost in. We didn’t need another melee pet spec. Survival now only gets played if it’s absurdly overpowered, and even then at a lower rate than BM and MM. It was a stupid idea. Most melee mains like you who support it just stick to their melee class mains anyway so it made no sense to try to chase that audience at the expense of most Hunter mains.
Lol “many”.
The overwhelming amount of SV’s current playerbase is only there for Wildfire Bomb damage, and that’s independent of being melee or ranged. Aside from this tier’s overtuning of Wildfire Bomb, which is painfully evidently a desperate ploy to bribe people to play the spec, it’s routinely one of the game’s least popular specs. Very few people legitimately find appeal in the concept of a melee Hunter.
P.S. Didn’t you have a massive tantrum and quit the game when in BFA they made SV a lot more ranged centric and kept only a couple of melee abilities? Looking at your armory it does seem like you’ve done pretty much nothing at all this expansion…
Lol. Hunter was a ranged class before 7.0. Did you cry when fighting at ranged was the optimal thing to do as every iteration of every spec? Besides, what they did is make us be able to use our ranged weapons in melee ranged which was actually far better for us than what we had before.
Here are raid logs for a currently popular blizzlike MoP server. Almost every single Hunter is Survival. BM isn’t even that far behind. Now, yes, SV has a numerical advantage in T14 gear while on 5.4 patch, but it’s not that great. BM is pretty close for the most part. Nevertheless it directly contradicts your claim that BM and MM were “100% more popular”.
It’s not just MoP, either. You can see here that it was pretty popular for at least the 2nd part of Cata, and here that the same was true for WotLK. If we had any available representation data for other patches like 3.2 and 4.0 you would probably see high SV represantion there as well but I’m not aware of any still-existing sources.
At no point did Blizzard say they were reworking SV because of low representation. That wouldn’t have made sense because SV routinely had very high representation. In fact the one time they ever mentioned it they verified that they knew melee SV would have low representation because most Hunters want to play ranged and not melee, and they were expecting rerolls and new players to make up the difference.
Your entire angle on representation here is just based on your on faulty memory and assumptions, nothing more.
So you keep saying, but you really haven’t demonstrated much practical knowledge from the time. Not only do you refuse to elaborate on why you think it was bad, it seems like your only recollection of the spec was a particular passive effect ranged SV only ever had in WoD (which, again, was kept in melee SV in Legion) that would be annoying to deal with if you were fighting against SV. As I said before, I suspect you didn’t play SV at all but instead found it hard to deal with SV Hunters in PvP, hence why you see the removal of ranged SV as a good thing.
You can prove me wrong by trying to demonstrate your knowledge on what Survival was and how it works. Do you know what its unique abilities were and how they interacted with one another? Can you explain some basic mechanics of the spec? Do you recall any significant changes to the spec throughout WoD? Do you have any footage of yourself playing the spec or at least any logs?
Changing Survival to melee makes it more unique amongst the other Hunter specs than when it was ranged. That’s a fact.
Who says? Survival and Unholy have two completely different “Class Fantasies”. There’s definitely room for both and it gives Hunters 3 unique options to play with now.
Within the Hunter class it’s unique “via handicap”. It violates basic spec design by forcing the player to opt out of the most significant and iconic part of the class just to be a “special snowflake” that imitates most other specs in the game.
This is like granting Outlaw “uniqueness” by taking away Stealth. It’s nonsense class design. While it’s important for specs to be distinct, it’s also important for specs to sensibly build on top of the core class foundation. Survival doesn’t do that.
Don’t pretend this is a positive for Hunters. For most Hunters it’s a dealbreaking negative that causes them to avoid SV as much as possible. Even in this tier where they’ve tuned SV to high heaven to bribe people play it you still have most Hunters to take a major performance hit to play MM or even BM instead in M+, and in all other tiers melee SV was one of the least-played specs.
We did NOT need or want melee in this class for the most part and melee players did not deserve to get handed a Hunter spec that was already widely played and enjoyed just because Unholy wasn’t just the right variety of “melee with a pet” for them.
this could work. I wouldn’t want 2h to be removed from survival but i would love a 2h DH spec forsure.
I love using 2h myself but i think DW should be a option in the talent tree. same with 2h ench!
Not our problem or fault.
options aren’t bad.
I get WHY people say this but that a hard pas for me. Arcane is the only mage spec i have interest in so i wouldn’t care to see that go. However im not currently maining it and if they did do this i would adapt.
same.
we all continue to decimate your points yet you remain delusional.
Honestly I’d be happier if they doubled down on survival being this melee ranged traps and explosives expert. As it stands right now, you’ve only like 1 single target and AoE melee button despite being labled as a melee class, hell with aspect of the eagle you’re practically a ranged class with a better spellkick
Ehh I’m enjoying my sv hunter. I hope the next expansion makes the bombs build more baseline. And have more fun abilities in the talent trees. Not a fan of mongoose bite rotation. But I would like more cool dragoon like stuff with like spear throws/, improved harpoon hurling bombs and traps, Mastery giving cdr to Aspect of the eagle.
Would be nice for the talents, terms of engangement, and Hydra’s bite to be baseline too. Those are really fun to have in torgast.
Definetly one of my favorite mythic plus specs to play. And I just wish we could use our exotic pets in it. : / miss my devilsaur.
the Very first line in the original wow manual for hunters…
The Hunter
The Hunter is a unique class in World of Warcraft because it’s primarily a ranged attacker. Even those other classes can learn to use ranged weapons, no of them is as proficient in their deadly use as the hunter.
Pet does not even come up till the end of the paragraph along with moving restricting abilities.
Right you know better than the people that made the game, silly me. maybe because the caster could do whatever in whatever ranged they wanted (good or bad) where as hunter were useless in melee. (or a meme joke) and had to be at ranged to do their job correctly.
Key component wow sounds like just like "The most iconic part " oh ya what does that pet section say about pets… The Hunter Pet can then attack the hunter’s target and keep it occupied while the hunter engages in ranged attacks…
Because they gave us no utility that the ranged specs can’t also bring, while also adding more and more spread mechanics that limits how many melee you can bring to a group.
You didn’t play Vanilla I assume. Hunters carried melee weapons and could fight in melee when they needed. It wasn’t optimal but it also wasn’t useless.
Crazy how the game has changed in 15 years huh?
Casters used to use mana. Ret Paladins had ONE offensive skill. We couldn’t ride mounts until level 40.
Like I said…trying to use the Vanilla WOW manual to make your point is literally laughable.
i love the MELEE hunter its so fun. i got my 4 piece tier set finally and spend 99% of my time with my SPEAR spamming 2 ranged abilities fishing for procs its peak melee fantasy tbh.
