There is currently a lead in terms of DPS in favor of Survival with Marksmanship close behind and Beast Mastery last. However Survival AoE DPS is still supreme in comparison to the other two talent trees and all around is better at the arts of crowd-control and trapping due to the improved traps in Trap Mastery and an additional crowd control in Wyvern Sting.
MoP–mid-WoD.
It actually didn’t have an identity crisis when it was a ranged spec. That’s just revisionist history from Blizzard. It does have an identity crisis now, though.
I wonder if you would have said the same things about threads asking for melee SV before Legion’s announcement. There were a hell of a lot fewer of those than ranged SV threads now, after all.
Explosive Shot was basically the same thing from 3.1 WotLK to Legion prepatch. The same reasons for SV being good in WotLK still held in Cata, MoP, and WoD, only with Cata adding the prominence of Serpent Sting for SV’s toolkit.
Demon Hunters already have a melee spec, why would they need another?
You don’t need to transfer the spec to some other class, the game already has a sufficient number of melee specs. The only time that Hunter had anything close to melee was back in vanilla when they started out with an axe and had to level up before they could learn to use a bow. So my suggestion is this:
Give Hunters the option. Have some melee abilities on the new talent tree which can be chosen if that’s the way they want to play the spec but also give them the old system of Survival with its traps and so on.
This is how vanilla Survival worked , the point of melee was for the hunter to have something to do when their enemy was in their dead zone back in the day , now with no dead zone -it doesn’t make any sense why they need their melee abilities . They were always a ranged spec and never truely melee
This guy is like talking to a wall and for years he swore up and down that Vanilla Hunters never used Melee.
Fast forward to present day and you got people playing Classic Vanilla Hunters creating videos doing exactly what he said didn’t happen, he is full of it.
Rexxar himself is a melee hunter and probably the most Iconic one in Warcraft.
No, I never said that Vanilla Hunters didn’t use melee because that isn’t true. Vanilla Hunters had to melee sometimes because of their minimum range.
What I said wasn’t true was that there was an intended or particularly viable melee playstyle. Hunters were absolutely intended to use their ranged weapon primarily and they were stronger for it. Including Survival.
Yes there are videos of people playing purely melee, but that’s entirely a self-handicapping challenge that doesn’t represent an intended or potent playstyle. People did those videos in the original classic too, and they entirely depend on cherrypicked examples of fighting against unkilled/low-geared players. It’s like those Roguecraft videos with the Rogue killing people with only starter gear.
Pretending that modern SV is representative of anything in classic Hunters is a farce. It’s a night-and-day difference. Classic Hunters had ranged weapons and preferred to fight at range. Modern SV does not have a ranged weapon and prefers to fight in melee. That’s a fundamental irreconcilable difference. Ranged SV without a melee weapon was more representative of classic WoW than melee SV without a ranged weapon. The appeal to nostalgia to promote melee SV has always been a revisionist lie, along with the lie that SV was identical and exchangeable with MM. It’s especially ironic because the same people who appeal to nostalgia to defend melee SV also attack people like me for being nostalgic about ranged SV.
As for Rexxar: people love to screech “REXXAR” into every thread to defend melee SV but that’s also a bad argument for a number of reasons:
Lore characters are never representative of in-game playable classes. The classes pick and choose from lore characters. Tyrande is a blend of Hunter and Priest fantasies but you don’t see Hunters running around using holy spells. Lor’themar has Hunter abilities as well as shield-based abilities but you don’t see Hunters running around with shields.
Rexxar’s primary contribution to the class is pets, not melee weaponry. In fact Rexxar is largely thematic backing for the Beast Mastery spec, not Survival.
SV is a very poor representation of Rexxar in any case. Rexxar dual-wields while SV is strictly 2-handed. SV also mixes in ill-fitting elements like Wildfire Bomb and Serpent Sting which are utterly unrelated to Rexxar.
We actually started off with a ranged weapon as well; a bow or a gun depending on the race. It just took some levelling before getting Arcane Shot (although Arcane Shot was actually extremely weak; most of the damage came from Auto Shot) while we had Raptor Strike at level 1.
What’s remarkable was that even with this setup there wasn’t really any confusion that Hunters were a ranged class. People picked the class and played primarily and extensively with the ranged weapon from the start. This is likely because the supporting material surrounding the Hunter class, e.g. the class descriptions and manual/website entry, were very clear about Hunters being unique specificually because of their use of ranged weapons.
While many SV mains agree with this, many are also opposed because they know that if you offered melee and ranged within the spec it would see an influx of players and they would mostly pick the ranged option. It’s a rare instance of self-awareness that they’re careful to avoid most of the time.
Yep this is absolutely true. You will often see melee SV Hunters try to frame SV’s use of melee as a unique strength. Even the Hunter wowpedia page says something like “SV is the most versatile spec because it can do damage at any range”. But of course that’s nonsensical: Hunters after MoP can use their ranged attacks anywhere within 40 yards without a minimum range restriction. So SV is in fact the only Hunter spec that can’t do maximum damage at any range. It’s a unique weakness.
The primary melee SV talking point in response to this is arguing purely from a thematic standpoint; it doesn’t make sense in real life to be shooting from a bow at an enemy right infront of you so you can just pretend SV is better off in melee range and is uniquely advantaged even though that isn’t actually the case mechanically.
I think they could just add a talent to the new trees that lets you use a ranged weapon as survival. Raptor strike becomes raptor shot, etc. It could be very fun. As a talent, it becomes an option. Melee still exists for those who like it, but ranged comes back with the same toolkit as melee, only slightly modified for ranged.
2 sv hunters in world top10 dps and these “hunter should be ranged” people are still doing blabla. SV is fine as a melee spec. If you like to play with your pets and doing solo contents? Go BM. You want to be a bad looking sniper? Go MM. And Leave sv as it is. What sv needs is some real defensive as melee. Every other melees have 2-3 short defensives.
You think there are too many melee specs? But there’s none fighting with a pet, and that’s the uniqueness of sv.