Survival Hunter Tank!?

Community General Discussion
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Tanking is a terrible fit for Hunters. It’s utterly antithetical to the identity of the class and the wishes of the people playing it. Yes, I realise that also applies to melee Survival but at least that’s still a damage dealer.

Now to address proudly incorrect people in the thread:

As opposed to every other spec in the game which is apparently just meant to fall over and die all the time ¯\(ツ)/¯

This is a great example as to why Survival is a bad name for the spec. It’s far too open to interpretation. There are people who want Survival to be a ranged DPS, melee DPS, tank, healer (yes, really), and everything in between. Every single one of those people swears up and down that “Survival” specifically implies their vision for the spec.

SV Hunter copium is looking at the game’s most abandoned, ridiculed, and controversial spec and calling it a job well done.

SV Hunter copium is also looking at a version of the spec that was vastly more played, widely-enjoyed, and respected and calling it bad.

How do you figure that tanking would make more sense for Survival?

While your post is correct, making it melee has also worked out really badly yet you tirelessly defend it on these forums.

“Any means necessary” except using a ranged weapon and sticking to a safe range like it used to and like the other current specs currently do, apparently.

This was always a bogus reason. It felt very different and unique. Just because melee brains couldn’t tell the difference between two specs that use a ranged weapon doesn’t mean they were the same. I can’t really tell much of a difference between Arms and Fury, or the Rogue specs. But that’s because I don’t play those classes. I don’t use my ignorance of those specs as a platform to demand nonsense reworks that I probably won’t play anyway.

They sure do look like Warriors/Paladins to me.

… So we are devoting an entire spec to being an earlier, worse form of Hunter?

Here’s the problem: specs are meant to meaningfully build on the base class. They are not meant to arbitrarily discard parts of the base class for the hell of it. Uniqueness via handicap is a terrible way to go about designing specs and it evidently hasn’t worked out for Survival since most people, even new Hunters, avoid it. That makes sense; you have a class that starts with a ranged weapon, you have two specs that build on that and serve as the only ranged weapon users in the game, and then you have the game’s 13th melee spec that asks you to throw away your ranged weapon for some reason.

Do you realise how ridiculous this sounds? It’s a primal Hunter that’s also casually throwing grenades.

Maybe this is the reason Survival has such a confused identity with a mix of various competing and poorly-interacting aesthetics; melee fans can pick and choose parts of it and say that whatever part they point to is the coherent thematic bedrock for the spec when in reality the spec as a whole is a bunch of random junk thrown together with no direction.

This is unmitigated BS and you know it. Ranged SV was a great spec and as such it was enjoyed by a broad audience; it saw magnitudes more play than melee SV could ever hope to achieve and, most importantly, it wasn’t the circus freak of class design like melee SV.

I know melee SV players like to cope with most of the game hating their spec by pretending it’s God’s gift to class design but it comes across as just a little desperate and revisionist so let’s just put a stop to that.

Terminal melee brain is looking how badly melee SV turned out and thinking what the Hunter class needs is even more reworking away from ranged DPS.

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I didn’t suggest anything. That’s what Blizzard said at the time.

That being said, I have several friends that like survival as it is now and do pretty well in keys as it. I think they ought to maybe add a 4th spec that is ranged that’s based off of the old survival but they definitely should keep the melee spec now since it had been established and some people like it.

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You trust the pet ai with the tank role?

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My memory of the spec has faded with the years, but wasnt it the ‘goto’ spec for PvP? It had a fab collection of traps that made it super good at pvp and back when pets could be picked that also did well against players, Im sure I remember it being like how Frost was for Mages and Affliction was for Warlocks.

No, I do remember, playing in Cataclysm and doing Tol Barad with snake traps that were just kickbutt good.

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And I have several friends who quit the class and even the game over SV becoming melee. That’s the thing about anecdotal evidence; it’s different for every person. What we do have is spec representation data which shows melee SV in the toilet since its inception.

So what? Ranged SV was the king of challenge modes. As it turns out performance is independent of being melee or ranged.

Ranged SV was better established and more widely enjoyed than melee SV could ever hope yet that didn’t matter and Blizzard removed anyway. By treating ranged SV and its players as expendable but protecting melee SV players that sends out a signal that melee players matter more than ranged players, and judging by the incredible levels of entitlement we often see from melee SV fans it seems that signal was received loudly and clearly.

It depends on the expansion. For a time around MoP it was quite bad in PvP because its Explosive Shot, Black Arrow, and Serpent Sting would just get dispelled all the time but otherwise it was usually good in PvP. In WoD it was one of the best PvP specs in the game; certainly the best in the Hunter class.

This is why people defending melee SV on account of its performance make no sense. It’s easy to make a spec perform well. That’s just a matter of tuning. It’s totally independent of being melee and ranged. Ranged SV, before they abruptly gutted it just a month before Legion was announced (I wonder why :thinking:) was a powerhouse but evidently that didn’t matter.

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I don’t believe it. I don’t know a single person who plays survival. You might know one. In 9.2 the only reason anyone will be playing it is if it’s completely broken, and it will be ww monk rerollers mostly.

All of these people saying survival is such an amazingly designed spec have definitely never played it. Your top like 5 abilities are all the same button.

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Obviously.

You skipped the most important part of the post. You know, where I said I think they ought to add a fourth spec that was akin to old survival whilst keeping the melee version intact.

Heck, they could even rename the melee spec. I don’t think the name overly matters.

I want folks from both sides to be happy.

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I know three, which can qualify as “several.” A handful would have been more apt.

One of them actually pushes fairly high keys as survival.

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I don’t understand how you talk down to melee players like this all the time and haven’t been banned.

At least your attitude helps ensure that Ranged SV will never come back.

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Evidence shows that ancient H. sapiens always used spearthrowers called atlatls though.

This means survival should be throwing their spear, not meleeing with it.

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If they don’t want to be ridiculed they shouldn’t post ridiculous things.

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This is the correct answer

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I see what you’re saying but honestly I kinda just want a fourth hunter spec for tanking that buffs the pets defense and health and shares it between the hunter and the pet.

Oh also it uses dual weapons.

Cause… Why don’t any of our specs get to use their dual wielding?

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So, we’re just going to throw out literally hundreds of thousands of years of hunter history, because you think bows and arrows are better? Makes perfect sense /s.

I’m sure if they had bombs, they’d have used them.

I’m not sure you realize how much people actually like the spec now. I mean, people are leaving BM for Survival like MM players left for BM after it got changed.

How exactly is it a handicap? It’s one of the strongest classes at the moment. Survival is in the best place it’s been in forever.

Yeah! It’s awesome!

Right… Survival in the past didn’t know what it wanted to be. It was part melee, part ranged. It had no real identity and wasn’t fun. At least now it’s fun.

Also, I just looked at a thread in the Hunter forums with people giving their opinions that started back in October, one that you frequented, and most people in that thread seem to disagree with you. The ones that don’t disagree don’t seem to understand how Survival is supposed to be played…

Also also, I have three hunters. The first one first raided as MM in WotLK. It’s been BM for the majority of its life, though. It’s probably the most played character I have. My second is the standard “High Elf” Ranger MM, just for the fantasy aspect, but it’s raid geared also. Then I have my little Vulpera SV. I didn’t like Vulpera or SV before I made it, but I figured I’d make one to get the heritage armor. It sat for a year before I did anything with it. It’s geared to 230 ilvl now and one of my favorite specs. I tried Survival in every expansion since I made my first Hunter, and this version is the best by far. BfA wasn’t bad, but I didn’t stick with it there because its performance wasn’t on par with BM.

Lastly, you seem to have a vendetta against the spec itself. If you don’t want to play it, don’t play it. Play what you want. Other people enjoy it.

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I agree that Survival should be tank, because finally the spec’s name would make sense. In it’s current form, Survival is probably least survivable spec in the game.

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It kind of does, actually, because the default context of the Hunter class is having and using a ranged weapon. It doesn’t make sense for a spec to “specialise” away from that to something worse and more primitive. And yes: it is worse. From a pragmatic perspective it’s worse to not have a ranged weapon than to have one.

Maybe it would make more sense if they rebuilt the Hunter class from the ground up and do something similar to how it was in Vanilla where we couldn’t use our ranged weapon in melee range so there was actually a trade off, but that would be a really stupid idea given that we already have plenty of melee representation in this game and the ranged weapon is the most unique and recognisable part of this class.

This was a silly response and I think you know that.

I’m not sure you realise how much people don’t like the spec. It remains the least played Hunter spec by an enormous margin in all PvE content despite its tuning strengths. This is something you can check on warcraftlogs and raider.io. We used to have wowranks data that checked a lot more than just PvE content (it scanned the entire guild roster of every player that was on raider.io at all) and we saw that Survival was the least played spec across the entire game by a pretty big margin.

Given its current tuning there’s no reason why it should be so unpopular. Hunters aren’t playing it because they don’t want to be melee; simple as that.

Laughable statement given tiers like Dragon Soul and Highmaul where it was the most played spec in the entire game with great performance, but never mind that.

Performance is not dependent on being melee or ranged. It’s easy to make a spec to a lot of damage. It’s just a matter of… upping the damage of each ability. Survival is handicapped because it must be in melee to do its full damage potential. It can do a lot of its damage at range compared to other melee specs, but for 100% of its potential it must be in melee. Meanwhile BM and MM can do 100% of their damage at any point within 40 yards. That’s a handicap by definition.

…any actual response, or will you just leave off with this proud naivete?

You’re trying to sell Survival to us as a spec with a coherent identity as a primal Hunter when it clearly doesn’t amount to that.

If you never had experience with ranged Survival, which is evidently the case given how breathtakingly misinformed this line is, you should just come out and say it.

“Part melee, part ranged”? Survival was just like the other Hunter specs in that it had a melee and a ranged spec and preferred to use its ranged weapon whenever possible. Come MoP the melee weapon was cut out leaving just the ranged gameplay. Otherwise it had a coherent identity as the utilitarian that used exotic munitions including poisons and explosives. If you want to look to a spec which doesn’t know what it wants to be, has no identity, and is a mix of melee and ranged you have to look to the current Survival. Maybe in the absence of any real recollection of what ranged SV was you’re just projecting melee SV’s shortcomings onto ranged SV?

As for which one is fun: that’s entirely subjective but we can tell one thing for certain: ranged SV was routinely an extremely popular and widely played spec while melee SV is more often than not very last place (as it is currently), so if either one of us is going to pretend our preferred version of SV is the most fun version I have a hell of a lot more backing than you do.

What, this thread?

Most of the highly-upvoted posts in that thread are against melee SV, including the number 1 spot. This is something we see across the Hunter forum. Is your new angle that everyone actually loves SV and it’s only a few vocal people on the forums who don’t like it? Because that isn’t going to work out for you. Remember the representation statistics. Remember what prominent WoW personalities have said on the subject.

What possessed you into thinking I cared about your life story? You could be an AI chatbot for all I care. The only thing that’s relevant to me is your takes on Hunter class design and they’re all bad. And when you say things like “ranged SV didn’t know what it wanted to be! it was melee and ranged and had no identity!” that tells me that either your memory is really bad, you didn’t play SV to any significant extent, or a mixture of both.

Have you been living under a rock? I did play what I want and let other people enjoy what they liked; I picked Survival Hunter because it was my favourite spec and I stuck to it for years. Then it was taken away and the spec was handed to melee mains on a platter. There is no “live and let live” when it comes to Survival. Why should melee Survival players be offered a level of consideration and respect that wasn’t offered to ranged Survival players?

Evidently melee hasn’t worked out for the spec considering its perpetually abysmal play rate. If anyone has a vendetta against the spec it’s the melee SV fans because at least on the other side of the argument we’re interested in Survival not being the circus freak of class design anymore.

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Who says? You?

Because of some misconception that it’s still the same spec it was when it first went full melee. Being the least played spec doesn’t mean it’s a bad spec, nor does it mean it does less damage. People’s perception of a spec relies heavily on past experience, and if they haven’t played with one recently, they won’t even think about using it until some popular, high-end player gets ahold of it. That’s already starting to happen a little. When people see that it can actually perform well, they’ll start using it more.

So, you’re a ranged elitist? Survival is a pure melee spec, with a ranged CD. That’s it. It’s not a ranged spec that’s forced into melee occasionally.

Oh come now. We both know the highest upvoted post in that thread was a snarky, slightly funny comment you made, and nothing really to do with the spec at all. All of 16 upvotes on it. The majority of people in that thread were rebutting you left and right. You had maybe two people agree with you throughout the whole thing.

And that’s the heart of the matter. You’re mad because they changed something you liked. Even though it was clearly not liked by the majority, because they’d have never changed it if it was as popular as you say it was. I see it in every response you make.

It’s time you move on and get over it. Seriously. You’ve been at this for six years, apparently.

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… the fact that we start with a ranged weapon from level 1, our class icon is a ranged weapon, and we have a large amount of baseline/shared utility themed around ranged weapons even if you pick Survival. It’s as central to the Hunter identity as Stealth is to the Rogue identity. Taking it away from one spec just to chase uniqueness is like taking Stealth away from a Rogue spec. It’s a handicap. It’s tokenism. It’s bad class design.

We are far too late into this to be blaming player perception.

In classic and BC, Survival was a a largely overlooked spec that had a few specific use cases but otherwise lagged behind MM in Classic and BM in BC for most areas of the game. No one really cared about it. Then it got Explosive Shot in 3.0 and it was immediately a very popular spec, and in fact would be the most popular Hunter spec for most of that expansion. Six years afterwards we were in MoP and SV was more or less at its peak popularity and it had remainmed a popualar spec that entire time.

We aren’t in the early days of melee SV any more and we can’t keep calling this “growing pains”. It’s evidently in a much worse state than it was when it was ranged.

That’s a Survival Hunter included on one of the first kills of Gul’Dan. We heard all the time back then about how now that Survival had been demonstrated to be a capable spec people would start flocking to it. The word “influx” was thrown around a lot. You can even see that chatter in the comments of the video.

That was five years ago and it amounted to nothing. SV did not become a popular spec. It didn’t become popular when it was reworked again in BFA despite WoW content creators tripping over themselves to praise it, or when it was one of the best DPS specs in the game in Uldir, or when it was the only option for rated PvP throughout BFA, or when it had some of the strongest uncapped AoE in Shadowlands. It’s time to accept that this spec will never be widely accepted. The playerbase might be slow to react to meta changes and player perception can have a lot of influence, but it’s nowhere near enough to explain away year after year of SV being the redheaded stepchild of WoW class design.

…yes, that’s the point. SV depends on being in melee range to deal its full damage potential. BM and MM do not.

Huh? You know I linked the thread and everyone here can check for themselves, right? The top reply was from someone else and it’s actually a very fair and level-headed take on the spec. He even likes the thematic approach aside from the melee aspect and he ultimately preferred ranged Survival.

Yes, I netted a bunch of votes too with a snarky comment but it was a very relevant point to make. Someone was talking about how great it is that SV can do 80% of its damage at range (which is in contrast to what you just said about SV being a pure melee spec BTW yet I don’t see you in that thread “correcting” them). I find it funny when people brag about that because BM and MM, as well as ranged SV, could do 100% of their damage at ranged. Somehow being ranged is a great thing for SV and a major selling point at 70, 80, 90% of the damage profile, yet suggesting 100% is suddenly unreasonable and “trolling”. I like exposing “Emperor’s new clothes” situations like this because it exposes how SV being melee is empty tokenism.

I’m looking at the thread and it’s only a handful of people on either side. There are certainly more than just me and two others on the side of ranged Survival in any case. You can keep pretending the thread was mostly in favour of melee SV but I did link it and people can check for themselves. It’s a reach at best for that particular thread and it’s certainly wrong for the broader Hunter forums. This argument has been going on for years which is why I asked you if your angle here was that everyone loved melee SV except for some minority on the forums. You ignored that question and went straight into nitpicking and handwaving about that particular thread. That sort of evasion might work for you personally but I’ll remind you that other people read our posts and they can see what’s really going on.

If you’re so interested in what’s going on over at the Hunter forums, here is a thread asking for ranged SV to return with 130 upvotes and 1.2k replies. In fact, if you sort by replies, most of the most replied-to threads are concerning SV and usually posts in favour of ranged SV get much better reception than those in favour of melee SV.

Yes: I liked Survival a lot and I wanted to see it do well. They turned it into something that does terribly. They turned one of the game’s more popular and widely-enjoyed specs into the biggest laughing stock of class design. As I said in my last post: some of us actually want SV to succeed and that’s why we say SV should be ranged. Because it once was ranged and it was very successful in that time.

So boldy stated, as if Blizzard doesn’t routinely axe popular designs in favour of unpopular designs. SV was not the only victim.

We don’t have to guess about SV’s past popularity based on what Blizzard did. You can find representation data from the past, for example:

You can also find commentary from the time as well as plentiful boss PoVs and even activity from active WotLK/MoP private servers. All signs point to SV being a routinely popular spec before 6.2 and then Legion.

It’s time for Blizzard to move on from their failed melee Hunter experiment. It’s their fault for messing it up; it’s not my fault for pointing out how they messed it up. Like I said, the ranged SV advocates are giving the most constructive criticism you can possibly give for SV.

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This is just a complete lie and you should feel bad for even having the nerve to write it out. Numbers don’t lie friend, almost no one is playing it.

Are you kidding? You just described what it is right now.

Too bad blizzard didn’t have that attitude when it was doing fine as a ranged spec.

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