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.