Hi. I boldened a few things in the above quotes.
Melee combat efficiency, what is it? Ratio of damage received for damage inflicted?
Now then, just what are the benefits of staying, not just entering melee combat range? Efficiency? The “hands on” style of engagement?
We see a similar degree of “confusion” (or just “choice”) in BM and MM as well.
Is MM “focused around” individually strong shots or layered amps? Is it about burst damage or sustain? Is it about consistently available tech (as per Trick Shots) or discrete function buttons (as per Volley)?
Is BM “about” Kill Command or Cobra or summons or Barbed Shot or main pet autos? Sustain or burst? Zookeeping or no?
Yes, SV’s tree is in a kind of flakey state, but that’s not particularly out of identity confusion. There are only 2 KC talents that aren’t in effect non-pet talents (as greater Focus gen means fewer KCs and TotS requires RS/MB to actually activate it’s bonus), and there’s no more need for SV to focus its whole self around bombs any more than for BM to focus its whole self around Stomp.
It’s fine for SV to feel a bit eclectic; its problem is simply a handful of lackluster talents and a few pathing issues.
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It’s not a real term, so I don’t know.
Best guess? “Melee combat efficiency” would be either…
- the portion of the time in which being in melee range would be optimal, and the portion by which one’s damage can be increased through optimal
—or— - the degree to which one can be in melee range before being significantly punished for doing so, and the portion of damage retained even under an average degree of being pressured into melee situations.
Survivalist’s earlier tone and wording would imply early Survival was more about the first. Historically, it seems to have been more akin to the second.
That is to say, it’s less that early Survival talents increased melee efficiency (as if there were any efficiency to be had) as merely that they reduced melee inefficiency (the punishment for being forced, at all, into melee).
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having got into the beta, im very satisfied with the changes they made to the tree and overall for sv
Ill give one actual post on this. Survival was only ever the definitive meta and most popular hunter spec 2 times in its ranged history. That being 4.0 bot/bwd and 4.3 dragonsoul strictly speaking PvE.
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Classic-TBC- it was garbage compared to MM (no one took it for exposed weakness be honest)
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Wotlk- it was actually OK at best, at the very start with low gear levels, but it got hard outscaled by MM very fast so its pretty bad.
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Cata- great all expansion except in firelands where BM was the best but still wasnt bad.
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MoP- all 3 specs were consistently close together enough aside from cleave, but BM was by far the most popular overall.
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WoD- same was MoP, at the start all 3 specs was close enough but BM had more numbers than MM+surv combined, until HFC where MM got its rotation “fixed” by the tier set making aimed shot instant again on top of surv getting gutted making it the least popular spec in the entire game even below gladiator warrior…
So you got 3 expansions PVEwise where it was actual or borderline troll tier garbage, 2 expansions where it was competitive but overshadowed by BM in terms of popularity, and 1 overall good expansion being cataclysm.
PvP wise its not much different. It was meta defining 6.0 WoD and thats really it.
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Classic-TBC- troll tier garbage
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Wotlk- brief period of time when TNT stunned it was pretty good, but quickly nerfed and quickly back to the garbage outside of arathi basin road fight montage videos trap rooting people 3 times in a row.
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Cata-MM was the best PvP hunter spec in cata with silencing shot and it wasnt even close.
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MoP-BM was by FAR the best hunter spec early MoP, MM was the best in late MoP unless you played HLS or scatterplay for dispel protection in MoP which very few people did.
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WoD-Survival was actually very very strong in early WoD with munitions slow being super cancerous and freezing trap having a stupidly low cd like 17 seconds or something making it the top dps spec in 2s with a rdruid, but this was nerfed and after that hunters in general were pretty bad.
So PvP wise, it was amazing 1 time in 6 expansions.
Now this is purely based on performance and not how much people vibed and enjoy its aesthetic/theme. Way more often than not, survival has been a poorly performing spec. This isnt a MSV issue this is just a straight up survival issue.
To take a spec, that was historically one of the least popular in the entire game, in a class that had 3 specs that largely played the same, and revision it into something completely different, its only a bad idea to classic purist and boomers who refuse change.
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yes and spears are a RANGED WEAPON. please just stop talking because you are making yourself look uninformed.
warlocks are crying because their damage took a hit with nerfs. their spec didnt get turned into a melee spec.
you started that. i simply proved to you that in life people make bows from everyday wilderness stuff and animal parts without having to go to…
i simply came in here to make the remark that melee survival, if it stays in melee form that it should NOT be the top meta hunter spec. ever. hunter has 3 specs. hunter is and always will be a ranged class. and as a ranged class with 2 ranged specs. 1 of these specs should always be top dps within the class.
thats what i said. and you being the argumentative person that you are got all sooky when anymore disagrees with you. remember you started this. i said my peace and you cried.
wrong, demonology was incredible in legion and was only overshadowed by affliction post nighhold being within the same class and also achieving the most overpowered PvE spec in the games entire history. Who wants to be a king (demo) when you can be a god (aff).
People are crying because they like to cry, just like you.
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right.
IT DIDNT GET DELETED AND TURNED INTO A MELEE SPEC!!! it got its damage nerfed.
your funny.
btw i play every class. its just that as i said a million times before and as others that actually have good ideas for the class is that no matter how hard you buff melee survival you will not get a good player base to play it. its junk nobody cares about it.
why do you cry when someone with extensive knowledge about the game and classes comes along and points out pros and cons and tries to help make the game better? why do you whine and cry?
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Look im not replying to you again since based on your other post, you dont seem very bright. Demo from WoD-> Legion was effectively deleted and redone the same way survival was. Melee or not doesnt matter. Going into legion, demonology was the top warlock spec until nighthold where it was still performing very well, just not nearly aswell as affliction. Its damage was never “nerfed”.
But because it was effecitvely remade entirely, purist and boomers still cry about it today the same way you cry about survival. This isnt my opinion, this is the truth of the matter.
whispers very softly survival was always unpopular for 85%+ of its life even as ranged. You’re on mega copium bozo. Accept it.
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at its height. ranged survival was the most played class. sorry if you cannot accept that but simple google search to various class distribution data websites will show this to you.
anyway im done here i cannot continue to help try and make this spec and or class better with ideas and opinions when you angry children keep crying about everything and everyone that disagrees with you.
bye.
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You/re joking right? Please tell me you’re joking here
Personal opinion and I respect that. My opinion is that hunters no mater ranged or melee should never ever use magic. Shadow magic to be specific. Fire , Poison, bleeds, animal companions are hunters toolkit.
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It was played during SoO because it had good tier set and only if it had bis off gear. In cata it was used in fight Madness of Deathwing, and in WoD it was bad spec. At start in HM it was played in some fights as well in BRF. Pretty much to summarize it for you it was never ever the most played spec. The most play it saw was in PvP
This crusade about melee and ranged has started by trolls. People ask about SV tips, You Beppels, Ghorak jump in telling people how its not supposed to be melee.
You don’t have ideas, you just have personal bias that you are trying to present as not a personal problem, instead like general problem of hunter community.
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While all true, I don’t think this quite touches upon the heart of the issue surrounding SV’s rework (when the conversation is had in good faith).
Was SV typically the least popular Hunter spec with the fewest stackable affordances? Yes.
Just before their rework, we’re the three hunter specs widely considered by multi-class players to play more similarly to each other that did the specs of other pure DPS classes? Also yes.
But could, taking the Legion spec identity pursuit in just a slightly different direction, RSV have been made as different from MM and BM as the latter two are from each other today? Also probably yes.
That’s where the real catch hits. Just as many would complain about (M)SV’s removal in favor of a new spec (say, Munitions) today, the added distinction derived from going melee did not, for many, exceed the cost to veterans from making the spec unrecognizable. Granted, had “well put the makings of the RSV playstyle in MM (if we have the time… and interest… and creativity)” been more than mere lip service, it probably would have gone fine.
But alas, it is what it is. Personally, I enjoyed some iterations of RSV quite a bit. But I also enjoyed, say, Venthyr Razor Fragments (+ Clusters, but that has no gameplay effect) SV even more than those favorite RSV iterations. Both feel, to me, equally “versatile” or “resourceful” or “eclectic,” falling short on some points while still being a pretty fun spec overall.
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You are absolutely correct. In a different timeline they could of gone this route and redid survival keeping it ranged. But it doesnt make it the “right” route, like many RSV purist seem to think. Both choices blizzard had were valid for different reasons.
They took a chance on hunter’s least popular and weakest thematic spec and tried to capture a new crowd of hunter fans with something entirely new.
And in my honest personal opinion, I would of had BM become melee over survival but again, I dont believe that to the “true” path either. Just another option.
(Another personal opinion, when they remade combat rogue → outlaw, it should of been converted into a ranged spec who uses guns/bows to pair with survival going melee.)
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The key difference is that Hunters were always worse off in melee; including Survival. Survival was just able to be less worse-off because the idea was that in PvP other people would try to keep you in melee range so it was helpful to be able to do a little more damage when stuck there.
If you did see how SV worked in Classic you would have also noticed it primarily used a ranged weapon and was given good capabilities to escape melee and get back to range.
This is a very stark difference to modern SV which wants to be in melee as much as possible unless it’s too dangerous, and lacks a ranged weapon outside of some animations. So trying to look to Classic to justify modern SV doesn’t make a lot of sense.
You’re just describing a worse Hunter.
It doesn’t make sense anyway. You’re going up against the same powerful bosses and getting unique and strong equipment like the other specs, not surviving in the wild with no resources. Also, how does a literal grenade Wildfire Bomb fit in with that? The word you’re probably looking for is “resourceful” but of course it doesn’t make much sense for the “resourceful” spec to be arbitrarily avoiding the most powerful resource a Hunter has i.e. the ranged weapon.
This is mostly revisionist history. SV and MM had appreciably different playstyles for a long time and ranged Survival was a pretty good spec most of the time. Like many others even those in favour of ranged SV you’re remembering its last patch (6.2) with how badly it was gutted then and assuming it was always that bad.
SV actually played much more similarly to BM than MM. People who don’t know the class that well focus on the MM comparison because they don’t know how they played so they focus on the immediately obvious thematic distinction i.e. BM depended on a pet while both MM and SV didn’t. Yes that includes the class developers themselves.
So I appreciate the attempt to actually go into depth and look at each era but you’re still making a lot of mistakes. The main theme is that you’re assuming in each patch that if a spec is not the best then it must be “troll garbage”. Did it ever occur to you that there’s such a thing as multiple specs in a pure DPS class being viable at the same time? If you go through all those patches you can make the same argument about BM or MM always being bad. Because the best meta option changes often. It’s unusual for only one spec to be viable.
In Classic it wasn’t so useful in PvE, true. That’s because back then they envisioned pure DPS spec design very differently. All the specs had the same general playstyle and toolkit with mostly passive additive changes to fit different roles e.g. BM being the solo spec, MM being the raid spec, SV being the PvP spec.
In BC Expose Weakness was in fact very useful and it was common to bring one SV Hunter to a raid with it. This isn’t just misremembered history. You can verify this with BC classic logs.
In any case when most people think of ranged SV they’re thinking of the version from WotLK onwards with Explosive Shot because that’s when it got an appreciably unique playstyle and identity.
P.S. For Classic MM was best for raiding but in BC it was BM.
Yes MM outscaled it with armour penetration but SV was not “pretty bad” even by the end. It was a capable DPS spec. MM outscaled it only by TOC and early ICC and even then SV was a fine option. There were still many SV players in patch 3.3. This is one of those instances I was talking about where there’s a clear “meta” option but also a viable alternative.
IIRC it was MM that was the best in Firelands, but again there were plenty of SV players because the difference wasn’t too great.
MM lagged a fair bit behind. SV was generally the most popular in this xpac so it sounds like you’re either making this part up or remembering it wrong. Go look at some logs for MoP private servers. SV is far and away the most popular. Back in actual MoP the gap wasn’t so large and it changed a bit throughout the expansion but SV was in fact usually the most popular option even in Siege of Orgrimmar.
You seem to be remembering the Blackrock Foundry meta. BM ws good because it got a good set bonus. Before the set bonus SV was actually a very capable spec before then and in fact for much of Highmaul it was by far the most popular spec in the game (not just in the class). Even the world first Blackhand kill included 2 SV Hunters although to be fair I think it was because of problems with pet pathing on that fight.
As for HFC: It’s not just that MM got instant aimed shot. It’s that the entire borrowed power reality of that patch favoured MM and wrecked SV. Everything mainly revolved around priority add burst and 2-target cleave which were MM’s specialties. The main thing was the legendary ring which intensely favoured specs with 2 minute cooldowns that lined up with it; MM had that, SV had none. Then, as you say, on top of this SV was gutted because they removed the initial tick of SS, which was an extremely suspicious move given it was just a month before Legion’s announcement.
Here’s my anecdotal experience from that patch: all the Hunters in my guild preferred BM and SV over MM but it was just not at all viable to play them. MM was just too crucial to a raid’s success. Our guild didn’t even attempt Gorefiend mythic when I wasn’t there that day because my priority add burst was so utterly necessary to kill it. There’s not a chance we could have killed the boss if I played SV instead.
Honestly, as someone who played mostly SV between WotLK launch and WoD, 6.2 was the only patch where I felt I couldn’t play it. In every other patch I could bring it into raid and not be too bad. In fact I did just that for most of them.
Like I said at the start it’s not right to just assume that because it wasn’t meta in that patch it’s “troll tier garbage”. Strictly speaking BM outperformed SV in Siege of Orgrimmar yet there were quite a lot more SV players. Hell, look at BM and SV right now: both are viable and MM’s actually better in a lot of the fights yet by far most are playing BM. It’s not always like HFC where there’s one clear best and the other two are garbage. In fact usually it’s not like that.
I do agree that SV wasn’t as good in BGs as a lot of people remember. It tended to be good in battlegrounds and when there was a skill gap but in cutting edge rated arena it wasn’t great (when you think about it this describes MM right now). The main barrier is that its DoTs especially Black Arrow could be dispelled, ruining its damage. This is why it suddenly got very good in WoD (and it fact it remained very popular right up until the 7.0 patch in PvP); Black Arrow got dispel protection and Serpent Sting was auto-applied by Arcane Shot.
Obviously this is a bad take because the premise is false. SV has not always been a poorly-performing, unpopular spec. You’re used to the post-Legion reality (+ 6.2 immediately following it) and you assume it was always like that. But it wasn’t.
This isn’t just some “Survival curse”. Ranged SV and melee SV were totally different specs with little in common so it doesn’t make sense to say that it’s just a “Survival issue”. Yes it’s hard to make a 3rd spec consistently relevant in a pure DPS class. But that’s what we had for quite a few years.
That’s why people like me are so upset with melee Survival. Because in fact they took something that was formerly pretty popular and widely-enjoyed and turned it into a largely unwelcome niche spec that just acts as a black hole for time and attention while generating mostly just controversy and bitterness. It’s not about “refusing change”. I was supportive of just about every change to the Hunter class up until WoD. It’s just refusing bad changes. Because as a matter of fact, while changes aren’t automatically bad, they aren’t automatically good either.
“Weakest thematic” is subjective. I would say MM is much more bare thematically and has been for most of its life. SV had a really cool theme of resourcefulness and opportunism with exotic munitions and utility.
In any case I don’t like this defense of the decision with “taking a chance”. Blizzard likes this sort of “don’t knock it 'till you try it” attitude but the tough reality is that some ideas are so obviously bad they aren’t worth trying and this was one of them.
This would be a bad decision IMO. It would detract from Hunter’s uniqueness, potentially upset a lot of existing Rogues who came to the class for melee combat, and it would cause tremendous balancing issues in that class. In all likelihood that ranged spec would be the best by default simply for being ranged unless they tuned the melee specs a lot higher. So the most likely outcomes for Rogues are either a) finding their formerly melee class suddenly dominated by a ranged spec or b) having that ranged spec be tuned down hard most of the time just to prevent the first outcome.
We already saw with Druids and Shamans that mixing melee and ranged in one class is a huge design and tuning challenge. It was very foolish to entertain bringing that situation into any other class in addition.
Not sure if you’re including ranged SV here so I have to add: this wasn’t true for ranged SV. It was true for some specific patches but the other specs also had times where they were in the dumps. SV wasn’t usually unpopular until melee SV.
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Something else to consider is percentage difference between all ranged and then two range/one melee. It’s pretty stark.
Absolutely.
As someone who enjoys the thematic space added in the Outlaw rework, that’s of course going to be a hard sell for me, but more than that, as with melee Survival before, I have to think that so severe a rework isn’t going to cost much, if any, less than a 4th spec, in which case… why not just position such as a 4th spec? With the changes to Sub (into shadowninjaboi) and Assassination (coating whole rooms in blood because that’s somehow the most efficient way to kill people?) in Legion, it wouldn’t have taken much for Combat to have differentiated itself. A Deadeye spec for Rogue could easily have been added later, much like a Pursuit spec for Hunter then or a Munitions spec now, to increase thematic range later if they thought player-favorite class aesthetics were nonetheless missing out potential player-favorite spec play.
P.S. When Outlaw was first announced, before I had seen any of its new abilities or that it was PirateRogueArr, my mind did jump very quickly to Torchlight II’s Outlander, which would have been kind of a Survival / Spec Ops Rogue hybrid.
The sample domain there was BC to WoD (i.e., specifically RSV and ignoring the far too wasteful/fledgling state that was Classic SV). And you’ll note I never said that it was an unpopular spec relative to every spec in the game. I merely pointed out that it was, over time…
When asked why DHs only have 2 specs, Blizzard went on the record to say, they wish they didnt make some classes 3 DPS specs (mostly hinting at hunters and rogues, maybe even warlocks/mage) and if they was created today they would be similiar to DHs with only 2.
Im not saying i agree with that, but because this is their reasoning weather its for balancing purposes or thematic consistency or whatever, this is the stance they have taken. It continues with evokers only having 2 specs despite the black dragonflight being an obvious under-utilized aspect of the class and a tank spec is what everyone is begging blizzard for.
If blizzard had to make hunters today, going by their modern new class design philosophy, survival or MM probably would of been scrapped entirely and not even exist. Outlaw/combat would be in a similiar situation. Its not a wide stretch to say these specs exist for legacy reasons today.
So being realistic, I dont think we will ever see another new class that features 2+ dps specs, and we for sure wont see a class that ever has 4 dps specs.
Man, you and me both. I don’t think it’s necessarily the best choice, but it could have worked. Like a Special Ops kinda deal? The elimination of simultaneous ranged and melee weapon slots is killing possibilities, imho. I also would love love love a pistols akimbo, or one-pistol-one-sword setup.