Ultimately, though, that warrant breaks down with even just the addition of any new classes, as specs on new classes will add just as much (more, really, pound for pound) stress to balancing. Moreover, a first spec of any given new class is of course going to be vastly, vastly more expensive to develop than an additional spec of an already existent role of an already existent class.
The point of interest to me is the efficiency in meeting a particular strike zone. If someone loves the aesthetic of a Hunter but just doesn’t care for BM’s pet focus or zookeeping or Frenzy upkeep (or just finds there to be little that can be layered atop that) and doesn’t care for the hard casts on MM and doesn’t want to go melee, that’s a much easier fix than “I’ve got a need for speed that only a low-cooldown damaging dash can fix, and only if it comes with wings!”
Now, the second may add an enjoyable experience for a larger group of otherwise unsatisfied players than the first, but it’s also far more costly.
If not for the excuse to wag about additional customization options and “new class” and “new race” (though one and the same in this case) each being so much easier a sales soundbite than “new specs,” I have to wonder if we’d have gotten Evoker at all over, say, a 4th spec each for Warlock (as once fabled to be in consideration, iirc), Hunter, and maybe Rogue, which would collectively still have cost probably far less than those two specs of Evoker even if they hadn’t involved a new race or new tech.
:: Full Disclosure: I was also a fan of the original DK design paradigm in which each spec could do everything, just with different perks and niches. I’d have loved to see a BM Hunter be able to tank mild to moderate content, for instance, with an appropriate selection of talents, or for a Combat Rogue to co-tank/ghost-tank (in place of the frequent CC utility so available to Subtlety CheapShotDance and Assassination Mass-Garrote, etc.), or for Outlaw to be able to go dual-swords with zero pistol use or sword-and-gun or akimbo.
Ill be more specific. ALL 3 specs played almost exactly the same even at the height of survivals glory days in cata.
You pressed SS once and had it auto refresh either cobra shot (bm/surv) or chimera shot (MM)
You pressed your spec primary off cd. Chimera shot, Explosive Shot,Focus Fire
You pressed your spec filler off cd. Kill command, Black arrow, aimed shot(if instant pref)
You pressed your class filler if the above are on cd/not available. Steadyshot/Cobra shot, and Arcane shot.
Yes each spec has small nuances overtime (like staggering explosive shots or not clipping focus fire with BW) but the general gameplay pattern idea was pretty much the same. This isnt revistion history at all. Hunters specs didnt get wildly different until WoD where it was pretty much disliked.
No im not making this assumption that its bad, Im saying when its bad, its bad. Survival was garbage all of classic, C tier-support niche garbage in TBC, hard outscaled in Wotlk past naxx which was the majority of the expansion. When its not garbage and actually decently balance against the other specs, such as in MoP/early WoD, I said as much.
People only played survival on fights where there was pet pathing issues, BM was the most popular consistently through mop. MM lacked cleave making it the least popular but ST wise they was pretty close all expansion.
I went off memory at first, but unless theres an error the warcraft logs for highmaul show this isnt true. Survival was popular in PvP by a large margin at the time due to being overpowered as hell, but in raiding it was the least popular hunter spec for normal, heroic, and mythic. Again Im not entirely sure if this is accurate since I thought WW monks was way better at the time, but I could be wrong.
No but its right to assume when a spec is only being played when its overpowered, its not a very popular spec in terms of fun. BM has seen its ups and down, but its consistently the most popular spec for hunters
Antorus is the best ancedote for this. BM was one of the worst performing specs dps wise in the entire game at the time but it was still top 3 for most played even when MM significantly outperformed it. Same was true for ToS. In nighthold when it still did respectable damage, it was only played less than havoc DH which was the new kid on the block. People love BM.
And this was the same for expansions prior to legion. BM even when it isnt the best spec or even when its an objectively terrible spec, is still extremely popular from low end content players to competitive ones regardless of its current patch strength.
Thats not true for survival. When survival is in the dumps, or even when on even playing field, those who are not its diehard enthusiast are not clamoring to play survival as a main or even as an alt. Only when its the absolute best spec like most of cata, or when pet pathing issues on certain fights prevent them from playing BM.
On PvP, MM was consistnetly the competitive hunter spec due to silencing shot until MoP where BM was giga OP with stampede meta, and once that was nerfed, MM went back to being the primary PvP spec. Survival was never “the” spec until WoD S1.
People like you are are the reason it generates mostly controvery and bitterness because you, the small subsection of RSV fans,cant let the current MSV fans just be happy.
This is me speaking as someone who liked RSV. I enjoy pet classes and played HLS back in mop with an IRL friend to get my first 2200 rating and elite set as survival only. Survival has always been unpopular. If it wasnt due to pre wotlk it was actually terrible dps, its because people just generally didnt like it. Making it melee didnt change that positively or negatively.
The first iteration of MSV was objectively bad because because it was actually badly designed. The spec has terrible cohesion and the mastery actively made it worse. It was a bunch of plate spinning buff maintence stuff and tight windows that made it generally unfun.
BFA rework #2 fixed most of the glaring issues and made it a much more fun spec. Does it still have issues? ofc. They took flanking strike which was thematically super cool and replaced it with kill command. Giant L. They removed a ton of fun abilities like caltrops and throwing axe but kept steel trap. Talent balance in SL+ BFA is extremely poor with really only one choice between BoP and WFI.
It wasnt bad because its melee. Thats what you dont understand. RSV for most of its life suffered this same fate. It was legitimately poorly designed, especially pre wotlk.
Truth is not a democracy and the truth is combat lacked an identity and defining playstyle. Which is why they went so heavy on the pirate theme. Some people were incredibly upset at just that aswell. The spec was still melee but they heavily disliked the change from something super boring and lame to something distinct and different because they hated pirates or whatever
People will cry no matter what and letting it be an inhibiting factor to make changes is silly.
Its really not a huge design and tunning challenge. Blizzard secured enh’s special bonus niche in shadowlands with WFT. Ele and Enh have seen almost equal performance all of shadowlands, and equal representation as far as raids are concerned.
You can apply this same change to feral and survival, give them a small bonus, and have them be closely balance the same way enh/ele are.
Honestly this is a huge stretch but my mind immediately thought a perfect chance to implement a red mage-like from FFXIV.
I envisioned a pirate/swashbuckler who uses primarily a gun/crossbow at range, then grappling hooks into the fray to finish enemies off in melee with its cutlass/dagger like as a dps cooldown , then jumps back to range
Raiders/pvper/m+ have never made up more than 40% of max level character participation. The entire reason why bm is consistently a top played spec is because people who don’t do high end content love it. Rsv used to also have a good chunk of players playing regardless of tuning (6.2 being the exception because if my memory serves, rsv was competing with tanks on the damage charts for that patch). The last time we were able as players to look up the accurate spec population info was s1 of shadowlands, and msv had a whopping 6% of all hunters at max level with a covenant selected. Rsv never saw rep numbers this low outside of 6.2 and maybe prior to wotlk when they didn’t have the explosive shot lnl gameplay loop.
It’s a similar template, but these are not identical playstyles.
The common elements were a casted focus generator, Multi-Shot (buffed in different ways by each spec), Kill Shot, a signature, and then a spec-specific mechanic. So there was a general mould for each Hunter spec but they absolutely created appreciably different playstyles. On top of that each spec had passive effects that changed how they were approached. For example Survival had many powerful bonuses to trapping while MM had Careful Aim for sniping high-health targets.
No they weren’t as different as they were after Legion. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s part of being the same class. In fact you could argue that BM and MM are working in a similar way now; they have a similar template they’re building on. Specs aren’t meant to be totally separate micro-classes with little in common. They’re also not meant to be identical. Hunters from Cata and MoP were actually a pretty good middle ground. Could it have been improved? Sure, and they were working towards that in WoD. Serpent Sting, for example, was Survival specific in WoD. But the class design of Cata and MoP was much preferable to Legion and afterwards. This is a big part of why there’s so much reminiscing of class design from that era and so much dissatisfaction with class design now to the point where they explicitly undid a lot of Legion’s prunings in Shadowlands.
You say that in X patch BM was a head therefore everyone played BM and hardly anyone continued with SV. That’s just not how it usually worked. You’re applying your understanding of patch 6.2, an unusual situation where one of the specs was far ahead of the others, and assuming every patch was like that. In fact usually there’s a couple specs close to one another with the 3rd falling behind, or sometimes all 3 were serviceable.
For example, here again you say SV was “hard outscaled” by MM in ICC. Do you actually know the margin? Because it’s really not huge. SV was a popular choice in ICC. Not as popular as MM, but certainly a lot more represented by BM which was actually pretty bad at the time. SV remains a popular choice in WotLK private servers to this day, and it will undoubtedly be a popular choice in the last phase of WotLK classic. Because as it turns out there are appreciable differences in the playstyle and identity even that early on and some people just prefer Survival.
A source from the time: I can’t say how accurate this is because it’s an ancient fragment from 2010 and it’s also doing it by armoury population of level 80s instead of raid participation but here is a post with data from early ICC (before the whole instance was available) showing SV was still the most played Hunter spec. It’s also very easy to find plentiful SV PoVs from ICC raids from the time.
This really isn’t true. SV was a very popular spec. BM was definitely ahead at times numerically and according to a source I found it was at least ahead of SV a bit in terms of representation, but for most of that expansion SV was the spec of choice.
Sources:
Worldofwargraphs still had some data from the time when it was running, from around patch 5.3’s release onwards, so it gets all of patch 5.4 (Siege of Orgrimmar). BM was ahead early on, SV for the rest of the patch which lasted a whole year.
Cynwise blog which includes some older Worldofwargraphs data (back to 4.3). I think it’s only including 1 data point per patch which sucks because it doesn’t tell us how it changed throughout a tier, but we can see SV had high popularity earlier in MoP too. BM was ahead in 5.2 but SV was ahead for the other patches.
Stormforge logs. This is a current private server so the numbers can be skewed by a few factors. It’s up to 5.2 content but with 5.4 patch balancing. Survival is by far the most represented spec, however I suspect Survival’s popularity is elevated by people specifically wanting to experience a spec that you can’t any more.
Hint: check the date range on Warcraftlogs.
By default it shows the last 2 weeks, and Highmaul is considered in the same tier as Blackrock Foundry. So you’re looking at data for Highmaul that’s from months after the raid was current, long after everyone has their tier sets and is playing BM, and people are moving to MM on the eve of 6.2.
To see weekly spec data you have to set it to “Going back the entire tier” and then go to the specific spec like this. If you look at the timeline there you can see in January and February SV was by far the most played spec, not just in the class but actually the entire game. To be fair SV was pretty well off in Highmaul after the December hotfixes. Immediately on WoD launches BM and SV were in pretty bad states due to tuning messups after the number squish but they got hotfix buffs pretty quickly.
SV as a ranged spec saw plenty of play even when it wasn’t overpowered. It only saw little play when it was drastically underpowered like in 6.2.
That’s only true for melee SV. Ranged SV did not need to be overpowered to see play. I know you’re trying hard to argue the contrary but it just isn’t true.
Up until 6.2 no one would have sincerely called SV an unpopular spec. If you look at videos from the time there’s no talk of SV being unpopular until after 6.2, or perhaps all the way back in Classic.
Firstly, do you think it’s really just a few others here and I who have had grievances about SV not being ranged any more?
Secondly, we weren’t allowed to just be happy with ranged SV so I really don’t care for melee SV sensibilities. That’s demanding a level of respect and consideration that wasn’t afforded to us.
Blizzard created the controversy. It’s their fault. Not the people voicing their genuine grievances.
I’ve tried to be more restrained here than usual because you seemed to make a genuine effort to look at how SV faired in each tier in the past but this is a dishonest statement and I think you know that. To pretend that making SV melee did not affect the long-term population of the spec is fantasy. No one saw SV as a niche spec until Legion. Until Legion’s announcement it was a usually popular spec with a short-term blip that was 6.2 (released only about a month before Legion’s announcement, mind you).
Making it melee forever cemented it as a niche spec. Before that this was not the case.
Nope. I’m not going to be gaslit because I played throughout that whole time. RSV was very well designed, and it had wide appeal. Meanwhile MSV is poorly designed; less so after BFA now that it has a half-decent playstyle, but the spec still has glaring issues and most of them have the melee rework as the underlying cause. There’s no polishing this turd and covering over it with excessively high damage tuning is not the answer. The spec shouldn’t have been made melee and it shouldn’t remain melee. It’s nothing but a negative influence.
I don’t pretend to know much about Rogues, but it doesn’t seem like the yearning for Combat is anywhere close to that of ranged SV. Also in this instance do note that they made a supposedly distinct spec without having to change the spec’s role as a melee DPS.
It’s also important to not dismiss any and all criticism and walk into obvious design mistakes because “people will cry no matter what”. Sometimes the complaints are fully valid.
That’s just Shamans, and that’s just Shadowlands. Keeping the melee specs relevant while not invalidating the ranged option is an ever-present challenge.
It’s even worse for Hunters because there SV is up against 2 ranged specs in a playerbase full of people expecting ranged playstyles.
Even this isn’t true. Viewing SV as always being the least popular option is a post-Legion reality.
Picture patch 6.1, around February and March 2015. The game was just 11 years old. SV had been pretty consistently popular since WotLK prepatch, about 6 and a half years before that point. That’s over half the game’s lifespan. There wasn’t any knowledge of SV being gutted later that year or SV being remade into a melee spec (even though Blizzard was certainly working on it at that time).
No one saw SV as an unpopular spec. Even after 6.2’s release which screwed the spec over on many fronts, that didn’t change the fact that up until that point it had seen fairly consistent popularity. In fact MM was arguably the more consistently unpopular one.
Now because of melee SV (and yes it really is because of the melee) people see it as consistently unpopular and they erroneously project that understanding into the past. But that’s just hindsight.
Im not interested honestly in writing severeal long post back and forth knowing your viewpoint isnt going to change because of it. Everyone whos ever been read these forums knows how you feel about survival because you make it known every chance you get.
So lets just say the past performance and popularity is irrelevant for a second and address the big boy point.
Do you honestly, fully, and soundly believe RSV will ever return?
Do you honestly, fully, and soundly believe blizzard will create a 4th dps spec in a class that has 3 dps specs?
Do you honestly, fully, and soundly believe any amount of complaining and campaigning, is going to change blizzards mind on this?
If you truly answer yes to any of these questions, then you are on an unhealthy amount of copium. If you answer no, whats the point dude?
Do you think it was a sound business decision to delete a popular spec to replace it with a spec they knew was going to have low representation? FFXIV did a rework to machinist and bard, then undid those changes because they were massively unpopular with the players of those classes. Msv will continue to have less than 10% of the hunter as long as it remains melee, not even having the highest aoe damage of any melee in the game was enough to get sv to have more players than either bm or mm.
Literally everyone and their mom was Survival. Seeing MM was like encountering Bigfoot. And lets be real, people typically like playing BM for the pokemon aspect of the spec, and its usually casual hunter alts
My opinion does not matter. The fact is that it happened.
I think it goes without saying, but blzzard is not SE. Ion is not YoshiP. This is a pointless comparison because they operate their games very differently.
yes to the first question, no to the second question, yes to the 3rd. I think its much more likely that blizzard will simply be ok with telling msv players to take a hike since they were willing to do it to rsv players, and it’s un-debatable that rsv had more players than msv. I think wotlk will show, especially in the later tiers when mm outscales rsv, that rsv doesn’t need to be grossly overtuned in order to have decent representation. (edit because i had my answers to 2 and 3 backwards)
I will say this again, because its already coming true. When HUNTERS are release, and ALL 3 SPECS are a hot mess, and do not play well, come back to threads like this. In Beta forum and here. Threads that derail from issues, gameplay and instead go back to a decision made by BLIZZARD 7 years ago, and yet still go on because the FEW here in the forums ae not happy.
Instead of reading about fixes, the dev’s get a chance to look at you tube vids of people who basically live off clicks. Like they are industry experts. Wow I guess though that is the way of things now days. So when our CLASS does not compete, remember what was discussed in the BETA and ALPHA and PTR about our class. then quit or play, its your choice.
I dunno, I’ve never found what’s said on these forums to be overly influential to the devs. They’re going to do what they’re going to do reguardless.
Playing with DF Surv, makes me wonder if they’re planning to scrap it though. They gave it an OP moment in the sun and transition to the dumps with the next big change. Wouldn’t be the first time Blizzard has used such a playbook.
No, we are all still functioning under that first real rework for each. They have not been reverted despite complaints. Only a single, badly programmed ability was removed for each because the devs couldn’t be bothered to fix how stances with a CD work in that game (by locking you into the stance for the set time instead of putting a cooldown on toggling back into that stance).
Spare us the “it’s possible because somewhere out there the grass is greener” if you’re going to point at a desert.
...
A single ability that had slightly too long a cooldown and locked in (as per Cleric Stance) instead of restricting re-use (as per Enochian, Blood of the Dragon, or any other cooldown not effectively just bugged by gating a buff’s removal behind its cooldown) does not a rework make. Especially when considering how little damage was actually lost to playing mobilely in “sniper stance” and that optimal play actually weaved both it and “default stance”. It was an “era-defining ability” only to those who did not understand how to use it. If not for a single programming oversight they refused to register and initial ridiculous levels of “Heh, why not?” stupidity like putting a 3-second cast time on damn stance change itself, Heavensward’s Wanderer’s Minuet and Gauss Barrel would have been fine. More importantly, though, never did they make an altogether differently functioning job (class). The reworks made in Shadowbringers for MCH and redesign trends that started earlier but fully completed/cemented themselves only in Endwalker for Bard, however, did.
Changing Physical Ranged’s support from a throughput-cost-of-use to a permanent tax and gating previously always available options behind 2-minute CDs and then removing them completely is a far more significant change. We are still operating under that change. Likewise, removing literally every unique mechanic from Machinist (such as the 50% chance each of unlocking the further empowered shot with those then being bankable, with abilities allowing you to aetherize 1 or many next shots to guarantee proc’s while avoiding use on the non-proccing maintenance skills while ammo is active) with yet another forced 1-2-3 combo and a skill that breaks Haste (“Skill Speed”) scaling to double down on the game’s ping issues is a far more significant change. And we are still functioning under that all-depth removed (just 1-2-3 while hitting CDs as they come up being literally optimal) for Machinist today. Removing all DoT interactions from Bard and setting even its personal gameplay-affecting songs on long (90s) CDs is likewise the actual rework, and we’re still operating under them.
Both had reworks, though you’ve been badly misinformed as to when those were (they were actual overhauls, or prunings of most mechanics from either job). Both jobs were worsened by them. Both reworks remain despite complaints.
:: The public-facing elements of the XIV devs are, btw, no less “We know best,” cherry picking of feedback, dramatic about what few changes they do make expansions after their requests, and frequently passive-aggressive with their playerbase when it comes to combat (as per the response to “‘Healing’ is 90% spamming your filler attack…” being “Go play the 3 hardest fights in the game” (Ultimate, where once optimized, even when solo-healing, you will still spam your basic attack most of the time).
I never have understood the bomb thing. Ive hunted for 45 years now. I never used a bomb, lol.
I agree. Its like they tossed a bunch of unused abilities together and SV is what they called it.
Then you’re entirely delusional. Melee Survival is now 8 years through 4 expansions with Ranged Survival having 10 years through 5 expansions; Classic WoW is completely irrelevant since it was quite literally “anything goes”.
There is a 0% chance Blizzard will revert Melee Survival when their artifact weapon is a melee weapon. You honestly believe Blizzard will throw that away when they’ve put in actual development time to ensure everyone can properly transmog their artifact appearances onto valid weapon types? Just going to delete the entirety of one spec’s artifact weapon appearances?
The “completely revert Survival to ranged” ship sailed in 8.0 when they didn’t do it and again in 9.0 when they added back 2h Frost, SMF Fury, and 2h WW and again didn’t touch Survival.
To be fair, I doubt you’ve ever turned your quarry into a giant block of ice, set it on fire, or attempted to bash it to death after dodging its attempts you bite/claw you, either, yet those were core elements of even the Vanilla take on Survival. It’s always been the eclectic spec.
Right, but that has, to many, been a very real and sufficient identity.
It’s just a matter of how well those different tools synergize.
Relatively few specs are any less vague, ultimately, than Survival’s “synergetic tools,” in any manner beyond an arbitrary damage type designation.
What gameplay value is remotely held in Mage’s being “Frost”? It’s just a damage type. You could give them crit-ramping, a simultaneously castable oGCD auto-crit, and instant-cast Flurries on double-crits and they’d still be “Frost” in that arbitrary sense, but their playflow would be that of Fire.
What makes a Frost DK? Gameplay-wise, a ranged attack used only for DoT application or upon procs, dual resource systems that regenerate each other, and melee-enhancing procs from AAs (and potentiallty spenders of ranged procs and the second resource system), but that can be said for many other specs as well.
They’re both, at best, cohesion in color palette with maybe a single mechanic that stands out much if at all (Shatter/Brain Freeze or Killing Machine). The first just happens to better hide or conflate how arbitrarily its gameplay is packaged together since you can just say “Frost spells!” like that actually means anything palpable, the second less so, and others like Assassination or Subtlety even less still.
That doesn’t make the later sets a jumbled mess, though; they just can’t as easily hide that, yes, they’re just a bunch of mechanics sown together to create hopefully entertaining rhythmic or deliberate rotational moments.
As long as Survival can feel alternatively engaged in (led by) the moment or preparing for the next in a way that palpably seems at least vaguely predatory and/or tactical, a broad range of tools is still fine.
Most wow specs have gone thru that in one form or another. This DF version of surv might the worst offender I’ve ever seen in 13 years of wasted time playing wow.
They basically started some iteration, found out it probably be hard to finish, tried to slap some bandaids on it, gave up, told the boss “all done and looking good!”, clocked out “its Miller time boys!” and are hoping no one will notice.
I liked playing SV, I dont like looking at it, lol. Like the frankenstein spec of the class.
I havent tried it yet on beta, almost afraid to. Seeing some of the complaints already, I probably will just stick to BM. Id be surprised if they can screw it up enough for me to not want to play it, lol.
SV was a lot of fun to play, just left a lot of ??? moments wondering what on earth they were thinking.
maybe they should revert SV to some previous iteration that players liked better.