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.