The answer is to double down on the exotic munition poison/explosive stuff and lose the bestial companion/melee stuff. Not the other way around.
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Oh, look! A Goblin Sapper has entered the chat. That post was written with you in mind, with particular emphasis on adolescence.
You have yet to rebuild the mutual respect we once shared, and a simple 1-2 day break from the forums will not suffice to repair the damage youâve done. As such, I see no reason to take you seriously anymore. Iâll let someone else make that mistake of thier own accord.
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Are you actually going to respond to the point at hand or waste everyoneâs time like this?
Hunters had Explosive Trap and SV had buffs to it from the very start. Why does it suddenly not make sense to later have explosive-based attacks?
Do you think the spec would be better-served and more exiting if instead of explosives it had⊠more dodge chance? Really?
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Nice opinion, thank you for sharing, weâll take it under consideration with the shadowy cabal of spear hunters. Have a good day, Bepples.
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Again, I worry this may miss the mark on self-sustain / survivability. And though you partly address this shortly, Iâd like to leave quick note, as the logic here will likely come up again later:
If this worked exactly as youâve stated, it could oblige very âdegenâ behavior.
- If the attacker is punished for hitting you, youâre essentially blinding them on hit taken, not just increasing your own dodge chance. Which means youâd want to take otherwise avoidable damage wherever if it could be easily healed up in time and would produce net mitigation for your tank. As suchâŠ
This would be far better. ButâŠ
Youâd still have the problem of being potentially one-shot before you get any of your mitigation⊠at which point itâs too late.
Compare that to something like a slight revision of Ignore Pain with the Never Surrender and Brutal Vitality talents:
- You have an at-cost damage-absorbing skill on a short CD. (Letâs say cost is also reducible over time, such that you have free mitigation every 40s or so, but can spam it at increasing cost if need be).
- The percentage of damage absorbed increases based on the %HP to which the attack would otherwise lower you. It has a base mitigation of 40%, allowing you to soften out multiple blows as to be synergetic with your otherwise wasted Leech, but increases based on the %HP below 80% to which an attack would reduce you, to a maximum of 100% mitigation if an attack would reduce you to 20% or lower, making it damn hard for you to be finished off.
- Your attacks while this effect is active feed/restore that effectâs total amount of mitigation possible, like Leech being duplicated into the damage absorption shield.
With that, you have a good balance for a front-liner with decent Leech and both potential in both kiting and going âall-inâ.
By all means, add dodge chance from Mongoose Fury atop that, but some sort of solid, synergetic base would be necessary, I would think.
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If the sheer diversity of tools that SV is willing and able to leverage befits a Survivalist, then wouldnât melee be among those, so long as it has its usual rewards?
Consider, if Iâm against a caster, Iâll want to be in a position where I can much more easily juke their cases through rapid angular changes, Iâll want more frequent interrupts, Iâll want to ensure they canât escape my line of sight, and Iâll want greater and more reliable kill pressure.
All those things tend to come with melee, at least as compared to ranged capacities. And in this case, since weâd have the same options to fall back on as, say, an MM Hunter who canât get off an AiS and for whom Rapid Fire is on CD, thereâs not really any added risk for potentially entering the range of some of their additional utility.
It is, in that situation, trading out what weâre taxed for as ranged (lower reliability, cast times, and/or lower burst, etc.) for whatâs taxed as melee (lost effective uptime if kited, etc.) is beneficial and melee therefore becomes the tool that would most increase our chances of survival. Itâs the right tool for the job.
Now, if Hunter could from range do a full Executeâs worth of instant damage in a cast-less GCD without needing any procs or other prep, sure, weâd just do that. But we canât, because that would be OP as hell, and so in balance that range therefore curtails us in other ways.
- (Aimed Shot takes 67% more time, through a 2.5s cast, just to do the about same damage as 1-GCD Mortal Strike that can be ramped far higher and has only half the cooldown).
Given that, we can at most choose what we will be advantaged in and what, in balance, we will be disadvantaged in. But if one can choose between the two, then they can always minimize the in-practice effect on disadvantages by swapping to whatever has the best net gains.
For my part, if given enough other stuff and alternate means to contextual complexity, then it doesn't especially matter, but usually when you think of a DnD or high fantasy Ranger archetype, they're not just archers. A "hunter," is no more implied to be limited in their scope.
Itâs contested whether âhunt,â which entered Old English via Old Germanic âhentanâ, is itself derived from the Greek ÎșÏ ÎœÎ·ÎłÏÏ (kynigos) / ÎșÏ ÎœÎ·ÎłÎźÏÏ (kynigoso), which originally had to do with killing prey by use of hunting dogs, but there is in any case little to no evidence that the connotation survived into Old Germanic, where itâs closest synonyms had to do simply with to prey on or to seize, regardless of the means. Perhaps more importantly, the word has been frequently used to describe many aboriginal practices of killing prey animals, even where no hunting animals, bows, or even snares were typically used. And even in WoW, our lead most famous hero characters had no trouble wielding a blade. As such, itâs damn hard to say that thereâs any thematic, lore-based, or terminological precedent for limiting Hunters to solely ranged capacities. And, itâs been a long time since there werenât any compensatory ramifications for being range / no compensatory advantages for being melee.
These days, it turns out sticking with something far larger, with less wasted force, more easily redirected aim, with less encumbrance to movement, and with less time spent in just loading the thing youâll be stabbing someone with, really will tend to be more efficient for sheer perforation/sanguination of enemies / stabby-stabbing than will arrows fired from a bow.
The bow will often have contextual advantages due to threat of other enemiesâ advantaged stabby-stabbing, but lacking that threat, simply efficiency trumps safety. As is common-sense balancing.
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Personally, I feel like it was a shift, but not necessarily a bad one, but for reasons you, I, and Ghorak have discussed before: I thought SV most connected to the deep strike guerilla [and sometimes even psychological] warfare teams in/around the Second War (in a much, much more ominous earlier take on Swamp of Sorrows), which more often featured things like septic, cursed, or poisoned ammunition rather than explosives (which were instead used more by dwarven bunker-busters up north against orcish holdouts around Khaz Modan). The latter I associated more with engineers, not Hunters/Rangers.
Granted, nowadays, when we look at places like Nazâmir, explosives, and what would seem âSV Hunterâ in those settings⊠yeah, spears, explosives, machine guns⊠that theme seems a lot more (purposely) open-ended and a bit more inherently tongue-in-cheek / sh*ts-n-giggles / crazed / Rambo.
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Been arguing the same since I first joined these forums.
I wouldnât say that this was their primary goal in that sense, design wise. In a practical sense, thatâs more or less where we ended up. But the design goal was for each category to feature a core part about the class identity/fantasy.
Beast Mastery was designed to include everything that had to do with pets. Marksmanship was designed to include everything that had to do with our ranged weapon. Survival was designed to focus on survivability, through improved defensive capabilities, utility, etc. They added in certain talents that increased throughput in some way, for each category, for the sake of balance. Due to the fact of how this class(and others) was filling the role of [solely] a damage dealer.
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My dog died in a freak accident nobody asked for, so I want to kill your dog and I want to be given a new dog to call it even.
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Thats⊠just been one of the preferred choices from the very start in this whole topic for agesâŠ
Changing a spec is now akin to killing a dog? You need to really flex your hand muscles and tighten your grip on reality, because youre losing it ever so slightly.
However, it is good to admit the change was an accident that nobobdy asked for. At least that part is reasonable. 
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Ok. Here is a more reasonable one.
Your TV fell of wall mount and broke so now you want my TV to fall off as well as you getting a new TV
Real life comparisons only work to some extend. Your comparison doesnt work since your TV and my TV are in no way connected or dependend on one another.
If you really have to force it into a real life comparison it would have to run more like this:
We have a shared appartment and theres a cool show running on the TV, many people come visit to watch it and have a good time. Now you break the TV and put an aquarium in its place, which barely anyone cares for. Noone comes visiting anymore, but you totally love those fishies, even if youre the only one.
Now, this also doesnt really work, because you could be legitimately upset over all these people having a good time in our shared appartment, while its kinda unreasonable to mad about a popular SV spec.
Again, real life comparisons are almost always bad.
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I have said multiple times I would be ok with a 4th spec, I just want to be able to play RSV again.
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Ironically this is what MSV players say to those who miss RSV, and to directly address your metaphor, itâs more like my tv show was taken away and replaced with yours, a lot less people watch the one we have now but we still wonât bring back the one we used to enjoy.
Those who enjoy the new tv show tell those who liked the old one that by asking for our old show to come back - even if we say to bring it to a new channel, are told that no, we have to accept what show is on now, and if we want to try and get ours back, we are just trolls or âzero-sum politicsâ etc. I have said many times that I would be ok with a 4th spec and that I just want to have RSV back.
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Sometimes melee is the right solution, but it shouldnât be the main one. RSV played like this actually, it was mainly ranged but it had a few melee tools for when that became necessary, personally I feel that fits a survivalist a lot more than someone who primarily goes into melee despite having skills with a bow / guns.
This also falls into my above reply, having all of these tools but then limiting their scope (in this case limiting the archer side) just doesnât make a lot of sense. Furthermore, you would generally want to start using as many ranged attacks as you can before being forced into melee as for one thing, you have that option so it makes sense to use it, hunters / rangers arenât built to go toe to toe for long.
I can kind of see where you are coming from but I just canât get past limiting yourself so much when you have access to so many more options.
Can we stop the RSV MSV argue. I didnât post to discuss any of the fundamental concept designs about survival itself but only want to issue the point that this certain specialization has a number of severe design and tunning issues and need to be take care of as soon as possible.
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Unfortunately I do no think that will happen until both sides get what they want. This argument started as far back as legion and has showed no signs of stopping. People really enjoyed RSV so itâs not really fair to ask them to stop having an opinion on it or current MSV, even if itâs not one you agree with.
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Letâs see if they show any gratitude for a top rated Hunter such as yourself and observe the designs that youâve clearly delineated for your thread.
If not, then itâs no wonder why the upper-crust abandoned this wretched cesspool long ago for the Trueshot Discord.
Agreed, unless a build were specifically designed around that. Again, I donât feel that melee in itself is enough to make a spec any more than, say, BMâs hypermobility is. Granted, Survival doesnât attempt to be âmeleeâ any more than BM tries to be just âhypermobilityâ or even that extra degree of fight mechanics it can thereby easily participate in.
But adding melee skills to particular specs or builds of Hunter does not âlimitâ the archer side of Hunter.
Iâm not asking for any limits here. On the other hand, asking that Hunter should never have X, Y, or Z, categorically, would be asking for those limits.
Not necessarily, no. If you have the option to garner more advantages than youâd lose in that trade, you take the trade.
The only thing that would not make sense would be to refuse, on principle, the better trade when offered or purposely preventing an any-range class from being able in a given moment to make any such trade (to leverage the benefits afforded the other end). Hunters arenât casters (and even casters will have some benefits locked behind melee range, and not just to be used âwhen forcedâ).
Again, thereâs no reason SV should lose access to Arcane Shot or Steady Shot. I donât think youâll find anyone defending that decision of Blizzardâs. And if the upcoming tuning ArS/MS buffs had just been applied to the class as a whole, instead of MM only, Arcane Shot (with Ranger) would already be damn close to Raptor Strike damage vs. plate.
To recap:
- No, I donât think melee or mobility are in themselves sufficient thematic basis for an entire spec⊠but no one has suggested as much.
- Rather, the idea behind Survival, even if its implementation leaves things to be desired, seems to have been that it expands Hunter to access ALL possible tools, bringing in additional poison interactions, explosives, pet coordination (rather than just buffing/ordering), even melee, and synergies in between.
- I doubt you will find anyone whoâs a fan of losing access to Arcane and Steady Shot just because a handcrossbow is being used instead of a two-hander. Rather, the Beta complaints were about the seizure-like animations of RNG ranged shots clipping the animations of their triggering skills, and using the handcrossbow at point blank range (instead of varying the procâs animation, as was later done for Viperâs Venom, to make sense from melee range when so used).
- Even the most hardcore MSV enthusiasts will usually tell you that having a variable (skill-dependent) degree of ranged tools that reward fight knowledge to retain effective uptime can accentuate the melee aspects of MSV, rather than detracting from them, as SV is then punished for mismanagement rather than simply being compensated as much as most melee.
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That isnât whatâs being requested, though. Hop into a General Discussion thread about what lessons WoW could learn from GW2 and vice-versa, then flood it with points on XIV where of no direct connection to either other MMO in question âmerely instead broadening the spirit of the argument to âWhat other MMOs do betterââ and see how that goesâŠ
âŠespecially when there are 297 other threads already on XIV and the GW2 thread was just starting to see some especially productive discourse.
There are already plenty of threads specifically on RSV. There are also the 99% of all Survival threads already derailed by that fundamental discussion, so itâs unthinkable anyways to have polite discussion into which specialization, say, a âMunitionsâ or âWildlingâ theme could best be fit, or how actual build diversity could be maximized⊠do we really need derailed thread #297? What benefit does that purposeful derailment offer?
- You may as well walk into a thread when Frost DK is painfully undertuned and crush all discussion on what tuning is needed with âFrost was better when Howling Blast was on a 10s cooldown and nothing you do will ever help until that happens again!!!â
(On analogies)
I mean, most people donât publicly lament their run-over dog for 7 years to the point of attacking anyone whoâs nonetheless happy in a state of the world without said dog. RSV, on the other handâŠ
But youâre right, maybe a more emotionally-charged analogy would have been more appropriate.
This is largely in jest. My apologies for touching upon the low-hanging fruit there.
Itâs fine for people to like what they like and to prefer it over something else. Itâs just important, imo, to find where and how the two things are actually mutually exclusive, and how a greater equilibrium can be formed (though I, too, would tend to weight that equilibrium âthough not exclusively soâ by popularity of those optionsâ component aspects).
For the most part, though, Iâve only seen Ghorak, Ilarion, and a couple others who prefer RSV also advocate for a 4th spec (with as many seeming to find RSV a side-benefit to burning MSV in effigy)⊠while among those preferring MSV, Iâve yet to see anyone say RSV should forever stay gone (except in very obvious mirrored retort), only that RSV neednât and shouldnât replace MSV.
I think thatâs why you see so many proponents of MSV complaining about âzero-sumâ thinking on this subject. That literally is one sideâs all-too-frequent approach to this area of discourse.
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