looks awesome man. genuinely wish i had it. also at this point it kinda serves as a symbol that you’re an og melee survival player. pretty cool.
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I had to judge it as a “dead” spec. BM Hunter is just extremely good right now; it is easier to execute, is doing TONS of DPS, plus is super mobile. Survival is hard to master, is a melee spec, its DPS is lacking a bit, especially in AOE, position properly impacts your damage, and its talent tree is really sad, with tons of boring % talents. The only thing that survival is just superior is Muzzle as a kick (15 sec CD) and that landing traps are 100 % easier. The spec certainly needs major reworks to its playstyle and talents, but right now it could use some a boost to its DPS, in both single target and AOE.
But just a While ago Survival was The Spec most people were on the train because it was Doing Huge DPS and all the Hate was on Survival now it is switched over to BM
I actually really like Survival. I even made a macro for it specifically so I can switch to range whenever I disengage, and while it’s a DPS loss, it’s still fun and niche. Like, if Blizzard leaned into using Ranged as part of the rotation through Disengage, I think the player count would rise up again.
Note: I do NOT want to remove SV Hunter. I like it being melee. But I also like to play in and out of melee, like old melee weaving from back in the day, so it’s a lot of fun for me to do this. It’s also useful for when I have to move out of danger zones, and I still want to hit buttons.
So my macro basically casts disengage, switches my melee weapon out for my ranged, and changes Raptor/Mongoose Bite into Arcane Shot. It costs +10 focus to do this (and tbqh I wish it was cheaper) and it’s a DPS loss, but still. Tons of fun to pop my bow on for a few cheeky shots while I wait for the danger to clear.
If I could ask for one change, is to nerf the cost of Arcane Shot to be 30 for all specs. And maybe make Posthaste remove the cost of Arcane Shot for its duration. Other than that, maybe tacking on a cooldown reduction on Explosive Shot somewhere in SV whenever you Arcane Shot, and I’d be super happy. 'Cause I have to disengage to refresh Harpoon anyway, it would be nice to have a mini ranged rotation added on between casts.
Fun fact: you can do this as BM and MM too.
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Leave it to Bepples to tell a stranger they’re having fun wrong.
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Just put him on ignore like I do. It’ll save you a lot of pain. I don’t even get notifs if he replies to my comments, and without seeing his posts, around two thirds of all SV hate has disappeared.
If he put half as much effort into campaigning for a MM rework, we might actually see progress for MM. But SV isn’t going to be purely ranged anytime soon, and his caterwauling does nothing for the conversation.
I want melee weaving like a Paladin in era servers wants seal twisting. It’s an old timer’s notion, but it’d be a really interesting part of the class if Blizzard incorporated it. It’d also be the cool, especially in PvP, when a class is trying to range you and you just decide to switch to range and start chunking them with ranged DPS too.
Imagine if they tacked on an explosive shot CD reduction on Arcane Shot casts. Right now, cooldown resets on Kill Command have a 30% chance to fire off an Arcane Shot, so even if you ignored the ranged mechanic, you’d still get value off of it. It would also be super fitting for a SV Hunter, who already uses Wildfire Bombs, and who used to have Explosive Shot in their old ranged trees. So while specs like BM and MM get 1 Explosive every 30 seconds if they take the talent, you could passively drop this down to 1 explosive every 18-30 seconds (from KC Resets) or far less from spamming Arcane Shot yourself. And it hits surprisingly hard, too, both ST and AoE, and with Ranger (+40% Shot damage) tacked on, it’s a legitimate threat.
On top of all of this, it would be such a small, but big change to the class. Technically speaking, it might even make it viable as a pseudo-ranged class, helping appease the crowd demanding it go back to pure RDPS. While Bepples would never stop crying about it, at the very least he has to admit that something like this would make him slightly happy.
“Can” and ‘having a reason to’ are rather different.
MM hasn’t had a reason to go into melee —unless the group is truly, truly desperate for knockbacks to the point of forcing damage loss on the poor MM— since the old Bolstering Shots bug.
Good. They should make SV play like that too.
The 12 people in the community who like roleplaying as melee can just run into melee range if they want.
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What about the 12 people that like roleplaying that Hunter is a ranged weapons class? Looks to me like the “community” also doesn’t want to play a spec that focuses on ranged weapons.
Yeah notice how once MM’s WRG bug was fixed and it could actually do distantly competitive damage its representation ticked up?
If we can remember back to the distant era of Dragonflight season 1, MM in that time had high representation with basically the same design it has now. If it isn’t rubbish, people play it. It’s still recovering from being rubbish and it needs a single-target buff urgently.
SV, of course, is not rubbish in PvE. Yet still more play MM instead. I wonder why.
Did you look at the image I posted? I don’t think you did. MM is one of the lowest played specs in the game, so by your own logic it means hunters dont want to play a ranged weapon focused spec.
Can you share your macro I like to see how it works?
Okay, it’s a few parts, so let me give all of them.
#showtooltip Harpoon
/click MultiBar5Button7
/cast Harpoon
/petattack
/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide();
Harpoon Macro, your melee engage. What this does is that it forces my melee weapon equipped, then casts harpoon while also forcing my pet to switch to my target. It also hides UI errors, if there are any. Edit: Note that this equips the melee weapon by using a different button on my hotbar. So it uses Bar 5 Button 7, which I’ve reserved for melee. Same idea goes into effect for ranged.
#showtooltip [equipped:bows] Arcane Shot; [noequipped:bows] Raptor Strike
/cast [equipped:bows] Arcane Shot; [noequipped:bows] Raptor Strike
/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide();
My filler buttons. When I press the macro, it will check to see if I have a bow equipped. If I do, it will cast Arcane Shot. If no bow is equipped, it will instead Raptor Strike.
#showtooltip [equipped:bows] Steady Shot; [noequipped:bows] Flanking Strike
/cast [equipped:bows] Steady Shot; [noequipped:bows] Flanking Strike
/script UIErrorsFrame:Hide();
This one is similar to above, but instead uses Steady Shot and Flanking Strike on a different hotkey.
#showtooltip Disengage
/click MultiBar5Button10
/cast Disengage
This one is simple. It equips the item in the hotbar slot (my bow) and disengages. I use this against enemies with giant stun fields really.
It’s fun! But the devs need to lean into this a bit more, and reduce the focus cost to Arcane Shot baseline. Maybe add in a condition while under the effect of posthaste, Arcane Shot is free with a lowered GCD.
Also, you can’t use Kill Shot with a bow equipped for some reason. This makes no sense? I have the bow in my hands, why can’t I use it to fire kill shot?.. Really odd design.
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Wow all the way up to be on the same level as sv the spec you believe should be removed due to low player count funny that
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Dragonflight season 1 where MM was an actually competitive spec:
You must be innumerate if you think that MM has the same representation issues SV has. SV’s representation is always that low unless they tune it to be 30% ahead of everything else. MM doesn’t need to be 30% ahead.
Where do we draw the line? It’s beating a spec that you want gone but it still pales in comparison to bm in those images why stop at sv remove mm too it’s significantly behind bm and on par with sv this season
10.0:
9.2:
9.1.5:
9.0.5:
MM is perfectly capable of seeing good representation. Usually not as much as BM, but usually not totally abandoned.
SV, meanwhile, needs to be absurd lengths ahead of anything for people to switch.
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Given how much stronger mm was than bm in CN and SoFO (SoFO until bm received multiple aura buffs). Couldn’t the same be said for mm?
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kind of crazy how BM is almost alwys twice as more played as MM. I guess that means Hunter players don’t care about ranged weapons specialty. So rSV would be a niche subset of a niche subset.