The other big part of SV back then was Serpent Sting. Ranged SV even got a baseline passive that caused Serpent Sting to apply to every target hit by Multi Shot (note how current SV has to talent into a worse version).
The reason it had a simple core back then was because it worked very well and was successful, simple as that. Yes it was less distinct from the other specs than in Legion, but it was distinct enough for the Hunter playerbase.
Nope, only since Legion. It was a solid spec before that. It wasn’t great in Classic and the BC updates, while helpful, didn’t bring it up to standard, from WotLK to WoD it was solid (although it was clearly in managed decline mode in WoD as they worked on melee SV).
IIRC it was Readiness to MM and Scatter Shot and Hawk Eye to SV (also Serpent Sting later became an SV thing) so it wasn’t very much. Readiness was transferred over because it’s more spec ambiguous (in fact it later became baseline) and SV gained a LOT in WotLK so it would have been very overpowered if it kept Readiness. The latter two were transferred to SV probably because they were largely PvP oriented and they still saw SV as the tree that should have most of the PvP utility.
It is true that Hawk Eye and Sniper Training were better fits for MM than SV and people at the time called them out on that. That’s why they later built the longer range into Sniper Training and made it MM’s mastery.
This is mostly a misconception.
The interaction was with Improved Serpent Sting and the new Multistrike. SV had Improved Serpent Sting (the initial tick on application) since Cata and it was a big part of the spec, especially its AoE. In WoD they introduced Multistrike which made attacks have a chance to duplicate. They also baked Serpent Sting into Arcane Shot (this was during their “pruning” phase) so the one button did both attacks. The way this worked with Multistrike was the Arcane Shot and its duplicate would both proc Serpent Sting which itself could multistrike. This make Multistrike very valuable and ISS a much bigger part of SV’s damage breakdown; especially after they buffed SS by 50% in early WoD. Whether or not that’s a bug is up to interpretation; it’s not like SV’s damage was crazy high at the time.
The “fix” they applied was just removing ISS entirely thus ruining the spec. That was nonsense. The initial tick of Serpent Sting was not a bug. It’s something the spec had for years. It’s impossible to see that update in any other way than a deliberate action to ruin ranged SV as they planned to remove it entirely in the next expansion. Legion was announced just under 2 months since 6.2 launched, after all.
This isn’t true. It didn’t see a total rework but it did get a ton of incremental updates and improvements. Like I said before they brought in Serpent Sting, ISS, and Serpent Spread later on. They didn’t overhaul it because it didn’t need to be overhauled. The design behind it in WotLK was good and just needed iterative improvements. BM and MM also didn’t get overhauled in the same period, aside from KC becoming the signature nuke of BM in MoP.
It was briefly a baseline ability in WotLK classic but it didn’t have interaction with anything else and it was a heavy DoT + slow.
Our original level 80 ability was going to be Camoflauge but Rogues complained about Hunters getting Stealth so they removed that (of course they did end up bringing it in for Cata). Black Arrow was the next candidate but they didn’t like that for some reason so they went with Freezing Arrow (ranged placed Freezing Trap) which wasn’t great.
It has place as a variant of BM, our existing pet spec. We do not need “ranged BM” and “melee BM” as separate specs.
I mean the results speak for themselves. Ranged SV had a much more successful and directed course of development in its era. It did not see this confused, ever-shifting, controversial madness of conflicting design it sees now.
It’s really not a solid foundation when the class itself is so heavily based around ranged attacks. All the problems are mostly because you start off with a ranged weapon and have to abandon it as SV. Look at the default tree for SL; it’s all stuff that makes perfect sense for BM and MM and even ranged SV, but it’s all jarring in contrast to the SV tree.