I think there is some truth to do that, you want the old SV playstyle bac and blizz has been kind of trying to mash it with MM and it has not gone well.
I think another part of it is, RSV was a very much liked spec. I rember the days of black arrow then getting those sweet loc’n load procs and whenever I did play hunter back then I always liked SV over Marks or BM, playstyle wise regardless of which spec was “best dps”.
So I get the complaints about wanting RSV back. For myself I enjoy MSV , I think MSV was a good move and I hope MSV stays. I have nothing against RSV coming back assuming blizz would be able to relatively balance RSV and MSV- similar to how DW and 2h frost are balanced (from what I heard they are quite close dps wise). If however the choice came between you could have RSV or MSV (not both), then my vote will go for MSV.
Hmm no actually the biggest reason is melee SV being a bad idea. This whole “they’re just jealous of SV” angle has always been a lame argument. In fact some of us are just tired of seeing a once great spec flounder over and over while they try and fail to make such a bad concept work.
MM and SV had very different toolkits as of WoD too. The playstyle was very different; so much so in fact that SV actually played more similarly to BM than MM. People just focus on the MM-SV angle because they don’t know the class well so they focus on the general thematic elements that are more obvious.
Nah Affliction is just Destruction with DoTs, Assassination is just Subtlety with poisons, and Fury is just Arms but a little angrier with 2 big sticks instead of 1. This is how spec comparisons work now.
Going from MM to SV was about replacing aimed shot with explosive shot and chimaera with black arrow. Same muscle memory. This was especially true during HFC with 4p set.
Meanwhile BM had to manage frenzy proc.
watching this video is literally depressing to think that someone thinks it’s better for a spec to be casting cobra shot to generate focus in order to arcane shot lol
from now on any argument about SV ranged will be answered with this video and it will be a non-bailable crime
Yes playing around Entrapment and Lock and Load in arenas was quite a lot different to how MM operated.
Besides; if your real issue is that there weren’t enough different skills between MM and SV, don’t you think the solution is to just… iterate on them a bit more to make them more distinct like they had been doing for every expansion up until that point? They were already very different in WoD and MM would even get its own remake going into Legion regardless.
Frenzy proc was just one mechanic. Aside from that BM also used Arcane Shot to dump focus, Cobra Shot to generate it, and Kill Command as a signature nuke, which while different to SV’s Explosive Shot in theme (and also lacking the Lock and Load interaction) it did serve the same role in the priority and had the same role in the rotation.
Meanwhile MM had a casted focus spender and its signature nuke was a cleave with a different cooldown. It also had you play around Sniper Training and Careful Aim (notice how both of you are carefully avoiding the passive interactions unique to the three specs that modified their playstyle greatly). It was absolutely more different to SV than BM was. And all three had distinct flows and gameplays from one another. People didn’t just develop a preference for either one over nothing.
Again people only focus on MM v.s. SV because people who make these arguments usually have very little familiarity with the class so they focus on the obvious thematic distinctions where BM depends heavily on a pet while MM and SV were both largely independent of pets.
P.S. If you’re going to use the 6.2 borrowed power for your arguments don’t ignore the fact that SV’s borrowed power in that patch significantly updated the playstyle of the spec. In fact the Archimonde Trinket added a simple mechanic that had huge potential for further iterations of ranged SV had they taken that correct route; it gave a CDR to Black Arrow so you could multidot with it and generate more Lock and Load procs to funnel into single target. That’s unlike anything the class has seen and would have been far more unique and valuable than yet another melee spec.
While I don’t have very strong memories from WoD but still do have some memories from Survival and want to remember it well. This video was a Very poor pick if you want to advocate For the survival spec.
I mean, it’s not worse than much of what we have these days… I like that we had so much traps and utility back then, but those things are also often more used in PvP. But the actual rotation is clearly not better than most we have today. It is pretty much cobra shot (steady shot now) to cast arcane shot and to keep black arrow up for the occasional explosive shot. I mean that is not completely doing the spec justice but that could be said for any 3 sentence description of any spec out there. It’s core was very basic and the core is very basic today. The class itself had a Lot more life and utility/defensives back then and the specs also had more small, situational things than they have today. But this is not much more different than to KC to throw in RS/MB and then throw in a bomb every now and then.
I think the single only thing differentiating RSV to MSV besides names and icons is pretty much that it was range vs melee. And that we’ve lost so much else around the core rotation. I’d say we deserve better than old RSV and current MSV. We know they can do better!
I have to go to bed so didn’t read it all. But I will give you this Bepples, the whole reason Blizzard gave us for changing RSV into MSV was bull. In no way, shape or form was RSV “too much like MM” for it to warrant a rework. It was not more alike than frost/fire/arcane mages or Assa/outlaw/sin rogues etc. It was a cop out to get to rework the spec. For whatever reason.
Idk man, HFC is whenever I played the game the most and SV felt way closer to MM than BM for me. And I played all 3 specs in mythic HFC just for fun (SV only after they buffed the damage back).
Also, just to add something as someone who plays hunter since early vanilla : SV has historically always been neglected by Blizzard.
During BC lifespan it swapped talents back and forth with MM for unknown reasons.
I remember crying for the whole cataclysm expansion for the removal of counterattack after it was made 100% useless.
It was balanced around a bug for the whole WoD xpac (until HFC).
It saw barely any change from WotLK to WoD. It’s pure luck that it flowed that well imo.
I also enjoyed it and only had a gripe about the OG Dark Ranger spell making it into the survivalist tree (I heard it was a MM spell during WoW alpha but idk if it’s true).
Polearm hunting with pets is a thing and I think it has its place in the game. I find it regretable that the L&L+explo gameplay is gone but I think with some effort it can be backed into MM (replacing aimed with explo, stuff like that).
a) I think a lot of this talk about RSV is rose tinted glasses. It was good and enjoyable but it was Far from most popular, super thought out spec. It had it’s diehard fanbase and I can understand how those would hate the change over to MSV.
b) I think MSV has a solid foundation in the game both from a gameplay view to a lore view. Hunters back in the day were not exclusively Sharpshooters/snipers. There was more tracking prey, stalking them, trapping them and fighting them close quarters. It’s just that they have had such bad implementations of MSV it’s become embarassing.
They took the Survival theme of a tracker stalking it’s prey and trapping/killing it from melee and made it into a spec that somehow still has the majority of it’s abilities being ranged and throw around shrapnel grenades from up close instead of… you know any kind of agility based close quarters hunter, stalking the prey (interaction with camouflage?) and trapping them, setting up the fight (traps much? CC abilities?) and then going for the kill (actual melee abilities? Besides the Mongoose bite spam window preferably). Such a lacking spec coming out of such a rich and diverse class with so much utility, defensives and good lore. And yes, how can they have hunters all around the lore and previously in the game with dual wield and then just straight up ignore it? Not even as an option. Despite clearly strong requests from the community…
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.
If I remember correctly, the issue was that the initial serpent sting tick on multistrike’d arcane shots did full damage, and multistrike basically had higher weighting than agility.
To me the complete removal of improved serpent sting sounds more like a confession that they couldn’t fix it.
They buffed the damage back at some point but it was nothing crazy and MM was absurd in comparison, but it was actually playable (well I did play it in some HFC runs). Archimonde trinket was pretty interresting yes.
Agreed. But I think the core Legion design was good aswell (lacerate, mongoose bite, flanking strike), the issue is that it was balanced around the most cancerous talent I have ever seen and was pretty much unplayable in raids (even when the damage were supposedly good).
But now it’s all about throwing bombs at your feet, spamming a BM ability and shooting stuff out of pocket crossbow…
I do think some good feedback from Legion got drowned into endless complaints though…
We could have both specs if they did some effort, but after seing how our talent trees turned out I kinda lost hope.
But it was only a Multistrike thing, that wasn’t particularly broken to begin with, and Multistrike was already being planned to be removed after WoD. There really is no other explanation than they wanted to ruin ranged SV.
The reason the hotfix buffs didn’t save SV was because its damage profile was still gutted by the removal of ISS and the legendary ring vastly favoured 2 minute cooldown classes in an expansion where they removed SV’s cooldown.
That’s the sims from post hotfix 6.2. As you can see SV is dead last by a big margin, and this is on a ST Patchwerk scenario which was SV’s strongest. Because of the ISS removal it could hardly AoE at all and it didn’t have the priority add burst that was so important on every 6.2 fight.
Im a fu---- mono survival hunter, i can guarantee that is astronomically FAR from:
“not worse than much of what we have these days”
Current survival is extremely rewarding spec, which satisfies you whenever you need to hit from range and still satisfies you whevenever you need to hit from melee.
