I think it’s a bit silly to flop them now.
But honestly, not sure why BM wasn’t made into the melee spec. I mean getting up close fighting with your beast? Just feels like it would make more sense yanno?
Survival should be the BM spec. Down in the trenches fighting side by side with your pet. Take away the cool pets and double pets and BM hasnt been fun in a number of expansions.
Turn BM into the melee spec, give it real melee abilities and make it more than Wrath/kill command/cobra/yawn.
Survival could be its own thing. More utility maybe. Leave Marks as the Ranger Spec with pet tank option.
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Make warglaive mogging a thing for them and other Sentinel capable classes and we have a deal!
The biggest reason I don’t go SV is just cause I can’t stand just one pet for customization, now that stampede is gone animal companion and matching battle pets as BM is the only way to have multiple animals out at once.
If we ever get cross spec back I’d like to either see an SV that can use stampede and animal companion the BM talent, or a melee and or one hand sword and glaive dual wielding BM. I am of course hoping they bring back MoP/WoD era glyphs first or even just revert the talent in general.
But really I think reactivating the old capability to go cross spec with talents would just be a better solution.
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no go away, never talk to me or my class again, you awful awful man.
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Well said.
Honestly, the fact that survival is melee doesn’t turn me off from the spec. It is the abilities. The attempt at making a melee class with so many ranged abilities is strange. Wildfire bomb feels like an engineering item. Serpent sting is being flung from … a concealed blowgun? (I similarly share a distaste for outlaw rogue’s pistol interactions/animations…) None of the melee abilities feel meaningful or thought out. And the ranged burst? Just awkward.
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Spec is fine. Spec is also fun.
Better idea: stop trying to force melee on a class that clearly doesn’t want it.
For the melee Hunter diehards they can make a talented melee stance within BM for all I care. Devoting 1/3 of the class to maybe 1/30 of its players makes zero sense.
So you saw a class centred around using bows, crossbows,and guns and figured the best outcome would be for only one of its specs to be using them?
Remind yourself that you’re making suggestions for a Hunter spec, not a Rogue spec.
No, it’s the least played spec because it’s melee and the same would happen to BM if it were made melee.
As it turns out, when you build the class around ranged combat and ranged weapons and then you try to make one of its specs unique by handicapping it to melee weapons only, people avoid that spec.
If it hardly makes a difference then you should have no problem keeping it ranged.
Carrying a large amount of portable ammunition around is a hell of a lot more believable than carrying hundreds of axes/throwing knives.
Not BC Survival because it didn’t have anything unique yet.
WotLK Survival was good and it remained good until Legion.
It’s consistently the least played spec in the game when it was once routinely one of the more popular specs, so evidently a negative change occurred and they should look into reverting it.
Great post but here’s a ranged Survival fan who doesn’t want BM to be melee either. We’re not all naive 
OP is not a ranged Survival main, he’s a Rogue projecting his own interests onto a different class.
Survival is consistently the least popular spec in the game regardless of its tuning (which is actually quite good right now). It evidently isn’t fine design wise. If it were fine design wise and had the performance it currently does it would be one of the more popular specs. We know this because ranged Survival was designed well and when it performed fine it was very popular (which was most of the time between WotLK and WoD).
They will never take player ideas seriously because they’re bad at their jobs which is why everyone is quitting lately (among other controversies, of course). Survival is a microcosm of Blizzard developer arrogance driving something into the ground.
It’s still extremely unpopular so evidently being melee is keeping the spec in the dumps. Why would it be bad to change it back, again?
- Start a Hunter as ranged at level 1
- Pick Survival at level 10 and become melee
- Pick a talent at a later level to become ranged again
Amazing design.
So you came to the class with a bow as it’s icon and figured it needed two melee specs, both of which are just different varieties of commanding your pet?
WoW forum class design suggestions never cease to amaze…
SV has stolen enough from BM as is.
You should explain why you think 2 melee specs for Hunters is a good idea.
That tends to happen when the spec is in a ranged class.
And still hardly anyone plays it.
More melee-brain delusion.
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Except BM is the to go easy spec… doubt it would go to least played since most people play it because it’s easy
No. BM is perfect where it is. Survival is also perfect in the stance of representing early-aged hunters who used spears to hunt. FYI bows weren’t the first hunting weapons…
I played it to lvl 40 on classic wow till I got bored of classic completely, and I loved it…because I could dual-wield+ranged. It was perfect. I want survival to be given dual-wielding abilities.
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On behalf of all Beast Mastery hunters on Azeroth.
Hell no.
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Unrealistic you say?
hahaha!
Swims in full plate armor and shoots bows that need no ammo
O/T
I rather enjoy my survival hunter.
It took a while to get used to it but aside from some energy issues, I personally do not have a problem with it as is.
Sure it could use some tweaks but its pretty fun to me.
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It needs a proper defensive cooldown that does not tank DPS.
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The theme seems to be that you fight as a team with your pet so maybe something where damage gets split between the two of you for a while?
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(Not actually I just wanted an excuse to use that GIF)
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they should add least let it dual wield like so many melee hunter npcs
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Honestly, I think this would be the foundation of a new and interesting tank class. We’ve got shields, self-heals and drunk staggering tanks - let’s have a pet tank as payback for all those times i made my pugs moan by confidently declaring that we didn’t need a tank cuz ‘I’ve got growl and mend pet’!
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I’d rather get a gunmage spec.
Keep survival the way it is, add the most popular legenadaries as baseline spells. Would be nice if chackrams with explosive shot stayed in the next expansion. Kill command could be replaced with something else imo.
no i love current survival, leave it alone
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The issue is unavoidable damage in PvE where you have to soak or otherwise avoid damage to cover for teammates mistakes and the turtle is long duration pacify for a Melee spec.
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I didn’t say it was a good idea. I responded to someone who said that BM should be the melee spec INSTEAD of survival.
I don’t think it is a problem to have a melee spec amongst hunter specs. Just because it was INITIALLY an exclusively ranged class doesn’t mean that is the sole reason it should only be a ranged class. Just because its other specs are ranged, doesn’t mean it has to be only ranged. Shaman has a melee and ranged dps spec. Druid has a melee and ranged dps spec. Having both ranged and melee themed specs is not the issue, it is the awkwardness of the implementation of the survival melee/ranged hybrid.
While I honestly wouldn’t mind if BM was left similar to how it was now while survival was reverted to ranged, I share feelings as the other post I responded to: if one spec of hunter is to be melee, it would be more thematically fitting for it to be BM. In my, and some others’ opinions, it makes more sense for the beast master to be fighting side-by-side his pet.
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