I disagree, I hope Blizzard keeps Survival as a melee spec. I thoroughly enjoyed the leveling experience as Survival and now at max level, I still enjoy it immensely. I do like how you typed out a well thought post for your reasons.
My opinion just differs than yours.
The original survival spec was a blend of both melee and ranged attacks. I wouldn’t be against survival getting some more ranged attacks, but it should never be 100% ranged like BM or marksman.
The flow between melee and ranged combat is what always made survival fun, especially in pvp. Currently, it’s mostly melee with only the crossbow-fired serpent sting or aspect of the hawk boosting raptor strike/mongoose bite to 40 yards for a short time (and of course kill command and wildfire bomb being semi-ranged).
An extra attack or two using the hand crossbow would be nice.
I use to use old survival for PvP and haven’t tried the new version much. I will say that from what I’ve played it could’ve just been a forth spec and they could’ve kept the old survival. I like both version but miss the old one.
YOu are right so why don’t you get a petition going to get Blizz to make one of the Mage specs and one of the Lock specks into a melee spec . How dare the yhave 3 range specs it is too much .
You can’t remove a spec, though hunter had survival changed, but you could add a fourth spec and it could be melee.
Mage could get Battlemage spec which is melee/ranged hybrid. Maybe your spells do different things depending on which range you are so a ranged spell would turn into a melee spell if too close.
And they could give Warlocks back the demon form and allow them to tank with demon armor or something. Maybe you sacrifice your demon and you merge with it and gain some of it’s abilities.
It’s a deflection tactic. When people start hating on SV on account of ranged SV no longer being a thing they turn around and say “well why not just make BM and MM more fun instead?”. It is intended to both deflect blame away from melee SV and also imply that the ranged Hunter specs are all interchangeable and expendable, which was core to the reasoning of making it melee in the first place.
Just for fun, you should try it with other specs. I remember when Guillotaur made a thread facetiously suggesting several melee specs should be changed to ranged. People playing those specs turned out and rioted about how he needed to respect their spec choices. It’s interesting how suddenly that matters when you’re talking about melee specs, but ranged players can apparently go jump off a cliff for all this community cares.
The great thing about modern Hunters is you can do this as BM; just dip in and out of melee. You don’t HAVE to sit at ranged the whole time. So if your only qualm is this thematic nature of being in the fray, why not just do that as an existing spec?
Aside from the harpooning, of course, but it’s not like BM lacks mobility. Just disengage in!
This might sound like me being facetious but I’m really not. This is honestly what I think the people like you should do. Why do we need an entire Hunter spec dedicated to the schizophrenic whims of melee players who like to… “dip in and out”? (which is not something Survival does, by the way, because you want to be in melee range as much as possible).
It is not “perfectly okay” when it costs Hunters a spec choice. This stopped being a “live and let live” situation the moment when an existing Hunter spec was essentially removed and all its players were evicted to make the melee spec happened. Your preference came at the expence of the preference of people like me. You didn’t give a damn about that, so why should I respect yours?
It is literally impossible for me to empathise with the position that someone actually chose an explicitly ranged class (and I really do mean “explicitly”: https://i.imgur.com/kBVr5Uc.png) for the melee aspects. That is unreal. Therefore I don’t believe you, especially given that sticking to melee weapons was flat out never a viable option for the class in any form of content all the way from Vanilla to WoD.
Some people have a bit more investment in the class and Survival in particular (when it was ranged) than… the levelling experience and a bit at max level, so hopefully you can understand why we get a little peeved when Hunter tourists like you pop in and talk about what the class should and shouldn’t be.
This is nonsense and you know it. What you’re trying to do here is find justification for melee Survival by appealing to nostalgia and it’s not working, particularly because you’re depending on a thoroughly revisionist view of the class.
Survival was never about deliberately running into melee. It was about holding up better when you got caught in melee and, most importantly, getting back to ranged ASAP. This is why we had things like Entrapment and Improved Wing Clip. Running into melee, especially in PvP which was SV’s original focus, was a thoroughly stupid idea which would neuter both your fighting and ability to survive (pretty bad for a spec named SURVIVAL, wouldn’t you think?).
Bandaiding the current spec with ranged attacks will do nothing but highlight how much of a farce the forced melee aspects are. Until SV can hold up while being at ranged 100% of the time it has not lived up to its past as that’s what it was able to do in EVERY era of WoW up until Legion. So stop pretending that it was a spec that weaved in and out of melee because it’s breathtakingly dishonest.
These are all cool ideas but only if, like you said, they do not come at the expense of existing specs.
I think a melee Hunter would have gone badly regardless, but if it came as a 4th spec I would never bother talking about it. The core issue most of us have with melee SV is how we lost a spec in order to gain it, so to defend melee SV people go to ridiculous, dishonest lengths to discredit ranged SV.
I explained in the post, a bow by logic is not useful in close range, believe it or not hunters carry melee weapons such as spears.
No? How does a warrior sound like someone who switches between melee and ranged? The whole idea of the warrior is staying on your enemy and quite literally overpowering them. Survival brings things hunters had before, against a warrior stay close enough they can’t charge, a mage dance around them and when the root and blink keep attacking.
Remember Rexxar was the hero they used for the hunter class. 
Enjoy being upset and throwing more tantrums while people continue to have fun.
THing is a favorite spec was lost to many players just to make it melee .
And a melee spec, by logic, wouldn’t be throwing explosives at point-blank range either yet here melee Survival is doing just that as well as using a point-blank ranged weapon like you just said (Serpent Sting), so take caution when attacking Hunter specs based on whether or not they make sense.
Like I said, not being able to deliver full damage at ranged makes Survival inherently less able to “press the hunt” than the ranged specs.
I was more referring to the part where you talk about “spear in hand, toe-to-toe, press the attack and close in”. All these describe WARRIORS.
Judging by Survival’s representation it really doesn’t look like there are a lot of people having fun due to Survival. They can sure attest to it on the forums but when push comes to shove they hardly ever show up in game.
On that thought, you know it’s a pretty regular occurrence to go into an epic BG and have 10-15 Hunters across both teams, none of which are Survival? Do you know how wild that is? In MoP and WoD you could conceivably have ALL of them being Survival. Looks like most people are opting to “press the hunt” as the two specs that are actually good at it: BM and MM.
A forward blast that stricks in a cone away from the hunter, guys watch out all our warriors are trained to flail around with bladestorm and kill each other.
Did you know in MoP it was common to have endless arms and blood? I wonder why no one plays them now? Did I do it, did I make logic?
I am genuinely sorry that you’re this upset, no one likes things taken away from them. But it’s happened to all classes and it will continue to happen, and I doubt they’re going to reverse a spec revamp as big as this one just as I doubt rogues will ever get combat spec back.
The only reason I’m expressing my opinion here is because Blizz reads these things, and I do like survival as it is. And I’d like them to be aware that some players think it’s an improvement, which isn’t something that you can discredit or disprove. People aren’t “wrong” if they enjoy a change, just as I don’t think you’re “wrong” for liking things the way they were.
Simple fix to all class problems. GIVE US BACK OUR TALENT TREES AND LET US DECIDE !
You want survival/BM there ya go.
Early age hunters IRL were melee spear-wielding hunters, not bow and arrow hunters. I love it!
My hunter went from 110 to 120 as survival. I changed to BM after 120. I really enjoyed the survival but I love BM so much more. Ashna’s been BM since the beginning except for those 10 levels.
My BM hunter stand quite a lot in melee range. It’s mostly because every other character I play is melee and somehow I just run up to the mobs and … yeah. Like yesterday after I ran everything on my hunter, I switched to my DH and tried to stand back and range… didn’t work very well LOL. Lots of alts = confusion sometimes.
They should make survival able to be range or melee. Talent into melee weapons to go melee or something. Im one of those that lost my favorite spec in game and im struggling testing out other classes i never touched before cause i patiently waited 2 expansions to see if they were revert back. I hate lone wolf with passion class fantasy is guns and pets, mm pushes no pets. So im with bm which is ok but theres no real range abilities besides shooting snakes. Survival range has been and always will be my fav spec and it was ripped away from me. I just wished i could find another class to fit my playstyle, think closest is lock. Its just flustration cause it ruined what fun and memories i had in a class.
This is the exact point many of us are trying to make.
Ofc it’s nice that there are people who enjoy the melee side of the class fantasy as well. The best part is that, the Hunter class fantasy, can serve as a basis for so many different themes.
But I, and evidently many others, would not want our favorite spec removed entirely. Which is what they did with Legion when they removed the old SV spec that included Explosive Shot, Black Arrow etc.
Agreed.
100%
By all means, if they find a melee playstyle that can somehow suit the Hunter class fantasy, then add it to the class(as a 4th spec option).
You DON’T delete existing specs/playstyles that thousands of players love just because you want to cater to a playerbase that largely is not already a part of said class(admitted by devs themselves that this was the intent).
Something like this, is NOT okay. On any level really.
While this is largely true. It still doesn’t apply to other classes in the same way as it did to Hunters, specifically, the ranged SV spec.
No other class had an entire spec deleted to instead have a new spec put in. That new spec basically filling a different role compared to the old one.
And no, by role I don’t mean in the way of comparing DPS to Healing to Tanking.
Very true. Which is why they should’ve added it as a 4th spec option in the first place. OR fast forward to today. Due to this history, it’s now justified to add in a 4th spec option to the Hunter class, in the form of a modern version of the old ranged SV spec.
Yep. This 
I pretty much assume by default that people who can’t even be bothered to post from a Hunter aren’t invested that much, especially when your post includes things like “the last time I played it” like your last one did, implying that you don’t currently play it, or any variation of “the ranged specs played the same” as your current post does, indicating that you are minimally informed as to the purpose and intent of each of the ranged Hunter specs and what made them different because that wasn’t true.
You’re allowed to make suggestions, and I’m allowed to say it’s not your place to influence the direction of a class you don’t play.
The devs think many things are good ideas that are actually terrible, such as titanforging, artifact power, or radically remaking specs from the ground up 6 expansions in to be something totally contrary to the interests and preferences of people playing the class in the hopes of drawing people in from other classes. Trying to act like the whims of a terrible design team that makes mistakes all the time backs you up is not exactly the best foundation for an argument.
Aaaaand there it is: MM and SV were the same thing… just because. Never mind their different toolkits and gameplay; never mind their different thematic focuses; never mind melee specs that are even more similar to one another such as Arms and Fury or any of the Rogue specs. Let’s take away a spec from HUNTERS because nobody likes them and we melee overlords want more stuff!.
Stick to what you know, demon hunter.
Please no. I like melee hunters.