I don’t think it’s a good idea.
Survival as a melee polearm/spear dps fits an awesome class fantasy. It makes for example Headhunters from trolls an actual playable class.
I think it’s a cool spec, it just needs an identity by adding something unique to them and if the problem is dmg then u just tune the numbers and done.
Hunters are not tanks.
Of all the ones who oppose the idea: How many play surv?
“Surv doesnt have good abilities to tank…” Like what? They could clearly overhaul it and add new abilites and such. (Harpoon throw didnt exit pre legion 
)
I for one would play a Tank spec on my hunter without a hesitation! (Might actually get into more dungeon groups 
)
I forgot to address this point.
That Warrior was named High Warlord Normyo. He was also featured in the 2nd duel. What you saw in the 1st clip wasn’t keyboard turning, but appeared to be a high latency strafe and mouse turn, which is fairly standard play. Due to the latency issue he encountered, I but a lowly Grunt was able to pull a decisive victory in the duel.
He, like yourself, underestimated the tenacity of Survival Hunters that do not flee in combat, and remained in Berserker Stance longer than he should have, which allowed me to inflict a high amount of damage to him in a short period of time.
In the 2nd duel, he adapted his playstyle and incorperated stance dancing where appropriate, switching between Battle Stance and Defensive Stance while being kited. He did not remain in Berserker Stance long enough for me to exploit the opening in his defenses, so I was forced to kite him. This was all standard play, at the time.
I’m unsure if you appreciate how difficult it was to play as a Warrior during that time, and how elegant their playstyle truly was under pressure.
Note that Readiness was not employed in the 2nd duel, which would have reset my mDPS cooldowns for additional damage, and would have provided a total of 20 seconds under the protective umbrella of Deterrence.
The argument was never just about purely short-term rotation altering gameplay. It was about what we had within our toolkit which amounted to a coherent playstyle, again, by intent of design.
Just because you chose to single out a small segment of what your chosen “rotation” would look like, ignoring many abilities which they created with the intent that we should use them, that doesn’t make your comparison able of supporting your argument. Or, are you saying that they did not intend for us to use the abilities I listed for our ranged toolkit/playstyle?
The reason I left certain abilities out of my list was because you literally couldn’t use them unless you were in a specific scenario you never really wanted to end up in, when engaging in PvE. + ofc the ones that don’t apply to the argument of ranged vs melee weapons. The reason you left out(want to ignore certain abilities) is because you think they’re not worth using/including, based purely on optimal numbers or because they’re not used often enough, not based on the intent of design.
…which, again, you couldn’t even use much, if at all, in most areas of the game.
Baseline, again, we had:
Please, do tell me how this amounts to a complete playstyle, intended by design to be pursued over our ranged toolkit…
This was never the argument. Not sure why you’re going there now/recently.
You claimed that SVs contribution amounted to a playstyle which was arguably fundamentally different/unique to what for example a MM hunter did. If, comparing both of them, whether you opted mostly for MM talents, or SV talents, you would still focus primarily on your baseline ranged attacks, until the enemy got too close, and you were then forced to use certain melee abilities to deal damage+escaping back to range, how does any of that amount to them having different/unique playstyles?
Again, that wasn’t your initial argument. See above.
We have. Again, see above. Your entire toolkit, and what abilities you used when, was almost the same regardless of whether you went deep into MM, or SV. Heck, even in PvP, unless the enemy was actively attacking you, the offensive ability you got from SV couldn’t be used. Neither could Mongoose Bite.
Agreed. Which is precisely my point really. In order for a presumed playstyle to be intended on a base level, it must function within all areas of the game. Again, because they designed the classes, and the respective talent categories for the game as a whole.
I.e., purposefully seeking out melee range as a separate playstyle option, for any length of time, was not intended by the design they gave us. Per our role as damage dealers.
Can’t wait until Asthelon backpeddles to “melee was an option in Vanilla SV” before coming back a couple weeks later with “Vanilla SV was a melee spec”… again…
Removed because it was utterly pointless. Even when it existed you would still not stick to melee as an SV Hunter. Not that you would play SV for anything at all back then.
15% extra agility is as good as ranged rigidity. Agility gave 2 ranged attack power per point, and only 1 melee attack power. So the ranged attacks scaled very heavily with stats as SV. That one talent was enough to make SV’s damage rival that of MM by T3.
I don’t believe you.
That characterised the talent and skillset of the spec. End of story.
I didn’t read much of the rest because you’re just making the same repeated bad excuses. Survival was a ranged spec in Classic, simple as that. WotLK’s changes were a natural and effective extension of it.
Wow I guess you didn’t need much skill to get to High Warlord as a warrior back then because he sure didn’t have much.
I didn’t read much of the rest of your post because it’s just more excuses. Including that he was lagging? How does that help your argument in your mind? “Survival was capable of outliving melee DPS if the melee DPS is literally impaired”.
Most specs don’t need >30% damage leads just to see similar representation to what its class peers get all the time.
You try to normalise SV’s unpopularity a lot but there’s nothing normal about it. It’s uniquely unpopular even among the usual suspects like Feral.
P.S. If utility is the problem, maybe it was a dumb idea to make a melee spec on a class that they don’t intend on providing with any utility?
You’re the perfect example of this. You brag all day in TSL about how SV is the most fun and highest damage Hunter spec oblivious to the fact that most Hunters still avoid it.
This is the part where you say it’s because all Hunters are stupid, as SV Hunters always do. There’s no contest to the ego and self-centredness of the average SV Hunter.
Even that, which is only some of the Hunter ranged toolkit, is already more than the melee toolkit. That’s how minimal the melee toolkit was. It was never the primary mode of damage for SV.
Nothing says troll headhunter like literal grenades, right?
Give me a break. SV does not have an identity.
Yeah and plenty of people swore up and down they would play a melee Hunter. Hardly any showed up when they actually did it. If they made SV a tank you’d probably end up just like one of the multitudes of people talking melee SV up on the forums while never actually playing it; just glad it’s there while not actually playing it.
“I’d definitely play it” is a hollow promise whenever it comes up to defend bad spec rework ideas like this.
There are a few flaws in your logic that I would like to highlight.
First: the ranged toolkit and playstyle found it’s mechanical basis in Marksmanship. It is fundamentally an MM playstyle, that all specs had shared access to.
Second: the gameplay elements centered around melee range found it’s mechanical basis in Survival, which all specs had shared access to.
Third: the gameplay elements centered around the hitbox of the Pet found it’s root in Beast Mastery, which all specs had shared access to.
Whenever Marksmanship abilities became hindered by Line of Sight or the Deadzone, the Pet or BM predominates in damage output until a solution is found. Once you regain LoS, the Pet may continue to receive critical ranged support and even healing should the need arise.
Whenever Marksmanship abilities were nullified by the intrusion of the target into our hitbox, Survival and BM both predominate over Marksmanship as a mode of expression.
The expression of gameplay elements provided by each talent and skill category (the base class skills were each individually categorized), constitues a fundamentally different archetype for each sub-section. However…
what you refer to as the basic shared playstyle prefering ranged combat is in fact comprised of three seperate but harmonious archetypes that synergize and work together under offensive pressure. The shortcomings of one area, are bolstered by the other.
While Survival had no ranged abilities, Marksmanship certainly did, which helped SV with it’s shortcomings. Marksmanship, on the otherhand, had no answer to LoS, the Deadzone, or Melee range (besides the token Scatter Shot). Marksmanship itself had an incomplete toolkit to deal with all facets of in-game limitations in all but Group PvE against the AI. What does this tell you?
In my opinion, it means that no Hunter playstyle is complete without the full use of all class abilities employed where appropriate.
…which is very much the same “rotation” as ranged Hunters?
It has just as much of an identity as BM or MM does, bud. Don’t let your bias blind you. You are not the final say of what is and isn’t an identity.
A guerilla fighter working in tandem with their pet is a very strong identity. You don’t like it, great, not everything is for everyone. You really need to get over whatever you have going on in your life where you think you have the only valid opinions.
auto shot, aimed shot, and multi shot is one more than auto attack and raptor strike yes. one single ability more
Making things up and putting words in my mouth just to “win” an argument in your head?
Is this compared to your humility and selflessness? Oh wait, you think you have the only valid taste in the community and anyone who disagrees with you is just a bad person genuinely.
Surely this is ironic, right? Bepples of all people saying someone else has an ego and self-centerdness?
A lot more people than me say SV is the most fun, even die-hard BM/MM players. I am not the only person who has fun on SV and to pretend otherwise is dishonest
I say SV does the most damage in M+ out of hunter specs, which is true. I’ve never said it’s the best in Raid, which is MM (MM also has an incredible amount of RNG, so YMMV)
Please stop being dishonest, it’s really unbecoming and doesn’t do a lot for your argument
You think this is the dumb thing, and not having a class with no utility? Kind of weird.
Yet not the least popular. Kind of weird?
Well, look at the other pure DPS classes. Warlock and Mages are literally always powerful and Rogues are overloaded with utility. Even then, Rogue always has a red-head spec, much like Hunter does.
SV was the melee spec in vanilla. I don’t really call anything in vanilla a “spec” because everything was very, very surface level with no depth.
It’s quite weird that you insist people who you don’t like have an ego problem or are self-centered. You’re on the forum all the time (except the frequent instances you get banned for being rude, or for harassing people you disagree with) pretending that you have the only opinion that matters, and that you are some enlightened secret game dev acting like you know more than the current devs.
What’s up with that?
Perhaps…but your shaming tactics against Lacerate does not satisfy the question. You have failed to produce a single ranged talent or ability that Survival contributed to the class, and now you must live on in shame.
My account remains intact.
Sure, but I’m curious why the description for Lightning Reflexes doesn’t read “only boosts Ranged Attack Power”, like how practically every talent in MM does. “Ranged rigidity”, 
Could it be that Lightning Reflexes was meant to bolster the entire class toolkit (including whatever portion of the Pet profile that scaled with Agility and secondly Attack Power) instead of some silly notion of a “ranged centric” Survival?
You’re not employing logic here.
Well, let’s see you do better. You talk a lot, but lack in substance.
My aim with that in-depth description was to refute your “keyboard turning” and “lack of skill” narrative, when in fact neither of those claims were accurate.
I mean… explosive grenades aren’t something so far away to what a survival hunter would use. Besides the grenades everything else is pretty much basic nature hunter theme
You don’t have to reply to Bepples, his view on this is really weird. He thinks current SV has no identity and using WFB is antithetical, but really likes RSV and lock n load explosive shots
Wait wait wait…I thought you were joking when last you brought this up.
Are you actually basing your arguments on how our spellbook was structured? That’s just their way of separating all of our abilities so that they can be more easily found. The different spellbook tabs weren’t part of our so-called “specializations” back then. We’re talking about the three talent categories we had. What each of those promoted in terms of gameplay and design, how they contributed to all baseline abilities.
Literally everything found in our spellbook was a baseline ability, not part of any spec, except the actual abilities that we got from selecting the corresponding talent in a particular talent category(these categories, again, are what’s referred to as our “specs” back then).
So…then we didn’t have specializations back then, like I said, so SV wasn’t Ranged, like I said. It was just a melee, defensive, and utility oriented classification of abilities?
So SV didn’t stand out as a “ranged” specialization till 2006?
Stop arguing “rotation”, which is mostly about an individual’s method of playing, what they’re choosing to use.
The argument you initially responded to was about what blizzard created for us to use, what abilities we had that were part of our ranged playstyle. Whether you thought some of them weren’t relevant, or weren’t used often enough to warrant being considered part of our “rotation” or not is, in itself, irrelevant to the initial argument.
Blizzard created all the abilities I listed under the ranged ability list, and they intended for us to use all of them, not just those we thought of as “optimal for performance”.
I have never said anything different…
If you actually bother to read what people’re saying, you’d know that I’ve based my arguments of how SV was ranged from the start on the fact that it relied on the baseline class-wide toolkit to function as a complete playstyle, pretty much at all. That’s literally WHY I’m saying that we had NO specs back then. What we got from each individual talent category did not amount to a separate core playstyle, like those we see today.
Again, what we got from each individual talent category simply added to our baseline, class-wide toolkit, which in itself was designed for us to want to focus primarily on ranged attacks(whenever we could). You cannot say that SV wasn’t ranged back then because without our baseline toolkit(primarily ranged), it wouldn’t be anything at all.
Well, you’re arguing that the “intended rotation” and “most optimal damage” of SV back then was for ranged abilities, which makes it a ranged DPS. You can’t tell me that rotation matters some times, and other times doesn’t matter.
And Blizzard also gave SV all the melee abilities back then.
Blizzard also made SV melee almost 8 years ago. So do we accept what Blizzard does or do we not accept it?
Except for the melee abilities, you mean?
Okay.
So now basic spells that fit under the Marksmanship Skill Tab no longer thematically or indirectly connect to the Marksmanship Specialization? That’s strange, I don’t find the Aimed Shot Talent appearing under the Beast Mastery Skill Tab. It must be a coincidence.
I never claimed otherwise. Base skills, and talents were always mentioned seperately. However, the thematic root of the Skill Categories are both directly and indirectly linked back to the corresponding Talent Tree, which is where said abilities received augmentation.
I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that Survival won’t be reworked to a tank, or a ranged DPS. 
No matter how many posts are made or essays are written, MSV is here to stay
In a previous thread, Wildfire Bomb was found to have a link to the Troll Batrider Unit from Warcraft 3. WFI does not appear to be an engineered explosive, but more like a bushcraft molotov cocktail. The blast radius is a frontal cone, such as if the contents were a liquid.
So I share in the opinion that it does suit Survival.
That’s unfortunate, unless MSoft is going to do something about it.
It will take a 9.2.5 or better to get me to play SV again. So it can stay. I never said it needed to gone by royal edict. It’s just got to be one of those things that “exists”, like an immigrant wife who stays at home practically all the time(true story about a guy I know).
You won’t really see SV, but it’s there, because to say it doesn’t exist would still be incorrect. SV pretty much “stays at home and doesn’t go anywhere”, but has a spouse who makes sure SV has what it needs to keep living. Meanwhile, there’s other class/specs to look at and discuss.