Survival spec change to make more relevant

Classes Hunter
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this is just what I think should be done to help make survival more relevant end game if you don’t like it the idea that’s fine and I know a lot of people don’t like the idea of melee hunter because they believe its a ranged class which is fine if you like it that way there’s nothing wrong with liking something the way it is and not wanting it to change.

first off not to relevant but I believe huntsman would be a better suited name then survival.

ok on to the abilities:

  1. mongoose bite should no longer rely on dodging as late game you wont be wanting to trying to get hit to get that extra attack in, it should be an instant with a small damage to x bleed bleed by x time kinda like rend for warriors (doesn’t need the small start damage it you think it make it to strong though it would have to be removed from savage strike talent if that’s the case).
  2. raptor strike make it an instant that doesn’t rely of waiting for you basic attack as it adds extra time needed to wait just to use it, it should be an instant that deals about the same amount as arcane shot with the same cooldown.
  3. wyvern sting change to a gap closer as I believe survival atm seems more melee driven it would be a good to have something to get you into the fight faster (something like the gap closer in BFA seems good enough but might be a bit far fetched).
    4.change deflection talent to increase melee damage by 1-5% (might be a bit overdoing it here but still an Idea i’d like to see) or even the human and monster slaying as its basically the same thing but stronger it would also give and open space for the next idea.
  4. add a talent that makes hunters mark also increase melee attack power and call it huntsman’s mark.

that’s all the skills/ talents but there is one other thing I’m not to worried about but still thought I should add it in is end game sets now most people will be annoyed by this as that probably don’t want their end game sets change but there is only 1 set that seems perfect for the survival hunter which is beastmaster armor but the 4 set passive is the only thing that would need to change to just melee instead which is why I’m not to worried about it sense its just one passive of 4.

Combat:
this would mean you can use hunters mark for extra melee attack power-send you pet into attack-serpent sting-arcane shot-gap closer-mongoose bite- raptor strike, then just keep up the bleed and spam raptor strike.

if you stayed till the end thanks for reading and sorry if this you didn’t like the idea, I though it would be ok to put it out there sense I have played a few off the classes to try them out and being a hunter at the end loving the idea of having a pet fight beside you in melee combat just felt amazing and would love to see it more relevant.

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I just noticed that it shows on of your characters at the start of the post and now have changed it to my hunter haha sorry about the confusion.

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I’m not sure how you arrived at the conclusion that making a ranged spec melee would make it more relevant in raiding, especially given how making SV melee in Legion turned out.

I don’t think making SV raid-relevant works with the philosophy of classic WoW spec design: MM is the raid spec because it is designed to be the raid spec, just like how BM is designed to be the solo spec and SV is designed to be the PvP spec. The design paradigm of making all 3 specs viable in all those situations and making them differ primarily in theme and playstyle came later. That said, SV can be raid viable in Classic but it takes a ton of agility to make it worth it (via Lightning Reflexes) and it’s hard to justify the loss of Trueshot Aura.

The proper way of making SV melee would take a long time, but the first thing you can do is make SV have something unique that other specs don’t have and fits the theme of the spec. You could go with something like a debuff that makes people do more physical damage to the target. Kinda like Hunter’s Mark, but make it scale with agility and therefore interact with Lightning Reflexes to be more distinctly “Survival”. After you do that and you decide you want to move the spec beyond a simple support role, you can come up with core damage abilities that make sense for Survival and its utilitarian nature, such as a shot that has TNT attached to it. But Survival uses traps, right? Gotta tie those in somehow, so to make the rotation less static you can add a proc that lets you use that exploding projectile more often based on when you trap something. But what about when you can’t trap something? Maybe add another special shot that gives you that proc for those situations; make it another DoT so you have frequent “dice rolls” for the proc based on each tick. That’s two buffed projectiles for SV, so why not move Serpent Sting into that spec instead of MM since MM is more physical damage anyway, and make a bunch of effects that buff Serpent Sting?..

… yeah, hopefully now you can see why they took the path they did with SV.

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thanks you for pointing it out, I love all the ideas you put out especially the one with serpent sting buffs as I am always using it for extra damage over time in the initial attack, I was just adding them ideas sense most of the abilities are in the game atm so its easy to just tweak them increasing the dps hopefully and not relying on getting hit to use mongoose bite for the extra damage allowing your pet to tank and you to keep up the dps in the mean time though some skills aren’t in classic wow like the gap closer which I believe this will make it even better for pvp as well with the combat pointer I added in the article you can also add to it a hit and run tactic just to get that bleed in then wing clip to get away hopefully and its just something in the mean time like you said with the debuff Idea and just work from there it would be a slow process but hopefully worth it (also love the Debuff Idea) and adding melee attack power to hunters mark I would have though made it a tad more desired then just ranged attack power by itself (that’s if I’m reading the skill right as it says increase ranged attack power of all attackers against the target by x amount)
thanks for replying :grin:

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I like those ideas too and so did Blizzard since that all actually happened.

  • Burning Crusade: Survival gets Expose Weakness, a debuff that increases your and your allies’ attack power against your target based on a percentage of the Hunter’s agility. This made Survival a support spec i.e. its value came from buffing other people
  • Wrath of the Lich King (3.0): Explosive Shot is added which is a 6-second cooldown that does heavy damage. SV also gets Lock and Load which procs off traps (low chance from fire traps, guaranteed from frost traps) and gives 2 free explosive shots
  • Wrath of the Lich King (3.1): Black Arrow is added which is a long-cooldown, long-duration DoT which gives a chance on tick for Lock and Load procs
  • Cataclysm: Serpent Sting becomes a Survival ability. For Survival it has an initial tick on application, does a lot more damage, and is applied by Multi-Shot. It did lose Expose Weakness at this point (it was a personal buff by 3.0) as the spec transitioned away from being a support spec.

This was the core of the spec until Legion.

The reason I brought it up is because when you look at Survival’s direction beyond Classic you realise it wasn’t arbitrary. They were answering the same question you were answering: “How do you make Survival more relevant?”. Each change along the way addressed part of the problem or new problems that popped up. That’s how iterative design works.

It’s interesting to look at classic WoW and ask how you would have done it but ultimately classic WoW is a museum piece and they shouldn’t be importing changes from later expansions or making different changes along the way; there’s no limit to where you could go with that and ultimately it wouldn’t be classic WoW anymore… it would be some derivative branch of WoW.

And, of course, when it comes to humoring these ideas, I really don’t think melee is the answer. There is some value to having Hunter’s Mark give melee attack power to buff other raid members but no additional value is provided by having the Hunter actually fight in melee. If anything it actually makes the spec less desirable, since generally fights are more melee-restrictive than ranged-restrictive (Gul’Dan is one of the only exceptions to this in the game’s history). Also, people debate this back-and-forth, but the WoW manual from 2004 is pretty clear in saying that Hunters are unique because of their use of ranged weapons.

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ah thanks you that’s given me more understanding now, as well as I understand classic wow is basically a museum piece no one wants it to change or change much but blizzard will probably in the future will change fair few things not guaranteed but it could happen, but yeah I get it now thank you very much for all the info :grin:

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I would agree.

I was quite surprised when I found out about that interview with the lead devs at the time, where they stated a big reason for changing SV into melee for Legion was that they thought it was too similar to that of MM.

I mean, put aside people’s opinions on similarities/differences.
Look at the development of the spec going forward. Why not just continue on adding things that further pushes for the theme/definition of what the old SV was meant to be about?

Why not do the same with SV as they did with BM and MM(and all other specs), going into Legion?

The only thing that I can come up with, is that those who at the time made the decisions regarding development, really just wanted to give Hunters a melee-spec.
They didn’t put any real work/time into trying to improve RSV(for the whole of WoD really) because of choices to make it melee.

I know the above sounds negative. But what else could it be?
Opinions on current similarities between specs weren’t valid reasons anyway due to the intended changes to class design, going forward.

This did make me smile a bit @Bepples :slight_smile:

I know that you have thrown me a like or two towards my suggestions for a potential design for RSV(Thanks btw!). But I wouldn’t mind getting some more feedback on it. More towards if there’s something you would want to change, remove, or add. And why.

Always fun to hear from someone else who was/is passionate about the spec we used to have.
If you want to, probably best to put it in the link below as the topic we’re in here is not really about that:
#[Suggestions updated] Pre-Legion/Ranged Survival

Back to this thread…

I appreciate that you have a vision for what you would want a spec to be like.
Always interesting to get to read about what other players find enjoyable.
Having said that, like you mentioned yourself, it is not likely that any spec/playstyle changes will be implemented into Classic simply due to the fact that they want to keep it as close to the old game as possible.

Could it possibly happen in the future? Who knows.
But I doubt it.

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