you lost me right there and i would imagine the vast majority of people that actually played ranged survival.
did you hear the news? survival hunter was the #1 most polished and enjoyed spec in all of wow. then one day while flying around tanaan jungle there was breaking news on the wow forums and other sites such as wowhead that ranged survival hunter will be deleted. and replaced with an extremely boring and untasteful lack of fantasy or real world concept melee survival.
so i say yes remove melee survival and give us back ranged. we did not ask for this. and when i say we i mean ranged survival hunter was the most played spec back then so i mean 10s of thousands of we’s did not ask for this.
sorry its nothing against you i am just trying to make it my lifes mission to infiltrate every single post i see about melee survival because even though it has been like 8 years i am still pissed off about it being taken away from us.
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no it wasn’t lol
maybe for you it was, but it wasn’t the objectively “most enjoyed spec”
There’s not one most enjoyed spec though. Every spec there is someone that has some issue with or wants something changed to make it even better. Some like MSV just as it is some want it to be range again or just have less range abilities. There no best for anyone just some.
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k well let me tell you why it was the most polished spec. and before anyone can argue i am talking about 5.4 ranged survival. not 6.0 not 6.1 etc…
- It had more mobility than any other class 10 fold.
- It was top 3 for burst
- It was top 3 for sustained
- It had 2 single target heavy damage dots
- It had an unlimited target aoe dot via multishot and serpent spread
- It had pets that could do a wide array of things and give every single raid buff
- It also had a talent for lone wolf which then could also allow you to give every raid buff
- there was not 1 single turret ability every single ability could be casted while moving even though every ability except cobra shot was instant.
- It had access to every trap.
- They were so mobile and so resourceful that every guild had multiple because when it came to off boss mechanics it was the survival hunter that did it.
i think we can sum up 5.4 ranged survival hunter as being the most polished perfected spec ever created in the world of warcraft.
I preferred 5.2, why you ask? Cause of THUNDERHAWK!! Yaaaaah.
Top 3 Hunter specs?
MM was king at end of WoD
I am a fan of mixing ranged/melee specs in classes so this would be really cool if it was balanced properly!
I still think DH deserves a 3rd spec. It’s kinda messed up they get only 2.
That’s because Blizzard intentionally broke RSV so much they were literally doing tank-level DPS… all in order to force players away from RSV because they knew they were gonna delete RSV for MSV.
Remember, WoD led to Legion.
They did the same with Demonology — like RSV, Demo was in the dumps during the last patch of WoD.
And we know that this was intentional. Ion outright admitted during an interview: “We’d rather that you don’t play Demo.” That’s where the meme came from, btw.
SO… I won’t say it really counts in this particular case, because Blizzard forced the players’ hands with MM.
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Not really into conspiracy theories as a foundation for an argument tbh
We will never know for sure if it was done on purpose to kill ranged Survival (it would have been pretty inconvenient to announce ranged Survival’s removal if it were a highly popular spec like it was in Highmaul just a few months earlier) but in the very same patch they gutted Demonology and outright admitted it was because they didn’t like how the spec worked and they didn’t want people to play it. Given the absurdity of the Serpent Sting nerf (removing a critical part of how the spell worked that Survival depended on since Cataclysm), it really does look like they gutted Survival on purpose. Not that they needed to because the legendary ring in that patch did a fine job in gutting every spec that didn’t have a 2 minute cooldown.
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Sounds like Demonology and Survival had nothing to do with each other tbh
It’s not really a conspiracy theory. It seemed logical to me. It is fact, what they did to Demo. They gutted Demo in the same patch as they did RSV. They explained why they do that (and got a huge backlash).
Both Demo and RSV were changed in Legion.
Personally, I don’t think it was too big a jump in logic. But if you dislike speculation about this, then okay. I’ve had my say, and that’s it. 
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I mean this happened how many years ago?
No need in speculating what may or may not have happened regarding the balance of a spec in an expansion lol
Either way melee is the direction they took it and are staying with
Both specs had major ground-up reworks pending in 7.0 and they both got functionally gutted in 6.2. For one of those they admitted that they didn’t want players to continue playing it in its then-current iteration. It’s not much of a logical jump to figure that they also purposefully broke the other.
Like I said, we will never know for sure, but it’s very likely. A whole lot of the bizarre decision making surrounding ranged Survival in 6.x makes sense from the perspective of “we’re about to remove this spec anyway”. Aside from the 6.2 nerfs, they neglected to give SV the unique spec cooldown they promised (leaving SV without a damage CD for the only time in WoW’s history), they removed Kill Shot only from SV, and they abruptly canned a major Lock and Load rework during the beta.
Another important note is that while 6.2 released in June the Serpent Sting nerf was added to the PTR in early April and they were certainly working on 6.2 class changes before that. As late as February of that year Survival was not only the most represented Hunter spec but in fact the most represented spec in the game. It would have been a really bad look to throw away the most played Hunter spec at its peak (rather: one of its peaks). And in a way gutting it in 6.2 played out well for them; you get tons of clueless melee Survival fans today declaring that ranged SV was always an unpopular spec because all they remember is the year-long 6.2 where it was gutted.
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Yes Blizzard does have a knack for doubling down on bad decisions.
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Bad is subjective
What’s bad for you is good for other people
Remember this young bepples
It’s blizzards game, not yours
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Survival was a hell of a lot more popular when it was a ranged spec and then Blizzard made it very unpopular. You can choose to side with the latter because you personally benefit, but most objectively-minded people would look at this situation and say it was a bad decision. They spent a lot of time and effort on 2 back-to-back reworks only to end up with the spec having a fraction of the playerbase it had before.
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Even if melee survival is less popular, bad is subjective
It can be considered a good change because now melee hunter is a unique option we didn’t have before
Choosing between MM and SV in the past was just down to “which one parses higher” and Blizzard found a way to get rid of that.
GJ Blizz
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Yes, they got rid of that by making SV perpetually abandoned by most of the Hunter playerbase regardless of how it parses.
Only Melee players can see this as a good idea.
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Why do you aggressively hate on melee players when ranged hunter is easier than melee
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