Survival was a melee spec for most of Vanilla

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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dude no matter how many times you ask, it’s not going to happen.
blizzard has already said they are using 1.12 and they aren’t doing any class changes.

and by the way.
wow went live 11/7/2004
1.7 went live 9/13/2005. that is a little more then 10 months.
BC went live 1/16/07. that is a little more then 14 months.

so no. survival was not in fact a melee spec for most of vanilla.

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Survival is still a range spec, with more options in melee approaches. If you melee survival in vanilla you’re doing it wrong. Also this is your second thread on this, not gonna happen bucko.

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Even if your argument was valid, it’s not, but even if it was, that talent tree was a joke that no one took.

It was a joke that no one took after the revamp, you needed almost 400 agi (which was a lot to make LR better than TSA) if another hunter in your raid group didn’t have it, and that’s assuming they don’t slap you in a group with melee dps to give them tsa. The 31pt talent in the revamp was exactly as bad as lacerate since it was inferior in every respect to scattershot, which a 0/20/31 hunter would have had to give up.

It may have been a “melee tree” in theory, but it might as well have been an empty tree.

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lacerate did a set amount of damage over time, comparable to rend
it was a laughably bad talent

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survival was a range spec lol, you would combine survival with mm and it would be a monster world pvp/ bg spec. Walking around nuking people down. The old talent tree allowed for customization, melee spec in vanilla was BM and survival combo. So its a no for me on this change.

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Just because it had a few talents for melee improvements does not mean it was a “Melee spec”. It was very much intended to be a ranged spec, and was commonly used as one. Enhancement shamans had talents to improve shield use, that doesn’t make it a “tank spec”. Back then there was a lot more multi-role-ing going on. The specs didn’t differentiate playstyles as much as they do today. Hunters had to have SOME melee improvements because they couldn’t fire a bow within like 7 yards.

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Sorry, which argument? I don’t believe I presented any serious arguments in my topic, just opinions.

Yeah true im not that familiar with Hunter’s shortcomings. I do know that the Hunter tree was 100% useless before the revamp, no doubt. But looking at it logically, yeah, it’s hard to see how a single 15% agi talent would be able to trump all the other benefits in the MM tree (even provided you had someone else provide you with TSA).

And, sure, like I said, the new 31 talent was pointless in PvE, it was pretty much just a glorified PvP talent, which would make more sense baseline, or as a level 21 talent, which was a problem in Vanilla for some specs and even later expacs(even as primary PvP’r, I don’t enjoy taking non-DPS talents). But at least Lacerate was still useful for melee hunters.

If it turns out that Survival is actually as useless as it sounds, then it will be as funny watching the same situation as early classic unfold. No one takes a dead spec, and a bunch of n o c h a n g e r s on this forum will come crying out of the woodwork and try to justify it. (“Fixing dead specs will ruin Vanilla!” “Being able to play other classes than Rogue/Warrior/Mage would be horrible”) etc. It will be glorious.

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Lacerate was an absolute trash talent. Losing it wasn’t a big hit to Hunters. Especially in PvE since no raid was going to use up a debuff slot to let you apply a worse Rend.

Also post-revamp Survival was not only in Vanilla longer(making your claim that it was melee for most of Vanilla false), but it actually scaled better with gear than Marksman did because of Lightning Reflexes.

The main reason many Hunters wanted to stay Marksman into AQ/Naxx is because of Trueshot Aura.

Survival is also a strong PvP tree with the traps, Deterrence, and Counterattack. My Hunter did a lot of PvP as 0/21/30(I preferred Scatter Shot to Wyvern Sting) and did more than fine.

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And you are wrong. Until 1.7.0 Survival was a complete melee spec.

Losing Lacerate was a big hit to melee hunters.

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There was no suck thing as a melee hunter, and lacerate did less damage than rend. Hunters had two melee abilities, raptor strike, and mongoose strike. Raptor strike was a “on next melee hit” ability and mongoose strike required you be getting hit.

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Did you even play WoW pre-1.7?

It wasn’t a melee spec. It was a tree that contained some improvements to melee abilities. The purpose of these talents was to improve your power when you were stuck in melee.

Even with the melee-specific improvements, you were still a ranged character, who wanted to be at range, because your ranged attacks were still more powerful than your melee attacks. Being in melee was just “less bad” with points in Survival. It was a matter of contingency planning.

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I’m sure they lament the loss of that 6 DPS that they couldn’t use in raids because it was the worst DoT in the game.

Actually I’m pretty sure that Scatter Shot that deals 50% ranged weapon damage every 30 seconds and is usable in melee range would do more DPS than it.

Lacerate is quite possibly the worst end-tree talent that has ever existed. Losing it was a big hit to nobody =P

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What about vigor? It even managed to survive the rogue QoL.

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There are a few contenders for worst talent ever.

Though Lacerate is definitely on the list =P

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…ummmmmm…wow went live Nov 23, 2004…I remember because it is my birthday :slight_smile: Unless there was some secret meeting of beta players for 16 days that I didn’t know about

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okay that just makes it even worse for the “survival was a melee spec for most of vanilla” statement.

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i’m pretty sure he is talking about this argument right here in your thread title
" [SURVIVAL WAS A MELEE SPEC FOR MOST OF VANILLA]"

which gets debunked right about here.

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some people actually took that. it wasnt amazing for a final talent but it wasnt bad for a single point if you were already going that far in the tree

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that point could get you scattershot. I’m sure some people took it, in the sense that some people took lacerate. But it was utterly inferior to scattershot. No competent hunter whose gear was good enough to justify going survival over marks would have taken it over scattershot. It was a CC that left a DoT, and could only be used out of combat. Sure, you could have used FD to drop it on mobs during combat, but you could do the same thing with freezing trap (a better CC), or immolation trap (a bigger dot). A ranged CC could have had use in PVP, except that survival was no match for BM in PvP.

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I’m not that familiar with playing the Hunter class personally, but I see some talents there early on that might be useful to take up, if you want to deal some extra damage to monsters and humanoids, or improve the potency of your traps. It probably wouldn’t be bad to mix some survival with bm or mks, but most people have been saying usually players didn’t main survival.

If you want to do it though, then by all means go for it. Play what you want to play.