Now this one I just can’t understand. Why do SV Hunters even have these two abilities, simply because level 1-10? After that they legit just sit there and literally can’t be used again. And I think to myself, instead of removing them, just make them usable like Kill Shot and Serpents Sting, a ranged attack that doesn’t need a bow. This would give us a bit better kitting, and more ranged pulling options. Just saying.
5 Likes
I’ve been saying this from day one when they unprunned the hunter abilities. Let Surv Hunters use the xbow (the one used for Kill Shot and Serpent sting) for Arcane Shot and SS.
Currently I have a macro to swap weapons to a ranged weapon to use these abilties then switch back to melee when the enemy gets closer.
5 Likes
Ideally, more and more abilities will become baseline, class abilities. Maybe that makes it possible to play a hunter, and not a spec hunter.
It’s going to take a shift in the design philosophy that has dominated the game since MoP, when trees were replaced by specs. I dont even know how they plan to do it, but it isnt unique to hunter. Fury and Arms warriors have shield abilities.
The stated reason of the unpruning of shield abilities in warrior was an intention that an arms or fury specced warrior could equip a shield and tank a dungeon. But there is no way an arms or fury warrior could tank any meaningful content, even on normal difficulty in the current game. I think that is indicative that they planned on phasing that capability in.
I hope they continue down that road. I hope they continue to unprune abilities, and open up possibilities for builds and playstyles. I hope I can play a BM hunter with butchery and mongoose. I hope I can play an SV hunter with a bow, bombs and chakrams. I hope I can fury tank again, and play my prot warrior in PvP. I hope hurdles they come across in development are seen as problems that need to be removed and not evidence that massive unpruning is somehow a bad goal.
1 Like
This would be good. I imagine it as an all-encompassing spell book, titled “Spells and Abilities of the Hunter Class”.
There are about 2 dozen Hunter Class spells/abilities, and each spec has about another dozen, excluding passives. The Hunter Class spell book is not uniform from spec to spec, I think it should be uniform, as it is the Class spell book. It is close, with some modifications it could be uniform, and could serve as the basic Hunter template.
If a Hunter has a weapon in his bags, he should be able to equip it, during a fight, before, or after, but not for free, it takes time. One Global.
The Hunter spec abilities, put them all in a pile and pick a dozen to two dozen, make something that works.
Who cares lol just leave them off of your bar/UI
6 Likes
The reason Arcane Shot and Steady Shot exist as baseline abilities is because they regret the “spec first” class design philosophy of Legion and they want to dial it back to how it was before; there was a defined core of each class that each spec built on top of rather than replacing. For the Hunter spec it meant every spec had things like Arcane Shot, Steady Shot, and Serpent Sting (with some tweaks e.g. Steady Shot being replaced by Cobra Shot for BM and SV); you got these abilities from 1-10 and you kept them. So they wanted to restore that. It’s an admirable goal but it doesn’t really work in modern WoW because the specs are still fundamentally different.
the only spec that should even think about using those spells is MM. not sure why you even want them. you have nothing that buffs them and they are both lackluster alone
the only reason i even keep it on my bars as BM is for the 0.00001% chance someone is in a BoP with like 500 hp and i couldn’t purge it off and i need to kill them that second or i’m gonna die.
Ion Hazzikostas:
“We want to keep melee as part of the unique identity of Survival but in Shadowlands and beyond, as we start to think about what classes should look like in future expansions, it’s important that there will be this sort of universal base of what defines a Hunter. All Hunters should have access to ranged attacks and Survival Hunters can be ones that specialize in melee but not necessarily at the expense of the universal skillset that everyone had as a level 5 or level 10 Hunter because that’s what being the class means.”
Hunters, at heart, are ranged.
5 Likes
This is excellent news. Expected, but excellent.
3 Likes
It’s from 2020, and it’s an outright admission that melee is a deviancy from the core Hunter theme. Hazzikostas in the same interview also claims that the Hunter class got more similar over time and that ranged Survival lost its unique traits upon the replacement of talent trees in 5.0, both factually incorrect statements.
You still haven’t answered anything about why melee is so necessary for Survival to be unique. Do you think it would be impossible to have a unique and interesting Survival that’s ranged? I fully expect you to yet again ignore this and give an empty 2-line response to some other cherrypicked part of this post.
2 Likes
In pvp we start off range to hop in to cleave down with melee. Again, play the spec to actually understand it before being biased again. Imagine how much you can actually learn.
ah so he also agreed that MM and RSV were the same spec. little to no difference. Damn son. LOL. Get that gym mat out and ready so you can practice some more gymnastics to warp in your own delusional reality.
3 Likes
Ion Hazzikostas:
“I think part of what led Survival to a melee space to begin with was trying to differentiate Survival from Marksmanship. The rotations over the years had become very very similar — OK you might have a couple more magical-seeming shots in the Survival space. Beast Mastery was very clearly its own thing with its clear niche as the pet-based spec. But then you had these two ranged specs that basically did a lot of ranged shots in their rotation.”
Well, of course they both did a lot of ranged shots! All three specs used ranged shots, as they all were armed with ranged weapons.
MM did almost exclusively ranged physical damage. Not so, with RSV, they dealt predominantly “magical-seeming” damage.
BM as the pet-based spec, making it unique, is that true anymore,? MSV is dependent on it’s pet, is it not?
MM and RSV, “two ranged specs that basically did a lot of ranged shots in their rotation.” How has this changed?
MM doesn’t have “a lot of ranged shots.” RSV is now MSV, does ranged damage using several abilities, most of which aren’t referred to as “shots”. sophistry… MSV does have “Kill Shot” for me, as MSV, a 46 yard ranged “ability”. The specs melee abilities–two? one? - they can be part-time ranged also.
I used to think melee did almost exclusively melee damage.
Are there any rules to it?
5 Likes
these are for the optional ranged build with a bow so you replace the unusable melee skills with these for optimal dps output. most people cant handle the increased skill cap.
1 Like
This was at the same time that they wanted switching covenants to be weighty.
ion is funny. at the height of hunter perfection which was around patch 5.4 survival hunter and mm hunter where so far apart in likeness that a druid bear would of been a closer match.
survival hunter was very unique. serpent sting, black arrow, explosive shot, cobra shot (cast) focus builder, multi shot with serpent spread (aoe serpent sting) explosive trap. black arrow procs for 3 explosive shots in a row. ranged survival hunters at this stage was very unique and nothing even remotely close to mm. in fact it make mm look unplayable with its mobility and smoothness.
5 Likes
Maaaaan you just reminded me of going into old BG’s back in the day with a prot warrior. xD Good and bad times for sure. Definitely want to see more diversity with what classes can do, I just don’t want to start seeing the garbage that happened in ESO here…then again…as much as I hate to admit it, maybe a little of ESO’s design would be good here. Not a lot…just like a dash or three.
In the full interview he claims that SV was perfectly unique before MoP but that all its uniqueness was from talented utilities and all that was lost when they switched talent trees over to talent tiers.
Of course that’s just factually incorrect. All those unique things SV had from talents became SV baseline in MoP, as was the case for every other spec. It was just the usual braindumping of excuses from Ion.
3 Likes
Basically, Blizzard brought back abilities for their start up area then failed to adapt them for all specs, eg Corruption which is baseline for all Warlocks but utterly useless for Demo and Destro, despite being made instant cast for Affliction.
Hopefully that might change in the future.
ego taking over, must imply I know more than the developers and game designers for forum clout
2 Likes
Which devs in particular? Which designers? Blizzard was a revolving door before the scandals. They took Ion off of his expertise and put him in charge of everything. The systems are incoherent, never balanced, and the devs aren’t confident enough in any kind of vision (or lack thereof) to stick to anything, making last minute changes to everything. The quote, World of Warcraft, endquote, is little more than a staging area where you wait for your instanced mini games. Everything happens in a sterile, curated, private lab like experience and they cant even get that right. The art team— always the star of every blizz-con— does less, with more resources, than ever; giants like Laurel D. Austin and Dave Greco having long moved on to greener pastures. Cdev is a mess. Danuser literally explained at a lore q&a that at the time of Before the Storm, they were not yet sure where they were going with Sylvanas… in the same expansion. They retconned BfA, mid-narrative, and we are supposed to believe that they were already developing Shadowlands, before they decided that Sylvanas was in league with the Jailer. Christie Golden blows of criticism of her writing in Elegy and Before the Storm as better directed at Cdev, when she has been driving the narrative in no small part since wc3, and has been embedded in Blizzard as a senior writer creating novels, cinematic dialogue and quest text for over 5 years…
My 4 year old daughter invented a kind of hopscotch that uses 1s and 0s. It was more coherent and well thought out than anything to come out of Blizzard in a while. The challenge you are suggesting is not a difficult one.
2 Likes