Ah yes more tone policing. Just what this topic needed.
The millionth post about how we should “stop wasting our time” will definitely be the one that makes us all change our minds!
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Right but the point I make is this. If ranged SV was good, why would you ever change specs to start?
Just trying to understand the situation here, because the only thing I ever heard about Survival Hunters was “Survival Hunters are not good at surviving.” Hence I am curious what made the spec so interesting or enjoyable when it was ranged.
No. This is post-Legion revisionism. It was often a very powerful choice v.s. the other two. In fact, it was the most powerful choice in raiding as recently as 6 months before they announced Legion and the change to melee.
Because people generally don’t want to be stuck playing the same thing all the time so it was good to have variety in ranged weapon spec choices. It’s the same as asking why we have the two Warrior DPS specs or the three Rogue specs. They provide different takes on the core fantasy to provide a variety in playstyle options within the same foundational archetype.
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MM and SV were too similar and the old Ranged survival didnt fit the new WoW. SV was strong in pvp due to all its skill set being instant cast. They are going away from that style, another good example is affliction lock.
Well that’s typical of a Barthilas player. Makes accusations like Legion revisionism when it was a simple question. So I’ll say it again. All this talk and complaining about Survival not being good at surviving? I heard this all the way back in Classic the first time about Survival.
I was curious what if anything made either of the other 2 Hunter specs different from Survival, because as far as I remember, there is/was nothing different about it from the other 2 specs aside from a few minute differentials.
Oh and before you attack my supposed ‘limited experience with Hunter’ you should be aware of the fact that I was a part of a pretty solid PVP guild back then, which produced more than 1 High Warlord on Silver Hand.
Point I am making? I never saw people in Survival spec when I PVPed as a Warlock in Classic. Marksman? Absolutely. Can’t recall anyone being Survival. Not even Sayuke who was arguably one of the best Hunters to ever play this game, and the owner of a WoW Contest Winner Tabard to boot. But then again I didn’t check her spec every single day, so I could be incorrect.
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Nonsense. MM and SV weren’t any more similar than Arms and Fury, or the three Rogue specs. They all played differently from the other specs of their class. Why are people just now insisting that SV was ‘too similar’ to MM? In fact, how can you say that SV and MM were ‘too similar’ but then claim that SV was too strong in PvP due to its skill set without claiming that MM was similarly too strong due to its skillset? You are claiming that SV and MM were too similar for the sake of your argument against spec variety, but then essentially saying the opposite for the sake of your argument that SV’s kit wouldn’t be able to exist in current retail.
You are claiming “X” but then turning around and claiming “Not X” when you shift your points. It’s almost as if you have no idea what you are talking about, and just pull your claims out of thin air to fit your agenda.
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The four or five people spamming these forums do not a majority make…
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Lots of different Hunter players on these forums have expressed that they miss ranged SV and that they would like it back. Just because they don’t post as often as we do doesn’t make their opinions invalid you know.
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And almost everyone I see posting about how they like melee SV also comment on how ranged SV should be returned, and that it shouldn’t have been deleted in the first place. Just a heads up but these two camps are not at odds with one another, and returning ranged SV would be beneficial for both.
There just seems to be a group of trolls on these forums who don’t belong to either camp, and instead only post to deride people who would like ranged SV back. They are in opposition to the improvement of the Hunter class in general.
Also, is this really what you do on these forums? When everyone has seen through you and recognized you for the hateful troll that you are, you just change your character to a different alt? “This was just the default character on these forums”, ya right what a lie. You’re just trying to hide your post history because you’ve contradicted yourself numerous times over.
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Who are you trying to fool? We can see your profile you know. I already did so when I told you your raid progress and you tried to write it off as ‘farming for transmog bro’. You have identical achievements to Darkeforge. Yes, I looked before you hid your public profile. Are you so embarrassed by how wrong you were shown to be that you had to change characters and are now lying about it?
You’re even both from Proudmoore, lol.
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You know that you’re losing when you have to change characters and hide your public profile just to prevent people from knowing just how wrong you are.
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My my how prompt of you. Showing up all of a sudden when you’re being talked about. Almost as if you were here all along.
lol look you can even see that they have identical achievement points under their names. Good luck ‘hiding’ that. ‘Daft imbecile’, lol.
And now they’re deleting their posts to hide their lies. But yup, we’re the unreasonable ones.
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Imagine being so desperate to win an argument that you would actually post from multiple characters, in the same thread, just to give the illusion of support.
And we’re the “unhealthy” ones. lmao
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They weren’t.
And btw, “the old ranged SV didn’t fit the new WoW” ?
Wth kind of bullcrap statement is this?
Especially considering their plans for updating all specs, going into Legion.
We’re not talking about SV as a talent category back in Vanilla/BC…
Yep.
Ok. And?
Huh…
Well, that’s pathetic and comical considering his/her accusation that we were doing this, about a month ago.
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I’m talking about all it’s iterations, but if you can’t do anything beside call people pathetic or sweep aside people’s questions then I’ll just disregard you going forward and ask other people the same question.
What if anything made either of the other 2 Hunter specs different from Survival? What justifies Survival being ranged when as far as I could tell, and everyone I played with always played the other two in a manner that seemed to indicate that Survival struggled to compete with them?
Not saying I like Melee Survival. I have no real skin in this game since, I don’t play Hunters as mains, but I am asking regardless; because I am curious on what the draw was and how it was better than what exists now?
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Eh overall I agree with you, but careful not to confuse correlation and causation, while you might have data that shows hunters dropped in play rate more than other classes there are far to many factors to be able to definitively say it was SV becoming melee. Without conducting a person by person interview and asking why they dropped the class you won’t ever have that data, and therefore can’t make that claim. Many factors would affect this, an alt became good, the spec they liked got worse, wanted a change of pace, SV change, BM becoming the go to, etc. Just not enough data to do much more than draw a correlation.
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Are you talking about DPS or spec fantasy/playstyle here?
As far as spec fantasy goes, for the most part BM has been about channeling damage through our pet, MM has been about strong physical attacks with cast times, and SV has been about various DoTs.
The big things that separated them were usually single abilities. MM is the most basic, and most of its rotation tended to involve longer cast times like steady shots and aimed shots, where you are simultaneously balancing your focus to prevent capping but to make sure you have it when you need it. Doing so by dumping with arcane when necessary. The longer cast times of steady shot and aimed shot made chimera shot feel really powerful to let loose, especially since it did so much damage. Plus Rapid Fire felt especially strong in MM due to the reduced cast time on steady and aimed.
For BM you are usually rotating between cobra and arcane to regain focus and dump, with kill command on cooldown. But when Bestial Wrath popped up with its focus cost reduction you could spam arcane and kill command and it felt really powerful dealing out such huge damage and constant attacks. Focus Fire added additional complexity to this rotation, as you wanted as many stacks as you could get of attack speed on the pet during BW, while still making sure to cast it so the Hunter can gain their attack speed stacks as well. I always loved turning off ‘merge pets’ in Recount and watching as both me and my pet both individually topped the meters in dungeons. It really felt like we were a team.
SV revolves a lot around explosive shot and Lock and Load. Again using Explosive Shot on cooldown, but the procs of LnL allowed you to release three all at once which, again, felt really powerful. Multi-dotting with SrS and even Black Arrow in 2+ target scenarios felt good as well. But again Lock and Load was the star of the show, and I remember many times getting back to back LnL procs and just spamming explosive shots like no tomorrow, and it felt great rapidly firing them off when they usually have a 6 second CD.
The way it felt to play the different specs was very different. Many specs can be boiled down on paper to “X as filler, Y on cooldown, Z on cooldown” but ultimately what matters is how the spec feels to play.
Sure, but we aren’t just talking about a small difference here. Hunters lost more than double the numbers of players than did the next class down (4.1% loss compared to 1.6% loss for DKs). Clearly there is an outlier that caused such changes. We can’t say for sure exactly what ratio of those lost players was due to SV becoming melee, but I think it is naive to not recognize that it was more than likely the single biggest thing.
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Both. Mainly I’m just a curious party who wants to know what the difference between the specs are / were and why Melee Surv. is loved by some and hated by others. I have no idea what Ranged Survival was about. I always heard it was the spec people avoided.
I’m basically just looking to grow my knowledge on the subject. 
You still shouldn’t assume this is the reason…
This makes perfect sense, and there is a lot of truth in this statement. We will probably never know why the drop in hunters occurred but it could’ve been many reasons.
I didn’t play my hunter much during WoD becuase I dropped it mainly for my enhance shaman and Ret Paladin (was having more fun in PvP on them). It wasn’t becuase the upcoming changes to SV.
Then in Legion, i didn’t play my enhance as much due to the changes, but still did rated 2v2 on him. Played every class to max level and messed around, but never really had a main that expansion. There were many reason I didn’t play hunter, but once again SV changes wasn’t one of them.
I just didn’t have fun on my hunter in pvp or pve in general in Legion. To me BM was meh, MM felt clunky and weird, and SV was interesting and i tried it out, but i wasn’t excited about doing 2v2 or 3v3 with it, especially since my partner played a mage (not a good pairing for a hunter in 2v2 or 3v3.)