So the other day I was clearing the “We Send Only You” WQ for the 3rd time. I was destroying a bone pillar. On my Arms hero she winds up with a giant overhead cut. On my Rett pally she conjures several Righteous Blades.
As SV I see my hero set a charge, and blow that sucker to bits. And thus it hit me: why aren’t SV Hunters Commandos?
SV has had an identity problem pretty much since inception. Were we raid? PvP? What did "Survival? mean? Everyone tries to survive, duh. MM = pew pew. BM = big floof. SV = ? The WoD switch to SV as a melee spec was a good call. SV tried to be Max Traps and several iterations failed and not at least because you couldn’t set traps in combat for the longest while. So we went melee and at least we had a gimmick.
But we had no identity. Then I played an Outlaw Rogue because, like “Surviving” being specialized at “Combat” made zero sense. Everyone does that; there is no Combat Priest spec because all specs for everyone everwhere are bloody Combat specs. And yet eventually Combat evolved into Outlaw (Subtlety differentiated into Shadow Magic Rogue), gained some properly piractical cursed cutlasses, stuck a gun in it’s shorts, and found it’s identity.
Well, give our propensity for bombs -flinging and setting-, our option to spec into an actual functional Stealth talent, our capacity to ambush via harpoon, that we attack in coordination with our pets and though I was underwhelmed at first the “throw tar and light it” Legendary is exactly the kind of thematic ingenuity that goes well with pocket poison crossbow. I think Survival could make sense as the “we pop out of bushes and murder fools” Spec Ops Hunter.
Which means jettisoning Rexxar.
Look I’m not going to pretend I care about Rexxar either way. He’s fine, but Rexxar’s not a useful depiction of a Survival Hunter. He has two pets out. He likes ranged even if to throw hatchets instead of using a gun or a bow. That he’s burl as hell and disdains shirts doesn’t make him a SV Hunter it makes him a Beast Master who’s really picky about his transmogs. Yes, Orcs get specifically pet boosting Racials. That makes them better conceptually as BM’s.
(This is rather like the Warrior iconics and Orcs problem: it’s a bit of legacy conceptualization that has aged poorly. Thanks to Grom, Garrosh, and Samuro the iconic Arms Warrior is Orcish. So is the iconic Fury Warrior image of the Orc Berzerker. If any of them used a shield they could sweep the category. See also: Gul’dan and how there’s no other Warlock who’s even as remotely important.)
The iconic Survival Hunter, the Commando, should be a Troll. I’m sure there’s a few Shadow Hunter types around who’d qualify. Trolls are up there with Tauren and Night Elves for nature affinity. Unlike Tauren they can be sneaky without shapeshifting. They live in the harshest places with the least distance between them and the wild. Personally I like the Rengari and would be fine with a Draenei getting the job, but Trolls deserve it more.
We need a new identity. I think we’d suffer fewer spastic mechanical reconceptualizations if what we did had a specific flavor and we could actually be assigned something that we do in lore. Yes, Huln Highmountain was a thing and was even a cool thing. Huln’s dead and his artifact is bank clutter. If we have to be dragged through revision after revision because it’s not clear what makes us who we are we should switch from “who we are is what we do” (ie A Hunter Who Survives) to “what we do is who we are” (ie throw bombs, set fires, shoot poison darts, stealth if we want and generally make mayhem).
And we are Commandos.
