Unique mechanics, primarily, that alternate between rapid prep or interim phases and burn phases that sort of slide around and past each other (even if, unfortunately, less so in DF than in ShL), giving the spec a sort of variable rhythm with frequent decision-making that’d have impact both the given GCDs and thereafter.
Legion Arcane and certain builds of Subtlety, Ret, Enhance, or Arms come close to some parts of its equation, but none of them to the whole of it.
Granted, there’s a lot more I’d want from it, and certain things I’d prefer to have removed (Terms forcing Harpoon on CD, Mongoose being positioned/tuned to be a non-choice, with no equally-weighty-but-very-different mechanic that could be taken instead), but all in all, it’s fun, and not of a sort I can quite get elsewhere. Which is all that can be concisely stated for just about any other spec I enjoy (which is… pretty much all of them, save perhaps Discipline and either Evoker).
I didn’t read beyond this point here because you’re obsessively nitpicking again.
I didn’t say it never happened. I said it rarely happened. Usually Explosive Shot is something that’s used every 30 seconds. I can count on one hand the M+ contexts where I would seriously consider holding it, and 0 hands for the raiding contexts. You specifically need a situation where you have Explosive Shot ready, the adds are coming soon (within 10 seconds), and they won’t be around for the next explosive shot after that.
Ah yes, a simple yet effective core mechanic that served the spec well in its most successful years was “crap”. You really are something else.
“Worth holding” isn’t the single variable that decides whether it’s complex or not; contrary to what you apparently believe.
Are you seriously going to pretend that every single case of “signature priority ability that you want to keep on cooldown” is a bad mechanic every time it shows up in this game?
The complexity came from the resource management. This is something that distinguished good and mediocre SV Hunters back in the MoP/WoD era and you could see it from logs. Satisfying the priority and maximising output, adjacent to fight mechanics, was a skill ceiling. It was a very fast-paced spec with zero downtime, a 1 second GCD, and a strict focus budget. On top of that there was the Lock and Load interaction. Yes, most of the time it was just a matter of priority, but importantly it also procced off CC traps and that mattered in many contexts especially PvP. It was a very effective and successful mechanical interaction, and all that was missing was extending the interaction to the realm of multidotting; something that was on the table and in the works until they abruptly decided to throw it all out.
You can dismiss this all you want and try to gaslight everyone into believing what we actually had was a terrible and boring spec, but this was one of the most celebrated and popular ranged playstyles of the time. The likes of Preach Gaming and Gingi point to this playstyle as the most fun Hunter iteration, so it’s not like it was the realm of pet-collecting wine mums who couldn’t handle more than 2 mechanics in a spec’s gameplay.
I didn’t read the rest of this paragraph because this is a ridiculous statement.
Also a ridiculous statement.
You’re again fixating on Explosive Shot in particular and not looking at the entire toolkit and priority system in which it fit. ES was a maximum priority ability that accounted for some 40% of the spec’s damage, so the challenge was getting the maximum number of casts for a given fight length. That meant GCD and focus management. Lock and Load itself was easy to handle, but what if you capped out on focus or didn’t keep Serpent Sting rolling before Lock and Load procced? That would mean lost DPS potential. And the gameplay was fast paced enough for that to matter over the course of the fight.
According to your understanding of the spec, no one would ever over/underperform and we’d never see a bad SV log. But there was evident variance in performance from exactly this sort of thing. I distinctly remember a conversation with a Hunter in WoD over why his DPS wasn’t as good as mine when it looked like his ability priority was correct, and we found he had the same ES cast count as me but on a fight 30 seconds longer. He had these inefficiencies and small delays in his ES casts which, while individually not too significant, added up over the course of the fight.
Damage breakdown and aesthetic prominence matters, and ES was very important for both. It was SV’s largest damage source by far and the most aesthetically iconic and recognisable. It was also intertwined into the spec’s mechanical interactions. It’s comparable to MM’s Aimed Shot.
I don’t see why it needed leverage beyond “use it whenever possible”. It wasn’t an AoE or a setup. It was the end result/finisher. The spec could use more mechanical interaction, for sure. But what it needed was more ways to get to that finishing point that was Explosive Shot. The ability itself wasn’t the problem.
I extensively played both. I’m currently playing the WotLK version. I played the MoP version very recently. The post-focus version is absolutely more dynamic and engaging than the WotLK version, aside from trap dancing weirdness.
WotLK’s model was a massive step forward from BC, but it’s still ultimately pretty static as it’s all entirely cooldown reliant. There’s a Steady Shot filler but it doesn’t amount to much. The resource management being an entirely separate “phase” of the gameplay via Aspect of the Viper removes much of the engagement. In the focus version, you had to be paying attention to your resource at every moment. The building and the spending was intertwined. With the mana version they’re separate, and what’s worse is that most of the boss fights are short enough for you to be able to ignore regenerating mana entirely.
You’re treating them as separate matters here but they aren’t. The resource management is relevant to the CD management in the focus version. It doesn’t work to say “well if you ignore the resource part it was the same engagement”. It’s a meaningless statement.
It’s not one-or-the-other because they’re entirely separate concepts.
What are you talking about? They didn’t just “give it AoE damage” and call it a day. It’s an entirely different ability. It has 5 times the CD and NONE of the mechanical interaction SV’s Explosive Shot had. I can’t set up a trap and Lock and Load burst with the new Explosive Shot.
This was in a totally different era of the game, though. This was in 2008. Very few specs had an interrupt, many were missing CCs, mobility was scarce, and one thing that was practically non-existent was passive cleave. SV was utterly broken when it dropped in 3.0. They hit it with 2 massive back-to-back nerfs to keep it in line, and that resulted in an awkward situation where it was still overpowered in multitarget situations but its single target was extremely lacking. So they took out the AoE component in 3.0.8. There were other ways to approach it but evidently they wanted the spec to be a solid single-target option and not have to deal with the balancing nightmare that was passive cleave at the time.
In modern WoW it wouldn’t be too OP. BM gets significant passive cleave for every Barbed Shot cast, for example. It’s common now. So a modern ranged SV could easily have a 6-second signature Explosive Shot that AoEs, perhaps via a talented option. It was just extremely problematic in the context of 2008 WoW. It doesn’t make sense to hold such archaic design constraints against the concept of ranged SV with Explosive Shot.
It could be a light ammo/heavy ammo situation where you talent into reduced ST damage in exchange for passive cleave. In any case if we had ranged SV I would consider explosives too important to the them/goal of the spec to be locking behind a long cooldown. But hey: I’ve said before that ranged SV should just straight-up have Wildfire Bomb and Wildfire Infusion, so maybe they could just have that in the place of Explosive Shot rather than 2 separate explosives in the same rotation.
You’re just talking about an entirely separate ability at this point, though. What I want is an aesthetically distinctive explosive munition that’s central to the spec. It had a great visual and was very satisfying to use, and being able to trap something and follow up with an ES burst was far ahead of its time when they first added it. It was by far the best attempt at making trapping an important part of the spec’s broader resourcefulness identity. I’m not interested in treating a 30 second CD alternative as a replacement. It’s just an entirely different mechanical space.
This is an interesting take on a possible ranged SV; it really emphasises the special munitions aspect. I would just hope it didn’t have a lot of downtime. 5 per minute wouldn’t be frequent enough.
Which is wrong in any and all cases that won’t have an additional mobs within 30 seconds. Effectively, all but single-target scenarios. In all other cases, it happens frequently.
That’s not a nit-pick. It’s the most basic of distinctions.
I never said it was; that’s why I laid out multiple.
But “always use whenever possible” is certainly not one of them either.
It’s not bad, in the sense that having a pure filler skill is not bad. But neither a mechanic that we should “Always use as soon as possible” provide any more depth than one we “Use only when nothing else is available.” For it to have any depth, it must have conflicts.
Which means nothing when one can simply float ~60 Focus without loss, knowing that you could optimally spend all procs without overcapping while still being able to afford BA + ES on CD.
You had more than enough time for which you had only a single spender option remaining to simply reach 60 Focus again before reupping Serpent Sting with at least a second left until any natural ES. You did not have to think about any of it. You just margined to the same degree as any other spec, no part of which was dependent on a fixed-priority rotation.
Which did nothing for your burst. You had the exact same ppm. It was at most small compensation for a damage-less CD (Freezing Trap). You had no reason to spend a GCD on Freezing Trap in raid settings unless you actually needed that Freezing Trap for an interrupt or hard CC, so why are bringing this up like it actually did anything for ES?
I don’t know who Gingi is, but Preach literally explained preferring simpler specs and that he gets finds no appeal in the actual execution of a raid-fight beyond its original problem-solving, nor any from the specs themselves beyond the basic appeal of their visuals and button-flow.
That’s not exactly a source whose review would indicate that, to have garnered the giver’s respect, a given spec would have been complicated. None of the WoD Hunter specs were, and I don’t know why you’d pretend otherwise.
Why do you keep bringing this up when I’m the one insisting it ought to be open to more depth and capacity? I know. I was there. I’ve played since Vanilla. I raided on SV until ICC, when I switched to MM primary and occasional BM offspec for cheese when helping friends in PuGs (stun-resist, snap-tanking / repositioning, Spirit Bond) when the tanks or healers couldn’t cut it.
I never said they were the same. I merely pointed out that even a generic 30s CD is going to have support more depth than did RSV’s Explosive Shot as it was. Add to that a context that actually has conflicts, and it picks up even more relative to ES within RSV as it was.
I’m not the one saying to. You’re the one who’s been insisting it was preferable to any sort of alternative or adjustment.
How is 5 uses per minute of something with what would typically be the weight of a 30-45s CD, in place of having any 2- or 3-minute CD… insufficiently frequent? Again…