From my POV the only constructive improvement to the spec is to make it ranged again. I don’t play hunter to play melee DPS, and never will. I play hunter because I want to play as an archer.
Even if I did want to play as melee, I don’t see anything particularly unique about survival hunter. It’s just a bargain bin Arms warrior.
You need some testosterone boosters.
And I play Hunter to play as a Hunter. That it may occasionally use a polearm won’t detract from that for me any more than a sniper rifle, grenade, trap, or pet would. We were never designed to be solely an archer.
If I wanted solely an archer, there are MMOs that actually target that aesthetic that I could play instead.
It plays nothing like Arms Warrior. Nor any of the other melee. Nor any ranged. It is very much it’s own thing.
No they just slap it with x% buff and that’s it. It requires some talent changes more then Ret paladin ever needed but hear hear.
We will be stuck with this mess from spec for a while. We are not melee fighter neither beast master. We are worst version of both.
Pet for survival should just be support, and nothing should revolve around KC procs. Mastery should buff mongoose furry and mongoose furry should buff all damage not just Mongoose strike
By players you mean 7 forums users form which one is Bepples and others are lvl 10 “EU players”??? Give me a break please.
If it was they would never add melee abelites at first place. Hunter started of with melee and ranged weapon. Sire they scraped the idea of melee hunter which was fine, and ranged SV was super fun spec. But just because they changed it to melee and made a spec that was as well fun but harder to change to when other two specs are terrible doesn’t mean is bad.
Main issues in change was the spec hopping. Before if BM is bad you had other 2 specs ready to go and vice versa. Now if BM or MM is bad you can change to SV hunter but if you don’t have weapon for it you’re underperforming, Again not by much but some try hard’s think that 5% dps loss is terrible.
Or you know, if your raid or M+ group doesn’t have a melee spot you can’t play it at all. And SV being a spec that brings nothing to the table whatsoever in terms of raid buffs or raid utility means that it’s literally the least desirable melee spec in the game.
OK so? Rogue usually has one spec that is raid viable. Warrior as well. Ofc talking about dps. When was feral druid last time a viable raid spec? Class design and statistic are for meta players. I can guarantee you that there is people that perform on high levels with any spec.
This game is all about guild. Get a good guild and you can play battle mage that uses bandages as heals and you will have a raid spot. If you depend to be accepted in pug high end raids then you better bring top tier class/spec. End of discussion
All 3 of those classes bring raid buffs. Hunter is the only class in the game that doesn’t.
Only because they started out with a deadzone.
Now, they easily could have made melee-weaving more productive, but that clearly didn’t seem to have been a featural goal, only ever perhaps an oversight.
Obviously, I enjoy having reasons to go in, because I like contextual complexity and it’s a damn quick way to get that, but it was primarily a downtime-supplementary feature, just like being able to use Arcane Shot and Steady Shot on SV now would be, or at most a way to apply a finishing blow in leveling or while needing to move past the mob anyways.
That’s also true for more classes than not, though. Out of all classes with multiple DPS specs, only Warlock and Mage do not have that problem. Frost DKs have traditionally suffered for using two-handers, if even allowed to do so, Fury uniquely takes up twice the weapon slot value and upgrade costs of any other spec in the game (unless SMF is balanced), Enhance and Feral use different weapons from Elemental and Balance, etc.
Neither do the other two specs. Which is to be expected, when those are, outside of healing specs on hybrids, all class utilities rather than spec utilities.
If there is to a Hunter spec that uniquely brings raid utility to the table, yes, it should probably be SV, but as it’s not a healer, there’s no reason to expect it to bring spec-unique raid support.
At least one spec that is raid viable.
And Feral is presently viable.
We shouldn’t be conflating “raid buffs” as all the same thing.
The “raid buffs” Rogues bring are rather different from, say, Battle Shout. Give Hunter an equivalent of the latter, and you’re that much more likely to cap raids at a single Hunter once that rDPS is balanced against (siphoned from) their personal output. Give them stackable/syncable utility like Rallying Cry, on the other hand, and you may have a reason to take multiple.
Sidenote:
Marksman has the highest average performance of any Hunter spec, by a pretty large margin. On all but 3 fights, it is the highest performer.
Why are there only three times as many parses by MM, the best performing spec, as the typically lower-performing SV, who allegedly has “no” players?
If BM or MM would perform bad they wouldn’t have spot as well. While rogue has 3 dps specs, based on meta you can play only one spec. And what part of my comment you can’t understand. For raid spot you need to have good dps or raid wide buff that is absolutely necessary.
DPS has never been balanced around having a raid buff.
The current best classes in VOTI are Warrior and Shadow Priest. Both bring raid buffs. Shadow Priest also brings PI for someone else while being the top damage spec in the game itself.
Rogue brings 3% damage reduction to the entire raid. It’s a genuine raid buff.
Sure Legion, BFA and SL feral saw some to none play in high end to my knowledge.
But they cab use their abilities with 2 h weapon. You can’t use MS or RS with bow.
Again furry will use 2H weapons and arms will use 2H weapon so still they can use their abelites without issues. So again have no clue what you are balborning about
Yea because one is caster and one is melee. People who decide to play them know that, they don’t cry how its a bad design that they have a melee spec.
People still think that hunter is or should be ranged only.
uhh actually chud MY vision of an abstract concept should be the most relevant
Hunter is effectively ranged only.
Survival is a spec that nobody wants and nobody plays.
There are literally 1/3 as many survival hunters as the next least popular spec (Frost DK).
There are 38 people playing ranged hunter specs for every 1 person playing survival.
And? People who play it enjoy it so who cares…oh right few low life balloons care about.
Blizzard would revert the change right away if that’s the case.
At least something you said is right. But as well they use traps and spears as well, but they are mainly ranged yes
To put it another way:
There are 38 ranged hunters for every Survival hunter in M Parses on Warcraft logs.
If even 10% of those ranged hunters would like to play ranged survival, they would still outnumber the melee survival enjoyers 4 to 1.
A lot more people enjoyed playing ranged survival. Melee survival has never even come close to the popularity enjoyed by ranged Survival, which FYI was the most popular hunter spec for many years of the game’s history.
Melee survival in comparison has consistently been the least popular spec in the game ever since it was created.
OK so ??? People play melee SV now , it was heavily played when the damage was top tier so 
people will play it if it makes big yellow numbers on screen
No, it was heavily played when it was ridiculously OP in M+.
SV’s damage has been top tier for quite a few raid tiers and still nobody played it.
But here’s the difference: those are both class buffs on multi-role classes. When UH and Frost underperform and Blood is at least not terrible, you’d take Blood for AMZ. On Hunter, though, you have only 1 role by which to provide that raid buff, making far less an inevitability.
As for Rogue, pretty sure you can only take one source of your standard damage reduction raid buff, just as you can only take one source of passive movement speed buff?
It’s literally twice the weapon requirement. To gear a single TG Fury Warrior takes up as many resources as gearing TWO Fury, Ret, Unholy, Blood, Arms, or MotFW Frost players.
Odd, as in raids there are more than a third as many Survival parses as made by Marksmanship hunters, despite Marksmanship hunters having significantly higher performance in all but 3 fights.