They are not the same. They don’t play the same, their fanatsy is different, damage profile etc etc.
Saying that is as foolish as saying “why play shadow priest? Affliction Lock is there.”
So? It was widely more popular than assassin rogue at the time especially in m+, the druid needs to stop making such dumb statements.
Mobility, jumping in and out of range, hunter pet
melee with a slave*
Also unholy is more akin to bm than sv with its billion of minions
I find I enjoy the ramp-up that is short to build up, and has a rewarding climax to reach. The mix of bombs and utility pets are also a nice addition.
Finally, the utility of being a melee class, being able to avoid engaging in some range mechanics, and focus more on damage, but retaining every bit of mobility (and then some) to do ranged mechanics if needed.
EDIT: (At least pets were a good utility)
While I am biased to Survival, I also keep a Bm spec ready at all times. This is so If we are overloaded with melee, I can flip to ranged, and in rare cases, go melee in ranged heavy groups.
BM can do all that. We can be in melee range if we choose. We are mobile and have a pet.
Not the same thing
By this same logic, bm si the same as old sv. (mobile, ranged, instant casts)
Not with two pets doing all the damage. I also miss my dots.
melee or ranged
skills cast by you vs skills cast by your pet on your order…
same difference
Not really the same but if you think so, who am I to argue.
you’re the one who said that playing ranged in melee range is the same as playing melee.
okay you got me
But this was your quote. Jumping in and out of range. I was saying bm can do that.
Jumping out from melee for some range vs jumping in from range for no reason. Good comparison
Funnily enough that perfectly sums up MSV.
and enhance, and feral, and dk, and ret, and rogue…
Having the pet is a big part of it, yes. I also liked the theme I saw when it originally came out in Legion, since SV looked like a modernized aborigine tracker. As I’ve said in the past, this was also after I said to myself “it’d be cool to a melee guy with an animal companion” when seeing the Frostwolf and Thunderlord orcs in WoD.
None of those started as a ranged spec and later became melee, they all started as melee, none of those specs also can shoot a bow/gun for 10 levels and then suddenly forget how to once they decide their spec.
This doesn’t mean anything. In a game with at least hundreds of thousands of players there’s never going to be a spec that has literally 0 players. So “has more than 0 players” is a meaningless metric for success.
This. People should actually talk to people in-game about the spec. Especially Hunters. It’s clear a lot of SV players live in a bubble where everyone loves it.
Remember originally they were working on a few new things for the spec, with its new Lock and Load charge system and spec-specific cooldown. They abruptly abandoned this halfway through WoD beta probably because that’s when they decided to axe it and make it melee in the next expansion after WoD. No one asked for SV to be void of all complexity.
Guardian was MoP and that was for the specific case of a spec being both a tank and a DPS which is something Blizzard now avoids. It’s very different when asking for a 4th DPS spec in a pure DPS class.
TBH it would still have complexity in its gameplay. Definitely reduced because you never have to care about going into melee to do full damage, but it would still be an engaging spec.
As for broken in PvP: it would come down to tuning just like it does for BM.
The bigger problem is its identity would be just as nonsense and BM-infringing.
We used to play it and we would like it back.
Just to add to the dogpile: do you regret this misinformation? Did you know it was misinformation before posting it?
What do I get wrong about the spec in my posts?
No one’s ever actually argued that SV has literally 0 players. Why do you keep pretending this? Can you argue nothing else?
TBH it would not be equivalent for the simple fact that more people played RSV and would play a new RSV, while very few people play melee SV. It’s stepping on a lot fewer toes.
You also have to figure that not everyone who’s playing SV is there specifically for the melee. MSV players having to go ranged is probably much less of a dealbreaker for them than RSV players having to go melee.
This would mean you would start off as ranged when you make the character, you spec out of being ranged when you pick SV, then you talent back into being ranged further down in SV. A mess.
Instead you should talent into being melee if you want. And BM would be a better fit for it than SV.
In like 99% of PvE cases it’s better to just be the ranged spec, though.
The only times it’s been genuinely useful to have melee is in the case where a fight has weirdly imbalanced mechanic distribution that makes ranged spots limited. That’s Gul’Dan and Lords of Dread. 2 fights in a 6 year period.
I know for some reason you want to hyper-focus on that, and conveniently dodge other points, but:
I guess I imagined reading that, on top of other equally stupid comments.
People on the internet: what’s with licorice, man, nobody likes it
Skol: 
ackshually you can’t say “nobody” likes it because there’s at least one person that does like it so you’re logically incorrect
Even when it does more damage than the other specs it is the less played spec in the game and has been since the rework.
Maybe people dont want it buffed because they prefer playing mm or bm and dont want to reroll survival because it just does better damage by a large degree. On top of the fact that the rework removed one of the 3 range specs anrld replaced it with another melee spec.
No point blaming other people for hating it. Blame blizzard
The numbers dont lie can have a ton of forum players supporting it but at the end of the day its the least played spec in the game and has been for nearly a decade by a large margin