My take on Surv vs BM is likely outdated as the lion’s share of my Hunter experience other than a mid-level (level, not ilvl) MM alt is from the Cata-MoP era. Skipped on it in WoD, and Legion is when the change happened.
But in Cata/MoP? Yeah, they played the same. They were -themed- differently, but the gameplay between the two was largely the same.
I can’t speak to MoP. I played in Cata though, and BM did not play at all like Surv. There was nothing in BM like the lock and load management in surv.
The key thing that made end-game surv unique in Cata specifically was an understanding of your focus regeneration compared to your lock and load procs. Arcane shot weaving when you’d cap out vs triple exploding shot when you wouldn’t. Having to pause briefly when firing exploding shots during lock and load to make sure you didn’t overwrite your previous exploding shot damage. There was a lot of dynamic play around lock and load that most people who never played end-game with it didn’t know was there. Maximizing it was a fantastic mini-game that I’ve never seen another spec in this game really emulate.
Warrior* We should get a ranged spec about throwing weapons. If anything Rogues should get a ranged spec that uses ranged weapons since only 1 class uses them right now and they have a spec that uses Melee for some reason.
Frost DK, Frost DK, Frost DK
Yeah fair enough, I wasn’t aware of any of that. I did play endgame. I raided old Normal. Consistently beat the other 2 hunters in my group despite being denied loot for not joining the Guild. So my first thought was “was it really a significant difference to pay attention to those nuances?” But, realistically, if I was beating them out while only getting loot literally no one could use and while not knowing these things, it’s more likely that they were just awful.
It is possible. The most significant burden is the artefact, and that’s not so much a burden anymore because since Legion content is now optional the solution doesn’t need to be clean/perfect. They could literally just duplicate Marksmanship’s artefact chain onto Survival and call it a day if they wanted to do minimal effort, and then they could make the SV artefact appearances available account-wide to other classes or even as cosmetic melee weapon appearances within the Hunter class.
Besides the artefact weapon there really is no burden outside of the work that needs to be done to the spec itself. After all, Survival was ranged for 12 years before Legion made it melee and they didn’t have to review a bunch of old content to do that.
Improving Survival’s single target DPS won’t fix most of the underlying issues that cause the bitterness and stigma surrounding the spec. It’s still a melee spec in a very crowded melee pool and it’s still in a class with a playerbase that overwhelmingly favours ranged combat.
I do believe I pointed this out in my post already. Since you opted to flatly ignore it and repeat the same point, I’ll copy paste what I already said and hopefully you’ll comprehend something from it this time.
Yes, good point. Mixing melee and ranged DPS in the same class is generally not a good idea and we should limit it to the classes that started that way (Druid, Shaman). Knowing that this is a problematic situation which requires a lot of care and balance to keep the melee spec relevant, why would we deliberately put another spec in that situation? We knew it was a bad idea before they even tried it.
Yes, exactly. And it gets harder to come up with a sensible, unique, and valuable crutch for every melee spec. It’s already problematic with Survival out of the picture. So why pile another melee spec onto that burden?
This is what you’re continually misunderstanding. You think that if a melee spec already exists alongside a ranged spec, that means it’s fine to just keep doing that. You think that since they bail out some melee specs with crucial raid utility then they should keep piling more melee specs on and applying that solution to make it work. But what you’re ignoring is that every spec added to that pool of melee specs exacerbates the problem. Melee is more overcrowded, they have to make even more unique, strong utilities to force you to bring each one, and god forbid your melee spec shares a spec with a ranged spec (much less two ranged specs; another crucial point you missed) and they now have to constantly perform a delicate balancing act where the melee spec is strong enough to be relevant but not strong enough to invalidate the ranged spec.
This was bad enough at the start of the game, it got worse when they added Frost and Unholy DKs, Windwalker Monks, and Havoc Demon Hunters. So, again, why would anyone then suggest taking an existing ranged spec and making it melee? We know full well what we’re getting into there. There’s no excuse. There’s no “Enhancement exists so it’s fine”. Every time we do it there’s an additional burden on class design as a whole.
If they made Survival ranged we would have a balance of 12 ranged specs v.s. 12 melee specs. I’m not saying they should start making melee specs ranged. I’m just saying that they should revise the one time they did do that, because it clearly isn’t working out, and keep it stable at 12 ranged v.s. 12 melee. At this point there is zero reason to keep Survival melee other than a vain attempt to preserve Blizzard’s pride.
Yes. Controlling the course of Survival discussions is important. It needs to be understood that it will always be a contentious issue and neither historical revisionism nor sweeping it all under the rug will work.
You’re never going to convince anyone of this because you’re clearly operating on shaky memory and poor experience at best. These weren’t specs that people considered to be equivalent. If they were equivalent, why were more people playing SV than BM in Siege of Orgrimmar despite BM doing more DPS? It would be trivial to swich to the equivalent spec that performed better.
Well uh okay, good to know.
Get help, seriously.