This statement is only valid for 1 out of the 6 expansions before Survival was reworked.
What I had in mind is very little damage done in melee range, with the vast majority of damage being done with your ranged weapon and big payoffs for managing to maintain a goldilocks distance.
This would keep a third physical ranged spec in the game and allow “melee survival” (whatever that fourth spec is named) to be more melee-focused.
If they balanced outlaw or something around not having stealth but having powerful advantages to make up for that I think it would attract plenty of folks who want a slightly different take on the fantasy~ (Ranged combat still exists for other hunter specs so we wouldn’t take stealth from every rogue).
As for why people outside of the class should have a voice… well because anyone can play anything, there’s no restrictions on what you can or can’t main or when you can switch. If there is a huge demand for a certain fantasy that’s not available they can tweak out some of the more repetitive and hyper niche specs and give more players a better fit.
If survival was mutilated it wouldn’t function at all.
There’s a reason one of our main cooldowns allows our melee ability to become a ranged ability. The goldilocks distance payoff is that we get melee interrupts (shorter cooldown than ranged interrupts) and if youre good at juking your range, we’re built for a very specific playstyle that is absolutely mid-range;
Surv hunters kite other melee, and chase down other ranged via mobility and a 95% ranged toolkit.
It’s already the thing you’re describing when played correctly in pvp. I’m not sure how you could translate a range-jousting spec into a PVE environment.
I just really don’t want melee to be significant part of survival at all. There’s so many other specs where the bulk of the damage is done with a melee weapon. Put melee focus in a fourth spec.
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Yeah, those bombs are range enough though… cringe.
Alpha Predator, Bloodseeker, Tip of the Spear, Chakrams build is perfectly capable of playing the game that way, especially with covenant+leggo powers.
This is small consolation when being melee instead of ranged is worse 95% of the time. Basically, outside of exceptional circumstances like Lords of Dread, we would rather have the 3rd ranged option.
Imagine if we had a ranged DPS option that focused on multidotting and spread cleave. That would be far more meaningful and useful “variety” for the class than a melee spec.
See above; this is very small consolation for losing a valuable ranged option. For most Hunters the “variety” of having a melee specs just means it’s a 2-spec class. Handwaving that away as “Oh well us Shaman mains at least have another class we can play around with” is nonsense and self-centred.
It is actually melee. To do 100% of your damage you have to be in melee range; for Raptor Strike + Carve for Bomb CDR. Yes, it has a lot of ranged damage… but that just means its a melee spec with a lot of ranged capability. It’s still always worse off when fighting at range and wants to be in melee unless it can’t survive in melee.
This is a stupidly semantic argument.
That’s kind of implicit, isn’t it? Rated PvP is where Survival sees higher representation. In casual PvP and even rated BGs its a lot more BM and MM.
Just stop. You’re not going to successfuly polish this turd. A Rogue without Stealth is just a handicapped Rogue. Stealth is something they get at a low level before picking a spec. It makes zero sense to spec out of having it. Stealth is a critical part of the Rogue fantasy.
There isn’t huge demand for a melee Hunter though. It’s an exceptionally niche concept. So not only is it chasing people who don’t play the class to begin with, it’s chasing such an insignificant group that melee Survival has been one of the game’s least popular specs for most of its existence as melee. They’ve now resorted to spoonfeeding it brokenly-tuned uncapped AoE to bribe people to play it which is of course a terribly unhealthy approach to class design.
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you mean a paladin or a DK? yes, we do.
I think you knew how bad an argument this was before posting it.
It’s not entirely that simple. I dash in and Carve now and then, but what I don’t do is stand in melee range 100% of the time. Mail armor just can’t handle that.
As the proportion of actual damage to simmed damage (2 targets) is about the same between my BM and my SV hunter (the difference generally being a bunch of expected raid buffs that I don’t have and don’t bother to turn off) I’d say I’m getting out of it all I’m going to and, most importantly, dealing well with the aphorism: You can’t DPS if you’re dead.
lol, you are ridiculous.
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I can see why you are so trouble by this, you are very inflexible.
If old survival was that popular it would still be here, sorry.
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Nope. This still ain’t it. You absolutely can survive in melee range because most of the time the mobs aren’t targetting you. You’re losing a lot of damage by not being in melee.
You have this the wrong way around. You’re not a ranged DPS occasionally going into melee. You’re a melee DPS occasionally going out to range. You only go in range if there’s some mechanic that will threaten you in melee. Otherwise you stick to melee in PvE.
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Bepps is the number one anti survival hunter player in the planet.
Mention survival hunter and they are right here like a summoning portal to tell you it’s bad.
Some people can’t get over change. Survival is on of the few fun specs I’m this game and bepps just mad they can’t play marksman with dots
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I’d love a Knife Juggler spec for Rogue. And I mean, LOVE.
But melee “caster” is pretty much what a paladin (melee priest) or DK (melee warlock) are.
Your finger isn’t on the pulse of the most active venue of pvp, which is also rife with survival players.
I’m not. I’ve stood in melee range and pounded away at it with a tank that could handle the damage output and got MAYBE 3% more damage.
It’s entirely possible I don’t have the right gear or the right rotation (I had some trouble deciphering the IcyVeins and Wowhead rotation notes - posted on the forums about it and got crickets for a response), but for the risks involved I don’t do enough extra damage to warrant getting “up close and personal” - I pull 30-35% more damage on SV than I do on BM and I loathe the SV play style (I still do it - you can’t argue with it working).
Now, if you could get me a solid, clear, logical set of rotation notes, I’d be more than willing to try them and see. 
Stupid argument. Blizzard removes popular stuff all the time. Remember reforging?
Ranged Survival was very popular and this is provable with representation statistics at the time.
“One of the few fun specs” yet people avoid it unless Blizzard bribes them to play it with broken damage 
Just admit you’re self-centred and move on.
I do quite a bit of casual PvP actually. SV is absolutely the lesser-played spec of the three there. You can even see this effect in rated BG representation. It’s first and foremost an arena spec.
3% is significant. And that’s AoE; it’s more substantial on single target which is still a factor in M+.
SV gets so much more damage than BM in M+ because SV AoE is overtuned and BM AoE is undertuned. Simple as that. With how overtuned WFB is with the set bonus you can mess up a lot and still do good damage. To be frank: the damage number you quoted earlier (25k burst) isn’t even high for that item level.
The fact of the matter is there’s no reason to spend most of your time at range and lose auto attack, Raptor Strike, and Carve. You’re not a ranged spec that occasionally needs to go to melee. You’re a melee spec that occasionally needs to go to range.
Evidently you don’t level many alts. I’ve been in level 30 battlegrounds where 20 of 30 players were hunters, half survival. It’s very popular in pvp, but not popular with casual max level pvpers; it’s popular with serial levelers and rated arena players.
Surv will always be less represented in RBGs than BM because of base sitting reasons. Most RBG hunters play multiple specs.
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