me saying survival hunter is bad in your head reads through like this…
what is vishamani talking about, it is destroying the charts and tons of people play it.
me saying survival hunter is bad and what i mean is…
it is s tier. it was massively over buffed by blizzard to get people into the spec and “try it out” because if it was A tier or less or not a meta spec then nobody would touch it with a 10 foot pole. also the playstyle is bad. it do not flow. it is not smooth and it is actually grotesque.
there is a night and day difference between a spec like ranged survival where even if it was at the bottom people still over represented it because it was polished and perfected vs a melee survival that nobody would touch unless it pulls 30-40k overall in mythic plus and even then only the hardcore pushers play it simply because they are forced to because of how powerful it is.
buff mm or bm to the same point that melee survival is and watch how fast it dies. lol
and the point is that it is. before it was pulling 200k aoe dps nobody would touch it. we cant get the fact twisted that if it was not a meta spec it would not be played apart from a handful of players. there is a big difference between a spec that is played by a ton of players because it is good and a spec that is only played because it is fotm.
Most specs representation is skewed by power. Resto Shaman are the hot Healer spec now but were crap through most of BFA.
Survival has been under played since Legion for multiple factors but the biggest one is it was one of the worst damage dealers until now. Whether it’s fun or not isn’t quantifiable.
Marksman has seen decent representation even in patches where it isn’t OP, such as the previous one.
As for melee SV… this tier is the ONLY tier where it’s seen high representation, and there’s no doubt why. It’s not just highly tuned; it’s basically an entire tier ahead of everyone else. This was predicted when we saw the tier set was a ludicrous +80% to Wildfire Bomb. It’s evident that Blizzard has given up on trying to make people like Survival via design and they’ve now resorted to forcing people to play it via tuning.
People played it where they could e.g. battlegrounds, rated PvP. But ultimately Blizzard made sure it was totally unviable for raiding. They literally removed a core part of what made the spec function since Cataclysm (Improved Serpent Sting). No spec in the game would continue to see play if it were gutted so heavily as Survival was in 6.2. It was painfully evident that it was on purpose so gullible people like you could say “aha, see! people only play it for the damage”.
Survival was so underpowered and gutted in 6.2 that playing it instead of Marksmanship could easily have been the difference between killing a boss and not killing it. The damage gap was well over 20% in Patchwerk ST (SV’s best circumstances) and far more once any multitarget or burst phase was involved.
But yes, please keep pretending that everyone was only there for the damage.
The difference between ranged SV and melee SV is that unpopularity was the rare exception for ranged SV while for melee SV the rare exception is popularity.
It’s not just like any other spec, though. You keep pretending it’s normal but no other spec saw such a total upheval and remake as Survival. Blizzard themselves admitted that they totally remade it to chase an audience other than Hunters. And here you are, a Shaman main, trying to explain to Hunters why they should be fine with that.
I’d be fine with that but then the question is: why melee? Why cling to such an ineffective and controversial part of the design when it isn’t even a necessary or prominent part of the spec anymore? What’s with the entire thread being saying “Survival isn’t that melee and most of it is ranged… but don’t you DARE make it fully ranged!”.
See above. Why not make it fully ranged, then?
And again. If it’s mostly ranged already and melee is such an insignificant part… why’s it so important that it stays melee?
Very few Hunters ever asked for this. It was a very niche request in general and most of the people pushing it were from other classes. Note how most of the people in this thread defending melee SV are posting from melee classes.
We can’t quantify how many people wanted melee Hunter in the same way we can’t quantify how many want a melee Mage. But in both cases it was very evident that it’s an incredibly niche suggestion and that following up on it would require an absurd level of favouritism towards a small niche at the expense of a larger group enjoying the existing design.
It really wasn’t that regular. It was a rare suggestion. I read all the old threads concerning the removal of melee weapons from the class. They’re not all easily accessible now because they were from the old deleted forums, but some are still visible on wowhead. The concern over melee combat for Hunters was absolutely minimal. I would say it was about as common as seeing Survival tank suggestions nowadays, but to be honest even that’s more common.
I would say Arms and Fury are blurred, as a matter of fact. You can point to Legion’s storylines but those were all contrived after the fact. Survival’s Legion story was based around Huln Highmountain; a minor side character from the books who had absolutely nothing to do with the Hunter class until they retconned it inside out to have something to go on with Legion Survival. If they can contrive something like that out of thin air then making a story for ranged Survival wouldn’t have been a problem at all.
You’re just arguing that Survival is a bad name for a spec, which is absolutely true. There are people who think Survival should be ranged DPS, melee DPS, tank, healer (yes, really), support, and everything in between. Every single one of them swears up and down that “Survival” specifically implies their vision for the spec. It’s a very ambigous and broad term. But that’s not an argument to remake the spec. It’s an argument to rename the spec.
Besides; when you describe the “ability to utilize anything and everything to survive”… how does that translate to “arbitrarily ignore the single biggest and most iconic strength of the class: the ranged weapon”? If Survival is all about versatility and opportunism, using a ranged weapon only makes sense. The old ranged Survival fit that outline far better.
I don’t care what ignorant outside observers fit. Hunter design should not cater to people who don’t play Hunters, period. I don’t play Rogue or Warrior and to be quite honest all of those specs seem blurred to me. Arms and Fury in particular are extremely similar general outlines and to an outside observer it’s just slightly different varieties of rage-based melee attacks. That’s not a platform to remake either one of those specs into something totally aline to the Warrior class. That standard only seems to ever be applied to Hunters and it reeks of favouritism.
I would prefer they did nothing of the sort at all, or at the most had a melee subspec option within BM. Everything beyond that is just massively preferential treatment towards people who mostly don’t play the class. You think that’s a fallacious statement but just look at the amount of people in this thread that openly describe themselves as people who are generally uninterested in Hunter outside of melee Survival. It’s very obvious where Blizzard’s priorities were when they made the change even if they didn’t literally and explicitly admit to it.
As opposed to DPS who are meant to just die?
A lot more liked ranged Survival Hunter.
You can buff any spec by a crazy amount and make it do good damage. That doesn’t make it a good spec.
The merits of Survival being melee are a matter of design and not tuning. Buffing Wildfire Bomb to the point where SV is an entire tier worth of damage ahead of everyone else (except Destro of course) doesn’t suddenly make melee Hunter a good idea… especially when Wildfire Bomb is a ranged ability that’s a poor fit for a melee spec to begin with.
Uh, no, you don’t. This is not Legion. Traps are not part of the DPS priority.
They did have minimum range but no there was no attack based on hitting the enemy with a ranged weapon.
I also think it should be reverted but this is an extremely fallacious argument. Tuning is not the reason why the design is bad. They are independent issues. That’s why SV is not suddenly a good design because they gave it an egregiously overpowered tier set. If anything the tier set actually worsens the design of the sepc.
Did Troll Headhunters throw grenades? Think before you speak.
Raptor Strike in the old days was a melee filler in a ranged class that had a minimum range. It was never in any iteration or form intended to be the primary mode of damage for the Hunter. So no, a melee Hunter lacking a ranged weapon is not representative of any iteration prior to Legion. Because all of those iterations used a ranged weapon first and foremost.
Cool story. There are many Hunter mains that are streamers and friends I know that hate Survival as melee. Unlike you, by the way, I have specific examples:
You can pretend all you want that generally Hunters like it, but not only did Blizzard themselves admit they knew most Hunters would not like it but representation statistics since Legion demonstrate that. Yes, there are some veteran Hunters who love it, but it’s evident that most don’t, and generally most people who support melee Survival are those like you; people who never really liked the class to begin with.
“You can’t criticise this bad change because there are other bad class changes”. Top tier argument right here folks.
None of those are comparable to Survival, which was completely remade from the ground up to chase a totally different audience. The most comparable change was Demonology in Legion which was also a catastrophic mistake, but even that spec kept the same role it was before.
“Keeping things fresh” is just buzzwording to say “all change is automatically good”. It’s not. Change is neither automatically good or bad. It needs to stand on its own merits. Making Survival melee does not.
I can demonstrate thoroughly why making Survival melee is a bad idea. Sure, I personally prefer it as range, but that’s not the argument I use. The spec, and as a result the whole class, was healthier when it was ranged. It kept a consistent, distinct, fun, and widely-enjoyed model for 4 expansions before undergoing a period of upheval, wasted effort, controversy, and bitterness. Buffing its tuning to the point where it’s a required pick for M+ doesn’t make it “definitely great and very fun”. In fact making an unpopular spec a forced pick is exceptionally unhealthy class design.
The devs made it melee for a number of stupid reasons including melee favouritism. It’s hilarious how you defend that sort of reckless class design when it’s done to Hunters but bemoan it when it’s done to your own class. What a hypocrite.
hey, look: this argument again.
Say it with me:
Good tuning does not equal good design
You can take any terrible spec outline and buff it to kingdom come to make it a required pick. That doesn’t make it a good design. Especially in Survival’s case where it’s good despite being melee not because of it. Most of its strength, both in numerical output and aesthetic prominence, is in Wildfire Bomb: a ranged ability that so poorly fits a melee spec that many Survival Hunters have been asking for it to be removed.
Mage and Warlock did it. Hunters did too before Legion. It’s not actually that hard.
Survival also originally used ranged weapons. Every iteration of every Hunter spec prior to Legion usede a ranged weapon. Appealing to the past doesn’t work here.
It sounds like you’re just trying to rapid-fire bad excuses.
P.S. Survival being a tank is an even worse idea. Stick to your own class.
He didn’t specify M+. You did.
In raiding it’s actually quite a bit less than BM and MM despite being so highly tuned. So yes that backs up the argument that people are feeling forced to play it by the tuning and aren’t playing it because they want to.
It’s actually seen high tuning before. In 9.1 it was pretty highly tuned for M+ but still saw low representation. Its representation only took off when they went nuclear and gave it an egregiously overpowered tier set in 9.2.
If you have a spec design that only ever sees attention when it’s given outrageously preferential tuning to FotM levels, it’s not a good spec design.
And he didn’t specify Raiding either. M+ represents a far larger percentage of the player base and is a much better indication of a specs popularity.
There are 60K parses for ALL hunter specs from Mythic Raiding while there’s almost 10 times that number of just Survival parses for M+ so WTF are you even talking about.
Bruh. You understand what a parse count is? Raids are on a weekly lockout. M+ are not. What do you think that means when it comes to parse count?
In any case, do you actually believe Survival is a genuinely popular and beloved spec and that people aren’t just there for, you know, the +30% AoE damage + uncapped v.s. most other specs?
I believe that all population numbers are skewed by fotm. The modern WOW player wants to play the “best” spec. Right now that’s Destro, Demo, WW and Survival for DPS. It used to be Havoc and Fire. In DF who knows?
What usually happens is players who jumped on the bandwagon that wind up liking a spec stick with it in future patches as long as it doesn’t get dumpstered.
There are 11 Raid Bosses with potential parses for each every week.
Most players running M+ do 1, 4 or 8 runs a week for the Vault.
Most people don’t parse M+ like they do raids. The WarCraft Log rank is just showing how fast you ran a dungeon based on data from the armory API. Just looking through M+ there’s maybe 1 or 2 dungeons that were logged, which is pretty weird.
Look at the difference between unique class population and class frequency per run.
M+ parse count is absolutely inflated by multiple runs.
I don’t doubt that there’s more engagement in M+ than raiding. The barrier for entry is way lower; especially in this season where you have an especially hard raid and especially easy M+. But you evidently envision it as far more skewed in favour of M+ than it actually is.
In any case, the unique class population is the important figure here. Survival is leading the Hunter specs, but given its enormous tuning advantage the difference is far smaller than one would expect. BM is almost the same number as SV, and BM is one of the worst options right now. There are more Fury Warriors and Retribution Paladins in M+ than SV Hunters. Again this is in a season where SV has an absolutely enormous advantage. Look over to Destro to see what it looks like when there aren’t other factors influencing the class’s spec choice.
He says he cares about representation, but BM and Marks were the ONLY hunter specs anyone played in S1 and S2. No bleeding heart and outcry for it then. It’s just because this player wants to only play 2 specs they deem their favorite while throwing shade at the current meta. Surv is awesome, there’s definitely been players who’ve loved it for a long time. It also gave something new to survival since the old surv spec wasn’t really anything unique.
The point is you can take any bad spec design and give it a ridiculous tuning advantage to make people play it.
That doesn’t make it a good spec design.
Look at SL season 2. SV AoE DPS was pretty on-par with MM in that season. Look at the representation. It’s a fraction of MM, and even BM which it actively outperformed. That’s what the norm is for SV when it’s DPS is simply “on par”.
Are we just going to keep SV overtuned by >30% over everything else to keep it at high representation here on out? Is that the new design standard?
Because they weren’t overpowered. Their performance was in line with other specs, both from other classes and including Survival.
MM and BM do not need a 30% DPS advantage to see good representation. SV does. Why do you think that is?
Can I ask why you believe survival is a badly designed spec?
Aside from wildfire bomb, which I’d contend would be worse at range then it would be in melee due to how the ability works.
its not true for bm a b tier spec and more people play it than melee sv.
a badly designed spec is a spec nobody asked for. its a spec that was picked out of a hat as a way to shoo off players from the spec and hunter class as a whole. and guess what it worked like a charm.
and even now as s tier with godly damage they still cant get anyone outside of end game key pushers to play it. funny huh.
well the fact remains that even the few that actually can hold their puke long enough to make through a few high key pushes as melee sv, dont like it. they do it because they have to otherwise the key wont time.
