Don’t be obtuse. I’m not talking about general popularity. I’m saying that when a spec is buffed to the moon it’s population goes up.
See Demo Locks as an example. They’ve generally had a smaller player pool than Affliction until this Tier.
It’s M+ in general. Having numbers that match both other specs combined isn’t just Key Pushers. Being the most popular spec in the most popular content is a significant number of players. Sorry.
thank you for proving my point. that a badly designed spec nobody cares about will be played because… and only because it is buffed to the moon.
dont loose sight of the fact that this whole conversation is happening right now because melee survival is a failed spec but it is generally somewhat populated only because it is miles ahead of the other 2 specs.
and again thank you for proving my point. because if melee survival was “oh so good of the perfectly designed flowing polished spec” then wouldnt these same players still play it through all content and not just m+.
news flash. bm is underpowered and still massively played across all content.
ranged survival even when it hit rock bottom with nerfs was still over played.
Having it be melee instead of ranged doesn’t make it poorly designed. It just makes it a spec YOU don’t like.
no but having it be melee and nobody touch it with a 10 foot pole and then all of a sudden it gets buffed to the highest damaging spec in game and a few people named doug, steve and sally jump on the melee sv train.
it should of never been changed to begin with. melee hunters dont exist. its bad story. bad fantasy. and most importantly bad design. its the reason you have to buff it miles ahead to even allow it in a converasion.
I mean, if you’re trying to push 30s your probably not going to be playing off-meta anyway.
That also still doesn’t equate to badly designed, just not something that some people enjoy playing.
I’ll be honest, there are interactions that could be improved (focus dumping for one aoe and one single target feels weird). But I’ve never felt like the spec didn’t flow correctly.
If you’re not pushing for 20+ keys or mythic raiding every class/spec is fine
People complain about the performance of a spec on the 1% but they usually don’t play at that level
It’s not perfectly true. Spec representation is a function of both performance and broad appeal, with performance being the major factor. So if you make a spec perform well enough people will play it, but it can still be evident that people aren’t liking the spec.
As I said, SV was on par with MM and ahead of BM in Season 2, yet it saw a fraction of the representation. In Season 3 its performance is extremely far ahead of both specs especially BM yet it’s only slightly ahead in representation. In fact BM is even ahead of MM now despite the performance gap which should hint that the current MM gameplay is disliked.
Compare this to ranged SV. It was usually popular unless it was totally unviable like in 6.2 (a level of unviability never seen by melee SV). In Siege of Orgrimmar BM was ahead in DPS slightly but SV saw quite a bit more play. In Highmaul SV was considerably ahead but nowhere near as much as it is now in 9.2, yet it was by far the most represented spec in the entire game.
Generally people played ranged SV unless they couldn’t, and they avoid melee SV unless they can’t. That’s the trend.
Wildfire Bomb is actually the best part of the spec in my opinion. It’s the most aesthetically and mechanically unique part. It’s pretty awesome aside from a buggy implementation and Wildfire Infusion is a genuinely creative and original talent.
The problem is the rest of it, in particular the melee. How does a grenade like Wildfire Bomb fit alongside the whole “melee berserker” angle of Raptor Strike and Carve, or the “pet companionship” angle of Kill Command and Coordinated Assault? From a thematic and aesthetic standpoint SV is the most directionless and confused spec in the game. They don’t know what identity to go with so they’re just trying everything at once.
Because of this, despite the entire spec now revolving around Wildfire Bomb, it’s been the target of criticism from SV Hunters themselves and a lot want it removed in favour of Butchery… a physical melee ability so generic that no one would think it out of place if they made it a Warrior ability. I think the opposite: Wildfire Bomb should stay, melee should go. And yes, Wildfire Bomb as a cone would be annoying at range. The solution is simple: make it a point blank AoE instead of a cone.
As for the general gameplay flow of the spec: honestly, it’s fine. There’s nothing particularly wrong. Raptor Strike is generic, multidotting with Serpent Sting is bothersome without a spread mechanic (something that ranged Survival had baseline, by the way), Coordinated Assault and Kill Command are lifted straight from BM, but there’s nothing egregious enough to make it play badly like Legion Survival did.
The thing is this isn’t a matter dependent on being melee or ranged. It could be ranged and have exactly the same flow. So why cling to melee? Yes, some people like the idea of having to balance melee and ranged in PvP situations, but that’s just it: some people. It’s a very niche preference. And the elephant in the room is that it used to be a popular and broadly-enjoyed ranged spec.
There’s also the nonsensical design where Hunters are heavily built and themed around using ranged weapons to the point where you start with a ranged weapon and not a melee weapon, yet a spec choice at level 10 tells you to abandon it for some reason and find a melee weapon. And the fact that Survival is ostensibly meant to be about versatility, opportunism, utilitarianism, and using every tool available yet it arbitrarily avoids the most powerful and unique tool available to Hunters… but that’s enough negatives for now.
So in short with SV we have a situation where it used to be a perfectly fine ranged spec, it was changed into an extremely troubled and high-maintenance melee spec, every negative is a result of being melee and every positive is in spite of it. So one has to wonder why we should keep it melee. It seems the drive to keep it melee is mostly out of a) a mistaken sense that the positives of the spec (good gameplay flow and good damage) are an inherent result of being melee, b) a sense of pride in the initial decision and an aversion to admitting a mistake was make, and c) a sense of tokenistic uniqueness v.s. the other Hunter specs which is never a good design standard. I always compare it to removing Stealth from a Rogue spec; yeah, it’s now unique… via handicap. We’ve just made a worse Rogue. Why bother?
I don’t think reducing Hunter population is why they made it melee (although I have seen people like you tout this as a positive in these threads… again, the priorities of melee SV fans are very clear), but Blizzard did explicitly admit to chasing an audience outside the Hunter class at the expense of Hunters themselves when they made SV melee.
Say it with me, I didn’t say it did. I was just pointing out that for probably the only time in history the spec is doing amazing damage in raids and mythic+. Honestly, reading comprehension has dropped to an all time low with this thread.
Oh and nice essay as a post, I was wondering if there was a character limit on a response but I guess not.
Every negative of melee SV is a result of being melee. Every positive is in spite of it.
Inertia is not an excuse for keeping it melee. If it were, it would never have become melee in the first place given it was ranged for 12 years before that.
I for one think BM should be melee too
Stop hiding behind your pets cowards
kek
So the same for every melee?
One of the main reasons to keep it melee is distinction from the other 2 specs. Being able to swap between melee and ranged based on the encounter seems like a win to me.
Honestly probably the best point of criticism, especially given that the primary melee ability can be made ranged with aspect of the eagle for a bit.
I’m not sure who you think I am, but my advocation has always been that melee survival is enjoyable to play; nothing more or less then that.
Melee SV has seen very good performance in the past. Just never to the degree that it is now, where it’s not only extremely far ahead in usual 5 target AoE pulls but it has an uncapped AoE in the expansion that limited uncapped AoE for most other specs.
There’s “doing amazing” and then there’s “being miles and miles ahead of everything else”. Blizzard should be ashamaned of the current class tuning. Shadowlands was shaping up to be a good expansion from a class design perspective but then they flushed it down the toilet with nonsense covenant design, AoE capping, and now these tier sets in both design and tuning. All three Hunter specs in 9.2 are actually great examples of how good damage does not equal good design. And then, of course, there’s the outrageous overtuning of SV and Destro. Blizzard are being raked over the coals for this by popular WoW players and streamers but it seems they genuinely don’t care.
I do think there should be a “melee subspec” of BM. Imagine a talent option that gave you a melee stance that swapped out all the ranged shots for melee strikes in exchange for a damage and health boost. Cobra Shot to Raptor Strike, Barbed Shot to Lacerate, Multi Shot to Carve, Counter Shot to Muzzle, Barrage to Butchery, etc. It could use 2-handers or dual-wielding, and it would fight alongside its pet(s).
It solves many issues at once. It provides a melee option to the niche that enjoys that. It keeps the pet focus in one spec instead of awkwardly copying it to another as we see with the current SV (lately I’ve seen many SV hunters demanding exotic pets; apparently Kill Command and Spirit Bond weren’t enough). We don’t have a spec with a totally nonsense directionless identity, mixing grenades with pet attacks and melee strikes with poisoned crossbow bolts, etc. We just have BM with a “Rexxar” mode and we can focus SV on the successful ranged archetype it used to me, improving the game’s limited and insufficient representation of ranged weapons.
Having a Hunter spec lacking a ranged weapon in its default state was just always a bad idea. It’s alienating and it defies basic spec design as an extension of the baseline class. The WoW Hunter class is just too heavily defined around ranged weapons for it to ever have been a sensible idea.
This is helpful for Lords of Dread. Before that you have to go back to Gul’dan in Legion to find the last time it was helpful to be melee instead of ranged. It’s such an unusual thing in WoW that it’s a totally absurd thing to hold as a major positive for the spec. In most circumstances, mixing melee and ranged in the same class is so problematic that it requires constant design and tuning efforts to keep the melee spec relevant. Just look at how Feral has fared all these years. So, no, they should not have introduced that concept to yet another class just to chase tokenistic uniqueness via handicap.
If Blizz felt the need to add a melee spec for hunters, should have done it as a 4th spec. The fact that rather than trying to give RSV a “more defined” identity as some say it needed, they just took the easy way out and made it another melee spec in a sea of melee specs, because we needed more melee on top of getting two melee specs from DH as well.
Feral’s issue have almost always come down to number tuning and/or weak AOE in an AOE world. They’re the melee version of Shadow with the same problems. Their weakness has nothing to do with mixing melee and ranged.
So asking a question or commenting on a class is a whine now?
Gimme a break.
I’ve said many times that I see no reason for hunters to be melee when we already have so many melee. It was fine as it was originally imo.
Funnily enough they actually took the hard way out. It would have been both vastly easier and more effective if they just iterated on ranged SV. Instead in true Blizzard fashion they went out of their way to create a bad option. They even had to remake it from the ground up again in BFA because they messed up so badly in Legion. It’s unreal how much time and effort has been wasted on melee SV as the class has more-or-less stagnated since WoD.
we also cannot look past the fact that blizzard as a company slapped every die hard survival hunter right in the face the moment they ripped the spec from their lives and obliterated it.
what does that say from a company / business / customer stand point?
it was wrong in so many ways. i own a business i would never make a change to my existing products that customers enjoy. if other customers wanted something different i would keep the same products but add something else for them to.
the decision was a bad one as we all can see now. that sour taste will never leave peoples mouths. making ranged survival melee was like trading 1 million dollars for 10 dollar bill. and thats being generous.
Didn’t they rip abilities from BM in an attempt to make it unique.
u wanna know what is funny. thats what they said about ranged sv. it was too similar to the other specs. but right now melee survival is more similar to bm than ranged survival was to any spec in the game. melee survival is almost copy paste bm but melee.