It’s weird how they are trying to have it both ways, ranged and melee. Either do one or the other, not some weird mix of the two.
They already have it’s called arcane, in M+ the arcane mage is almost always going to be in melee due to proximity requirements of arcane blast and if they are far the use of shifting power
1 Like
- I have put you on ignore like 4 times. If you use another toon to circumvent the ignore, I can and will take action by reporting you via email. You know you re on ignore and you’re purposely switching toons to harass me. For anyone doubting me - take note of the fact he posted on a character with 1 post.
- You need to actually visit petopia. The vast majority of hunters there want exotic families removed. As I said in my post, they serve zero purpose now, as BM hunters are locked to Spirit Beasts due to their heal. My suggest, to add an Exotic Ability that functions the same as Spirit mend, would mean BM hunters would actually be able to use something other than a Spirit Beast.
- I am entitled to my opinion, and you constantly acting like I am not is harassment, stop it. Period.
And if anyone comes in here saying I’m making up the stuff about Petopia, here’s the newest thread about it, in Dragonflight. (There’s more, if you just want to do a quick search for “exotic” in the main page.)
https://forums.wow-petopia.com/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=26712
Note the first post, by Wain, the owner of Petopia. That. GASP includes removing Exotic. As do multiple future posts by very reputable hunter players in the thread, including ones who are the ones who find all of the pets that get added in secret.
There is MULTIPLE threads about this, that again, you can find with a simple forum search on the site.
It is not an opinion I solely carry. It is the opinion of the main hunter pet set majority. Exotic Pets outserved their purpose when they started adding “Extravagant” pets to non-pet families.
I also made sure to mention Spirit Beasts should remain exotic only, as they are the identifier for BM, but you conveniently left that out.
2 Likes
We are 100% not required to use Spirit Beasts. Even our class guide recommends using a Ferocity pet in raiding for the leech. We can chalk that up to yet another example of Maizou not knowing a damn thing about her own class.
Maizou wants exotics to be non-exlusive because she wants Survival to steal even more stuff from BM, end of story.
I don’t care about what roleplayers on petopia think. Exotic pets are a big selling point of BM. Survival Hunters are accustomed to the spec being handed BM’s unique stuff due to the BFA changes. Give them an inch and they will take a mile.
1 Like
last time i looked there were some bm’s pushing 20’s which people seem to not realize i guess. i mean if pushing like 28’s-30’s i can understand but i mean if your pushing that high i’d assume you’d be pushing into MDI as well with alts for that as well.
idk though feels like people just gonna complain if you not pushing meta classes/specs that it’s the end of the world. reminds me of drag racing tbh you can have the faster car but if you jump the light or your car breaks down you’re DQ’d. even watched one where the guy was DQ’d before racing. forgot why but they still let him race to test out his car but had to intentionally lose the race visually ontop of being automatically DQ’d prior even his competitor knew. they were racing mini vans i believe was some youtuber
1 Like
idk i don’t play SV anymore but i don’t doubt it because the devs talked about tuning and something like how they don’t tune because as the expac goes they get better gear and more stats and all that so the tuning would basically be off balanced.
Yeah, but my question is why?
I mean the whole POINT of having beasts fight for you is to keep yourself OUT of melee range.
It’s a spec that does Melee damage from range which is kinda cool.
pvp can be cunning for the extra cc breaker. many (epic) bgs you can burn through this, the trinket, and the disengage. and still need more.
Yes generally in PvP Raptors are the best option because they are the only pet that’s Cunning and has a heal reduction. To open up the choice a little more they should allow us to respec our pets again.
Otherwise the pet system in SL is actually one of the unsung successes of class design and this is coming from someone who’s generally extremely negative about modern class design. Freedom of pet choice is at an all time high and shoehorning into particular cookie-cutter choices is at a minimum. The only remaining barrier is not being able to respec. Fix that and it’s golden.
1 Like
I mean, if I had my way none of them would be melee specs. If you gave me an option of two ranged specs, I would choose marks and ranged sv. The way they made melee sv feels super similar to BM anyway. If current BM didn’t exist, you could call current SV bm and it would still make sense because of all the pet interaction.
So …which survival hunter hurt u?
Uh… Citation Needed? Think the fact that they’re a tenacity pet is slightly more impactful than the heal that spirit beasts have now.
I did some math to put it in perspective:
My hunter has 65,000 health and uses a ferocity pet.
Pets have 70% of the health of their master.
Mend Pet heals for 50% of your pet’s health.
With the two pet talent and aspect of the beast, you end up effectively healing a total of 70% of your health over 10 seconds each time you use mend pet [even if it overheals your pets!], which translates into getting 10.5% of your health over 10 seconds via the 15% leech you get from aspect of the beast and a ferocity pet. This meant that I’d get 6825 health over 10 seconds, or 682.5 hp/s.
The Math: 65,000 [My health] * 70% [Pet HP multiplier] * 50% [% of pet HP Mend Pet Heals] * 2 [Number of healable pets] * .15 [Leech from Ferocity pet with Aspect of the Beast] = 6,825 HP healed to the hunter over 10 seconds.
At the gear level my hunter had, spirit mend heals for 1892 instantly, plus another 6,240 over 10 seconds. The initial heal can crit, but the heal over time cannot. For simplicity’s sake and to try and put Spirit mend in an even better light than is possible, I assumed it would always crit, making the total heal 3,784 + 6,240 = 10,024. While spirit mend has a higher hp/s at 1,002.4 over those 10 seconds, Spirit Mend has a 30 second cooldown, so it actually results in having 334.13 hp/s if used on cooldown.
Basically: Using mend pet twice in 30 seconds does more healing to the hunter than Spirit Mend, when using Aspect of the Beast [with a ferocity pet] and Animal Companion.
Now, that’s not to say that BM hunters shouldn’t use spirit beasts [Since spirit mend could be used as a clutch heal to save someone’s life, not necessarily the hunter’s] or tenacity pets in general [That extra 5/7.5% health could be the difference between being able to eat a single hit or dying to it in high-end M+ runs, not to mention the 3 minute cooldown ‘barkskin’]. It’s just that “BM = locked to spirit beasts” is most definitely not the case.
As a side note: I found some rather… interesting bugs in the process of testing this… like how ferocity pets end up having 38.7% leech baseline rather than 15%, but putting on gear that gave an additional 4.62% leech from gear resulted in the pet suddenly having 49.6% leech, or how tenacity pets get the 7.5% health bonus applied twice.
…No, really:
Ferocity pet:
With 0% leech [+15% from aspect of the beast], my pet’s kill command crit for 3,959 damage and healed him for 1,536. 1,536 / 3,959 = 38.79% leeched.
With 4.96% leech [+15% from aspect of the beast], my pet’s kill command hit for 2,354 and healed him for 1,168. 1,168 / 2,354 = 49.61% leeched.
Tenacity Pet:
Going off the 65k health my hunter had before, my health went up to 69,875 health as expected. My secondary pet’s health was 48,912 health, as expected. However, my main pet’s health was 56,524, which is 48,912 * 1.075^2.
Note that the first post advocates removing the Exotic Pet tag and giving BM an Exotic ability for ALL pet families. Which is not remotely the same thing as letting MSV tame exotic pets as-is. Cosmetically, sure, but mechanically, huge difference.
Further, you keep saying MM is “ranged without pet”, but that simply isn’t true - I do most of my world content as MM with a pet, most of my Torghast runs are MM with a pet, and I frequently bring out a pet in M+ for Bloodlust.
Blizzard tried pure “ranged without pet” MM in Legion, the backlash was so immense they changed to the current Lone Wolf implementation in BfA beta.
4 Likes
Now you understand what it feels like to play a Hunter and see a horde of uninformed Warriors and Rogues insist that Marksmanship and Survival were the same thing.
I know Arms and Fury are distinct specs. They are not, however, as distinct as something like Fire and Frost. There is a clear foundation that applies to both specs. And to be quite honest: when you’re talking about two physical melee DPS it isn’t as outwardly clear what the difference is just from things like animation. At least with Hunters Explosive Shot and Black Arrow looked very different to Aimed Shot and Chimera Shot. The name, outward appearance, spell effect, and kit all lent to the different identities of MM and SV but that wasn’t enough for ignorant melee players and Blizzard developers.
I think there are 3 factors here:
- It is easier for someone who doesn’t know anything about the class to draw a distinction between BM and MM just from the names alone. I still say that MM and SV were just as thematically distinct, but Survival is a more broad and vague name that doesn’t immediately describe what the spec does. This is why you see uninformed people insist MM and SV were the same thing and that includes the Blizzard developers; in fact SV played more similarly to BM in MoP and WoD but if you’re someone totally uninvested in the Hunter class but trying to make a point about it the thematic difference between BM and MM is more outwardly obvious
- SV got totally remade from the ground up in Legion. Nothing at all remained from the WoD iteration, and for the entire last year of that ranged SV was thoroughly gutted. So it was easier to disguise the fact that going from being able to fight at 40 yards to not being able to do so just comes across as a nerf. In contrast BM would have had to hold on to things like Kill Command and Bestial Wrath so I think it would have been more immediately obvious that it’s just a reduction in spec capability.
- BM has a lot more inertia in terms of representation and popularity. It’s the “default option” of sorts for this class. Even when it’s pretty underpowered it sees a lot of representation in casual content. So it would be harder to gut it to the point of abandonment like they did to SV in the later half of WoD.
Very few people asked for melee SV especially among the Hunter playerbase. The few people that were asking were mostly melee class mains that didn’t play Hunter. Just look at how many of the melee SV defenders in this thread aren’t actually Hunter players.
Ranged SV was also fun to play and saw a lot more adoption/representation.
It’s because they’re trying to make it not as jarring as it was before BFA. It’s the same reason why the spec has Kill Command now. They’re trying to make it more familiar to other Hunters and at least partially adhere to the whole point of spec design which is to extend from the base class rather than run off and do something totally different like in Legion.
Remember, in Legion SV not only were there no ranged weapon based attacks at all but the spec didn’t even have basic Hunter things like Disengage and Misdirection. They were basically designing SV as a separate class to Hunter, sharing only the pet (which many of the few melee SV players back then still wanted removed).
There is some thematic value in fighting alongside the pet, but the problem is:
- It’s a very niche concept
- We already have a pet spec
So it’s not really something worth chasing and removing an existing ranged spec to achieve. It should just be a talented variation within BM.
Perhaps the Leech heal crit?
Also, if you’re specced into Aspect of the Beast it improves the effect of those passives by 50%.
Pets getting the Tenacity buff twice sounds unintended but maybe Tenacity pets are given higher baseline HP before the passive is applied.
To go into detail on this, they have tried a few different approaches to Lone Wolf.
The first iteration was in WoD where both MM and SV could talent into it (BM got Adaptation instead which was just a big passive pet buff plus giving the pet all the abilities of the 3 pet specs). It was aimed to be competitively tuned with the other talents on the level 100 row which were Focusing Shot and Exotic Munitions but later on in the expansion with how MM was in HFC Lone Wolf became the clear best.
The second iteration was Legion. In the beta they wanted to just remove the ability of MM to summon a pet entirely. This was when they stopped caring about the purpose of specs as an extension of the baseline class so they were fine with making a spec take abilities away from you when chosen. However there was a lot of backlash especially because the basic Hunter outline for so many years of “ranged weapon user with a single pet” was now going to be impossible (since BM had 2 pets and SV was melee). So they made Lone Wolf a level 15 talent but they intentionally tuned it so it was always the best option by far.
The third iteration was BFA which is also the current iteration. It’s a baseline passive. It’s ostensibly meant to be competitively tuned with having a pet out for single target but with the state of borrowed power lately Lone Wolf is a lot better even on pure single target. And of course Lone Wolf is a lot better in AoE situations.
I think the current iteration is the closest to ideal. They should make it only buff single target damage so it’s not so punishing to have in AoE situations. It will be difficult though because of how Trick Shots works (it’s a percentage of the single target hit).
I used to like Lone Wolf a lot but now I see it as a precedent/invitation to the sort of picking, choosing, and removing of the core class identity that plagues Hunter class suggestions and led to melee Survival. You even have a ton of melee class mains demanding lone wolf for SV so they can play a Hunter, a class defined around ranged weapons and pets, and use neither of those things. I still think it’s valuable to be able to be independent of a pet for those situations where a pet is a drawback (e.g. fighting something out of reach of a pet) but I don’t like the idea of having a pet out being extremely punishing.
1 Like
The amount of people on this thread saying that RSV was the same or even close to similar to BM or MM pre Legion obviously didn’t main Hunter back then. The three specs were as different or more so than any other class that had three specs of the same roll. Saying that they were all similar (BM MM RSV) is ignorant at best.
3 Likes
Rexxar is Rexxar. He’s in a class by himself.
1 Like
idk why people hate on Surv hunter, it’s a ton of fun to actually play imo, compared to ‘I sit back and shoot things when I get clear casting’
Crazy concept but a lot of people prefer ranged DPS.
Why did you pick a Warlock, after all?
1 Like
Every Hunter used to be a melee Hunter. We had a slot for a melee weapon which we’d automatically switch to when a target came into range. It was a lot better than standing like an idiot shooting an enemy in the face. Some people even played their characters that way. The devs peeled that ability off so they could create an unnecessary spec.
I appreciate your extensive coverage but BM focuses on pets; MM is the sniper with high burst, what is ranged survival? Dots?