You are very late. I had this feeling when I came back from Legion. I immediately went to forums and asked “Who the Crap asked Blizz that we need a melee Hunter?”
It is the worst thing that happened in WoW. It is really out of place. You have a Range Weapon and when you try to play Survival spec, your high ilevel powerful becomes garbage to the spec. Imagine, you already have Warrior, DK, Paladin, Rogue toons and you want to be refreshed and to play a Range Class. You are excited to play an awesome Range Class called Hunter then when you tried it, you got disappointed becoz it’s melee.
That’s the reason I watch now the forums and shutdown bad ideas becoz I dont want another massive failure to happen again on my favorite game.
I would support that honestly but Blizz won’t because of the backlash over what happened with survival.
I’m glad some people like it as melee and I don’t want to see what happened to range survival happen to them but people are asking for a range version back and I would like to see a way for it to be either in the mm tree or surv tree.
Or possibly even in the class tree.
I’ll tell you what someone recently pointed out to me: Although SV is listed as a melee spec, it really isn’t. Only one attack and only one ability are melee-ranged. Everything else including all but your minor rotational filler are ranged.
It was explained to me that the goal is to only run into melee range when your major cooldown ability is live (for me that’s Wild Spirits) and even then Aspect of the Eagle makes that pretty much unnecessary.
I just ran a Tirna Scithe (I think) 11 and was doing 25kdps on my 259 iLvl SV Hunter (which I’ve only been playing for about 3 days - I’ve been BM all the way) using that strategy and it’s remarkable how well it works.
Just imagine when you are here in Legion playing BM then tried the new survival melee with subpar dps. And many Hunters then were Range Survival and when they played Legion, their specs got deleted/replaced by a melee spec. It was chaotic on Legion.
That’s a lie . Melee survival in usually near the bottom of the pile for popularity .
Range Survival had more back in the day and people wanted them in their groups .
I both sim and experience the reality of about a 33% improvement in my DPS (simmed as 2 targets in raidbots) playing SV over BM.
Honestly, I’ve never been a fan of Survival - I’ve failed at it too many times - but this player explaining to me HOW to play it really opened my eyes.
It works well, it doesn’t feel as good as BM, but I can’t argue with the results.
The only time I went to Survival was during Wrath. Survival back then has powerful DoTs and master of traps. I found out that Survival back then was more powerful than MM on AoE scenarios. Survival AoE DPS is like Unholy DK’s AoE… both base on DoTs. On ICC-25, there were 2 fights that are heavy on AoE including Lich King fight. I was survival on those 2 fights while I was MM on the rest of the fights.
I remember when we were on the ICC Boss (with Healer mechanics) that require us Hunters to AoE DPS, I whispered to my fellow friend Hunter to switch to Survival. He said he cant. He doesnt know how to play Survival. Ouch.
There are tons of Survival Hunters during Wrath … master of Traps who never ever used a single trap. What a failure. Traps were somewhat part of my AoE rotation when I was with Survival and it’s DPS was equal to flavor of the month DK’s. We were dominating on AoE DPS like the Unholy DK’s.
I was not here after Wrath. I dont know what happend in Cata and MoP… and Draenor. What I remember is when I went back on Legion, I got very disappointed to see Survival became melee.
