Ok, you got me, that was clearly a hyperbolic statement.
The situation on the server I’m on right now breaks down like this: Of the top 20 guilds the two at the top of the food chain are full, of the remaining 18 all are looking for more rdps though three of those are specifically looking for warlocks. One is looking for a tank. There are 5 healer spots open though 4 of those are only for rsham/rdruid.
This creates the awkward situation where if I want to play my hunter I can basically have my pick of guilds, but if I want to play any of my other characters I would pretty much have to join one of the guilds looking to bulk up to start mythic.
The precise statement would be: demand for rdps vastly outpaces demand for any other role (with the possible exception of rsham) on my server.
I suppose it’s possible I’m playing on an outlier server and others are awash in rdps… but I have my doubts.
Either they put back the old Survival master of traps or use the new one but make Survival constantly on range like Aspect of the Eagle turned on indefinitely.
If Melee Hunter was the best spec then Blizzard would have not revamped it again for BfA, nor would be one of the lowest played specs, 0.3%, only spec under it is Subtlety Rogue, 0.1%, and that is also melee. Unless there are more melee friendly bosses in Azshara’s Eternal Palace guilds will continue to pick range over melee, and if Blizzard keeps with the idea of having add heavy fights then Hunter will be on the bench again.
Old Range Survival - On PvP, they have powerful traps (cant recall if they have shorter cd, traps last longer but all I know they were so annoying. That makes them special. On PvE, they were master of AoE DoT just like the flavor of the month’s DK back then… AoE DoT plus explosive trap equals competitive AoE DPS. I will tell you I outdps’d all MM Hunters on Lich King fight back then as Survival Hunter becoz that fight has AoE mechanics and MM sucks on AoE.
New Survival when in Range with infinite Aspect of the Eagle - On PvP, we just go in melee to keep them snared and we go out of melee and kite our target to death with bombs/or range Mongoose Bite. It would be OP. On PvE, they would be awesome doing range AoE DoT while positioning themselves out of the harm’s way just like the old Survival specs. When in range, Survival could do fight mechanics like other range DPS’ers. We can Range tank Zaxasj from Crucible of Storms. Survival would be the best mobile Range DPS’er with this.
Whatever it is, Range is always better than melee. Who the f uck told Blizz we want a melee Hunter?
Aside from Balance, affliction, bm, spriest, yeah.
And thus, would never exist as you state it. Which derails your entire point.
like affliction, destro, spriest, balance, ele, demo…
So you have to go back to Wrath of the Lich King, over a decade ago, to try and make your point. Not only that, but anecdotal evidence that in a single fight you would sometimes outdps a single spec.
WoTLK is the last expansion when I was a hardcore. I came in and out on all expansions and Survival was there but I was just casual. Hunters were all range. Then one f ucking expansion in Legion, I was shocked to see Survival as melee. WTF? I have melee alts. I play melee classes when I like to play melee. But when I play a Hunter, I am expecting it to be range… not another f ucking melee.
Hunter is all about range… physical damage or poison damage or fire damage from traps. It is all about kiting melee to death. And now, you want to go to toe-to-toe with Warriors/ DK’s on Plate? I rather play other melee class than to play with melee hunter.
Thats why up to now, Survival melee will never become popular.
It always had melee abilities. They decided to try something. It got a pretty hardcore cult popularity in Legion. It still had, and has, dot and physical damage.
Then do so.
Survival is, by amount of players, roughly as popular now as it ever was. Because it was, for the majority of it’s life, a pretty garbage spec, numbers wise.
Survival has been a top tier spec in the past 3 1/2 years more times than it was in the entire 12 years prior.
You wish. LOL. BM is way more popular in BFA. MM was the most popular in Legion. Survival always end up last coz most of the original Hunters of the past will never accept a melee hunter. Survival Top Tier? They never do the fight mechanics. Switching targets is not their specialty… whatever Survival do, they wont excel on it coz they are now melee. Dont mind me a BM Hunter as your competition on group. Your competition to raid spot or Mythic + spot is not me. Your competition are the Demon Hunters and Rogues. Good luck on getting your spot. You damn know you are dead last on melee popularity.
And in Nighthold, survival was one of the best specs, especially for the three hardest bosses, and again in ToS it was better than MM and BM on the three hardest fights (MoV, FA, and KJ) and was even a top tier spec on MoV and FA. In Uldir, it was consistently strong, top 8, and was the highest boss damage on Mother, mythrax, Vectis, and seconds highest after Sub rogue on Zul.
In WoD, it was consistently below the tanks in damage. It was similarly bottom tier in MoP, and Cata, and on and on…
Tell that to Thyminde.
…what?
Melee is usually strong though?
Arms, UH, and enhancement were typically top 5 specs throughout all of WoD, Rogues, warriors, paladins, ferals, and havoc all had their time at the top throughout Legion, especially warrior and rogues.
Like, what?
Actually, that would be fdk, arms warriors, and sub rogues.
I dunno, I always did amazing as Survival back then. During BC, Survival was godly with AoE explosive Shot. During WotLK it was still good but Armor Penetration MM pulled ahead. It was very solid during MoP, especially given all the add centric style fights throughout the tiers. Cataclysm and WoD, it was playable and it was fun, though damage wise it was lacking a bit.
Numbers can be tuned though. That has zero bearing on if a spec is fun or not.
Yea, melee abilities designed to help you get back out of melee. Funny how that works, isn’t it? Raptor Strike was filler just so you could do something if something did get into your deadzone. Wing Clip was to help you get back to range. If talented, Lacerate(ye olde days) and stuff made it so you could do some damage in melee but being at ranged was still vastly preferred.
Also, lol no. SV now, is ignored by most players because its a trash melee spec in a game drowning with melee specs that do everything better. 0.3% as our Dwarven friend pointed out. That’s pathetic. Even if it was only 1% during BC/WotLK/Cata/MoP/WoD(btw it wasn’t, was higher). That is still over three times the current players. So your “roughly as popular now as it ever was” is laughably false.
But I digress. Some people, though few in number, enjoy melee SV. The majority, do not however and want a return to a spec they played for over a decade. Both sides have merit. Truth be told at this point, the best thing Blizzard can do is give hunters a 4th spec, being old ranged SV. Though I won’t hold my breath.
You suggested an MM talent approach when that approach is too flawed to entertain. What’s cherrypicking about that? The core problem of your idea is that the entire definition and gameplay of your spec is decided through talents; that is way, way too much of a burden for the talent tiers and completely nullifies the whole point of talents, which is meaningful gameplay choices on top of the foundation that is the spec. So you would basically start with a blank “ranged hunter” template spec and everything about how it plays would come from talents as you choose a “MM” route or “SV” route. Now that you’ve completed the base of the spec, there’s now no gameplay choice on top of that. Other specs have talents, you’ve just use the talents to build the base of the spec that other specs have by default. It’s an abysmal situation and would honestly probably be worse for the class than the current model, even without any ranged SV playstyle. You just can’t cram 2 specs in one.
4th spec would be the ideal solution but that’s a non-starter simply because they have explicitly said that even three specs is more than enough in their eyes for all classes and they would prefer if each spec had 2. Plus, it would be another giant effort sink just to keep melee Survival afloat. This all comes down to a dedicated melee Hunter spec simply not earning its keep in this class so any solution that includes one is a bad solution; that’s why the only melee compromise I agree to is some sort of “subspec” of BM where a single level 100 talent swaps out your ranged abilities for melee ones with a damage/survivability boost. It would still be a big effort sink but it would be better than any of the suggested solutions or the current model.
There are only 2 specs in the game that use a ranged weapon. There are 13 that use a melee weapon. A ranged weapon spec would be more special by default.
Neither of those 2 specs focuses on DoTs, either, and we have very few specs in the game that do in total. Combining a DoT spec with a ranged weapon spec is very unique, again by default. What SV is right now really isn’t unique. It can simply be described as “Unholy, but moreso”.
Clearly melee SV sucks more given everything Ogdenir posted. Don’t just skip over it and say “I don’t care” before following it up with such a ridiculous statement as this.
You keep trying to equate it to other specs like this. If that’s your standard, we can use it to tear melee SV to shreds. There is essentialy nothing unique or useful about melee SV compared to other melee specs beyond more ranged capability (other melee specs still have ranged capability, by the way; SV just has the most) which has failed to be a huge factor in BFA.
Having a combination of a fully mobile spec that uses a ranged weapon, can multidot, and can kite effectively is something that is unique. You would stop it from being OP by making sure its damage isn’t as high as specs like Balance or Affliction. Simple as that. Stop being obtuse.
SV was the preferred spec as late as 6.0/6.1 in WoD, literally a few months before Legion was announced. This argument will not end well for you.
Those melee abilities were never a valid avenue for making up the spec’s full DPS toolkit before Legion. They tried something and it failed; claiming it has hardcore cult popularity is exceedingly generous. Its representation is absolutely pitiful.
Yeah, it still has dots and physical damage. It’s also melee now instead of ranged, which means the current version is a straight-up downgrade over the pre-Legion iteration. Fantastic!
Why should Hunter specs be changed to better suit melee players from other classes?
Disgraceful lie
and you should apologise for it. The closest Survival has been to a top tier spec since being melee is a brief time in early Nighthold (where it was still worse than BM with the correct legendaries, mind you, and even BM wasn’t considered to be a top tier spec then) and Uldir (where it was still not a highly preferred or represented spec). Ranged SV, meanwhile, was the best spec in the whole game for Dragon Soul and Highmaul and one of the most represented and desired specs in several other tiers including Throne of Thunder, Siege of Orgrimmar, Blackrock Foundry, Blackwing Descent/Bastion of Twilight, and Ulduar. Put it this way: the last time the Survival spec has been included on a world first kill was Blackhand in early WoD. Let that sink in before making more ridiculous lies about melee SV’s proficiency v.s. ranged SV.
Massively skewed due to the low number of parses, as evidenced by the fact that top guilds weren’t bringing it to their first kills of those fights with the lone exception of Gul’Dan. Survival was behind one or both other hunter specs to their first kills on pretty much all of those fights.
[quote=“Drezwazluz-aegwynn, post:33, topic:169896, full:true”]
In WoD, it was consistently below the tanks in damage. It was similarly bottom tier in MoP, and Cata, and on and on…’
Only for HFC, when it is all but certain that they intentionally gutted the spec in preparation for changing it to melee. It’s a huge lie to pretend it was that way for all of WoD due to its dominance in Highmaul and early Blackrock Foundry. It’s an even more egregious lie to pretend it was like that for every prior expansion. Who exactly do you think you are fooling? I can pull up several world 1st videos to prove you wrong, starting with Method’s kill of Blackhand. You ready to apologise for lying, yet?
Clearly you don’t understand the word “most”. His statement is backed up by Hazzikostas’ answer concerning Survival hunters in his 2017 Gamescom interview where he said, and I quote, “We knew with Survival Hunter that we were making a niche spec. It is a melee spec for a class that has traditionally being range. I think that a lot of existing hunters, they are all hunters because they want to be a range class, and so we don’t necessarily expect them or want them to feel like they should be changing”.
Having a mobile ranged spec like BM or even MM is infinitely more valuable than a melee spec when it comes to dealing with mechanics. That’s a basic fact of WoW encounter design.
There are so many melee it’s next to impossible to find a useful niche that makes them desirable. Also, melee are essentialy by default less desirable than ranged in raiding; there are a limited number of melee slots due to mechanics. What he said is absolutely correct. Your argument is based on bad reading comprehension.
It’s true that SV isn’t dead last this expansion, but it’s not far ahead. Right now it’s only ahead on parses v.s. Sub Rogue. It was better in Uldir but it was still in the bottom 5. For Legion it really was dead last for the entire expansion.
SV didn’t have ES in BC, that was added in the 3.0 WotLK systems patch. ES had an AoE component until 3.0.8 which came a few months after WotLK released. ES actually ended up being very undertuned to compensate for the splash AoE it did, so the change to being purely single target was actually a buff to the spec.
Sorry for the longer-than-usual post, but that was a hell of a lot of misinformed arguments to debunk.
Just to put to rest the idea of SV being a weak and underplayed spec before becoming melee, I present to you the Highmaul logs. If you go to the right place you can actually see the week-by-week parse count for a spec, which is important because by default if you to to Highmaul you will see the data of the last 2 weeks before 6.2 which was well past SV’s prime in that expansion (also when HM was technically no longer current).
You have to specifically select the spec and then select “Going back the entire tier”.
There’s Survival. As you can see, it peaked in the week of Jan 20 - Feb 3 2015 with 66,993 parses. For the same period, BM had 2,137 and MM had 14,896. Therefore, during that week, you can conclude that almost 80% of the class was playing SV. It was literally the most popular spec in the game. The second place was Frost Mage with 40,123 parses in the same week. No, this was not the only tier where Survival was dominant. HFC was an exception, not the rule.
Compare it to melee SV, which at its very best failed to break 10% of the class (IIRC: someone check the Uldir pre-8.1 logs because I can’t be bothered right now) and usually sits well below 3% of the class, then realise the absurdity of someone trying to claim that melee SV was always more viable and stronger than ranged SV.
I was not the one trying to argue survival was, or needed to be, “more special”.
LOL. Survival was below tanks in damage throughout WoD.
Literally what.
So the same group of people doing incredible amounts of min/max and theorycrafting for two years straight, even when survival was the worst spec for multiple raids, doesn’t count as a cult following? What? You know what that means, right?
Being melee is not a downgrade from ranged beyond preference.
Not Even Close.
It was consistently one of the better specs in Nighthold, specifically for the three hardest bosses, Elisande, SA, and Gul’dan. Not only was it strong in NH, but it was strong where it actually mattered. There’s a reason it was consistently used in top kills for all three bosses.
Except for being one of the top 8 specs consistently every fight, sometimes better, and being the highest boss damage on 3 fights, and the second highest boss damage on Zul, the only spec that could even pretend to hold a candle to Sub Rogue.
And you’re ignoring it being so strong on the three hardest bosses in the hardest raid in all of Legion, MoV, FA, and KJ. Just ignoring that little tidbit?
So not being in any of the top 50 kills for the three final bosses (Garrosh, ScB, PoK) and being consistently behind BM, and well behind other specs, makes it qualify as “most represented and desired”?
You sure you want to push this? You’re not doing too hot.
Wait, so a spec has to be in a world first kill to be successful? And out of the top 50 kills, only 8 Survival hunters are found, compared to 76 Bm hunters?
That’s now how that works. Actually a spec being played more should push it up in the rankings, not down, due to the boundaries of what it can do being pushed.
So, wait. A spec can be successful, strong, and do good to great damage, but because it’s not in world first kills, it’s trash? And being in one world first kill, in BRF, makes up for the atrocity that was HFC?
And don’t give me that “they were getting ready for melee hunter” crap. That’s the same tin foil had thinking locks have about Ion saying he didn’t want people playing Demo. A 3% nerf overall from a 15% nerf to explosive shot does not kill a spec.
Only for just over half the expansion. Oh, and Imperator Mar’gok, Blast Furnace, Hans and Franz, Flamebender, Kromog, almost Operator, and Iron Maidens.
So yeah, only HFC
Logs don’t liieeeee, and neither do I.
Dominance in HM? By your metric of “world first kills”, why isn’t it in the top 15 kills (not going beyond that, tired of watching videos) Or dominating the damage charts? Oh, and now we get the detail “early” BRF. Could it be because for the first three kills of Blackhand, Survival was slightly overtuned and subsequently nerfed immediately after, and was quickly dropped from popularity in the top kills?
Or is that “skewing the data” and being misleading. No, you wouldn’t do that, isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?
I’d love to give it a good shake in every expansion, but it’s a funny thing. We didn’t have WCL until ToT, and it is clear to see that in ToT and SoO, survival is at best not garbage. But consistently beaten by other specs, and that’s without mentioning that hunter wasn’t even the best class in those two raids.
So what do we have for everything that came before? Hearsay and anecdotes? Please say World of Logs, I need this to hit that peak of amazing for me.
Again, for a spec to be considered sucessful, it has to be in a world first kill?
There were multiple arms warriors in the first dozen or so world first Archimonde kills ,then they fell off the face of the earth. Their tier was overtuned and had to be nerfed, twice. Then suddenly, arms warrior wasn’t so amazing or popular anymore. Does that count as super successful class design popular and strong wow?
I’m certainly not a world first raider, much less a world fifty raider. And I don’t think you are. Or anyone else reading along.
That’s a basic fact of…some encounters. And on other encounters, melee are better for mechanics. See, half the mechanics in ToS, most of the mechanics in NH, most Antorus fights besides Coven (which was a sadly undertuned fight on mythic anyway) Ghuun, almost like it depends. Do more mechanics favor ranged or no one? Yes, for sure. Do all mechanics favor ranged or no one? No, that’s a DISGRACEFUL LIE
You have 14 slots for dps. Typically in the past, anywhere from 4 to 8 of those are melee spots. What’s the problem with that.
It’s almost, again, like it’s fight dependent and it’s skewing the data to imply that it’s the same case for ALL fights.
What are you even trying to convey here? You are the one arguing that the spec he is outlining is not “special” by singling out individual aspects and pointing out other ranged specs that share those while ignoring the combined product. At least try to keep track of your own arguments.
I warned you it wouldn’t end well for you.
Survival was only meganerfed in 6.2. Before that, its damage was fine and it was more than viable. Like I said, it was the dominant spec for Highmaul. I can already sense the nonsense arguments formulating in your head as I’ve read your entire post before responding and I already know the fallacies and misinterpretations you’re employing to keep this argument up. The best part is, I’ve already acknowledged it in my previous post. You just skipped over it. Here it is again:
Why are you basing huge parts of your arguments on WCL when you evidently have no idea how WCL works? Highmaul is counted as a concurrent raid to Blackrock Foundry, therefore the data you are looking at is from the very last weeks of Survival’s viability in that expansion and well past the point where BM surpassed it due to favourable gear (i.e. T17 bonus). Before BRF and T17, SV was absolutely the top spec.
Even then: SV didn’t do below-tank damage even in 6.2. It was a possibility between 6.2’s release and the July hotfixes, but I can’t get sim data from the time. You can see the post-hotfix data, though, and while SV is crushingly low (due to nerfs and ridiculously unfavourable gear conditions; I’m not sure why you think this is some sort of indictment on ranged SV as a whole)
Here are my WoD boss videos from Highmaul as SV. As you can see, I sure as hell had no problems beating tanks, or most other DPS specs for that matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SkI7MIBjrs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hGTt35khac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_F7vfDKNkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0SrterytZU
As far as I’m concerned “cult following” is a euphemism for a product that either isn’t good enough to earn appeal among a large audience or doesn’t have the means to market itself to a large audience, and when it comes to WoW specs it sure as hell isn’t the latter. Who knows you think Survival having a dedicated following of theorycrafters and enthusiasts validates the spec. So what? Ranged Survival had that too, while also having an enormous, active playerbase for most of its lifespan. Again, ranged Survival fully outclasses melee Survival.
Before: Could do full dps at 40 yards at all times
After: Cannot do full DPS at 40 yards at all times
Downgrade, objectively. There is no mechanical benefit to being melee outside of exceedingly specific circumstances (read: Mythic Gul’Dan and pretty much nothing else).
No, it’s a demonstrable lie. Ranged SV was more valuable and desired at more times than melee SV could ever hope to be. It was regularly brought to progression raids by cutting edge guilds across several tiers. This is why I mention world first kills: that’s the most easily verified. But if you investigate through old logs and kill videos and compare it to the modern raiding environment the difference is night and day.
Put it this way: people stopped and gawked at SV being brought to Method’s first Gul’Dan kill; it was a rare occurence and therefore people were talking about it. That reaction didn’t happen for ranged SV because it was a usual sight to see it being brought to world first/cutting edge kills. This shatters your false narrative that it was a dead spec before it was melee and that it’s more useful now. You should apologise for this lie and move on.
Early Nighthold = 7.1.5. 7.2 came out not long after and BM was unquestionably the better spec then. Even in Nighthold SV only held an edge during progression because it was the least gear-dependent and legendary-dependent of the 3 specs; BM was still better but only if you had Mantle of Command. Even then both MM and SV were brought earlier and more often in all those situations you mentioned, INCLUDING GUL’DAN. Basically, SV only held an edge in a hyper-specific circumstance for a brief period of time. It was perfectly competitive at other times, but the other Hunter specs were always preferable and this shows in the representation. Survival in Legion, at its very best, failed to advance beyond dead-last place in parse count. And you know damn well that cutting edge-guilds would ignore preference and pick the best spec no matter what; SV was just not that spec.
Go look at the WCL statistics for the early weeks of those bosses. SV NEVER surpassed the ranged specs on representation, even on Gul’Dan which, again, was its very best circumstances. I struggle to describe a spec as “top tier” if it was perpetually less valuable than both other specs in its class.
Top EIGHT!? That’s a third of all DPS specs! You’re also dreaming if you think SV was anywhere near as valuable as Sub Rogue for Zul. This is why I have very little respect for the desperate over-hyping that comes from the SV crowd on these forums. It borders on absurdity and honesty/consistency with the data isn’t even a remote consideration. Funnily enough, I don’t actually dispute that SV was a top-tier spec for Uldir in terms of single-target damage, but that’s a very specific category. Again, it was absent from most cutting-edge progression on all those fights. It still wasn’t valuable enough to bring over BM even post-nerf. Therefore, I struggle to call it a “top tier spec” when it wasn’t valuable enough to earn a raid spot the majority of the time.
I skipped over it because this is the same cherry-picked, over-hyped nonsense as the rest of your posts. You’re harping on about how it’s the most amazing specs on all these fights because of an overly-inflated WCL ranking which a) still usually puts it behind many other specs and b) doesn’t actually translate to any cutting-edge guilds bringing this spec to the raids in their progression. I remember checking these logs weekly to see where the latest SV Hunters were up to; it was always several bosses behind and you would have situations where BM and MM Hunters had already been brought to the end boss while the furthest-progressed SV Hunter still had 3 bosses to go.
Here’s a perfect example. Go look at Kil’Jaedan on WCL: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/13#class=Any&boss=2051®ion=1
There literally is not a single SV Hunter there; no SV Hunter killed that boss before 7.3, which was a period of 2 months. The first kill of that boss was on 30th July and no kill of the boss included a Survival hunter until October 5th. At it’s peak it was getting 16 parses a week. SIXTEEN!
Oh, and better yet: the only reason it ranks better than the other two hunter specs is that the 75th percentile MM and BM parses dilute their higher parses, whereas this doesn’t happen with Survival because when you apply the 75th percentile filter you are looking at the tiny handful of top-parsing SV Hunters because there were hardly any of them. Basically, for a good few weeks, the 75th percentile filter was equivalent to the Max filter for Survival. Remember how later in this post you call me out for “not understanding how parses work”? Here you go! The exact dynamic I was describing. The tiny number of parses for Survival massively inflates its apparent performance at the 75th percentile! This was a frequent occurrence throughout Legion and was noted by many people.
So, let’s recap. You are trying to convince me that SV was a top-tier spec on a boss where:
It wasn’t included in any kill on the boss until 2 months after it was first killed (i.e. wasn’t part of any cutting-edge progression)
Its parse count was less than half of the second-least-represented spec (i.e. was scarcely brought even to late progression and reclears)
Its numerical performance was flat-out worse than the other two Hunter specs and only appears to be better at the 75th percentile filter due to the miniscule number of parses (i.e. was objectively worse than the other Hunter specs on that fight and you just failed to look at the data long enough to realise that
It’s moments like these where I have to step back and ponder at how Survival Hunter delusion never ceases to amaze me, even after all these years.
See above. Learn what “Current standings/Over a range of 2 weeks” means.
I think what makes this even more comical is the brash confidence.
Firstly, when it comes to Blackrock Foundry, we’ve been over this several times already: Survival was dominant early on and then was over time surpassed by BM, primarily due to the T17 set bonus which heavily favoured BM. You are getting an incredibly skewed perspective by looking at only the final two weeks of tier 17.
Secondly, you say it yourself later on: WCL was not used in those tiers by a significant number of people and therefore this is not reliable data. The earliest parse on that list for Lei Shen, for example, is from December 20th, 2013 i.e. 2 months after SoO launched and long after Lei Shen was current. For Siege of Orgrimmar it was the same deal: the earliest recorded kill on that is literally months after the world first. Hell, it’s months later than my own guild’s kill. And the total number of parses is nothing compared to post-WoD.
It’s harder today to judge what spec was best in those two tiers, but the general consensus from people who played at the time was that SV was preferred for ToT and BM was preferred in SoO, but in both raids the specs were close nough to be interchangeable in most situations. SV was apparently good enough to be included on the world first Heroic 25-man Lei Shen kill (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMRAox_qCUU). SV was also more represented in ToT as well as most of post-hotfix SoO. Check the distribution data here (https://cynwise.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/class-distribution-data-for-patch-5-4-2/).
I think a spec has to be prolific among the cutting-edge guilds to be successful and I can count on one finger the time that’s been the case for melee SV.
We’ve already established the T17 dynamic several times: SV was still the preferred spec before you had the T17 4-set, hence it was brought to the first kills. After T17 4-set, BM was better.
See above example. A low number of parses can inflate a spec’s position on the charts because you’re only seeing the best of that spec even at the 75th percentile. The only time SV actually earned a high spot on the DPS charts was Uldir. Throughout Legion it was always overinflated on the charts due to this dynamic.
Melee SV is trash because it’s generic, it takes away a spec people like and in exchange we get a spec most Hunters don’t like. This argument includes so much talk of cutting edge progression because you are consistently trying to overhype Survival as the “best spec evar” on just about any fight you can think of, which is dishonest and misleading.
Survival was consistently powerful in most tiers before HFC. That’s what “makes up for HFC”. I’m not sure why you think it needs to make up for HFC anyway; Blizzard set it up to fail in that tier and it did. It wasn’t absent from progression in that tier because people didn’t like it, it was absent because we were effectively barred from bringing it to raids.
Uh, what? You do know Ion actually said that, right? They explicitly nerfed Demonology to the ground because they didn’t want people to play it in that patch. Here’s the Q&A response: (https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/39qvdq/we_dont_want_you_to_be_playing_demonology_were/)
Lol @ the downplaying of the 6.2 changes. Educate yourself (http://www.thrillofthewild.com/2015/04/62-and-nerf-bat.html). Also, even without the SS change it would have been a dead spec because the Legendary ring was designed in such a way to screw over every single spec that wasn’t a 2-minute CD burst spec. BM was screwed in that patch, too, as were several DPS specs.
Add one more to the ever-growing pile of “failing to understand what is conveyed by the front page of WCL raid statistics”.
Interpretations of the logs do lie, and you’re lying this way non-stop. Or maybe that’s too harsh: maybe you are just really wrong and misled and you’re failing to grasp that. I’ve seen enough dishonest tactics on this forum to lean towards “lying”, though.
SV was hotfix buffed in early Highmaul. For the first couple weeks of Highmaul progression i.e. mid-to-late December MM was the only viable Hunter spec, so BM and SV were hotfix-buffed. The world first race was over and done with before that, but most people who cleared Highmaul, even cutting-edge guilds, did it after the hotfixing when SV became dominant.
I’ve already covered why SV was brought to the first BRF kills.
You can see the spec representation changing over time here (https://www.worldofwargraphs.com/pve-stats/classes/hunter).
You are deliberately misrepresenting the data and ignoring key factors, yes. Remember, your argument was that melee SV was more competitive in its 3 years of existence than ranged SV was in its 12 years of existence and you have utterly failed to prove that.
Already established how you misinterpreted data about these patches.
No, I don’t use WoL. There is, however, representation statistics going back to DS and usually the top-represented spec coincides with the top-performing specs. Just look at SV on that Cynwise blog page which cites old worldofwargraphs data. How can you argue that melee SV has performed better than ranged SV when there were at least 2 raids where ranged SV was pretty much the best spec in the game in both performance and representation while melee SV has only excelled in performance on one boss and has never had non-terrible representation?
This is what makes the brash confidence even more comical; you’re so consistently wrong about everything and proud of it.
I would call Arms a top tier spec before those nerfs, yes. As for design, that’s a different matter. I suspect the rest of this thread will be conflating these two things, but the bottom line is a) we’ve already established there were periods of time where ranged SV was a top-tier spec and these clearly exceed those brief instances where the same can be said of melee SV, and b) the design of ranged SV was clearly successful when it provided enjoyment for so many people for so long. More people enjoyed ranged SV than melee SV, simple as that.
The vast majority of WoW encounters favour ranged over melee. This is a basic, common-sense fact about raids. Go ask anyone who raids. Melee spots are always limited due to the competition of space around the boss. How does anything about what you said disprove that? You’re just cherrypicking specific examples of specific fights (most of which still favour ranged) and treating that as a counter-example. Quite pathetic.
4-8 is less than half of 14 in most cases. You’re just proving my point. Melee spots are limited, end of story. No one is ever claiming these are blanket examples applying to every situation. That strawman argument is nothing more than empty desperation. I already named Gul’Dan as an exception, and there are probably some others. What’s important is that the overwhelming majority of situations favour limiting the melee spots and bringing more ranged.
Last place: Sub Rogue at 467 parses
2nd last: Survival Hunter at 1260 parses
3rd last: Feral at 4168 parses
Oh look, I’m right. Because you failed to understand our points correctly and you thought we were talking about damage rankings instead of representation. Making a spec do high damage is easy. Making people like a spec is hard. Apparently reading comprehension is hard, too.
x2, because you do the same thing for the next couple quotes.
No, just yours. You are the one lying and misrepresenting statistics in a feeble attempt to sell melee Survival and denigrate ranged Survival. Ranged Survival never needed such dedicated and ardent defenders on the forums. It was better in every single way aside from being the circus freak of class design.
I agree, the spec has more range abilities now than melee. All it would need is to have, as Jhannae said, Aspect of the Eagle have toggle feature, or talents that change it back to a rang spec. It opens more types of play-style and would allow SV to change for the demand of fight.
![:roll_eyes:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/roll_eyes.png?v=6" ":roll_eyes:")