I still see the misconception floating around. I saw someone complaining that a Hunter ninja’d a Strength/Stamina axe from RFK or somewhere and the reply was something like “Was he SV? In which case, he needed it”.
For the record: Hunters have zero use for strength, in case anyone’s wondering. Agility gives both ranged and melee attack power. We NEVER take strength stuff unless it also has agility we need, which this axe did not.
Ironically, given that Savage Strikes and Lighting Reflexes were added in 1.7 (in their recognisable forms) Survival after 1.7 probably had better melee DPS than Survival before 1.7.
Even before 1.7 Survival did not stick to melee range, period.
It sounds like you’re the one not using “precedence” correctly, or at least depending on overly-generalising the situation and avoiding context. Hunters having some melee abilities before 5.0 would only be precedent for Hunters having melee abilities later. It is not precedent for a purely-melee spec or a spec that must stick to melee range to achieve its full damage potential.
Yura knows this well. He is mocking the people that don’t. There’s a pretty widespread belief that Survival in Vanilla stuck to melee combat.
Yeah, Survival gave melee options. Survival in Legion and BFA gives melee requirements. Not precedented.
They had to remake the spec and compromise much more towards ranged gameplay, even going as far as to add an ability from ranged Survival back (Serpent Sting). Evidently not.
Yes because the spec was entirely overhauled and forced in a ranged direction after 2 years of minimal PvE representation. It wasn’t just a tweaking of the ranged capability of the spec. The playstyle almost totally changed with only basic elements making it through to BFA.
You should read the Q&As more often. In the January 2018 Q&A Hazzikostas talked about the mistake on focusing on “spec fantasy” over “class fantasy”. He gave Survival as a specific example and said that it felt like a different class to BM and MM and that it was weird how you got to level 10 and forgot how to use a bow if you picked Survival, so Survival would have a better mix of ranged and melee mechanics in the future. This is also why the spec has Kill Command now.
To your credit, he has also said since then that they still thought melee Hunters were an awesome choice. But that can change. They were pretty happy with ranged Survival at some point too and it was way more widely enjoyed than melee SV is today.
It’s far more ranged than it was in Legion and it was forced to conform with the Hunter identity far better.
Melee is also often framed, if often subconsciously, as a weakness of the spec even by people who like it and the primary selling point and distinguishing feature of the spec over other melee is its ranged capability, so melee is NOT safe.
Being able to accept change is a virtue, but unconditionally accepting any and all changes including those that are negative is not.
Literally any spec is going to have its fans. I’ve seen people swear up-and-down that Survival’s best iteration was the pre-1.7 one despite such overwhelming disagreement from everyone else. The point is that the debate is still raging on even this long afterwards. It’s still a relevant, controversial issue. Keep in mind that Survival being ranged was NOT controversial and there was hardly any community pressure towards melee but they still did it.
In my experience, just like with any debate with two sides, most people don’t care and aren’t invested and therefore don’t post on the forums.
The problem is that even so, those that don’t care and aren’t going to ask for anything to be done about it still generally shy away from Survival. For example, the other Hunter in my guild has related this to me (paraphrasing): “I don’t mind SV being melee, but I’ll never play it”. I’ve heard that many, many times from in-game Hunters. I’ve even met many that play Survival but would prefer if it were ranged. Of course, there are plenty that love melee Survival and never post on the forums. But the representation of the spec speaks for itself. Most Hunters avoid it, when in the past most Hunters tried it out and many mained it.
