First, I actually think BM should have actually been the melee role. But that is another topic almost.
What I don’t like about BM, you are USING your pets which to me is kinda like just abusing them like a circus animal. Used for your own entertainment or do the work for you.
To me, that shouldn’t have been how BM played as the “animal” lover spec.
Survival on other hand, you are fighting alongside your pet, fighting together one in one. Sure BM you still fire your arrow and do some stuff in the distance, but there is no bond or partnership with that pet to me when its just being used and you are in the back letting it do (most) of the work.
As survival, I feel a real bond (as far as “games” go) with my pet you can’t get with any other spec as I fight alongside it like a real partner. There is no other spec in the game where you have an ANIMAL (not a demon, not an elemental or whatever else) and you are one in one going against an enemy TOGETHER alongside each other.
BM would have been perfect like that of course, but then you’d hear the complaints of how BM was ruined or similar like you get with survival. But since that wasn’t how blizzard did it, survival is the only spec in the game where you get an actual bond with a pet animal. And no cosmetic ones you can’t fight alongside them, but I guess every spec gets those but there is never a bonding feeling with the cosmetic pets to me, no specialness of fighting together side by side.
It has been my thought that BM should have been about using the pets to attack and defend. You don’t just sit back and watch. You direct their attacks, give them commands to support their auto-attacks, heal them and, if you’ve developed the expertise, you can manage more than one at a time… SV was (melee) hunter and pet companion against the world. MM shouldn’t have a pet at all since it’s all about shooting.
To be fair we only have kill command as survival and that’s about as far as our relationship with the pet goes outside of being in melee with it as you stated.
I definitely like the idea but to be honest I never even feel like the pet is there because hitting kill command just feels like a focus generator with no relationship to my pet.
Only time I’m reminded of that relationship is when the pet ui is jacked up and I’m not getting focus from KC.
Good thing SV isn’t “using” its pets with abilities like Kill Command…
Renaming Bestial Wrath to Coordinated Assault doesn’t suddenly make it all about cooperating rather than using. Spirit Bond as the mastery does thematically reinforce that, but that was just stolen from BM in the first place. As for BM; the Barbed Shot/Frenzy interaction is a great example of coordination with the pet. Meanwhile Survival is using abilities like Wildfire Bomb which don’t contribute to any pet coordination identity at all and if anything actively contradict it.
So it’s all about fighting in melee range alongside your pet? Because BM can do that too, as a matter of fact. I don’t know if you noticed but the minimum range doesn’t exist any more. The class doesn’t need melee BM and ranged BM as different specs; if the melee weapon is such an important part just have a melee talented option within BM and call it a day. Besides; Survival’s toolkit and identity has drifted back towards being ranged despite still using a melee weapon to the point where in competitive PvP it’s all but primarily ranged and you aren’t fighting alongside your pet most of the time. Both these facts put into question the entire point of Survival using a melee weapon in the first place.
Yes BM would have absolutely been ruined if they did that because it’s something most Hunters would not have wanted, and I’ll be blunt: Survival was ruined because of what they did. They upended its identity and threw away over a decade of iterative class design and the result was the most consistently unpopular and avoided spec the game has ever seen, with no clear identity or direction to speak of.
As I said earlier: just stick a melee talent option within BM and call it a day. Forcing Hunter specs to be melee was always a terrible idea. You seem to be fixated on the idea that a companion of pets must be melee for it to work out and ignoring the fact that ranged weapons are a critically important part of the Hunter identity.
MM should have pets because it’s a Hunter and Hunters use pets. Simple as that. Legion demonstrated that mutilating classes by going crazy over what’s shared and what’s exclusive and trying to make every spec it’s own micro-class was a terrible idea and the game is moving back towards having a lot of shared baseline elements. In fact they should revise Lone Wolf so that having a pet out is a more viable option; we still do it in some situations but it’s a pretty big AoE nerf. Ideally Lone Wolf should only buff single-target Marksmanship abilities so that the damage between having a pet v.s. no pet is very close in all situations.
It would be some serious BS if I lost the ability to Bloodlust as MM because some genius developer thought that it makes sense for baseline class elements to be denied from one of its specs (i.e. what they already did with Survival).
Hi. I play MM spec.
Me and my pet, we are partners, and we hunt as a team, each of us having our specific individual jobs.
My primary job is to kill the target.
My pet’s primary job is to keep the target off me while I do so.
My pet is much harder to hurt, and much easier to heal than I am, and has several methods to keep our target’s attention focused on him.
Me, I can lay OUT the DPS, provided nothing is chewing my face off.
We are partners, working as a team.
as it’s always been… from Day one.
I will be keeping my pet.
MM is about being able to go ANYWHERE in the Azeroth Universe, the Hunter and pet as a team, and coming back alive. Having help, it is nice, but we don’t need it.
I do ALL this with my pet now, and I do it as a MM Hunter. I could manage more, but as MM, I only have the one pet. Np, I only really need one.
I would give up my hunter pet as MM if they let me choose lust as my lone wolf ability and gave me a spammable self-heal (to replace the benefit of mend pet). Bye stinky!!
“Only melee during gos” => Most of the time ranged
=> Primarily ranged.
I mean, its not that hard to make that connection. Also in most PvP vids with SV you see them staying ranged for the majority of time, ergo staying primarily ranged.
Because its a hybrid. Go ahead and keep reading too far into it though, this is almost as stupid as me trying to tell you what marks is in mythic raiding. Be better Bepples, usually when you spew vomit about things you don’t understand you atleast try to make some sense.
I’m quoting what you and others routinely say about Survival in PvP…
The OP described how being in melee fighting alongside the pet is what’s great for him about SV. Never mind the fact that BM and MM can also fight in melee despite how much people apparently think the minimum range still exists; do you think that describes what SV is doing in PvP and do you think there’s anything wrong with the statement that SV is far more ranged-centric than it was when it first went melee in 7.0, i.e. the entire original point?
I think you are still desperately clinging to anything to make survival be a “ranged” spec. Its not, get over it.
Survival in pvp is a melee/ranged hybrid. Meaning that we can do decent “poke” dmg from range but when its time to be a threat we need to be in melee. We cannot be in melee at all times because we are not warrior/dk/rets and we cannot stand toe to toe with them constantly (kind of like every other non plate melee in the game) so we weave in and out.
Go ahead and try to twist this into “SuRv Is MoRe RaNgEd!” Or, just realize your wrong.
I didn’t play it in 7.0, nor do I care. My comments are 100% towards your lack of knowledge on survival pvp, yet somehow making statements like they’re biblical truths. Again you making comments on it is like me trying to claim Marksman is a support spec in mythic raiding.
I am very strongly in favour of choice when it comes to “to Lone Wolf or not”. As can be seen in this post alone people strongly defending the need for a pet and others not wanting MM with pet.
In terms of improving the balance, I would go the other way and say let multishot give MM beast cleave, it is never going to hit as hard as the BM version. With balancing should bring in the AoE missing from pet based MM?
And for the love of this old mans memory, i could have sworn some iteration of Lone Wolf in a .x patch in the past had Lust as a button without a pet out?