Your focused strictly on DPS and groups rarely deplete due to low dps. Groups deplete because of deaths/wipes and utilities help prevent them.
What utilities does a survival hunter bring that will replace other melee classes? Monks have ring of peace, dks have AMZ, DH have darkness, ect.
Came in expecting the usual suspects. Wasn’t disapointed. Its been 5 years guys, might be time to get over it.
In my group, if you are a gnome, you do whatever you want, baby!!
So your facts are based on what you’ve seen in low keys where the player skill is abysmally non existent. Do you ever think that because the player skill is so bad at that level you’re looking at it all wrong? Your facts you go by are what the very tippy top goes for when it comes down to crunching out an extremely difficult key and only the very best will do. At your range and my range none of those will be a real consideration as at those levels the players skill will be vastly more important than the spec they’re playing.
You can try to deny it and point to all the facts you wish, but at the end of the day you’re at a level where those types of decisions mean absolutely nothing if the people that are controlling those specs are incompetent. Even at my range you can still make any spec work, but you’ll have to be somewhat competent and around 20 is where the drop off begins and those facts of yours will come into actual play.
Player skill in the low to mid range is far more superior in terms of smooth group play than the spec, as a bad player using a smooth meta spec at the end of the day, is still bad.
I’ve had 2 fire mages this season with more ilvl than me and between the two of them they they casted flamestirke 4 times and only one of them actually casted it 4 times. If they were good we would’ve easily timed the 15’s and because they didn’t know how to play their meta specs we actually failed easy keys that you have to actively try to fail. My best guess is they bought their io scores, but it is what it is.
Nobody is arguing that the survival hunters counterparts aren’t better. The argument I’m making is the vast majority of people in this thread including me are not anywhere near the level the spec would actually hinder your run if they played at a competent level. If you can get better specs that are more skilled than the survival hunter, then by all means do it. However, the spec is far from useless and even for some specs at the same skill level we can leave them in our dust with uncapped bombs and big pulls. What we lack in single target we make up on trash pulls which are just as important in terms of clearing.
We can look at charts and logs all day long telling us what we already know, it doesn’t mean the meta slave you picked up over that non meta spec is gonna give you the smooth experience you’re hoping for. Everything is a gamble and I’ll say it again, nobody here plays at the level where taking a survival hunter or any other non meta spec would be a hinderance unless the person is bad skill wise and at that point the spec doesn’t even matter because they’re bad and it wouldn’t of mattered what they played.
I’ll leave it at that because we won’t see eye to eye anyways. At the very least I’d ask you to reconsider on how you make your groups at that range because you could be passing up on some extremely good players not doing meta specs because you’re trying to apply the top 1% mindset to the bottom 90% where it simply doesn’t work.
I’m not reading this essay. The fact is there are better specs to pick from than survival hunters.
For the life of me I do t know why more melee classes don’t have a ranged option. DH could easily have a glaive throwing spec, rogues a dagger chucking options. It even plays into those class fantasies!
Be too much balance work to make them viable in pve and pvp.
Perhaps, but balancing ranged specs isnt harder than melee specs , and they’re attempting it for hunter. Its not like you can swap specs mid arena or boss.
I’m talking about a full ranged spec like how hunters have a melee spec in their mostly ranged class.
The question is, how would pug group leaders know who is more skilled? If there was an evenly skilled DK and Hunter in the queue, I would go with the DK due to AMZ and especially grip during sanguine weeks.
You are right though, any class/spec combo is viable at the +15 mark.
And you totally should. But some peoples thought process is so black and white that they’d never consider the off meta spec even if it wasn’t sang. I may not be able to pull something right out of sang but if it’s channeling and for some reason every single kick is on cd I can quick trap it to cancel the cast and make it move. Sure, it’s not as good as said dk, but I still have a way to clean up a messy situation. It just won’t be as flawless but a few ticks is hardly the end of the world.
I spent a few mists last night watching my meta bros typhooning mobs back into sanguine and a few even rooted them in it. I’m all for the meta specs having their spot at the top because they got more love in class design. But people can and do let you down on them all the time.
As to the skilled part I doubt there is ever a surefire way. Obviously you could spend a little extra time and deep dive a profile and see how many times they’ve ran and completed it and how consistent the runs look. But only my tank buddy tends to do that as I’m all for inviting anyone so long as their score looks decent and the profile doesn’t show a clear sign of bought io.
My biggest gripe with this whole thing is people trying to apply the top 1% mindset to areas so far beneath the 1% they aren’t even in the same galaxy and it hurts mythic+ as a whole by creating this crappy expectation that meta specs will smooth out a run when in reality a group of skilled individuals regardless of spec will create some of the smoothest experiences you could ever see up to a point.
mostly because melee suck in general and you have 2 range specs
And for a brief, brief time in WoD, Unholy was fairly decent at being melee-free.
HUnters for the most part did not want a melee spec. Ion even said people roll hunters to play ranged and that they made Surv into a melee spec for those that might not have normally rolled a hunter.
Hunters are the only pure dps class that has had a spec changed from range to melee . In spite of what others say each spec had its difference and Rsurv was not the same as MM.
MM is or was before they removed Rsurv a hard hitting focused on single target sniper spec and Rsurv was more of a DOT crowd control spec that focused on traps and special munitions. With the change to surv they added some of the old range aspects to MM which has watered down that spec because Blizz is trying to please both MM and old RSurv hunters and they are failing at it. Another thing is in order now for them to create an identity for MSurv ,they have now taken from BM. They took Spirit Bond from BM and they have given Surv Kill Comand which is a carbon copy of BM Beastial Wrath.
What they should of done is add back some the old melee abilities like wing clip but kept the spec as range. THis would of brought back some of the old surv feel of having a melee ability or 2 to help surv while you were fighting to get back into range position , which was always the focus of the specs damage from Vanilla -WoD. In all actuality until they got rid of the min range in MoP all hunters had a melee weapon equipped . Yes it was mostly a stat stick but it did come in handy from time to time.
I’ve only played 2 specs since going hunter main in Cata. From Cata -WoD 6.2 I was RSurv only. Once they broke Surv in WoD I went MM . I am not a fan of BM personally I like to be the mane focus of the damage and if I use a pet it is as a helper and not the main focus of the damage. Now if I had the choice of staying MM or going back to RSurv ,I would go back to surv in a heart beat . I enjoyed the mobility of it , as well as the dot damage and there was imho more diversity to it then that of MM. It was the perfect adds phase spec for boss fights because of it being good in aoe. You had a group of hunters in a raid and stuff needed kiting , you didn’t send the BM or MM to do it you sent the rsuv hunter .
No how about Blizz makes a 4th hunter spec and give those of us that would like a version of the rsurv spec back instead of taking an even bigger dump on us .
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a survival hunter in keys, or anywhere else for that matter lol, but they are solid. Most classes that have a meta spec are going to have a tough time if they choose one of the other options. There’s just no way around it.
Melee surv is fun, but I dislike how the fun is tied to certain talent combinations. I don’t like it without mongoose bite or wildfire bombs.
Don’t care for the meta though. I’m maining demo and I’m trashing folks. c:
I had a SV hunter in a NW15 timed and he/she hit KSM. To that point, I never invite Hunters for their melee DPS regardless if they’re parsing #1 in the World. I know their DPS is solid, BUT don’t need another melee.
True facts here: most people are not good. They assume therefore that everyone else isn’t, and don’t trust anything that isn’t deeply advocated by guides. I agree that surv is deeply underrated right now, but it’s hard to blame people for being skeptical. If they know you it’s one thing, but it’s understandably hard to trust a random with an off-meta spec, especially how badly some people can perform even with specs that are meta.
Though I’d imagine if you have a timed 20 on your IO you could play literally anything and get invited.
That’s the real problem.
This is true for all pure DPS classes. It’s not an excuse to locking one of its specs into a state where Hunters avoid it regardless of its tuning. You know that’s worse, right?
They had diverged a lot by WoD, actually, and they absolutely felt like different playstyles by then. If they were still too similar that’s just an argument for further iterating on their individual identities and playstyles. Again, not an excuse for melee Survival.
MM can do all of these things from the safety of range while also having drastically better single target. MM might not have the consistent uncapped AoE that SV does, but with the generally smaller pulls of Shadowlands M+ and MM’s excellent cooldown burst AoE means this advantage of Survival really doesn’t amount to much if at all.
MM’s DPS is absolutely not gutted by having to Bloodlust. Most of the time BL will be used on bosses i.e. primarily single target scenarios and in ST having a pet out instead of having Lone Wolf is a minor DPS loss (did you forget that the pet actually does damage?). It’s only on AoE pulls where not having Lone Wolf is a major DPS loss (up to 10% obviously). There are some situations where we have to BL on an AoE pull but it’s not nearly enough to make this a significant shortcoming for MM.
Combine all of this with the fact that this tier of PvE is one of the more melee unfriendly ones in both dungeons and raids and the choice is clear. SV’s uncapped AoE is simply not nearly enough to make it a desirable spec in M+. It’s still good enough for +15s so groups shouldn’t be kicking them out (I wouldn’t accept one into my groups, however, just on principle) as long as they don’t already have a melee DPS, but it’s absolutely a worse option than MM for most situations.
That’s the thing: melee specs. Good MM Hunters are a dime a dozen; why hold out with an SV Hunter when you can just easily get a better ranged DPS spec from the same class instead? It doesn’t mean anything to say SV is on par with other melee DPS specs. It has to stand up to the ranged DPS in its same class.
What you’re ignoring here is that usually the skilled players aren’t playing the off-meta specs. You know what I would rather take than either of these options? The skilled meta spec player and they aren’t hard to find.
It’s a shame you’re naive enough to pretend Legion SV, a spectacular dumpster fire that managed to be even more avoided and shunned than the current version, was a “masterpiece” because otherwise this was a good post.