In retail a hunter uses the ranged weapon no matter the distance from the monster. Where in Cata if you’re to close you will use melee.
When did this happen? Was it Panda land?
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You become a hunter at level 1. Sounds like you wouldn’t have liked the dead zone in vanilla.
To answer your question, yes in MoP the minimum range is completely removed.
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Side silly note. I’m always amused when I see “troll hunter”, “Night elf hunter”. Those folks never actually hunt any trolls or night elves. 
Yes
/10 char
I did. when classic BG’s went to same faction vs. faction lol.
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Pretty sure hunters went from being hunters to not being hunters and it happened in Legion, not the other way around.
TBC: Removed dead zone
Cataclysm: Changed from mana to Focus
Pandaria: Removed minimum range
Legion: Completely obliterated hunter’s identity as a whole.
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The minimum range isn’t a massive issue in Cata with deadzone gone, since you get concussive shot at level 8. It’s really NOT that hard to get/keep distance from most things as a hunter.
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But not being able to wield weapons anymore just feels weird.
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This is why i quit in legion and never went back to retail.
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Oh come on blizzard didn’t gut hunter’s identity in Legion.
Meleeing is as much as being a hunter as shooting with a weapon. The Blizz devs based us on Aragon, skilled in both melee and archery. After several expansions though the melee component became virtually irrelevant and hunters were just made straight archers until Legion gave us the ability to play in melee once more.
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Agreed. Hunters still feel like Hunters in retail. Over the years though, they removed many RPG aspects from it. The Deadzone and minimum range got removed, and then feeding your pets and using ammo got pruned too.
That’s not to say the class was gutted. Just quality of life changes that were made due to the evolving nature of the game. If anything, it still feels like Hunter.
And Melee Hunter is something a lot of players wanted over the years. Heck, I mained SV in Legion for a while. Was super fun, and still is. Easily one of my fav specs in retail.
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They should have made Beast Mastery the melee spec
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I said that even in Legion.
It makes far more sense for the melee spec to be based around fighting side by side with your pet as beast mastery.
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They honestly should have. Even the most famous BM Hunter in WoW’s lore (Rexxar) was a BM Hunter. And you know what they did? They changed him to SV in Legion. In the lore in the RTS games, he was BM.
Not sure why they didn’t keep ranged SV with the dot playstyle :\
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It’s because survival barely had an identity until Legion. And initially survival was the melee focused tree in Vanilla. Over time they just turned it into this weird dot spec.
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Survival is really fun in TWW
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Early legion hunter (i quit before they gave traps back to mm and bm) had hunters feeling like this
Bm felt like crazy cat lady https://youtu.be/47msKc3abqo?si=lg8K2IIRI_dtUryV
Mm felt like spray and pray https://youtube.com/shorts/E2WC7ib2mZ0?si=02Fef1R5FLhDv-6l
Sv felt like wannabe rambo
None of the specs felt good.
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It’s extremely annoying on some large raid bosses though.
that explains why despite being the 2nd highest dps spec for the current retail raid over on warcraft logs melee survival doesn’t even have 3k parses while MM has 24k and BM has 49.5k.
as someone who did the mage tower on a survival hunter in Legion, people play hunter to be a ranged dps, not whatever survival became.
I’m a pvper, what is parsing?
Vanilla and tbc hunter were cool when I could finish someone off with a thick raptor strike.