I do not understand why people keep wanting hunters to turn into a melee class. Everytime a discussion on 4th specs being added comes people start shouting about Hunter tanks. I see so many thread where people start talking about how BM should be melee becuase of Rexxar in WC3 or how BM should be a tank spec.
We have one class that uses Bows/crossbows/guns why do people want to turn this into a melee class? You don’t see people talking about how Fury warriors should be a ranged DPS or how a 4th Warrior spec should be a healer spec. People seems to understand that if you play warrior you want to wield a big sword at hack at the enemy up close.
Hunters already have to give up one of our specs to melee and looking at the player numbers over the years its pretty clear that it is a niche community that enjoys it and its been a negative for most of the hunter mains.
But people continue to bang on about new ways to turn hunters into a melee class. Are there not enough melee specs already compared to specs that uses ranged weapons?
Its not like Ranged weapons lack different concepts to use, you have Tinker/Spellbow/Dark Ranger/Assassin/Guerilla fighter/Priestess of Elune etc.
And it was the most popular spec back in WoD when it was a triple ranged DPS so its not like people do not like the fantasy of being a Bow/gun wielder.
fwiw half of those suggestions are lazy trolling, you see it with warlocks and mages too - people suggest they should get a 4th healing spec (or a melee spellsword spec) because it sounds theoretically viable and, predictably, has the people who play those classes swarm to angrily post about why it’s a bad idea. hunters are the easiest kind of players to set off - the rsv players are keenly aware that blizz changed their spec due to a small number of people on the forums and are hoping if they raise enough of a fuss history will repeat, the msv players are terrified of that exact thing happening - so even players who don’t care about sv one way or another will respond to those idiotic “bm should be a melee healer” bait posts because they’re worried the devs might confuse them for genuine demand and chop and change their spec next.
the people who suggest it earnestly are in general fairly clueless: they perceive a tank or healer shortage (because their m+ groups are swarmed with dps requesting invites when they very clearly only need a tank or healer), and rather than thinking ‘what could incentivize more people to play those roles’ go for the cart-before-the-horse solution of “take a class or spec that people already enjoy and make it a tank/healer.” their reasoning is never more considered than “people like bm so make bm but you kill command your allies for heals”.
hunter i think gets the most simply because it has the most players, and because aside from druid (who had cat and bear as distinct identities within feral before bear was split out into guardian), it’s the only class where one of their specs was deliberately transferred from one role (rdps) to another (mdps). if the devs did it once why not do it again etc, the game urgently needs more tanks and healers etc etc.
the issue of course - leaving aside the wishes of the people playing hunter currently, which is clearly “not to be a tank” or they would already be playing tanks - is that a) there isn’t really much as much of a tank shortage as people perceive there is (you only need two of them for raid and pvpers in fact wish loudly and repeatedly there were fewer tanks in solo shuffle queues - the issue is in pug m+, where tanks are numerous but more likely to run with friends or acquaintances than face pug toxicity), and b) adding new tanks or healers historically doesn’t really increase the overall % of players choosing to be tanks or healers, it just gives existing tank and healer players a new spec to play around with for a season or two.
i’ll leave the commentary on the popularity of melee dps aside because the usual crowd will be here soon to argue incessantly back and forth about it for another 200 comments.
I seen so many weird things in the game, some like to dress up in bikinis and try to fight the craziness. I really havent gotten into SV role as melee, but i have seen some did okay, but no match for my BM or MM in pvp. But that was some years ago.
I believe most players doesnt know how to play properly or dont really care, they just want to relax and enjoy the game. But i know some take this too seriously, then the shouting starts.
Survival has never been a solid spec. Even in the beginning it was messy to say the least. It has gone through so many iterations that I can’t even remember them anymore.
Survival should be less about Melee and more about weakening/slowing enemies down with traps/venoms/ambush tactics.
It’s current play style has nothing to do with surviving.
“I’m just going to run up to this 50 ton dragon and lob bombs at it’s feet and hope I don’t get shredded by either the shrapnel or the Dragons claws.”
It was a solid spec when it was ranged with Explosive Shot from WotLK to WoD. It was also very stable in that time and required little maintenance/reworking.
We didn’t play the same game, I remember waiting a year (+ forum posts) for them to replace counterattack after it was made unusable, and during the whole WoD xpac (except HFC) it was balanced around a bug that made serpent sting initial tick multistrikes deal 100% dmg.
Also took a while before we got dispel protection on black arrow.
And imo it was a mess thematically, mixing Rambo themed shot with dark rangers signature ability.
Not saying that throwing bombs at your feet makes more sense btw.
I enjoyed the spec because it was fluid and very easy to play but to me it always felt like they put the least effort into that spec.
Sure it wasn’t the best PvP spec in Cata and MoP due to dispels, but it was a wildly successful PvE spec.
For example you begrudge Counterattack being bugged and unusable throughout Cataclysm, but consider that a) it was such a minor issue due to the ability already being mostly obsolete by WotLK most people didn’t notice, and b) the spec was probably at the height of its relative power and popularity in Cata and got the most favourble updates going into that expansion.
I’m not sure if I would consider the Multistrike interaction to be a “bug”. An oversight, maybe. Serpent Sting was a separate ability that was auto-cast when Arcane Shot cast, so it made sense that by default it would multistrike. To “fix” it they removed Serpent Sting’s initial tick entirely which broke the spec; conveniently they did this a month before Legion was announced.
Black Arrow wasn’t the best fit but it’s like Arcane Shot for MM: purely there for historical/nostalgic reasons. Plus SV was the spec that dealt more magic damage so that’s probaby the logic that went into it. Rebranding it to something else would have been trivial, and the core of the spec still had a strong theme around explosives and venom, so it was far from a “mess thematically”.
I don’t see how it had any less effort in the WotLK-WoD stretch than the other two. I would say MM had it worse. Hell, when they replaced Volley with Multi-Shot as our primary means of AoE, at first only SV had the strong interaction with it via Serpent Spread. If I were back in Cata/MoP times, I would say the treatment of SV erred closer to favouritism rather than neglect.
the revisionism here lol. a clearly bugged interaction that dealt significant damage being generously interpreted as “oversight” is very on brand for you.
a strong theme around necromancy shadow arrows, 1 poison ability, and two explosives is a strong theme; yet you don’t thing current SV is cohesive. wonder why that is
Well they knew about it from WoD beta and went on to make Multistrike the attuned stat for SV, then tuned around it, so chances are they probably knew about it.
Serpent Sting was originally a separate ability and then in WoD they made it auto-cast for free with Arcane Shot casts. Multistrike caused abilities to sometimes duplicate. Logically it would apply to the Serpent Sting as well.
Also when they did “address” it they didn’t actually change the interaction at all. They just removed the initial tick of Serpent Sting, something that had been part of the spec since Cataclysm, which destroyed the spec’s damage profile. And I don’t believe for a second that was done without an ulterior motive to drive players away from ranged SV in its final days.
In any case I’m not sure how any of this business constitutes ranged Survival being a mess. If you want to go down that road, for the longest time for melee SV haste reduced the duration of Serpent Sting making it useless for that ability.
At least it was only one ability out of line instead of nonsensically blending the explosives and poisons with melee and pet based attacks taken from BM.
Yeah the difference is back then people were actually willing to play SV more than MM.
Legion baby SV Hunters can’t even imagine a reality where the spec is broadly enjoyed and respected.
I think if RSV is propped up by a clearly bugged interaction that its removal (by your own admission) killed the spec, it must be a mess.
A single ability with the same name but different effects does not a stolen spec make.
how is this weird to you?
and now BM absolutely blows MM out of the water for years and years. MM really needs to be reworked, clearly people don’t like the archery fantasy. even more evidence why MM should be replaced with RSV
I know its adjacent to the subject but could be please avoid turning the entire thread into a discussion whether Survival should be melee or ranged. All that can be said on that subject has been said a thousand times already.
Did you read what I said? The initial tick of Serpent Sting was not a bug. It was an intended part of the spec for years.
As for the other stuff, this is a nonsense standard to call any spec a “mess”.
They also took Spirit Bond. The spec’s identity heavily infringes on the identity of BM, which demonstrates that all the talk of “we made SV melee to make it distinct” was a hollow lie all along. It was even worse when Coordinated Assault was a blatant copy-paste of Bestial Wrath.
It’s weird when it’s a ranged weapon doing it, plus the explosives. It should just be a ranged spec focused on poisons and explosives; that way it would be distinct from BM and MM and it wouldn’t have some nonsense tokenistic handicap making most Hunters avoid it.
Or they could return ranged SV while also improving MM and we could have 3 great ranged specs again.
Again, if the entire strength of the spec hinged on this “intended” interaction or “oversight” or whatever you want to call it, it sure doesn’t sound like the perfect spec you like to romanticize. You yourself said the removal of this “destroyed the spec’s damage profile.” Kind of nuts it all depended on a signal tick of damage.
Gosh if you think a CD that increases your damage by a flat % is infringing on identity, you’d sure hate a lot of damage CD’s prior to DF or SL. That was NOT unique to BM or SV.
Not to mention you’re complaining about something that doesn’t even exist anymore and pretending that lends any sort of credence to your argument, which is really weird.
A pet class with pet abilities
it’s already distinct from BM and MM.
mega delusional. just because it would be ranged doesn’t mean it’d be “Great” and you can tell that by looking at current MM
I do enjoy the option to be melee, doesn’t matter if someone think “Hunter must be ranged”. We all play this game for fun, that is the most important thing. Everything else is just personal opinions and there is no wrong opinions.
I dream for a day where people just accept that other people may think differently without trying to tell them they are wrong doing so. But… eh.
Ps: I posted this on my main Shadow priest. My hunter survival is an alt, and i have so much fun playing it.
This is like saying that Fire Mage entirely depends on rolling Ignite damage, and that if they removed that from Ignite and the spec died off this would mean it were a “mess of a spec”. It’s gibberish. All specs have a number of core mechanics that they depend on where deleting them would cause havoc.
In SV’s case, the initial tick of SS was very important because in WoD they made SS an auto-cast from Arcane Shot so it made up a large part of our single target damage. Furthermore our primary mode of AoE was Serpent Spread, which caused Multi-Shot to apply to every target hit. So the major part of our AoE damage came from that initial tick against every target. By deleting it, it nerfed the spec’s damage by something like 20% single target and almost entirely removed its ability to AoE.
Also you still appear to be confused. The initial tick of Serpent Sting was no less of an “oversight” then as it is now. It was an intended SV-specific addition to the ability. That’s what got removed. The “oversight” part was how this whole interaction worked with Multistrike, a stat introduced in WoD. Arcane Shot cast Serpent Sting, even if the Arcane Shot was a multistrike. That didn’t change when they removed the initial tick. So I say again: holding this against ranged SV is gibberish. Especially when it’s in defense of a spec in which Mastery doesn’t even improve its signature ability.
It literally used a variant of BW’s animation and had a similar description as well. It was well and truly a copy-paste job.
Yes, the mechanical situation improved now that it’s something different. That doesn’t fix the fact that the spec’s identity still infringes on that of BM. They give it pet synergy and try to create this wedge issue of “coordination, rather than mastery”, which is incoherent given BM has historically been the spec built around pet coordination as well. It’s enough of an infringement for clueless people to copy-paste the buzz phrase “SV is more BM than BM!” everywhere.
It shows that Blizzard was never sincere when they gave us all this talk about how ranged SV was too similar to BM. It was another Hazzikostas lie in a long list of Hazzikostas lies.
Why doesn’t BM have Spirit Bond instead? It started out as a BM-specific thing.
Yeah it would also be distinct if it were a healer spec. Just throwing out suggestions in the event that distinction from the other specs is the exclusive end game, class identity be damned.
It would be a hell of a lot easier to make it great if it were ranged. In fact it will never be a broadly accepted Hunter spec as melee.
“Live and let live” is crazy talk given the context of how melee SV came into being. Those of us who just “played the game to have fun” with ranged SV weren’t allowed to continue doing so, and people did not “just accept” our playstyle choices. We were told that our preferred identity and playstyle was expendable and we were misled for enjoying it, while we were evicted to make room for a spec that was explicitly made for Hunter alts like you. To this day we get gaslit by revisionist history that ranged SV was an expendable and failing spec.
because it worked once already. ppl kept throwing out melee memes and blizz actually did it and made the least popular spec of all time. now hunters are the stupid idea suggestion box of classes
I mean… if all three hunter specs were still ranged, you’d have the option to be melee. Without MSV, there would still be, what, 12 melee specs in the game currently?
