Because people were asking for enh to become a tank… You can’t be this daft can you?
I don’t think it’s trolling. i wouldn’t mind having a support spec on my mage so it’s easier to find groups. Alot of people who play pure classes don’t like the idea of having a support spec because they’re afraid of pressure to play a non-DPS spec and it’s an easy excuse to get out of it. Find better friends if you feel that way.
An easy thing to do though would be to add armor-class level optional specs that all classes of the armor class have access to but perhaps have to learn through a quest or something.
WoW’s class system isn’t that competitive. Managing alts is still annoying compared to other MMOs that either make it way easier to have alts (GW2 where almsot everything is account wide) or that just let you be what you want (FFXIV where you can learn all classes)
Mail and cloth are the only armor classes that don’t have access to tank. The other two can fill all roles.
If there’s a will, there’s a way. If they perceive that it would be better for the game for SV to be ranged, they would come up with some workaround for the artifact; especially since it’s long-obsolete content most new players will never see.
Right now the game director supports melee SV, so it would take a change in leadership for any sort of ranged SV decision to be made. On that note, it’s no coincidence that the game director that supports melee SV also ran the game into the ground with nonsense systems design over the last several years, starting with Legion. Bad decision making is rarely limited to just one area.
It will be melee for as long as Hazzikostas is game director. After that, there might be a chance.
Remember, if you asked around in 2014 people would have rated melee SV as a flat-out impossibility given the design of the class. And ranged SV was doing far better than melee SV. So it was arguably far less likely for SV to go from ranged to melee circa 2014 than melee to ranged now.
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First off, outlaw rogue should be decent at range using guns and bows, like a sniper outlaw.
All this bickering back and forth about Survival. There’s a clear cut reason why it would never return to a ranged spec. As Ion Hazzikostas stated:
"Question: The Hunter community is still split on the issue of the melee spec even two expansions after its introduction. With your new stance of “class over spec” and more ranged abilities returning to the class, what does it mean for Survival in the long term?
Ion Hazzikostas:
That’s a good question. I think part of what led Survival to a melee space to begin with was trying to differentiate Survival from Marksmanship. The rotations over the years had become very very similar — OK you might have a couple more magical-seeming shots in the Survival space. Beast Mastery was very clearly its own thing with its clear niche as the pet-based spec. But then you had these two ranged specs that basically did a lot of ranged shots in their rotation.
Some of that is actually fallout from the shift that we did in Cataclysm going into Mists. We moved from the old-school talent trees that could probably better support types of play styles and utility without having to build a whole spec around them. Having a tree like Survival that was about traps and utility and a little bit of melee stuff in there — that worked when it was something that you could put points into as a broader class initiative. But then turning it into its own spec ultimately led us down a path of duplicating a lot of Mark’s abilities.
We want to keep melee as part of the unique identity of Survival but in Shadowlands and beyond, as we start to think about what classes should look like in future expansions, it’s important that there will be this sort of universal base of what defines a Hunter. All Hunters should have access to ranged attacks and Survival Hunters can be ones that specialize in melee but not necessarily at the expense of the universal skillset that everyone had as a level 5 or level 10 Hunter because that’s what being the class means."
P.S. Please don’t shoot the messenger x)
Ion acknowledged that all the specs should have access to range abilities as it was the classes core concept for years; however, over time they begin to homogenized when Talent trees were removed, and replaced with tiers that greatly reduced the number of talents.
The specs started to share same abilities with only unique abilities to differentiate them apart. By WoD all 3 specs shared only very basic elements of a Hunter, one focused on rot damage, one on interaction with the pet, and one on hard-casted burst, but it was not enough of a distinction for Blizzard.
They wanted a clear identity for each spec and having them separated by range, melee, and pet as they thought this was Hunter’s original core from classic.
The class designers are looking for new opportunities to grab potential customer’s attention and this is where these changes come from. Having three specs based on range was not striking enough to get players. They needed three distinctively diffrent play-styles that would encompass a unique fantasy for each new player.
Likewise, we classic that has Survival still ranged to full fill those who want to replay the spec as it was.
It’s simply as long as Blizzard sees opportunities in making money from this change then they will not touch Survival.
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Not if they make BM melee they would just swap it around, personally i think BM being melee and more pet focused makes more sense than survival being melee
yeah I think BM should be melee
Ogdenir, are you seriously going to accept Hazzikostas’s spectacularly revisionist and incorrect statements at face value? You know better than this.
Hazzikostas is factually incorrect when he says that the specs became more similar over time. They started off as the same things and they strictly diverged in every expansion after that.
The whole talent tree explanation is also just made-up gibberish. Survival in MoP was at its core the same thing as Survival in Cataclysm with incremental improvements; just as MoP MM was Cata MM with incremental improvements and, notably, a separate and distinct spec from SV. Everything SV had on its tree that made it unique made it into the base spec in MoP. There was no grand homogenising rework going into MoP. Ion made it up on the spot. Do better than unquestioningly accept it on the spot. He lies like this often.
“Having three specs based on range was not striking enough to get players” is an incoherent statement, by the way. The class was one of the most popular classes in the game prior to Legion; in fact often the most. It still was after, but with a notable drop. And evidently Survival does not share that popularity. Any attempt to justify melee SV with an argument to mass appeal is invalid given the clear lack of appeal of the concept.
As for “go play classic for the old one”: another ridiculous excuse. Ranged SV is better for the class and for the game as a whole. They got rid of it and the class is worse off for it. They should not be doubling down on decisions that made things worse. If Classic does something right, Retail should always get it right too. We don’t wait for new patches and buy new expansions for things to get worse.
If you don’t want people to “shoot the messenger” don’t uncritically accept and repost the opinions of charlatans and especially don’t try to back them up with even more shameful revisionism.
This would be an even worse idea than keeping SV melee, by the way. How about we don’t hot-potato this unpopular and unwanted concept between specs? There are not enough people genuinely interested in playing a melee Hunter to warrant giving them an entire third of the class.
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What if they made survival into a healing spec. You would run up and bandage to heal them, mouth to mouth to CR people, apply cold compress to dispell and send your emotional support pet away to help others. Would live up to its survival theme.
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Yes, it couldn’t possibly be the player base aging and different game types appealing to younger players. I mean it’s not like WoW isn’t still the most played mmo or anything… After near 10 years of whining and making up objective statements to support your arguments, have you actually started to believe your own lies?
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You clearly haven’t been paying much attention. Player engagement is way, way down from pre-Legion days. It’s even far down from Legion and BFA days. The barrage of poorly thought out, badly implemented systems in the last few expansions have taken an extreme toll and a ton of people have moved on. This isn’t just organic “people growing out of it”. This is people being driven away by hostile design. The worst of it was the Shadowlands covenant system and domination shards of mid 2021; it took urgent and prolonged remediation to clean up that mess.
Dragonflight has helped perception a bit but there is still steep decline.
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I never said that I accepted his statement. I was only giving cause to why Blizzard would never fully bring back Survival as a range spec.
Ion and Blizzard believe that having a spec that is melee wil bring in fresh players as it makes Hunters more unique. It is unfortunately about money.
Imagine linking Bellular’s click bait as proof of anything, Just wow…
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Would Asmongold have been a better choice?
asmongold would be just as bad, he’s so out of touch with the game and only puts out the same boring rage-bait as bellular
they should make BM a tank spec too and MM could be swapped to a support spec. would be cool!
You not only failed to acknowledge his comments were incorrect, you posted an extensive addendum restating his opinions as fact, arguing in their favour, and even including additional bogus arguments to try to back them up further.
It doesn’t work to repeatedly disclaim “I don’t endorse this” when you’re doing exactly that in all but name.
The argument that this is about money is nonsense. The financial impact is not something that can be measured or quantified. It’s one spec in a very big game. However if it were about money, the financial-minded thing to do would be to not waste a lot of scarce development effort hours on a concept very few people like at the expense of something that already exists and a lot of people like.
Being melee doesn’t make Hunters more unique, by the way, because lots of other classes are melee. Hunters are the only ones that use ranged weapons. So in fact making one of the specs melee makes Hunters less unique and amounts to homogenisation with respect to all the game’s classes.
Do you have any counter-argument to the claims in the video other than snobbery? Do you even know what the claims of the video are? Not to mention that there was another video by a different person in the post.
There is far more evidence in the “the game’s taken many Ls in the past few years and driven away a lot of players as a result” column than the “everything is fine and people are dooming over nothing” column. To believe that Hazzikostas and his system design escapades haven’t damaged the game is delusional.
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Are you telling me you do not want to send your pet with a barrel of whisky around his neck to your downed team mate to revive him, like those avalanche dogs. Would you not give your raid members the kiss of life in time of need?
According to ‘statistics’ 40% of subscribers had already left the game. A game cannot force subscriber to play a class they don’t want just by simply nerfing other classes. If Hunter class becomes a Tank spec or given the choice; I’ll guarantee you more subscribers will leave the game. #1 thing that causes games to fall from grace is when they do things to satisfy the less than 1%. Who are always nagging about what should and should not be.
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already have the matching battle pet!
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Exactly it is very cool