Imagine complaining about a spec in a video game that was deleted 6 years ago lol
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Before the 1.7.0 talent rework, Survival Hunter was the dedicated melee tree.
Here’s a list of all DPS talents melee hunters lost and gained in the 1.7.0 talent tree revamp.
Lost:
- 5% Melee Hit (5/5)
- -1CD on Raptor Strike (5/5)
- 20% damage on Mongoose Bite (5/5)
- 5% Melee Crit (5/5)
- 5% Melee Damage (5/5)
- Lacerate (1/1)
Gained:
- 3% Beasts, Giants, Dragonkin damage & critical damage (3/3)
- 3% Humanoid damage & critical damage (3/3)
- 20% Mongoose Bite & Raptor Strike crit chance (2/2)
- 3% Hit Chance (3/3)
- 5% Crit Chance (5/5)
- 15% Agility (5/5)
Overall:
- Lost 5% damage on non-humanoid, beast, giant, dragonkin targets
- Lost 2% damage on humanoid, beast, giants, and dragonkin targets
- Lost 20% damage on Mongoose Bite
- Lost -1CD on Raptor Strike
- Gained 20% Crit on Mongoose Bite and Raptor Strike
- Lost 2% hit
- Lost Lacerate
Losing lacerate was a big hit, but 15% agility should make up for any damage lost from that and the other talents.
But more than that, Survival Hunters now lost their identity as Melee Hunters. OG Survival Melee Hunters, inspired by the likes of Rexxar from WC3, were delegated to a shoddy, soulless “Marksmanship 2” clone, whose final talent felt more like a 21 pt “PvP” talent than an actual talent.
Melee Hunters might have been an more interesting part of Vanilla classes if they received few abilities to support it and became melee instead of being delegated into a Marksmanship clone.
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Don’t worry Yura you still have 2 other specs to choose from if you only want to play ranged.
Not a big deal
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Vanilla had a talent system where you could play it your way to a much greater extent. 11 points into MM made ranged sv from the start.
Anyway, a ‘why’ was asked and answered.
Moving on, 10.0 talent system revamp provides a great opportunity with SV that I’m fully confident Blizz will biff on.
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Let’s imagine tomorrow Blizzard announced that Melee SV was going to be removed in Dragonflight cause range was more popular. How would you react, just be “okay whatever there are other melee specs”?
Really think about it and not just be sarcastic.
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Raw numerical performance is utterly independent of being melee or ranged. All the reasons we don’t like melee SV still stand even if they buffed it by +1000%. Bribing people to play it with high tuning doesn’t fix any of the fundamental issues.
Nope, because it was ranged since the launch of the game (I know you think differently i.e. incorrectly on this so we’ll get to that) so you’ll need to wait until 2028 until this is true.
So? All the issues with it still stand. The fact that it’s still relatively unpopular even considering this + the high tuning should tell you that it’s still problematic.
You’re projecting a modern understanding of specs onto Classic.
It had several talents buffing melee attacks, but it also still had all the baseline ranged capability of the Hunter class and it was fully intended to use them. It still had a ranged weapon, highly tuned ranged attacks, and high scaling with ranged (Agility gave 2 ranged AP and 1 melee AP per point). Because it was a Hunter. Specs weren’t intended to be so decisive about your playstyle and identity until later.
Having melee capabiliy was for situational usage. You couldn’t attack when close up with ranged attacks and you had to use melee attacks instead. Survival was meant to be the PvP utility tree, and in PvP other classes would try to close the gap to exploit that weakness, so it made sense for SV to have some melee buffs. It also had Improved Wing Clip and Counterattack to help you escape melee.
But never mind all that. Let’s pretend for a moment that they did intend people to spec Survival, forget that the ranged weapon that largely defined their class existed, and stick to melee range to spam Raptor Strike ignoring the entire ranged toolkit. That’s still not a good justification for melee Survival in Legion and beyond. The fact that it didn’t work out back then as it did is all the more proof of that.
Lol.
In case you’re unaware, and it seems you are, Lacerate was useless. It did 77 damage over 18 seconds and didn’t scale with any stat. It was less DPS at level 60 than Serpent Sting at level 40, and Serpent Sting itself was largely useless.
It was replaced with Wyvern Sting, a ranged CC. It wasn’t great, but it was a hell of a lot more useful.
Yes, and agility gave 2 ranged attack power and 1 melee attack power per point. So your ranged damage scaled even further ahead.
This is revisionist history, plain and simple.
Firstly, Rexxar wasn’t significant for his melee attacks. He was significant for his use of pets, and those were represented thoroughly in the class and we even had the Beast Mastery spec which was named after Rexxar’s hero type in WC3 (Beast Mastery).
Secondly, SV didn’t have any identity whatsoever until 1.7. It was a shoddy, directionless, and useless talent tree that was poorly designed, tuned, and picked by absolutely no one. Instead of one good melee talent (Savage Strikes) it was a bunch of split-up weak talents. The same goes for traps and Clever Traps. The “unique” ability of the spec, Lacerate, was a soulless Rend clone which, as previously mentioned, was utterly useless. No one cared about Survival until 1.7, and even then it was still largely pointless until 2.0. If you’re imagining some utopian melee Hunter past you’re dreaming. It was never played before 1.7 and rarely played after, and when it was played it was as a ranged spec.
Thirdly, using ranged weapons, which define our class (I know it’s difficult for a Warrior to understand), doesn’t make it a Marksmanship clone. As it turns out, there’s more than one way to approach using ranged weapons especially when you get pets involved.
To put it in terms someone like you can understand: we have the Warrior class which is all about melee weapon mastery and power through rage. It has 3 specs; one tank and 2 DPS specs. Let’s focus on those DPS ones. Both are entirely physical and focus on using rage and melee weaponry. If I were as reductionist as you, I might go ahead and call Arms a soulless Fury clone. I would ignore the differences in their toolkit identity and declare that everything Arms did that Fury didn’t was just a derivative that could be included in Fury. We don’t do that because we understand that Arms is a different approach to the Warrior archetype than Fury. They share a lot but that’s because they belong to the same class and, after all, they are specialisations.
Survival was the versatile, utilitarian munitions expert. Rather than being based around sniping and raw sharpshooting skill like Marksman, it used special munitions and enhanced utility to gain an advantage. It was a very unique, interesting, fun, and valuable take on the Hunter archetype and it was absolutely worthy of being its own spec. It provided a hell of a lot more value to this class than melee Survival, which is largely the plaything of ephemeral Hunter alts of Warrior mains like you.
Maybe to a Warrior main, but as a matter of fact this game is already loaded with melee DPS including physical melee. In Vanilla you already had 2 Warrior DPS specs and 3 Rogue specs. That’s 5 physical melee DPS right there. A 6th would have been utterly derivative, boring, and redundant. It would have had none of the aesthetic flare and uniqueness of Warriors and Rogues while serving to just be a worse Hunter (hey; that kind of describes current Survival if not for Wildfire Bomb and Serpent Sting, two ranged abilities that are ill-fitting of a melee spec to begin with).
Meanwhile Hunters were and still are the only class that had a ranged weapon and abilities to use them. They went with what was more unique and that served the game well until some newer, melee-favouring, inexperienced, and talentless developers “changed things up”.
Imagine a spec being in a worse place from a design standpoint to iterations from 10 years ago.
People talk about it because they actually want to see Survival be something more than something for Warriors/Rogues to play around with on alts. Survival was once a widely played and respected spec. Now they have to bribe people to play it with favourable tuning and handicapping of the other specs, and even then most people still just stick to those other specs.
People who like melee DPS have 12 other specs to choose from, including 5 other physical melee specs.
Why should this game continue to cater to melee DPS so much? Why shouldn’t we talk about a version of Survival that worked far better? Ranged weapon specs are actually unique in this game. Melee is overdone.
33 Likes
It looks like they’re just going to shoddily recreate what we have now. They said that the base class talents will be classwide for every class, with the exception of Survival which has to swap out things like Counter Shot with Muzzle. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that if they have a spec design that works for every class except for Hunters with Survival, then Survival violates basic spec design. Specs are after all specialisations. They are meant to build on the base class; not cut and replace stuff and handicap themselves just to be unique snowflakes.
99% of defence of melee SV comes from two things:
- The fallacious association of SV’s positives with being melee, even though they are mostly in spite of being melee and not because of it
- Warriors, Rogues, DKs etc who prefer melee and enjoy the preferential treatment of having a spec of a ranged class handed to them
OP is both. He’s a Warrior main who thinks that Survival’s tuning advantages are a result of Survival being melee… even though a) you can tune any bad spec well and bribe people to play it whether it’s melee or ranged, and b) Survival revolves around Wildfire Bomb, a ranged ability that hardly fits a melee spec. In fact they’ve had to compromise Survival’s melee so much that it’s down to just two melee abilities in its damage kit. Survival has just as many ranged weapon abilities in its toolkit than melee weapon ones (not even counting Arcane Shot and Steady Shot because SV doesn’t use them); it just uses an awkward animation-only crossbow instead of the dedicated, unique, and exclusive ranged weapon that the rest of the class enjoys (including level 1 Hunters before even picking a spec).
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I agree, though predictably I would argue for adding some melee back to all specs, not returning to the short-lived no melee hunter.
Except that there is no point to melee attacks when there is no minimum range on ranged attacks/weapons.
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There is actually one melee attack that still has a point on a ranged class: Wing Clip. They should still keep it baseline to max level (it’s baseline until level 13 when it gets replaced by Concussive Shot for BM/MM) and have a cosmetic melee slot that works into the animation for it, then have a talented melee stance for BM that allows it to be played as a melee DPS, Yes, it’s not the best outcome for people who like melee Hunters, but it’s a much more sensible compromise considering it’s a small niche.
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Because melee survival will always be a meme spec regardless of how well it performs.
i play hunter because i want to be ranged.
90% of people playing survival right now are meta slaves FOTM goons.
15 Likes
Well that depends
Are you asking for my immediate reaction or my reaction in the year 2028
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hey look yet another thread where bepples is being absolutely over aggressive in defending rsurv as a concept and implying people who play melee are literally lesser beings and braindead
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This is clickbait. What are you even on about OP? A few folks rightfully don’t like SV so we create this thread?
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Shakes head, say’s "Well, Duh! Before they fooled with it, back in Legion, they knew it would be this way. I still think the point was to lower the Hunter population…
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I said no sarcasm. You know I ment how you would react when you first heard about the change and how that would look down the road.
I’d be genuinely surprised, as it’s rare for Blizzard to backtrack on dramatic reworks.
At the end of the day though, it’s a video game and I wouldn’t still be bickering about it 6 years later, or even 6 weeks later lol
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This is what happens when you had over development to poeple who didn’t understand the individual traits of each spec.
The only saw hunters as three range specs and that there was not enough individuality to tell them apart.
Then it just a game to you and not important enough for you to get worked up.
Some players are just very involved in WoW. Loosing Range SV was like having their arm cut off. You try to adjust over time, but ever time you use that stump to grab for something you remember how you lost it.
If poeple told you that at least you still had one good arm you would tell them about all the things you could do if you still had two.
If you are very passionate over something you not just going to give up hope that it may come back some day. Telling them to give up is telling to give up on hope. They don’t not want to face a reality where they can not play range survival anymore.
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You should give this advice to these people:
This is a player problem, not a Blizzard one
1 Like