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.