It’s true to version 1.12. They picked the last patch of classic which makes sense because it’s the most complete and balanced version. It would be nonsense to try to go through each Classic patch cycle.
In any case you still wouldn’t pick Survival and run into melee in version 1.1. If you truly played Vanilla you would know that each point of Agility gave 2 ranged attack power and 1 melee attack power, meaning your ranged attacks scale far beyond your melee attacks. There were only a few talents that buffed melee damage and they did not buff it by much. This is because they were intended for situational usage, not as the primary mode of dealing damage.
You should also know that dual-wielding was not preferable for melee damage. Raptor Strike scaled with main weapon damage so melee-weaving playstyles used two-handed weapons.
You should know that Toxiktraktor himself didn’t believe that point until he abruptly changed his mind. Here’s a video of him talking about SV in Classic:
In it he says that SV Hunter was a ranged spec and that it was distinct from Marksmanship. He changed his mind a couple years later because he wants to defend modern melee SV.
When confronted with this he first tried to argue that the video only applied to classic WoW and it was nonsense to use it in a discussion about modern SV. We pointed out that this doesn’t change the fact that what he says now contradicts what he says in the video (he specifically mentions WotLK Explosive Shot SV in the video as distinct from MM), he now says the video is satirical… even though it contains no humour or absurd statements and evidently no one watched it and took it as a joke.
Yes it was fixed in the Zul’aman patch 2.3. Since BC classic uses patch 2.4 class balancing and design there was no deadzone from the start of BC classic even though in BC we spent the first few months still having the 5-8 yard deadzone.
Supposedly the reason they had the deadzone in the first place was because they didn’t think they could have a smooth transition between ranged and melee for Hunters. Which makes no sense at all, of course, but a ton of their early Hunter class design decisions didn’t make much sense. They were mostly winging it.
Black Arrow and Arcane Shot exist for historical reasons.
Arcane Shot was first added on release because they wanted more classes using arcane damage. A bit strange if you ask me but that’s the original reason. They were actually not going to have Arcane Shot in BFA in favour of a physical damage version called Quick Shot but I think they didn’t want to abandon Arcane Shot after so many years so they changed it back before BFA beta was over.
Quick Shot is the first ability in my action bar in this video:
Black Arrow was added because they needed a shot that emulated a trap so that SV Hunters had a way of proccing Lock and Load without trap dancing. We were going to get Trap Launcher in 3.1 but they decided they couldn’t get it working properly in time so they left it for the next expansion. They chose Black Arrow because Sylvanas used it in Warcraft 3 and it was going to be the level 80 ability for Hunters in WotLK; originally it was going to be Camouflage but they decided against it because Rogues complained about Hunters getting stealth (they changed their minds in Cataclysm), then Black Arrow which was a dot and a movement speed decrease, then they settled on Freezing Arrow (ranged Freezing Trap placer i.e. another temporary solution for not having Trap Launcher). So they already had some implementation of Black Arrow and they just reused it for SV because it was the spec that was doing more magic damage due to Explosive Shot so it seemed like a good fit.
