You dont get locked out of half your kit if your pet dies as unh. And you don’t have to spend 2s ressing it, just a single gcd
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That pet is very set and forget; survival’s main energy build/regen is tied to their pet, as well as their stun (and lust, if ferocity) and does’t work if the pet is CC’d or dead. Unholy used to be more interactive in Legion, but now you just pop dark transformation for more dps and that’s basically it.
unholy’s pet is pretty much what survival’s should be - if it dies and you ignore it you suffer a minor dps loss; not a major system shutdown.
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Thats why i have the unpopular opinion of survival moving away from pet dependency, and focus more on the things that make it a unique spec. Traps/devices, melee, stings/venoms, tracking, and even stealth should all be core tenets of survival, that are used to develop a fuller more fleshed out spec.
Survival being able to use a pet for assistance is ok, but it should not be a mandatory part of the main kit of the spec. We already have beast mastery and pet focused abilities are better left for that spec.
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Yeah, it’s weird they offered lone wolf to MM and not also to Survival.
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It’s not weird at all, actually. You’re asking for a Hunter spec that doesn’t have a ranged weapon or a pet. Would you also like a Rogue that couldn’t stealth or dual-wield, or a Druid who can’t shapeshift? Specs need to actually have a tie to the core class identity and Hunters have always been centred around fighting with a ranged weapon and a pet.
If you want Lone Wolf you can look to the only iteration of Survival that had it: Survival in WoD (6.0) when it was still ranged.
15 Likes
So? I don’t mind the pet thematically, but mechanically it is sometimes a problem.
I think survival should remain melee; I think the fact it also has to manage a pet to keep its toolkit is why it isn’t played much. I don’t mind using the pet, but the ability to stow it for certain fights and instances would be nice.
They opened the door when they added lone wolf in the first place.
Except it’s not. It brings nothing unique to the table. They have some pretty horrible issues as well such as their mastery is awful, their focus regen is nerfed in SL, their pet summon are nerfed in SL, the high end BFA gameplay is keep CA up 100% of the time and spam kill command/mongoose bite, their serpent sting scales adversely with haste (the dot does the same damage in a shorter time period meaning more focus to keep it up 100% of the time the more haste you get), the unpruned stuff in SL (arcane shot, steady shot) can’t be used, and kill shot doesn’t cost focus so it won’t scale with mastery. All in all, Legion was a far better version of melee survival than any iteration since, but they radically changed it to whatever this is such that the only reason they’re not a ranged spec is because of 1 single button on your bar raptor strike (or mongoose bite if you talent it). Otherwise, everything else is ranged so just make it back to a ranged spec.
P.S. Good luck having to resummon your pet with a 6 second cast time every time the marvelous pet AI gets stuck on a piece of rock during a boss fight.
1 Like
gotta be honest here, hunters without pets or ranged weapons isn’t weird. there are numerous examples of other mmos having such a thing as well as hunters throughout the ages of history where they didn’t use animals to hunt. just because it has no precedent in the history of wow development doesn’t mean it can’t be done. if that was the case, tbc would never have happened because wow had no precedent for an mmo expansion.
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Wow doesn’t even have any precedent for off world death realm exploration, but here we are. I just wish survival didn’t steal all of it stuff from the other specs. Murder of crows, most of it’s utility options, kill command, serpent sting, even their mastery was the same as marksman’s until they buffed marksman’s to be all shots instead of all focus spenders and the healing portion is the old beastmaster spirit bond. So there’s very little unique about the spec now. The mongoose window + legion weapon ability gave it a skill cap and made it fun, now it’s just boring and is better off going back to being ranged since only mongoose bite (or raptor strike) is all that keeps you locked to melee.
1 Like
This is my beef. Swapping SV to melee was simply dumb, from a numbers perspective.
Since Vanilla, this is the net change in each role:
- Tanks: +3 (Blood, Brewmaster, Vengeance)
- Healers: +1 (Mistweaver)
- Melee DPS: +5 (Frost, Unholy, Windwalker, Havoc, Survival)
- Ranged DPS: -1 (Survival)
Ranged DPS is the only role in the game with fewer options on retail than in classic. W 
T F
Blizzard didn’t really like the theme of SV in WoD, and thus they threw literally the entire thing, and the more-than-a-decade of history behind it, out the window and invented a completely new spec. Of course, this rubbed a lot of hunters the wrong way, seeing a spec they enjoyed chucked in the shredder and a completely new spec, of an entirely different role, dumped in its place.
But in addition, this even further exacerbated the issue of ranged typically being preferred over melee (in raids, and kinda in general, BfA M+ is relatively unique in its high demand for many many interrupts) and there simply being too many melee specs for that need. We really didn’t need another melee spec, much less at the cost of a ranged spec, and much much less at the cost of a much-enjoyed ranged spec with over a decade of history.
SV since the revamp has also played as a bit of a haphazard mixed bag of random junk. In BfA, it has Kill Command for no readily apparent reason (like, Flanking Strike, duh), and it’s a spammy generator rather than a central nuke. It randomly has a bomb just to have an additional ability/DoT. Its AoE is broken and near-useless without Butchery. The rotation has no real complexity or interaction without Mongoose Bite or Wildfire Infusion. Really, the entire spec just feels like a bunch of left-over ideas and mechanics from other melee specs thrown into this new spec with no real regard or care for whether they make a cohesive and consistent spec vision.
20 Likes
Being melee is always a disadvantage for a raid composition. Feral Druids and Enhancement Shamans have the same issue as Survival Hunters: Raid boss mechanics favor ranged classes the vast majority of the time. If you’re a class with a ranged dps spec, then your melee dps spec becomes useless for raiding.
Melee typically need to stand out to be used, which is why you often see some raid compositions where there are things like 4+ Rogues, because they were able to break a mechanic on a particular boss or do exhorbitant dps. But you wouldn’t even want a Rogue if all they did was standard dps that can be replaced with a ranged class.
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Fun fact, this isn’t other MMOs, this is wow. What other MMOs have done in the past is irrelevant. The Hunter fantasy in wow is a ranged dps with a pet.
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The hunter fantasy since legion has been ranged or melee dps with a pet. Why does your time frame reference get to be the trump time frame reference? You can be a ranged dps with a pet as a hunter, why must that be the only option allowed? If you want |ranged + pet| = beastmaster, |not ranged + pet| = survival, |ranged + no pet| = marksman, |not ranged + no pet| = almost every other melee.
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Go look at BFA survival again and count the number of purely melee abilities, that can’t also be made ranged with aote. I’ll give you a hint, it’s 1. Carve is the only ability survival has that can’t also be ranged. Even butchery has an 8 yard range, making it a short range, but still greater than melee.
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I said fantasy, not mechanics. I think the spec was more unique in Legion than it is now. It needs either to be given more melee abilities or reverted to full ranged because right now it’s bad in SL alpha. Nerfed a lot stuff, got nothing worth using unpruned, and overall feels horrid compared to the Legion mongoose windows with legion artifact weapon attack.
What would be really good would make it so they can use every ability at ranged, but make their mastery do more damage the closer they are to their target.
1 Like
Hunters battle their foes at a distance, commanding their pets to attack while they nock their arrows and fire their guns. Though their missile weapons are effective at short and long ranges, hunters are also highly mobile. They can evade or restrain their foes to control the arena of battle.
Direct quote from blizzard’s hunter class page. So yeah, you tell me what the class fantasy is and always has been. And before you say it’s a neglected page and meaningless. Take a loooooooong look at what is listed as available weapons.
In case you didn’t notice, it says Bows, Crossbows, Guns, and Polearms. So clearly it was updated at least when they made surv melee, yet they didn’t even update the general overview of the class or mention melee in it at all.
So in short, even Blizzard thinks the hunter class fantasy has always been ranged and that melee survival is this weird thing that doesn’t really belong.
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Sure if you only want to read the left side of the page. Survival does do damage from range by the way. The right side of the page:
Melee Damage
Hunters are rugged trackers who can use venom, explosives and traps to damage enemies up close.
Furthermore, that little description also means Marksmanship doesn’t fit the fantasy cause they don’t “command their pets to attack” if they’re lonewolf. So a fantasy can be broader than two - four sentences.
What ability would you want to add that would make survival unique as a ranged spec that couldn’t just be given to marksman or beastmaster and fit them just as well if not better?
You wanted to argue fantasy not mechanics, don’t change the tune now just cause you’re loosing.
6 Likes
The right side is part of the fantasy. It’s describing how they play, not mechanically what skills they have. Millions play this game, thousands of those play hunter. If a single person says they envision hunter as a melee character who has an animal companion it’s a valid fantasy. If enough of those players exist that the designers want to embrace it then it’s in the game. That’s how it works. Not a two to four sentence paragraph written by their community intern.
P.S. It’s “losing” and I’m not, because fantasy is subjective, not something to win or lose.
1 Like
No, the right side is not fantasy, The right side is a description of the features, aka the mechanics.
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