Why Surv gets no love?

Classes Hunter
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Explosive Shot, Serpent Sting, Black Arrow, Wildfire Bomb. Add in passive effects like Lock and Load and Trap Mastery, something to encourage multidotting to give it a different gameplay style, and a unique spec cooldown for once and you have yourself a very different spec. It would actually be more thematically distinct than the current Survival which relies on several iconic BM mainstays.

I want a physical damage melee Mage spec. I think it fits. Where’s my spec, Blizzard? It must be valid because I said so.

And Survival has thoroughly proven that there are not enough players who like that particular fantasy to justify an entire spec dedicated to them.

https://i.imgur.com/kBVr5Uc.png

This is the actual manual page of Hunters from 2004. Ranged, ranged, ranged. That’s all it goes on about when it talks about Hunters in combat. There are melee abilities, but they only existed as a compensation for the minimum range that existed at the time; likely part of a naive attempt to balance Hunters. Melee was never intended as an alternative playstyle to ranged. It got phased out of the class because as the game evolved further the melee mechanics were not only unneeded but actively conflicted with the identity and playstyle of Hunters.

Melee was not “balanced poorly” in classic WoW. It was balanced exactly how they intended it to be balanced: always worse than ranged. Because sticking to melee was never ever a real goal that the developers had for the class. The whole point was that Hunters could be countered by getting them stuck in melee range. If melee were as strong as ranged then it would completely defeat that purpose.

No, I just focused on the part where you think there should be an option for SV to be petless. Because you’re wrong on that. Thinking pets are OK does not fix that. Besides, you’re clearly not fine with them if you think you should be able to play without them.

Cool story. It’s a bad guess. The fact still stands: Hunters used to be all ranged so there are very few people in the class open to playing a melee spec. All the people who liked melee went to play something else, and there’s little to no reason for them to reroll to Hunter to play melee. As for new players: it will always be hard for SV to appeal to people when it’s up against the only two specs in the game that use a ranged weapon.

Here’s Blizzard deretmining it:

https://i.imgur.com/kBVr5Uc.png

Here’s what it looks like without the ranged weapon and the pet:

https://i.imgur.com/b2en1Jd.png

And yes, some people do argue that Lone Wolf shouldn’t exist. If Lone Wolf is contentious on a ranged spec you can guarantee the melee spec having it is far and away beyond tolerance.

I’ll say to you what I said to Axeperson who made the same argument. They didn’t balance it poorly. They balanced it exactly to their intention: always worse than ranged. Melee was never at any point until Legion intended to be a valid Hunter playstyle alternative to ranged. The entire point was for melee to be weaker. Making it just as strong or stronger would utterly defeat the purpose of the class according to classic design.

EDIT: Damn, Dawnspirit beat me to it.

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As I already countered this by saying if enough players want it then the developers might make it so.

Seems to have quite a few players in pvp. Just because they don’t play it in whatever your desired gameplay is doesn’t mean it’s not enough players.

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This requires we assume that blizzard knows how to balance anything.

This has never been the case; and certainly not in vanilla.

Anyway, whatever you feel about that, Surv has been melee for at least four years now. They aren’t changing it back.

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Regardless of anyone’s opinion on Blizz’s ability to balance, the intention was that melee for hunters in vanilla was not as potent as ranged.

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And now that has changed. Survival is melee, and has been for years.

But I don’t think we can make strong claims about intent in vanilla squaring with how things played; they claimed paladins could be tanks and they gave warlocks fire stones.

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Paladins could be tanks. I had paladins tank dungeons for me all the time.

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With great effort and patience on the part of the group, yes. But with a group like that, you could melee hunter (or, hell, melee warlock), too.

Paladins were not very good tanks, in the TPS department, because Blizzard either (1) didn’t know what the heck they were doing in vanilla or (2) they did know, and only wanted priests, rogues, mages, and warriors to be good. Late vanilla warlocks were an accident.

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Not much more than warrior tanks. If you weren’t waiting for 3 sunders, you were doing it wrong in vanilla.

Paladins were fine actually. Their problem wasn’t threat generation it was the lack of a taunt which prevented them from raid tanking. They were perfectly fine for dungeon tanking.

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This is the most damning evidence, in my opinion. The baseline class abilities for hunters in SL are almost entirely ranged. The only melee ability we get baseline is Wing Clip. Raptor Strike is still survival only, yet Arcane Shot is now global to the full class (in fact, some enterprising SV hunters are considering whether it could be possible to run RV using Arcane Shot instead of Raptor Strike as a filler). Even Blizzard thinks of hunters as fundamentally ranged at their core.

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I gotta say that the idea of hunter class identity solely revolving around pets and ranged dps is a incredibly limiting and shallow concept of what a hunter actually is and could be in wow.

There are already many variants of hunters in the game that differ from this cookie cutter path that most of you seem to be obsessed with. Headhunters are a prime example of a hunter archetype that is already present in the wow universe, and is in no way represented by the hunter class.

We should be letting the class evolve and change into better more fleshed out specs, that actually encompass more aspects of what a hunter actually is.

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I am aware, and I’ve advocated for getting additional classes with ranged specs. Let’s stop trying to force every ranged weapon user identity into 1 class.

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While your idea is absolutely stupid, but battlemage has been a long requested spec too. Though its fantasy is represented by enh shamans and frost dks

So it would be ranged venomous explosive magic hunter?

Didnt you complain just about this very thing a couple threads ago?

Idunno man. Been seeing an increase of sv in the wilds…

Then again. I play on Argent Dawn EU.

Agreed on that. No wonder most specs were unplayable back then

And melee hunter tanked Onyxia. Your point?

Fair enough.
Heard it before from a former pally main.

If it were up to me, rogues, warriors and priests would get ranged bow specs to expand ranged weapon user fantasy.

Dark ranger class when?!?!

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There really isn’t that many SV players. Most new SV players I’ve met play it because it’s a melee spec, not because it’s a hunter. That distinction is important, because the change to melee did nothing but hurt hunter players as a whole. It only helped those who weren’t hunters.

I’d imagine quite a few people would agree that Hunters didn’t ask for a melee spec, and in fact no actual majority asked for it in the first place. It was birthed from Blizzard’s own arrogance and will never leave because of that arrogance.

I still think it’s a fine idea to return RSV and bring in what few unique traits MSV has as talents (Wildfire Infusion, Mongoose Bite, etc.) but that’s just wishful thinking on my end.

Survival is a spec doomed to create bitterness among it’s community.

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SV hunter here, and I am enjoying it, will probably be the class I take into SL. Now as someone stated earlier, to be fair that has not been that many changes to hunters for SL yet aside from getting old abilities back and small changes for each spec (for SV I believe they just buffed the talents that no one ever picks). I don’t think we have yet get our “first pass” or perhaps there will be no major changes and blizz is relatively happy with how specs play, will play come SL

hunters along with a lot of other classes are still waiting on something substantial aside from talent buffs. So I don’t see it as “blizz ignoring SV hunters”, rather many classes are waiting for a “first pass” as well (when are we going to balance 2h and dw frost dks…)

As for “lack of love for SV” well you are playing a spec that was from the beginning ranged and to change it to melee, leaves a lot of people bitter. Now I could argue times change, etc… but the majority of people are/will still be upset that SV went melee. I believe blizzard’s excuse at the time was something of “SV is to similar to MM so we are making SV melee now”. As to how true that statement is, I don’t know. I don’t work for blizz, I wasn’t in the room when that choice was made. You could argue that blizz was lazy and they could have better differentiated MM and SV without making SV melee, but melee is the direction blizz went.

Honestly they could buff SV to be ahead of the other 2 hunter specs, buff SV so it is the “top dog” of melee classes and still I bet the popularity, population of SV hunters really wouldn’t change that much for the simple fact that most people when they think of “Hunter” thing of a physical ranged damage dealing class. As this very forum demonstrates it is very hard to expand upon that perception.

As for myself if they brought back RSV as a 4th spec I would be fine with that, though I would hope that blizz would have the ability to balance all 4 hunter specs. At the same time if blizz could only have MSV or RSV and not both, I would pick the melee version every time- yes I know it is an unpopular opinion but that is honestly how I feel.

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Very well said sir, I completely agree.

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Humans in the ice age used spears, fire and traps to hunt the biggest, most dangeorus creatures during that time, the mammoth. Survival hunters in wow use polearms(spears), explosives(fire) and traps to hunt all the junk in this game. So yeah, the fantasy is there and deeply rooted in human history.

edit: I also like to think of my survival hunter as a warrior with a battle buddy. shrug
edit2: Oh and humans tamed wolves to help on their hunts during that time period. So melee with pets.

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To be honest, the current iteration of SV isn’t all that interesting. Most of the abilities don’t interact with each other. It doesn’t bring anything that other, better melee classes can bring, and it’s… well it’s melee.

People are still (rightfully) upset that ranged survival is gone, and they still haven’t brought anything close to that playstyle. They either need to completely rework the spec, or just bring back a 4th spec with MoP/WoD Survival.

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Legion version with the Animal instincts talent (instead of the popular moknathal) had the perfect flow for me. Almost no downtime and cool looking rotation without any silly arms flailing. Everything looked fluid and impactful, just how it is supposed to be.

Apart from the artifct ability. It was silly looking.

Another edit. Also during the patch you could not throw your exlosive trap around. Simply 5yards in front of ya

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suv hunter is good as it is it just needs some buffs which its getting in shadowlands.

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The real answer, it aint because you have some haters not wanting to play it, it’s because their dmg number isn’t the top. If Survival was doing more dmg than BM this xpac, you’d see a lot more of them in PvE.

In PvP, they do have lots of love, it is strong class… though really limited when in comes to Arena comps.

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