It is just Azagorod posting on one of their alts, as at this point either they just get pushed into a corner or ignored.
BM may be strongest right now but if you look at MSV it is not that far behind BM in numbers. Looking at Mythic Ny’alotha SV 89K (82%) vs BM 98K (90%) SV may not be the meta spec but the only two melee specs that out preform are Frost DK and Arms warriors. So, why does it still have such low representation in raids?
Most of the raids in BfA have been more range friendly this time so why go with a spec that has all the same advantages as a Hunter, but does not need to be in melee range to fight? I think MSV just needs to have a advantage over the other two specs to give it a chance to stand out. Some utility that non of the other classes have, maybe give them more CC or a way to heal in battle. If it was just a numbers game it would be no issue as MSV can out preform many specs in damage.
There are more issues with MSV that need to be looked at if you want to find why it is it’s very under-represented to other specs.
I just don’t like the spec. I don’t find it fun in solo world content, which is the majority of the game IMO. If it isn’t fun there, I’m not likely to enjoy it anywhere else. I find my Warrior, both Arms and Fury, to be much more engaging. Enhancement is my other go-to, though not so much in BfA, my Shaman isn’t even 120.
I understand MSV is strong (comparatively) in PvP. I still don’t like it, and will do WPvP and the extremely occasional BG as MM. I don’t go BM for PvE either, I’d rather take the DPS hit to play my preferred spec, and since I’m not doing anything competitive right now, I can do that.
For me personally, MSV feels like they took away a fun and interesting RDPS spec and replaced it with something that doesn’t feel like a good Hunter spec or a good MDPS spec.
That is true most of BFA raids have been geared to ranged making them an obvious choice to play ranged. Most raids want a hunter who is ranged in my cases, and lots of people still don’t give msv a chance. It took me a good while to show that I could do good dps as msv,l.
If we had more CC as survival it would definitely help the class out, as well as give us more utility. I understand melee survival isnt on a lot of peoples like list as well which is why I say just bring back RSV as a forth spec to at least please some others.
Which is why I also said they could bring RSV back for a 4th spec. There are some hunters who do like MSV, and to please everyone give MSV more utility and find a way to implement new talents to RSV.
They’re not “expanding” on it, though. When they explicitly defined the class around having a ranged weapon and a pet and built the entire class based on that for years, taking the ranged weapon away from part of the class is not “expanding” on it’s identity but rather actively dismantling it.
It’s not about being “archaic” either. In fact, melee for Hunters is the archaic mechanic given Hunters started off with melee mechanics for close range and a lot of arguments defending melee Survival revolve around misconceptions and revisionist conclusions about what Survival Hunters actually did in Vanilla.
As it turns out, it’s good for classes to have some sort of strict definition in WoW, otherwise you can dilute each class to the point where they lose their identity and boundaries with other classes. It’s hard to even say what a Hunter is anymore. If you asked me in MoP it would have been very simple: ranged weapon users with pets. Now that can’t apply anymore. We have Hunters that don’t use pets and even Hunters that don’t use ranged weapons. So what’s our identity? You can write a spiel about “fighters who have a strong bond with nature but aren’t Druids” or whatever but you can see how there’s no simple, underlying “fact” about what makes a Hunter any more.
Well it’s obvious that you think it was the right decision since you’re clearly infatuated with melee playstyles and are making bad excuses here to justify forcing a melee playstyle onto a ranged class that you otherwise, as evidenced by your armory page, put absolutely no investment in whatsoever. You’re yet another melee-obsessed person making selfish overtures into other classes. We get this all the time. It’s nothing new.
You might think in your melee-obsessed mind that you’re “giving a more unique playstyle” to the class because it’s hard for you to perceive someone enjoying ranged over melee, but given this class was defined around ranged weapons from the beginning it’s full of people who like to play ranged damage dealers. Taking away a ranged option is just that: taking away an option. Since most of the class is not interested in playing melee, they didn’t gain anything; they just lost a playstyle option.
As for the difference between MM and SV: I just have to stop and laugh at “not counting passives”. Passives are important in defining how a spec plays and feels. You can’t just ignore those and call it a day. Lock and Load was a huge part about what made ranged SV work and feel unique and that was a passive. But I guess it just didn’t exist as an appreciably unique mechanic to the spec? Besides, if there was concern about MM and SV being too similar there were plenty of avenues for differentiating them without flat-out deleting one of them. In WoD they did exactly that to the point where “literally 2 buttons” were shared between the specs. Was that not distinct enough? I guess not because to people like you all ranged specs are the same, right?
I have zero reason to listen to your “advice” and cater to your sensibilities here. I’m not going to pretend to respect you and your positions when I don’t. I have complete contempt for selfish melee players lording over the Hunter class and I’ll make that known however I see fit.
All I’m hearing is “all change is automatically good”. Here’s a tip: change is neither automatically good nor bad. A change needs to stand on its own merits. And pretty much none of the changes you listed succeed. They were all changes for the sake of change and they all made the game worse. No one is saying they should never update anything. What we are saying is that updates should make sense and be mindful of earlier class design decisions as well as justified in their direction.
Uh, yeah. You should do those things, actually. Because I don’t believe you. Whenever I talk about something Blizzard said I always back it up. Why should we just accept your word on it? You have already demonstrated yourself to be unreliable and incorrect on just about every PvE issue, which is understandable because you have next to no PvE experience.
You literally haven’t done a single Mythic+ run or raid and yet I’m meant to listen to you when you talk about what is and isn’t overpowered in raids? I’ve done all the cutting-edge content and I can tell you with authority that full mobility has never been the decisive “overpowered” factor you think it is. We spent a whole year with Marksmanship as the dominant spec with its Sniper Training movement penalty while the fully mobile BM and ranged SV still existed.
Let’s not gloss over (like you attempted to here) another basic failing of this claim. If ranged SV was bad because it had no movement penalty… why not just add a movement penalty? SV became fully mobile along with BM in 5.1, back in November 2012 (over 7 years ago) when they made Cobra Shot castable while moving. If it were such a game-breaking issue they could have slapped the movement restriction back onto Cobra Shot at any point in the 3 and a half years until July 2016 when they made SV melee. Why didn’t they? Why did they leave it in for multiple patch cycles and raids before deciding that it was so brokenly overpowered it was worth deleting the spec over? Why did they simultaneously keep the other fully mobile ranged spec in the game regardless (no, occasional pet issues does NOT explain it away)? Why didn’t they actually say this is why they removed SV rather than going on diatribes about class fantasy and spec distinction?
This is why no one believes you when you say Blizzard stated anything of the sort, and the fact that you immediately jumped to calling me mentally unstable when I called your bluff speaks volumes about the veracity of this claim and your personal character.
Hmm, no, the post explicitly said “explosives”, actually.
This is why I find posts that get all hyper-specific and nitpicking about what a Hunter can and can’t do to be totally pointless and a waste of time. Hunters in WoW are not defined and tightly restricted to what hunters do in real life. They were not intended to be the class that was defined around nothing beyond hunting animals in the wilderness.
This is why hunters typically hunted in groups. Another reason why focusing in on what real-life hunters do is pointless. What isn’t pointless, however, is highlighting how Survival has always been about controlling the battle, using all available tools to get an upper hand, and being an escape artist. Choosing this spec to be the one that arbitrarily sticks to the melee range with a melee weapon totally misses the point of the spec.
This is where u are wrong. I made my hunter back in MoP when MSV wasn’t a thing. I mainly enjoyed playing MM back then, but i dabbled with RSV and used BM a little to level. I played my hunter for 2 expansions before MSV even was a thing, so i was already invested in the playstyles the class offered and i enjoyed them for what they were.
I think alot of you RSV loyalist forget that most people playing MSV aren’t people who rolled hunter in legion or BFA, but are actual longtime players of the class. Also just because a melee spec is available now, does’t mean that people only play MSV or the other two ranged specs. Believe it or not but you can still play MM and BM if you enjoy MSV, and myself and many other people do.
The only data we have for sure is that player numbers for Survival dropped substantially with Legion’s MSV.
Personally most MSV players I’ve met are Warriors and Rogues who wanted a new flavor. Which makes sense since current SV feels like a hybrid of the two classes mechanically. There are a few pro-MSV hunters who always mained hunter but there is far more hunters who miss RSV, which is something easy to prove.
Yes removing MSV for RSV is also selfish in itself, but would result in a substantially happier hunter playerbase overall. Far more people benefit from RSV than are hurt by MSV’s removal.
I would say unless you have a poll taken from all the hunters who play the game (not just the ones who are vocal on the forums) then this also is impossible to prove statistically with what information we have available to us.
You may be right however, just as i could be right with my statement about long time hunters playing survival more than new hunters.
I said what i said because it seems like the most probable truth. Players tend to stick with their classes that they have invested time in, and are less likely to flock to class that they need to level to max just because it has a newly designed spec, especially when it is common knowledge that the spec in question has performance issues in certain aspects of the game. (survival being PvE)
Expansions are really the exception to that, though. Everyone has to level to max at the start of an expansion, and many people have many or all of the classes already at the existing expansion max. Gear progress is also reset. Expansion launch is the best time to change classes, and especially in an expansion that saw significant changes to many classes and specs. Survival, CombatOutlaw, Enhancement, Marksmanship, Unholy, Balance, Affliction, Destruction, Demonology, and Fury all saw significant changes, ranging from substantial redesign of their core gameplay loop up to a complete and total rework from the ground up.
That caused many players to swap classes. I did, because SV was flat out gone and MM was a completely different spec than it was in WoD. Performance also wasn’t a factor, because the expansion hadn’t launched at this point, so no one had even the foggiest idea of where the specs were going to land on the performance breakdown, or how they were going to play with the new 100->110 abilities, artifact traits, legendaries, etc.
So ya, it’s perfectly reasonable to think that many players jumped ship, both on the spec and the class, due to the changes, and that many of the people that did jump on MSV were coming from other classes (most likely melee, like the completely rebuilt Outlaw, Enhancement, Unholy, and Fury specs).
Edit: In fact, an argument could be made that Legion SV, with its Mongoose spam, filler, maintenance DoT, and mid-CD ranged nukes, played a lot like WoD-era Enhancement, before the Legion rework. I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if a number of WoD Enhancement shammies made their way over to MSV.
BfA likely saw similar trends. The removal of Mongoose Bite baseline likely drew people that tried out MSV during Legion and decided they didn’t like it, and many of those were not hunters either (in Legion or prior to it).
Given that the spec completely changed raid roles, I would actually find it hard to believe that the majority of MSV players are made up of those that played hunter in WoD or MoP. Melee and ranged play so differently, and MSV in particular played massively differently than any of the hunter specs, being entirely dependent on passive regen in Legion (and still mostly dependent on it in BfA, around 2/3rds non-Lucid focus comes from passive regen), having a very spammy rotation with little cohesion, and generally just playing like an entirely different class in many respects. I strongly suspect that the significant majority of MSV players played a different class in MoP and WoD.
It was an inference based on the statistic I gave at the top of my post:
This statistic is a bit skewed since it comes from how many players use SV in recorded M+ and raids (which doesn’t include LFD, LFR, or PvP players) , but overall SV is in the bottom in terms of users despite having middle of the road dps in Legion and BfA. Which is even stranger because BM performed below SV dps-wise in Legion raids but BM still had substantially more players.
This tells me that overall most players didn’t want to play MSV, and would therefore mean more players miss RSV than like MSV. Plus you can scroll through the thread, all the pro-RSV posts have quite a number of likes compared to pro-MSV posts. (not that it qualifies as a good statistic.)
…Though a poll does sound like something fun to do, hah!
I can name several guilds that no longer run hunters after the loss’ of survival.
Plus, after playing msv to max (well heroic raids with some mythic progression) there is no reason to take one over a demon hunter or warrior.
Beast mastery does better AOE and sustained. (Slightly less st but that’s barely an issue in the waking city anyway)
Seeing as how in mythics, you are min/maxing, to get through the raid or dungeon, people are being asked to play other toons…this argument isn’t even worth making here. But go ahead and ask mythic raid groups and dungeoning groups if they would ever prefer a msv hunter over RSV, any other ranged class, or a good melee spec
Honestly, ranged survival is missed by a pretty good portion of higher end hunters because the utility, good dmg, reliability of the spec.
Which cannot be proven either way… those statistic took the spec of all hunter characters that were on X day… so if on that day they were on BM spec and logged off and the next went back to SV main spec… it counts as a BM hunter.
Personal experience will differ from one individual to another.
That’s just speculation. It would create as much “issue” (we’ll call it that) as it did. One group hate it, one loves it.
The players playing Survival.
Which has nothing to do with the specs of hunters. Which ever spec did the most dmg would be taken. You’re trying to make an argument about the spec in a world where the community is the problem… they care for most optimized spec. They look at top 1% and want the same thing, demand the same thing and sometimes forces the same thing on others.
If the community was more open and people played more what they love, the class rep % would be way more equalized.