Anecdotes are not evidence of anything.
I could tell you I rarely see a survival hunter ever. That I see far more BM and MM hunters in random BGs then I do survival hunters, but that doesn’t actually mean anything.
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Well the game is big, large amount of players on it. Everyone will have different group setups in BGs. You didn’t see any, another would be different. Just yesterday, grinding blood of enemy on warrior I only saw survival and 2-3 bm hunters. There was no MM.
In reference to what he quoted… ask the Survival hunters.
“Everyone has different experiences” stops being a reasonable explanation when you’re literally the only one who claims your random BGs go like this. Literally everyone else who’s ever commented on this says its Survival that’s always rare/missing entirely.
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He is asking survival hunters… for actual evidence not “Well I play survival and I know three other people who like it now that it’s melee.”
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The point is, we don’t live in that fantasy world.
Msrv, is still not wanted, because it can’t perform, on the level, of the previous iterations. Doesn’t have the utility than other classes can give. Isn’t the highest DMG melee that it replaces(get real. AOE stealth, darkness, warriors doing insane dmg and self healing, ret can toss in some bubbles and off heals, enhance can pop earth totems and give a second of relief for a tank, dks are battle Rez with decent dmg. Msrv…doesnt have a click of things it doesn’t better. Utility, or dmg. Yes, groups tend to be elitist, which only hurts this melee version more lol)
I digress, your arguments at this point don’t make sense. Almost as bad as a certain lonely wolf.
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Thats…not a citation. You made a claim that, and I quote, “most people playing MSV are longtime players of the class”. You need to back up a claim like that, you know, with data. Data that I’m almost positive doesn’t actually exist.
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As a note, I always post on this character even though she’s not my main. I try to be something of a roleplayer, but Dimpishly has a “voice” that’s closest to my real self. Also, I’d just as soon not embroil either of my mains in forum squabbles. For the record, my Horde main is a Survival Hunter and always has been.
I don’t think it can be argued that the number of SV hunters has dropped since it became a melee class. Maybe only a little, probably more like a lot. I do think that most of the current MSV players were long time hunters though. I don’t have facts or an anecdote, just some logic. Of all the players who were Survival, when the spec turned melee they had three options: delete the character, change to a different ranged spec, or play melee. I feel like there are more long time SV hunters who stayed melee than there are non-hunters that came to play hunter just for the melee spec. That just makes sense to me.
Here’s some logic to refute this claim.
Most people who play hunters prior to legion played them because they wanted to be a ranged physical weapon user. Aka bow/gun user. When they removed one of those possible specs, most of those people would have changed specs, rerolled to a new class, or quit wow altogether before playing a melee spec, because they didn’t chose to main a hunter to be melee.
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I know of at least 6 longtime RSV hunters that immediately chagned to MM on the day they logged in and found a pointy stick in thier hands. They are my hunters.
Whether the people playing MSV are long time hunters or new to the class, doesn’t really matter. The issue is that most Hunters chose Hunter to be ranged. Even Blizz admits this. MSV caused hunters to become a 2 spec class with a 3rd niche spec that appeals to very few.
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couple days ago was in a bg that had 3 sv hunters. Want pics?
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Survival is the premiere PvP spec for hunters. BM hunters are rare unless it’s some trash heap do-no-damage BM PvE’er trying to get some echoes in randoms or Hogx keeping the dream alive. I don’t know why you keep propagating this lie so constantly.
Used arrows like twice and mostly fought with a hand and a half sword.
Holy heck, Aragorn is MSV!?
Based.
No… Aragorn was a ranger not a “wow hunter”, msv or otherwise.
You can imagine what it says about Survival’s popularity when seeing 3 SV Hunters in one BG is so noteworthy to you.
You’re clearly confused. We were talking about random BGs where SV is very much NOT the best option and is in fact usually the worst Hunter option; especially in epic BGs where Survival practically doesn’t exist. Survival is only the best in rated arena which is a very niche corner of the game to begin with. Even in rated BGs BM is more played than SV.
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Survival will continue to struggle in representation until it gets some quality group utility. From a group standpoint, there’s just so little reason to bring one. It doesn’t matter how fun a spec is to play if you can’t play it because no one wants you in their group.
As for BM having higher representation than Survival in Legion, you could also attribute a good portion of this to BM being far easier to play than Legion Survival. Despite so many players claiming they want more complexity, the vast majority of them steer away from it and migrate to the easier specs. This tendency becomes exponentially greater when the easy to play specs also yield the highest dps. Havoc and BM are prime examples of this tendency.
First of all, they have discussed it. Again, I’m not scouring through hours and pages of interviews and Q and A’s in an effort to find it. It’s there for you. If you want it, feel free to look for it.
Second, even without the citation, you can apply some basic logic to the situation. BM is an oddity of a “ranged” dps when the bulk of its damage comes from a pet that is a melee combatant. If your pet is not in range, whether that be from mechanics of the fight or pathing and AI issues, your dps falls off hard. The damage you’re left dealing with your ranged weapon is comparable to a DK or Warrior’s DoTs still ticking.
Ranged Survival, on the other hand, had no such weakness. Its pet only dealt about 10% of its overall damage, which is rather negligible when you were able to avoid all the melee mechanics and suffer no penalty from the ranged mechanics.
As for spec distinction, that was the primary theme of Legion. Several specs underwent heavy revisions for the sake of a clear theme from which to create an artifact weapon. Mages have 3 ranged dps specs. Warlocks have 3 ranged dps specs. Why then would only Ranged Survival be shifted to melee and no melee spec shifted to range?
It’s almost as if Blizz took issue with a fully mobile, ranged dps spec that enjoyed the luxury of range without dealing with any of the drawbacks of being a caster.
I mean, sure, but those situations are rare, especially given that BM has two abilities that instantly charge the pet at a given target, both of them on extremely short CDs. The only time you run into pet travel time issues is when you’re dealing with really long distances (like Prophet’s clones). Swapping to adds involves essentially zero downtime for BM due to the charges baked into Kill Command and Barbed Shot. Those pets also do not have to move out for all of the anti-melee mechanics that SV does have to move out for.
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I’m not taking your word for it because I have no reason to believe you’re telling the truth. I would have a reason if you showed me where they said this.
Every time I refer to something Blizzard says I have the post ready to go. When I claim that Blizzard said that most Hunters want to play a ranged DPS I link to the 2017 gamescom interview where they said exactly that. When I claim in BFA they wanted to make Survival more recognisably a Hunter spec by giving it ranged abilities, I link to the January 2018 Q&A where they say that. When I say their rationale for making Survival melee was to differentiate it from the other Hunter specs, I link to the 2015 post-Blizzcon commentary of Ion Hazzikostas and Travis Day where the say that (notably neither of them were talking about ranged mobility at the time).
If you’re going to claim Blizzard said something it’s up to YOU to verify it, not me. Think of how much stronger your argument would be if you could show where Blizzard actually said anything about SV and full mobility. That should be enough incentive for you to go find the post/video.
This doesn’t work because BM has mechanisms to ensure very high pet uptime against the boss. Kill Command and Barbed Shot both cause your pet to charge to the target from 40 yards. Pets don’t get targeted by boss mechanics. They take massively reduced damage from all AoE. Pet downtime is very, very low to the point where it’s basically a non-factor. Once again harping on about how the pet is a big penalty is a telltale sign of someone who doesn’t play a Hunter or PvE content enough to know the reality of the situation.
Of course, there’s a much bigger reason…
The fact that for the entire last year of its existence ranged Survival was utterly unviable and MM, a spec with a movement penalty, was the dominant spec that you had to play if you wanted to raid at all should tell you that fully mobile ranged DPS is not the ultimate raid-destroying damage dealer you think it is.
Besides, I have to ask again and I’ll put it in big text so you hopefully won’t just ignore it for the third time:
Why didn’t they just add a movement penalty to Survival?
Survival still used a casted focus generator: Cobra Shot. Cobra Shot was originally a cast that required you to stand still. Patch 5.1 made it castable while moving. At any point since 5.1 they could have made it require standing still again. Instead, they left BM and SV fully mobile for the later periods of the opening MoP raids as well as all of Throne of Thunder, Siege of Orgrimmar, Highmaul, Blackrock Foundry, and Hellfire Citadel after which they made SV melee and kept BM fully mobile all the way until today.
So not only did they leave SV fully mobile for literal years, most of which time it was NOT the best Hunter spec, but they also remade the spec entirely instead of just reverting Cobra Shot to its previous behaviour? How can you even pretend that full mobility was the main reason? Oh, right, the absolutely zero PvE experience. I almost forgot. When arguing from a position of experience I tend to easily forget that there are people out there so uninformed about raiding that they think being able to move while damaging the boss breaks every boss encounter and makes people stack only BM Hunters to kill everything.
Or maybe they had a combination of melee favouritism and a lack of investment in the Hunter class? There were a whole heap of Hunter design decisions that expansion that indicated that the people in charge hadn’t the slightest clue what they were doing; not just decisions regarding SV. The developers made a melee Hunter spec because to them melee was more exciting than ranged. Allegedly, of course. Their actual reasoning was that Survival was too similar to MM, but as you said this didn’t make them make a ranged Rogue spec or a melee Mage spec or anything.
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It is, but not by you I’ll give you that.
All class have different utilities… surv has some that other class dont. Your point is invalid here.
There’s always a top and a bottom in the dps list… which is a number tweaking. Does it mean they do bad dmg? absolutly not, they do good dmg. That issue is a community one, not spec. Again, invalid point.
Saying it yourself, community issue. What ever spec/class would be at bottom of the list will be rejected… it has nothing to do on how the spec plays / is.
Someone else saying there’s survival in a BG, and you outright refuse it or try to make it boost some sort of point that makes no sense.
Fun fact, SV is more played than BM in any high RBG… BM is more popular on low tier RBG for point def.
Community is ignorant on its utility, but its not the reason. Its unknown, its not shown in MDI and it isnt the top 3 dps on DMG meter… so the community outright just refuse it. Yet they bring good utility, do good dmg.
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You’re absolutely in the wrong here, Photon. Normally I’m not the type of guy to be so direct in saying another person’s claims are wrong… but also I can’t watch you continually make the same claim after Bepples and others have continually repeated why such claims are wrong.
Unless you can tell us when Blizzard said that the full mobility of old SV was a problem, your claims are objectively incorrect. Not to mention they wouldn’t really affect the argument in your favor even if they were correct.
Now if you’re a pro-MSV player and are defending your spec then please use different points. Like maybe the fact the general population prefers melee and that’s the reason Blizzard decided the spec should be melee in order to appeal to non-hunter players? Or the fact that SV was always a hybrid ranged/melee tree and Blizzard doubling down on the original fantasy makes sense as a result? There’s a whole variety of different points you could make.
Obviously the above can be disputed as well, but they are far stronger points since there’s actual proof to back them up. In contrast, claiming that mobility is the issue of RSV is just blatantly wrong and can be beaten by a simple:
I’ll still be pro-RSV unless there’s ever an actual concrete argument for MSV that can’t be disputed.
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Just to chime in here when it comes to pvp as a SV main, the amount of dps we can do is insane. For those who are saying “sv is terrible for pvp” clearly never saw a good one merc and it shows