If this is the case, then why does Affliction exist? It’s just Destruction with DoTs instead of direct damage.
If this is the case, then why does Assassination exist? It’s just Subtlety with DoTs instead of direct damage.
Specs shouldn’t exist to be unique. They should exist to bring fun gameplay that isn’t realized by the other specs of that class. RSV did so, in spades.
I have always preferred MM, but many others long preferred SV. To pretend that MM and RSV were the same is complete nonsense.
Clearly you dont know much about rogues. Sublety is about using stealth only abilities through shadowdance throughout combat, assassination is nothing of the sort.
Clearly you don’t know much about Hunters pre MSV. Survival was about applying dots to multiple enemies and funneling those dots into burst damage procs on a priority target, marksmanship is nothing of the sort.
You can bark up that tree all you want, but its too close to the other ranged specs and anyone with a tiny bit of an open mind can see that.
At the very least, its obvious that a melee spec is vastly different in playstyle compared to the two other ranged specs.
Melee + pet classes have a very long history in the mmorpg genre as well. EverQuest 1 had the Beastlord and Warhammer Online Had the White Lion. Its in WoW’s best interest to provide as many of these similar classes as is reasonable to attract players to make a home here.
A third ranged hunter spec that is extremely similar to the other two is not going to do that.
Did you play a Hunter pre 7.0? If you did, I can’t imagine you actually ever touched Survival, because it was a VERY different gameplay experience than the other two specs. Setting up DoTs on huge swaths of enemies, raining instants and chunking off small amounts of health, eventually whittling them down through attrition.
Compare with Marksmanship, which is all about hard casts and heavy burst damage - “one shot, one kill”.
Beast Mastery is obviously a completely different thing, since the pet is doing the majority of the damage, with the Hunter directing and supporting the pet.
I’ll agree that a melee spec is more different. I also think “making it more different” is an absolute garbage reason to delete a thing that people like, when they could have just leaned further into the rot gameplay of RSV, or pushed MM further into hardcast gameplay.
What other games do in terms of class design is irrelevant to what WoW does.
Are there a lot of EQ1 players out there looking for a new MMO who have somehow not heard of WoW for the last 16 years?
I think that as long as there is a reasonable amount of people demanding for it to come back it wouldn’t hurt if the team had the time to look for a way to reimplement it. Unless you are part of the team, you saying there is no reason for it to return is moot.
I guess…it’s time to remove a couple of Mage specs then…
Quite the in-depth analysis you did there. Solid work!
Oh the irony of how you’re calling people out for not having an open mind…
(Aimed Shot in WoD)
A hard-cast shot that dealt high upfront Physical damage without a CD and with a high Focus-cost. Themed around taking the time to properly aim your weapon.
vs
(Explosive Shot in WoD)
An instant cast, short-burst DoT with a short CD and a fairly low Focus cost that dealt Fire damage , and was themed around attaching explosives to your projectiles/arrows.
Did you judge these solely by the fact that they both have the word “Shot” in their names?
But yeah, great job there. They were literal copies of one another!
You ever get tired of regurgitating the same nonsense? If that where the case then all the mage spec’s must be the same. All the lock specs the same. I mean people loved that play style. More then whom love melee. So it was enough for us to want it back. So please stop with this tired debunked lie. Thanks.
That’s precisely the distinction used by Assassination and Affliction to feel like different specs in their classes so this is an egregious double-standard.
Furthermore, even if you did think Survival played the same as MM and BM, that’s not an inherent result of being a ranged spec. There was nothing preventing them from further evolving each spec on its own path while keeping them ranged.
No, that isn’t great, because the 3rd spec is predicated on a strict weakness v.s. the other two. The only reason it is melee and therefore worse off is to be different. Designing around tokenistic differences is a terrible practice. Specs are meant to build on the base class, not take away from it.
The distinction between the specs can’t just be boiled down to 2 simple variables like this. Don’t play dumb. There’s a lot more to it. All 3 Warlock specs are “fel magic caster with a demon”; we don’t declare that they are all redundant specs because we understand there’s a lot of identity and mechanical development on top of that simple baseline foundation.
No, that isn’t. Even Blizzard now admits that they went too far in distinguishing specs, to the point where it came at the expense of class identity. Survival was the worst offender given it literally takes the most core element away from the class. If you’re under the impression that specs need to be radically-different micro-classes from one another sharing minimal traits, you’re years behind even the Blizzard class designers on this.
This isn’t Legion. Specs are meant to share some things because they are part of the same class. They’re just not meant to steal iconic exclusive elements from other specs, which is actually what SV is doing now to BM.
Wrong.
Not an inherent, unsolvable problem even if you were correct.
Besides, look at how much Survival steals from BM’s toolkit as it is. You’re kidding yourself if you think the tokenistic melee difference is a good foundation for the spec.
So you pretty much walked straight into that. Did you not see the set up coming? The fact that you’re fine with all the Warlock specs despite them all being built on “fel caster with a pet” and all the Rogue specs despite them being “dual-wielding skirmisher with stealth” shows that you have a double standard. When it comes to those specs you’re fully understanding that there are more variables than just the most baseline classwide elements. When it comes to Hunters, however, suddenly it’s all “hurr all ranged therefore all the same hurr”.
You’re not smarter than everyone else on the forum so spare me the cringeworthy “have an open mind!” talk. You’re the one being close-minded about Hunters because all you see in the class is “ranged weapon” and “pet”.
So what? They could have a ranged spec that’s sufficiently different. It doesn’t need to be blindingly obvious. It’s not immediately obvious when looking from afar whether a Warrior is playing Arms or Fury but we don’t go nuts over that.
Once again, being melee is not a good distinction on which to build a spec. The class is still to this day mostly defined around ranged weapons. When you make a Hunter you go 1-10 using a ranged weapon. Choosing a spec at level 10 that forces you to throw that away and be a melee fighter is nonsense. It’s predicating a spec on a handicap instead of a strength. I know specs being as distinct as possible is important to you, and in Legion it was important to Blizzard, but there is such a thing as “too far” and we absolutely crossed the line when they made such a fundamentally flawed basis for a spec just for the sake of making it obviously different. What good is being different when that distinction just comes in the form of “Hunter but worse”?
I have to say, it takes some nerve to, with a straight face, try to use popularity as an argument in favour of melee Survival of all specs. It’s been famously unpopular and despised since its incarnation 5 years ago, as opposed to ranged Survival which was routinely very popular. Evidently it’s not in WoW’s best interest to spend so much time and effort on a spec almost no one likes.
P.S. If you want to talk about attracting players from other MMOs, one of the most popular classes in the second most popular subscription-based MMO, Final Fantasy 14, is the Bard which is a fully-mobile archer that uses primarily magic-themed attacks for sustained damage over time and funnel cleave, which is pretty much what ranged Survival was. A popularity-based argument is one you’re going to lose. You’ve been warned.
simply by the sheer embarrassing numbers of people who play survival, it is by every metric a failure. Idk about the rest of you, but Survival Hunter in MoP was one of the most fun specs this game has ever seen and why they felt compelled to change it to the mess it is now, is beyond me.
Well…this is usually what happens when this topic is brought up.
You asked some questions earlier in regards to RSV, and it’s potential future existence next to the other specs within the class. Me and others answered. Feel free to check those out.
Also arcane plays as a burn wait for cool downs burn wait for cool downs. It’s the same bloody thing as fire. Big cool downs wait big cool downs wait. The only difference is convoc. Black arrow synergy with explosive shot dots is different then aimed shot as a sniper spec.