I think an earlier comment of mine would be an appropriate response to this:
Survival having talents that improved melee abilities isn’t the same thing as Survival being a melee spec. They were still a ranged spec that only used their melee abilities when the enemy got within melee range, and the Hunter then tried to get back out of melee range so that they could use their ranged abilities then.
Even if you specced Survival, your bars were still chocked full of ranged abilities, and at best you had 2 melee attacks (3 if you count the completely unviable Lacerate which was removed in Vanilla and replaced with a ranged ability).
Go looks at survival talent again. Most Vanilla survival talents aren’t about melee and are about survivability. I was serious. Go play classic as a melee hunter right now. See how well that works out for you.
Nobody main specced Surv back in vanilla… literally nobody. If you tried to join a group specced into surv you would have been laughed at. Vanilla survival was so bad that wyvern sting was removed as final talent. In fact, the melee attacks were so bad they took most of them away in favor of either ranged buffs or general attack buffs.
To answer your question, Survival was DOA from day one. Totally overhauled by 2.0. You only dipped into it if you were doing PVP, and even then it was only a talent or two.
This is like saying Trueshot Aura was removed from being the final talent for MM… it wasn’t removed. It was still the 31 point talent for survival, but like all the other talent trees going into BC, there were new 41 point talents at the end.
The BC talents were largely unchanged from Vanilla aside from adding new 41 point talents. The melee attacks were eventually taken away because the minimum range for ranged attacks were removed and thus no real need for them anymore as their only purpose was to make a hunter 90% useless in melee instead of 100% useless in melee.
Show me one time prior to Legion where you picked talents/or a spec which allowed for you to become a “melee-hunter”, by the intent of the design.
If you go back to Vanilla talent design for Hunters(or just look at Classic right now), you will see that the theme of SV as a talent category, is not on presenting any form of “melee-build” for you to play with.
Survival was designed where the theme of it was focused on increasing your survivability in various types of content(in the game), depending on what talents you picked.
Yes, SV had some talents that focused on melee as, in certain parts of the game, it was more than likely that you would end up in melee-range of your target, thus it making sense for you to have more tools for how to deal with that enemy.
You can’t just say “SV had melee talents in Vanilla…”. You actually have to look at those talents(and the category as a whole). It’s not about that you did have them, but…
…why did you have them?
…how were they designed? What did they do/allow you to use them for?
Everything that involved melee-combat for hunters back then, was designed to be used situationally. Our primary focus was on the use of the ranged weapon combined with pets.
This also means that when they decided to add more defined combat-exclusive themes to each category/spec, it was still nothing but natural for them to base it on ranged gameplay for SV as well, since the core focus of the class was still ranged combat.
Just to make this perfectly clear…
Talent design in Vanilla had a very specific purpose for us as Hunters. Each talent category, no matter individual talents, had an overarching theme to it.
Beast Mastery - it didn’t “make you a master of pets” as you said there.
This talent category was designed to hold literally every single talent that focused on pets/bestial aspects.
Marksmanship - as a talent category, only focused on having talents that improved our ranged weapon-gameplay. Both in the form of more damage as well as some utility.
Survival - held individual talents that somehow improved our traps, our defensive capabilities, melee-based utility, or just some damage in general.
But no matter what talents you picked, the overarching theme of the category was that of ‘increased survivability’.
How you chose to focus on said survivability, what talents you picked, depended on what type(s) of content you engaged in.
Talent design in Vanilla was ONLY meant to add to specific main features of the class as a whole. For Hunters, that was either Pets(BM), the ranged weapon(MM), or survivability and utility(SV).
It seems like you don’t…
Specifically, it seems like you don’t understand WHY we had them. What we actually had them for.
I don’t know what you’re looking at but they almost completely redesigned the top tier talents in the survival tree in BC. They moved wyvern to 31 and added readiness. They added Thrill of the hunt, Resourcefulness, Expose weakness… Expose weakness was HUGE! If you stacked crit expose weakness let loose some monster shots. Thrill and expose were spec changers. Don’t know how you discounted those.
They basically rounded out the talents to be a decent split between melee and range as opposed to the nearly all melee from vanilla. It was the beginning to the shift to range… because melee hunters were very lacking.
Again, survival was almost always used in pvp only, but with Thrill and expose weakness you could do massive bow damage if you stacked crit.
Wyvern Sting was always the 31 point talent… Most of the Vanilla talents were unchanged. Yes they added more like they did to every talent tree. This was not a unique thing they did to survival. In Vanilla the 31 point talent for MM was Trueshot Aura. In BC the 31 point talent for MM was still Trueshot Aura, but the new top of the spec 41 point talent was Silencing Shot.
Nearly every talent they included in BC was for ranged. I forgot to mention master tactician too. Exposed weakness + Master tactician was such a boon for range. Wyvern was totally useless anyways, it overrode serpent sting. very specialized shot which nobody outside of pvp would ever use and they didn’t there either.
For the first time you could actually bounce off a melee guy with wingclip, disengage then smack them for massive damage with your bow. Before BC you had very limited range dps before they closed. Those new talents changed everything.
Sure, they kept the bottom half of the talent pool mostly the same, but nobody took the upper half anyways before then. I don’t think I ever saw anyone use wyvern shot prior to BC. The furthest anyone ever went in the vanilla survival tree was deterrence, maybe survivalist for the extra hp but only in PVP though
Survival was useless in pve because no was was a hunter getting first crack at a top tier sword drop unless they used all their dkp.
Did you play in vanilla? Using vanilla surv tree as an argument for anything is kind odd considering it was considered one of the broken specs. Nobody played it.
You seem to be under the impression that I was arguing survival in vanilla was a melee spec and not simply pointing out that Wyvern sting was always the 31 point talent in Vanilla and wasn’t “removed” from being the final talent. Like seriously, every 31 point talent was still the 31 point talent. Wyvern sting didn’t go from being “the final talent in the spec” to the 31 point talent, because the 31 point talent in vanilla was the final talent. All this other stuff you’re saying is completely irrelevant to what I was saying, not that it isn’t true, just fouled to right field when I was in left field.
My goodness you are picky. Said final talent… Meant stayed as the 31 pointer (Happy??) and was replaced at the top (New BC) with actually usefull talents. Wyvern sting was among the worst final talents in the game, glad you’re championing it’s place in game history 15 years after the fact.
So was basically every other talent. Are you really going to try to argue that Silencing Shot was better as a top of the spec talent for MM then Trueshot Aura?
Wyvern Sting was super useful, but super situational. If you were running TBC Heroics (or later, Cata Heroics) with an SV Hunter, the additional reliable hard CC was always appreciated due to how the dungeons were designed. Contrast with Wrath, where everything was a zergfest almost from Day 1, and Wyvern Sting was rarely picked even by SV Hunter mains.
It came back into style in cata for sure. I’m just finding it hard to believe anyone can defend survival being a good complete spec early on.
I mained sv in LK and never took it. The only time you quit running through dungeons was when a door stopped you. No CC ever. Cata… total culture shock.