Demo is not a good comparison. A better one is what happened to blood death knights. They lost their dps spec to a tank, which is a non-starter for possibly the majority of the playerbase. I know it ticked me off and made me quit playing death knight.
That said, Legion survival is also my favorite spec the game has ever had except maybe Cata fire mage. The BfA version is nowhere near as fun.
Okay lets just say youâre 100% right. Whatâs a bigger change? Losing your key defining feature or losing your key defining feature, all your abilities and talents, and having your role completely changed?
Both seem pretty equal to me TBH. Sure, you can say âBut warlocks still cast spellsâ, but fundamentally changing the class is what we are discussing. So yes, Iâd consider it to be the same thing. Warlock was completely changed after the loss of Meta (I didnât like it so Iâm not complaining here). Iâve seen countless posts about Sub, DKâs, Warlocks, most specs have been changed fundamentally, but (IMO) to say
I feel like is Subjective. I know a few people who stopped playing after the Meta changes to warlocks. I personally didnât think it was that big of a deal, but they truly did, just as you feel this was a huge change. Not saying anyone class is more or less important, just saying that everyone has experienced the same thing you have, and others are angry too. SV isnât the only spec to feel the pain.
Not going to lie, I was one of the DKâs in WoTLK who played Blood DPS with all that Smexxy Armor Pen, and it was glorious. Iâve slowly been transitioning away from DK since the death of 2H Frost and the UH changes (not a fan of the wound system). Iâm aware that 2H frost is coming back, sadly Blood DPS never will, and UH is probably stuck with the wound system. So iâll more than likely be sticking to my Hunter next Xpac.
You and three or four other people, many of whom donât even play Hunters. Pretty sure theyâre just here for the trolls.
I hate it because I mained RSV up until they axed it. If I wanted to play a pure dps melee toon Iâd play my rogue. Rogues do everything surv does, except they do it better with more stealth and tools.
Are we also going to ignore the fact that Hunters used to be able to melee when needed and that was just randomly axed? I liked that aspect of hunters. That was part of MY fantasy. Now its added back in. Survival is a mix of ranged and melee (admittedly with way more of a focus on melee now). To be honest I wish we could equip a bow and a melee weapon as survival and truly be hybrids.
Rogues cant lay traps
Rogues cant flare
Rogues cant use tracking
Rogues dont have pets with utility
Rogues cant feign death stuff, sure theres vanish but it doesnt work on everything and has longer CD
Rogues cant go full range mode.
Yea lots Survival can do more than rogues 
Yea, but those with a different fantasy than yours will come to say youâre wrong and only their fantasy is right. That melee was never something for hunter, etc. An endless conflict.
Back before they made surv fully ranged I donât think anybody filled their talent tree with survival points outside of PVP. Having ranged attacks mixed with melee attacks with the dead zone was only good in limited situations, all of them pvp. I donât remember any SV hunters in any serious raids⌠you just didnât run that spec in pve.
Iâd take the rogue stuns and interrupts over my hunter interrupts any day.
Flare, pvp only but good stealthers know how to avoid it anyways
Many means of getting tracking on any character, most of the time itâs a hundred overlapping dots anyways.
Rogues donât have utility pets, but their damage doesnât depend on a pet being alive. Any hunter knows the pets die easily in PVP, see the ten sec revive broohaha threads.
Iâd take vanish in a heartbeat over feign in pvp. Feign superior out in world, near useless in pvp.
Surv canât go full range either without losing tons of DPS
I get where youâre coming from, but a rogue can easily do what a surv hunter can do, and do it better. That said, Hunter 4 life!
It all depends on which scenario you take it. For PvP obviously rogue has always been the top. And its not about to go anywhere down for a long time.
On a pve side, surv can do better with shorter CDs on most things. Right now rogue would be taken over Surv due to one thing. DPS numbers. Which isnt the classâ fault, but those adjusting the numbers.
Personally, Iâm of the opinion that Survival was the most extreme change for these reasons:
But all this agonising about whether Survival was worse or just as bad is missing the point. Those massive changes to the fundamentals of other specs were also largely bad decisions. With Death Knights they can at least argue about the fact that having 2 roles in 1 spec was generally a bad thing for the game but with Demonology that loss of all the uniqueness and refinement of the MoP/WoD playstyle was incredibly poorly received. You canât deflect from one bad class design decision by pointing to another similarly bad decision. The fact that the same mistake was done multiple times doesnât make it not a mistake.
This is pretty cut and dry. Any change to a class could be deemed as âfundamentally changing the classâ, depending on how far you want to stretch the definition. But lumping all class changes together under that one roof, and then therefore claiming that any change is just as bad as any other change is silly. The change to SV (or rather, the deletion of SV) was much greater than these other examples. Itâs not even close.
Demonology lost Meta and some of their spells changed too. But they didnât lose everything, and they didnât change roles. They didnât lose Shadow Bolt. They didnât lose Felguard. They didnât lose Hand of Gulâdan. They didnât lose a slew of other baseline Warlock abilities. They werenât suddenly required to run into melee range.
Survival Hunters lost more and changed more. Just because you can lump them together as both âbig changesâ doesnât mean they are therefore equal. Yes, Warlocks went down in representation from 8% to 6.9%; thatâs a 1.1% loss. But Hunters went down from 12.7% to 8.6%. Thatâs a 4.1% loss.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160609175121/http://www.worldofwargraphs.com/global-stats/classes
https://www.worldofwargraphs.com/global-stats/classes
The point I was trying to make is that they tried to make hunters into something fun but msv could easily double as a 4th rogue spec. Just swap out the pet for a magic dancing dagger and better stealth and youâd never notice it was ever a hunter spec.
The one thing I question the most about RSV:
Serpent sting is an arrow shot. Where am I hiding the bow?
I would hate SV less if I could use a bow for serpent sting and wildfire (no bomb). Would atleast feel like im playing a hunter and not some randomly made spec.
You mean walking up to someone and smashing a shrapnel bomb over their head from a foot away feels strange? What about dumping hormones on someones head to make your pet get meaner?
The whole spec feels like the result of a third grade focus group.
Miggz, dont be fooled by that manipulation of data. We have 0 scource of the reasons why people quit / change classes. Heâs been using that line to support false claims.
DH came out, reworks, lack of content moments, changing class, multiple characters, etc⌠So many god dam variation can affect those numbers. Not only that, but with the date those data were taken, it affects them a lot as well.
So be careful of Modded data. Best to ignore it / not use it.
Issue being people trying to add too much realism into a fantasy game for no reason. Not only that, but game mechanics coming into that cannot fully respect it.
Hand crossbow. Since we cannot equip ranged weapon with our 2 handed, it wont show on the character. So its only there as a visual from using the skill. Otherwise itâd be attached to the left side of our waist
As has been told to you many, many, many, times already⌠None of these things would be exclusive to the hunter class. People from every class would have quit to become DH. People from every class would change class. People would have more than just their main and their hunter alts.
Take all those things into consideration and compare it to all the other classes and then look at the difference. Hunters even with all common causes taken into consideration lost more players then any other class by a significant margin. Clearly the causes that would affect all classes relatively equally would not explain the massive disparity. So to explain the disparity you need to look at something that would be a hunter only explanation. The most likely explanation would be the just terrible design of the hunter class in Legion.
Was melee surv the sole reason? No. The hunter class across all three specs had issues. Melee surv likely a fairly significant impact on survival players. MM RNG has a significant impact on MM players. BM⌠well I honestly donât know what exactly was BMs problem, but I do remember people complaining about it.
As I repeated multiple times, never said it was. But you seem to never understand that. To add also, a lot of the factor are not based on the class, but the player playing it. So lets say as an example, if out of all ppl that wanted to play a DH 45% of them were death knight and the rest scatter on all other classes⌠then obviously DK would lose a more to people rolling to DH. Now I do not know how else to explain this simple thing to you.
Every time you say
you are implying that these things apply more to the hunter class then any other class or that they are exclusive to the hunter class. Stop being intellectually dishonest.