Solution: merge the spec talent rows so we have one massive table of 9 talents per tier to choose from.
well you can play survival again when it sit in it’s glory days cause wrath is coming one of the main reasons i’m going to play it.
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I played Survival up to the change and to this day I am still mad. They already gutted hunters as it was by removing or changing traps, loss of auras, and complete destruction of spells and pets in general. I like training my pets and deciding on what abilities I wanted them to have, but the fun is detected, and that is the end. Now the end of a fun spec.
That the problem with the people they hired had no clue what the customer wanted. Only what they wanted. That is what has ruined this game. New hires should not make a game for themself. They should have stuck with what worked and not what they wanted in a game. That never works as they are newcomers to an already enjoyable game. Not so enjoyable anymore.
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i’ve always said, out of all 3 hunter specs, Beast Mastery should have been the one that got changed to a melee class for Legion, not Survival. Because out of all three specs, BM was always the most boring, simplistic, and in dire need of a change at the time.
Makes sense lorewise too, considering Beast Mastery is the spec that apparently has the most understanding, strongest connection, and strongest bonds to their animals, so makes sense that they’d learn from, adopt animalistic traits, create an animal fighting style (melee), and willingly choose to fight along side their animals. Meanwhile survival lorewise is literally based on it’s namesake, maximizing survival, so they’d be more about stalking their prey/hiding in the shadows (camouflage), using traps, poisons, and keeping their enemies at a distance (ranged).
Out of all 3 specs of hunters, SV pre 7.0, especially during Warlords of Draenor, was the most unique hunter spec ever. A dot based hunter spec, where your rotation and damage was focused on keeping optimal dot uptime (explosive shot, black arrow, serpent sting) and weaving normal attacks in-between. 6.2 as a Survival Hunter was my most favorite time and fun I experienced ever playing hunter and in my honest opinion was the greatest hunter spec there ever was.
Unfortunately now both remaining ranged hunter classes are stale, they have boring plain attacks, especially ever since late Legion and BFA which stripped most hunter attacks of their visual flare or visually fun nature, which was the last thing they had going for them, so as a result now hunters are just stuck with 3 mediocre and boring specs which are in no way unique, standout, or exciting.
That and also formerly fun or unique talents are essentially dead in the water and have not been a viable option for multiple numerous patches and expansions at this point, those being Barrage (not since 8.1), Murder of Crows (Not since 7.2), Piercing Shot (not since 6.2), Stampede (not since 6.2), and Chimera Shot (Not since 6.0). …Essentially been stuck with the same few talent choices for over 2 expansions straight, especially Marksman, which has been hardstuck in the same literal talent build for ST or AOE for multiple patches now.
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Well with the latest announcement all hunter specs going to melee next expac will be a moot point.
They’d have to give Demon Hunters a third spec first or many of them will go off about sacrificing everything… even their third spec… and what have the Hunters given.
Believe when folks asked for melee hunter, they meant they wanted some of the old hunter melees spells like wing clip, or whatever it’s called back. Not a whole spec to be changed to melee lol. Survival was also pretty good in CATA to.
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Ah look at you. Always with the bad takes. How are you a council member again? When you’re so vehemently against regular playerbase opinions? I guess you are more like blizzard and their stubbornness, which is why they added you. But I can’t say you speak well for the people at all and only serve to hurt the game by having any say on anything.
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I’d rather they just fix pets, give them specs again. Let me use the pet I want to use.
Ummmmmmmm
Lock and Load procced from Black Arrow way back in Wrath of the Lich King.
Not only is it firmly ingrained in my memory because I swapped between BM and Surv based on Replenishment, I double checked it again:
Survival in BC was the Agility Buff spec. Survival going into Wrath became more competitive on personal damage (in the sense that it wasn’t held back as much to be a buff spec), and folded into one of the Replenishment specs. It played significantly differently from both BM and Marks at the time. At the time, I refused to play Marks (which I could get away with)
Edit: Meep, didn’t realise this was a multiple-necro.
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Being boring and simplistic isn’t contingent on being melee or ranged. If they made BM melee with the same gameplay it would still be boring and simplstic while also being handicapped and unappealing to most Hunters as a result. They would have to update the gameplay… but then they could do that while keeping it ranged.
This is the mistake people like Maizou make. They perceive a problem (that really didn’t exist): SV being too indistinct, and they perceive melee as being the only solution to the problem. They can’t perceive a universe where you have three different and unique Hunter specs even though that’s what we had and the distinction could have been increased with more unique mechanics for each spec (which they did for BM and MM anyway in Legion). Yet apparently SV copying half of BM’s toolkit is fine because it’s melee. It’s nonsense.
It’s true that if there needed to be a melee Hunter it would make the most sense for BM to do it (as evidenced by how much SV copies from BM) but it’s just too bad an idea to have any of the Hunter specs as melee in their baseline states. If there were to be a melee BM it should be a talented stance that swaps out the ranged shots for melee strikes in exchange for a damage boost.
After all, each spec is 1/3 of the class but there are certainly nowhere near that many Hunters who are interested in melee. Right now SV is the highest damage Hunter spec and is S tier in mythic+. Meanwhile BM is about C tier and has double the players. In raids it’s even worse. And you can bet most of those SV Hunters are only playing for the damage rather than the melee. It never made sense to devote 1/3 of the class to something maybe 1/20 are interested in.
This is an especially good point. Survival is meant to be all about resourcefulness and opportunism. It’s meant to use any and all advantages to gain an advantage in combat. Using exotic munitions and traps as it did before Legion fits that identity well. Arbitrarily throwing away the most significant and iconic advantage of the class to fight in melee like a Warrior “for the hell of it” does not fit that identity well.
Now some would say “but SV had the melee-buffing talents in Classic!”. That’s true, but the spec was still ranged with a bow/gun and preferred to fight from afar. Back then we had a minimum range and in PvP other classes would try to keep us in melee range where we were more vulnerable and did less damage. It made sense for the PvP utility tree (SV) to have some melee buffing to handle those situations. Contrary to popular belief that’s not precedent for an SV iteration totally lacking a ranged weapon and preferring to stick to melee range a decade later.
Yep. This class sorely needs someone in charge who is actually enthusiastic about Hunters and ranged weapon combat. Because since Legion (inclusive) all their Hunter development is totally lacking in enthusiasm. Their most “exciting new thing” for the ranged weapon class being retreating into their comfort zone and making one of its specs melee, acting as if it was new, unique, and exciting to make yet another melee spec like every single other new DPS spec they’ve added to the game post-launch.
Since BFA (inclusive) the overwhelming majority of their Hunter talent development effort has been sunk into Survival 
What gets me about Maizou is the gleeful misinformation. Pretty much everything she said about SV in those posts is utterly wrong and misinformed, and it’s all easily verifiable with guides and video PoVs from the time. When called out on it she also moved the goalposts and twisted reality until she said the guide agreed with what she was saying, even though anyone can check for themselves.
That’s the guide I linked. It says “Serpent Sting and Black Arrow are always used on the target”.
Here’s a POV from the time:
As can be seen, Black Arrow is used on the target on cooldown. In fact it’s literally the first ability the Hunter casts on the target.
There’s no weasel-wording around this and saying that Black Arrow was not a priority or not used etc but here Maizou is repeating it and saying that somehow that’s what the guide is saying.
Maizou has muted this thread and put me on ignore so she won’t see these posts, but it’s important for people to realise what goes on with Maizou on the forums. This isn’t a one-off occurrence. She does this sort of thing regularly. It’s fine to not know something, especially about an old version of WoW. What’s not fine is bluffing, revising history, inventing fake information, and misleading anyone, and this is Maizou’s MO on the forums.
Such behaviour isn’t appropriate for the community council. I don’t care if saying that is bannable (I have not been banned for these posts yet); it needs to be said.
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What was so special about SV?
It would be more productive to isolate what about old SV you enjoyed because there is definitely room in BM and SV for a few more tools.
My first alt is a Hunter. It could even become my main. It was my main in BFA. I wish I had another ranged spec, but at the same time, I don’t want to put people that enjoy SV into a position where their main no longer has a melee spec for them to play.
Nor do I think Hunter should have 4 specs.
See Raven’s post in this thread.
SV built on the resourceful and utilitarian side of the Hunter identity; this meant enhancements to traps and a focus on exotic munitions. It was special because it felt like a meaningful and valuable extension of the core Hunter identity, as opposed to melee SV which feels like it’s actively conflicting with the Hunter identity and handicapping itself just to be a unique snowflake.
When I made this Hunter back in Cataclysm it was as a replacement to my Night Elf Hunter as I was switching to Horde. While I mainly played MM before WotLK, with Explosive Shot’s addition in WotLK the SV spec became very appealing and it was the natural fit for my Goblin Hunter. It was all about craftiness and resourcefulness. It wasn’t the master of beasts or the expert sniper. It was the run-and-gun munition specialist that used any tool it could to get ahead in combat. That didn’t mean “arbitrarily abandoning the most significant and iconic strength of its own class” like Blizzard apparently thought it did. Now that spec is gone, and I have to play the much more ill-fitting BM or MM. It’s not like I ONLY played SV when it was ranged, but it was my “home spec” and one of the main reasons I made the character in the first place.
No, it wouldn’t. Ranged SV’s tools and abilities would be a poor fit for BM Hunter, and vice versa (note how SV now copies many BM abilities and they’re extremely poor fits alongside things like Wildfire Bomb and Serpent Sting).
The most productive thing that can be done is to make SV ranged. There is very little reason to keep it melee, and no reason to have made it melee in the first place. It was a whole lot of effort to take a bad idea and execute it badly, condemning SV to pariah status in the hopes of pulling in some Warrior/Rogue rerolls. It’s the source of most of the major issues the spec suffers since 7.0, while every positive of the spec is largely in spite of being melee and not because of it.
Very few people play SV specifically for the melee. It’s still the least-played Hunter spec by a big margin this patch despite a large tuning advantage. Without a large tuning advantage it’s routinely one of the least-played specs in the game, if not last place. So most of the people playing it now are FOTM rerollers playing it for the damage, not the theme, and they’re mostly gone the moment that 4 set bonus is no longer a factor. That leaves a small playerbase behind, and it’s not even clear how many of that niche is playing it specifically because it’s melee.
If they wanted to represent melee in the class they needed to pick a much fairer compromise. For example, since they evidently can’t come up with a melee Hunter that’s independent of a pet (after all taking the class that’s all about ranged weapons and pets and removing both of those things doesn’t leave that much left), they should have made being melee a talented option within BM, e.g. a stance that increases damage but replaces ranged shots with melee strikes. It makes a lot more sense than awkwardly duplicating much of BM’s identity in another spec like they’re currently doing. While that’s not such a favourable compromise towards the melee players, it doesn’t make sense to grant them an entire 1/3 of the class in the first place; they sure as hell don’t make up 1/3 of its players.
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