Personally, I think it’d do a lot more justice to the class fantasies of each respective hunter spec. Survival can go back to being more of a ranged/traps/gadgets type of playstyle, and Beastmaster can adopt all of the funnest aspects of the melee hunter (Rexxar-style) fantasy.
Thoughts?
P.S. I’ve always thought it weird that Survival has “Spirit Bond” as its mastery when that has always traditionally been a Beastmaster-oriented ability…
P.P.S I love the melee hunter playstyle. Current survival is fun outside of the borrowed powers and tier sets of the current patch/expansion. I just think Beastmaster is better equipped to do it justice than Survival.
I always thought the beast master should be using beasts to do the fighting, maybe one ‘special’ (with 6 to 8 skills to fight with it), two of different types (with maybe 3 or 4 skills appropriate for each type), or a pack of four of the same types (with pack attack buttons), and no ranged weapons. What’s the point of ‘mastering’ beasts if you don’t use them as your principal weapon.
What is it about the current Beastmaster that “works the way it should”? I’m curious what the drive is behind wanting Beastmaster to remain the way it is.
A hunter technically has 3 separate “sub-classes”. If you don’t play Survival because it’s melee, then what do you choose between Marksman and Beastmaster (and why)?
Depends… I prefer marksmanship because pew pew. But I use whichever is more beneficial to the content I’m running and gives me the better chance at success. Survival can just go die in fire, IDC… Lol…
Survival became a ranged spec and Beastmaster became a melee spec
You’d:
Still play Marksmanship primarily unless a situation is significantly more optimal to play in the other ranged spec (which would just switch from Beastmaster to Survival).
Maybe… It depends on how Survival changes, but basically yes. Although you and I both know a swap like that will never happen so not sure why your so worried about what I like about Hunters.
you would think with a beastmaster your pets would be doing all the damage but blizzard change that along time ago they made mastery useless for bm hunters,
Survival was chosen to be melee because back in Classic the melee abilities were all classified under Survival. What the developers of Legion failed to understand, however, was that all the side utility and mechanics that weren’t immediately related to raw ranged damage output or pets was classified as Survival. This is because Survival was the PvP/utility spec, and an important aspect of Hunter PvP back then is dealing with enemies closing the gap to prevent your ranged attacks. Survival wasn’t a melee DPS spec and it still had an identity of resourcefulness, versatility, and opportunism. That identity is irreconcilable with not having a ranged weapon in Legion onwards, so despite SV having the melee-buffing talents in Classic lacking a ranged weapon in modern WoW is an exceptionally poor fit for the spec.
Meanwhile, most of the motive for melee Hunters comes from Rexxar and the concept of fighting alongside your pet. That concept comes up all the time when discussing melee Hunters to the point where being melee as a Hunter is inseparable from beast companionship. After all, Hunters in WoW are all about ranged weapons and pets. If a spec lacked both of those things it wouldn’t be much of a Hunter.
Yet we already have a pet spec: BM, and as mentioned earlier SV has always been more about resourcefulness and utilitarianism rather than specifically melee. This is what leads to the thematic dumpster fire that is current Survival where it has multiple competing elements.
It has Wildfire Bomb and Serpent Sting which are both such poor fits for a melee spec that many SV Hunters have spent the last few years demanding they get removed and replaced, as it seems they both represent the old utilitarian side of Survival that was usurped by becoming melee.
At the same time it has multiple elements that are blatant copies or borrowings from BM. You identify Spirit Bond and how it was originally a BM thing as recently as Legion before now nonsensically being SV-only. The spec also copied Kill Command, and Coordinated Assault is just a rebranded Bestial Wrath. Ostensibly they made it melee to prevent it from overlapping with other specs but here it is stealing half of BM.
Finally it has a few generic physical melee attacks that would fit just fine on a Warrior or even a Rogue. Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite can at least be tied to Hunters as they are “animal themed” (at least in their name, because mechanically there’s nothing specifically “Hunter” about them). Carve and Butchery are so generic that no one would bat an eye if they were Warrior abilities.
So yes: much of this mess could be avoided if SV were just ranged like it used to be and focused on its historic identity of resourcefulness and utilitarianism. It could even keep Wildfire Bomb; lord knows Survival’s universe revolves around that ability at this point even as a melee spec.
They could have made BM melee instead. The problem is, as a matter of fact, the overwhelming majority of Hunters don’t want to be melee. That’s only natural. The class was built around the ranged weapon from the beginning. It’s the literal icon of Hunters. No other class uses them. We start with them at level 1. It’s a significant fantasy archetype that draws in a lot of people. From a pragmatic standpoint it’s inherently better to be able to attack something from 40 yards away than not. So the audience for melee Hunter is people who both like Hunters, a class built around ranged weapons with 3 ranged specs, and tolerate melee enough to look past it or like it specifically enough to try out the Hunter class. That’s an extremely limited audience. So it’s extremely egregious to make any of the three specs melee in its baseline state.
This is why what I’ve always suggested is making melee a talented option within BM, such as a stance that swaps shots for melee hits (e.g. Cobra Shot to Raptor Strike, Barbed Shot to Lacerate) in exchange for a damage and health boost. It’s the most fair and reasonable approach out of anything.
Would BM be improved by being melee? Remember that BM as it stands can do 100% of its DPS at any range of 0-40 yards and with any amount of movement. Making it melee would only represent a reduction in capability. That means thematic affinity is doing all the heavy lifting of making melee worth it, and you’re betting on an iconically ranged class to have a playerbase with thematic affinity to a melee spec. That bet didn’t work out for Survival so why would it work out for BM?
It seems your line of reasoning is that, rather than improving BM by making it the melee Hunter, you’re trying to improve the melee Hunter by making it BM.
I’ll answer this my own way because he already gave his.
I do mythic raiding so there is pressure for me to play whatever is the best spec. However I’ll still sometimes ignore the best option if I can get away with it. Survival is by far the best option for Lords of Dread but I just killed it as MM a couple days ago.
I prefer MM because generally the ranged weaponry is much more important to me than the pet. However I do like to be able to switch it up. I did just go BM for Rygelon. The ideal situation for me is basically what we had back in Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry; 3 ranged specs that are close enough so that I can get away with playing whatever spec I wanted.
Having said that Survival Hunter was actually the entire original reason I made this Hunter back in Cataclysm. I did have an alliance Hunter before that in Classic, BC, and WotLK, but I had started to play my Prot Paladin more at the time. Survival in WotLK and Cataclysm renewed my engagement with the class. MM is a distant second less-preferable option to me. I always preferred Survival’s fast-paced utilitarian style over Marksmanship’s sniping with cast times.
My own answer again: if Survival were ranged again and if it were even remotely viable I would probably play it on everything. I would only stop playing it for the same reason I stopped playing it back in WoD: if it became so unviable that it was a burden to the raid team.
Granted, I did play BM back in Blackrock Foundry after playing SV in Highmaul, but that’s because BM was both really good and I hadn’t played it in a long time so it was fresh to me and a nice change. Had I known that tier was the last time I’d ever get to play ranged SV in a viable state I would have played SV instead.
Note that this was largely a side effect to another trend; the increasing prominence of Cobra Shot in our damage breakdown which of course doesn’t get buffed by Mastery. Before SL and especially before BFA Mastery was actually quite good for BM because Kill Command was a much greater part of the damage profile.
In fact one reason Cobra Shot became so strong is because they can’t nerf it too much or they risk it becoming not worth using over the baseline Arcane Shot, which was actually the case for some of the SL beta before they buffed Cobra Shot. What they should have done is targeted buffs to Kill Command and Beast Cleave. Instead they just repeatedly buff or nerf the entire spec by a percentage amount, not understanding that the relative difference between abilities matters a lot. Blizzard makes that mistake a lot these days. They don’t have much engagement in their own class design.
if survival hunter was dual wield like rexxar people would be more accepting of it.
yea i like bm hunter a lot in bfa i played the entire expansion with the change to cobra shot in SL to be the main damage making bm hunter a weak ranged class compared to mm hunter bm became a lot less fun to play and i didnt play SL as much as i did bfa and other expansions.
hopefully in dragonflight with the new talent trees we will get back to were we were before shadowladns.
Nah I like it on survival you cant base classes off story characters cause they will have traits from multiple specs. But I do think Beast Master needs stronger beast summoning spells and that they need replace most there ranged spells with.
For survival there needs to be a gimmick and benefit for melee and they need to bring ranged survival back in some form even if it is bringing back the old MoP wombo combo. Though id perfer just something new like turning survival hunter into a spell caster hunter who uses magic to hunt more then the other 2 specs and me like the idea of a spell sword.
I’m only down for making beastmastery melee if it retains its ranged option. I started BM because a) I loved the pets and thought a spec that made them the star of the show sounded like a dream and b) I do not want to be melee and never have. The OG cinematic was pretty unambigous in presenting this as an option - the dwarf hunter with the bear and the gun. In D&D I always used to play a bow-using ranger purely for the animal companion even though the animal companion sucked, lol.
I have a couple melee alts I fart around on but I won’t do any organised group content with them - I just don’t like it and don’t want to play it. I like BM because it has the best of both worlds, plus the unique combo of ‘highly mobile ranger with a pocket tank’ that makes content so easy to solo is fun for me. I don’t really like MM and while I thought Survival was fun enough when I last played it in like, Highmaul, it was a relief to go back to BM in HFC.
I’m not worried about what Rexxar can and can’t do. He’s not a player and before we go ‘melee bm because rexxar’, mages still can’t levitate entire ships, summon mass water elementals or fly on icicles like Jaina can; priests can’t wear plate and use swords like Anduin can, much less rend, pummel, starfall and execute like Tyrande does; and druids still can’t manbearpig like Malfurion can. NPCs aren’t supposed to be 100% faithful representations of player class abilities - they’re meant to stand out and be special.
yea gl with that. if i can go back to like 6.1 or 6.2 when survival was first announce that it would be melee come legion…
I BLEW THESE FORUMS UP
i raged and shouted 24/7 about this for months and months and months. ranged survival hunters especially 5.4 was the king of all class specs. even in wod is was good. not as good as 5.4 mop but still good.
i still dont get it. its almost as if whom ever was the person making these decisions at the time hated the idea of melee hunter and they personally played ranged bm so they werent gonna give that up so they make survival the melee spec. dumb. so dumb.
it broke every rule in the book of lore and fantasy the moment this change was announced and went live.
there should of never been a melee hunter spec. but if it was do or die, then it should of been bm.
Yeah ive played bm as ranged for like 17 years and chose it because it was ranged…if they changed it now to melee id def quit game. I dont care for melee. If you want to play melee play a melee dont ruin the spec for people like me
I feel bad for the original ranged survival players that blizzard basically deleted their spec. Dont do the same thing to original bm players.
Melee hunter shouldve always been just a 4th spec if anything
I think BM and MM should stay ranged. Survival Hunter is the only melee class. Blizzard has no reason to change all hunter classes to be melee.
Some people are unhappy because hunters have one melee class. I don’t see the issue with it? Some people like the melee action. I enjoy it immensely.
There are hunters outside of the game that use their hands. They’ll wait patiently till the prey is close enough, then they’ll strike and take the creature down.
I think blizzard made a solid choice by turning Survival Hunters into melee.