The thing is, several of these people were never going to play a hunter to begin with. By your logic, you can start turning mages into physical DPS and warriors into casters, even though that goes against the interest of everyone playing those classes, because "newcomers deserve just as much attention and a lot of them wanted melee mages/caster warriors". And if you come back with "but those don't make sense with those classes' class fantasies", neither does a melee hunter.
What a healthy attitude to have as a customer: "I don't deserve a product that actually lives up to any of my standards because ultimately its the designer's game, not the 5 million or so people that pay for it".
And if he hated hunters because he preferred melee, he had 12 other spec options. There were 3 archer-based specs, all with good mobility. Now there are 2 (and one of them has highly restricted mobility), and 14 melee spec options. So that (weak) argument actually works in my favour. Find a better one.
45% of WoW players did exactly that over the first 9 months of WoD. How much more can blizzard actively piss off the player base before WoW actively starts hurting due to low population? How much longer will their devotees continue to regurgitate the "if you don't like it, quit" line? Will they stop it when their server has emptied out too?
You are talking out of your ass, I play a hunter since vanilla (and its not even a decent argument but since you are relying on this crappy "I'm not a post 7.0 newbie" crap) and I enjoy the new survival hunter.
Was the old survival bad?No I liked it quite better than the boring MM since focus was introduced in cataclysm. But between MM and Survival it just was more of the same with procs and spam things with different colours. What was really unique about survival? It just played like a magic version of MM.
If you don't like melee its fine you have 2 other specs to play. You do realize that most people make sure they like at least 2 specs out of 3 for a class right?If you were full on survival then just play a fire mage
No, you absolutely didn't. The only time this was even remotely true was in early Vanilla when survival hunters were a melee/ranged hybrid, which no one played because it sucked and no one liked it. And since then, hunters have been strictly ranged.
"Blizzard said so" is the weakest argument you can come up with. The current class design team constantly missteps and ignores feedback, and finds themselves up shit creek all the time. They are single-handedly dragging all of Legion down, at this point. I can write a whole list of obviously-bad situations that they have blundered into. They have none of the experience, self-evaluation, or communication skills of their predecessors. So when you say "they said so", that means fucking nothing to me. These are the same people that think RPPM is entirely deterministic and you can't be GCD capped and focus capped at the same time. If these are the people you put faith in, I seriously question your judgement.
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And you are in a minority. It is the least popular DPS spec right now. Hell, discussion about survival is pretty much entirely off the front page (other than this thread which directly asserts that they are not popular) and they have the lowest number of parses in HFC right now out of ANY DPS spec (not just hunters).
Survival has much more mobility than MM (MoP and WoD it had full mobility while MM had restrictions). Since 7.0, there no longer exists a non-pet-dependent ranged spec with full mobility, and BM is the only fully mobile ranged spec in the entire game now.
Survival could multidot and therefore had much more multi-target versatility than MM.
Survival did not rely on cast times like MM. It focused more on sustained damage while MM was more burst.
It's very easy to find differences between the two.
And if you are going to give the same bullshit "but they were similar because of x and y": that's because they are the same god damned class. I don't understand this new craze where specs apparently have to be 100% different with absolutely nothing in common. There is meant to be a base class with the specs building on that: hence why they are called "specialisations". Hunters don't have that any more. What even is the hunter "class fantasy" now? There is none.
And if you guys wanted to play a melee so badly, you had 12 melee specs to choose from. Why did it have to be a hunter? What about the people playing a hunter who actually liked the specs it had to offer? Why do hunters get changed for the sake of everyone else, now?
Seems I'm one of the few here that love the new survival. Never been a fan of ranged, but loved the hunter concept (pets, feigning death, traps, animal aspects, etc). Melee made me reroll hunter for this expansion
Hunter had 3 ranged classes. Although I've met enough hunters in pvp to understand that the specs are vastly different in playstyle, the concepts were all variations shooty shooty with a pet. The new designs are more unique, as it is now easy to spot what kind of hunter you're facing.
I understand why some players are annoyed that old survival is gone. Went through the same when combat rogue was changed in cata. Still, I also see this is a playstyle that other players have asked for. Blizz can't please all, so they made a choice (and hopefully sticks with it).
So far, survival offers insane mobility, easy to deploy long-ranged CC, rooting and snaring (so MUCH), and some very nice aoe-burst. Playstyle is very similar to old combat rogue, but with rooting instead of stuns (new combat rogue feels too spammy for my taste). I also like the mongoose bite mechanic better than combo points.
Talents need to be reworked. Some outdamage others by 100%, both in long and short fights. Sticky grenade is either bugged, or the most useless talent ever designed. Steel trap is weird; I'm still trying to understand why you would chose a talent that replace freeze with a root that easily break on damage. None of the lvl.100 talents feels like a major upgrade, and are quite lackluster.
tldr: New survival is awesome.
Get a load of this guy.
I only brought up the blizzard thing, like any other company they also make descision to their products.
And their always people who will enjoy the change and other who dont.
Learn to read something proper.
Stop talking out your ass.
Now you're just starting to hate.
Like it or not, there are people who enjoy the class as it as now.
And there are people who disliked hunters because theyre where solely range and due the focus they got in Cataclysm.
Each expansion something changes, this time sadly it was your favourite spec.
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Finally someone who gets it.
People are just spewing hate around it seems, While there is nothing wrong with the spec.
I personally hated the change from mana bar to focus bar in Cataclysm. It slowed down the pace of the hunter (especially MM) quite tremedously and forced to spam the crappy steady shot which is even more boring than scorch for mages.
Still miss several utility/niche abilities such as eyes of the beast, aspect of the monkey or drain mana but well if you enjoy the ranger archetype even if the class is dumbed down it remains satisfying to play.
I do agree that this "class fantasy" is becoming the new fancy word for blizzard to justify anything in regards to class design. Hunters are hunters, if you want to make specs more unique,sure but don't just prune everything and switch it to the pvp talents or other specs its just lazy.
This is my opinion, but I think survival hunter is the most fun hunter specialiaztion, both in PvE and PvP. I love it. And I actually do a lot of damage in raids aswell. I think many people miss out on keeping Way of the Mok'Nathal on four stacks all the time. Otherwise you will lose a lot of dps.
If you're going to create an analogy, at least keep it consistent. A melee hunter is not similar to a physical dps mage or spellcasting warrior at all. A decent analogy might be a lightning mage, or a ranged warrior (archer).
So, I did come back with that argument, and I refute your baseless counter.
A few examples:
In Little Red Riding Hood, it was a hunter who slew the wolf....with an axe
In Snow White, it was a huntsman (ie hunter) who was tasked with cutting out her heart
In LOTR Aragorn was a ranger - the inspiration for the D&D ranger class, which was I believe a big motivator for the Hunter class in WoW. He did plenty of melee.
A slightly more obscure reference that probably a lot of people won't be familiar with is a game called Earthdawn which had (among others) the Archer and Beastmaster Disciplines of which the WoW Hunter is a hybrid. The latter was all about melee....
Lastly, if you look at the Hunter's history in WoW, they were initially intended to be capable of using melee weapons (it just wasn't implemented particularly well). If anything, the move to actually finally give Hunters a decent melee capability is them going back to the actual original vision of class. If Blizzard had intended for Hunters to be a purely ranged class then they would have named them Archers instead.
You're assuming that your "standards" are the same as the rest of the 5 million who play it. I can tell you quite confidently that even without knowing anything about you that this assertion is false, simply because I know how diverse the 5 million are. There is not a single aspect in the game in which there are not 2 diametrically opposed viewpoints with a whole spectrum in between.
Or maybe Blizzard should look at creating an archer based spec for another class (eg rogue - like in Diablo 2)? To be entirely honest, the differences between Survival and Marksman were never sufficiently different to justify their existence. Blizzard simply had a formula where they had 3 specs for each classes so they made 3. A melee option is a great idea because it finally gives each spec a distinct identity.
And 90% of those 45% had already "quit" before WoD, and seem to be back for Legion, after which they will probably "quit" again. Not because of reasons that suit your argument, but simply because that is what happens to a lot of people who have a played a game for 12 years.
I picked hunter to play ranged, not to goof around in melee range.
Will never play Survival.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake
Nope. I, personally, leveled one of my two hunters in Wrath using the very limited munter spec that was available then. I enjoy the concept of charging into the fray with your trusty pet at your side...
That said, for raiding, they bring nothing to the table that most other melee don't and it's difficult to justify giving a melee spot to them.
Yeah it was so much fun to have our damage cut by 50% just to recover our mana with AotV...Not.
And not having mana =/= non magical class. DK don't have mana and are much more magic oriented than hunter.
Edit : And as we can see with Legion, only Mage and Warlock use mana for DPS now.
Last edited by MrTharne; 2016-08-17 at 12:15 PM.